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Authors: Jane Bowles

Everything is Nice

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Jane Bowles

Everything Is Nice: The Collected Stories

 

Is the first publication of the complete short stories of Jane Bowles, including three previously uncollected.

 

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY
PAUL BOWLES

Published by Virago Press Limited
1989

Plain Pleasures
,
Other Stories
and
from the Noteooks
first published in Great Britain in
The Collected Works of Jane Bowles
by Peter Owen Ltd.,
1984
Copyright
© 1970, 1972, 1976,1977, 1978
by Paul Bowles

This edition Copyright
©
Virago
1989

Introduction Copyright
©
Paul Bowles
1989

'Andrew', 'Emmy Moore's Journal* and 'Going to Massachusetts* Copyright
© 1970,1972, 1976, 1977
by Paul Bowles; the material first appeared in
Antaeus
and was included in
Feminine Wiles
,
published by Black Sparrow Press.

The Iron Table',
'Lila
and Frank' and 'Friday' copyright
© 1977
by Paul Bowles; first published in
Antaeus.

Plain Pleasures
Copyright
© 1946, 1949, 1957,1966
by Jane Bowles; first published in Great Britain by Peter Owen Ltd
1966.
'Plain Pleasures' and 'Camp Cataract' first appeared in
Harper's Bazaar,
'A Stick of Green Candy' first appeared in
Vogue.

'Looking for Lane' Copyright
©
The Threepenny Review
, 1984]
'Señorita Cordoba', Copyright
©
The Threepenny Review,
1985;
'Laura and Sally' Copyright
©
The Threepenny Review
, 1987.
The three stories from
The Threepenny Review
are previously uncollected and were selected from the notebooks of Jane Bowles by Millicent Dillon, edited by Millicent Dillonand Paul Bowles.

 

 

 

 

JANE BOWLES

was
born
in New York in 1917
and began writing at the age of fifteen. In
1938
she married the composer and writer Paul Bowles and they spent the first year of their married life in the famous Brooklyn Heights boarding house in New York, also tenanted by Richard and Ellen Wright, W. H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Carson McCullers and Gypsy Rose Lee. The Bowles then spent many nomadic years

in Europe, in Central America and Mexico, in Ceylon

before settling more or less permanently in Tangiers in
1947.

One of the most celebrated literary figures of the 40s, Jane Bowles was a writer's writer. Her literary output was small, her career ending abruptly in
1957
when, aged only forty, she suffered a cerebral haemorrhage which made reading and writing impossible for her. After a long illness she died in Malaga, Spain, in
1973.

With a tragi-comic view of life expressed with biting wit and cool compassion, a literary style of immense precision, constantly surprising, often hilarious, she is a Magritte among twentieth-century writers

as her friend Truman Capote described her, 'a modern legend'.

 

JANE BOWLES

Introduction

Plain Pleasures

Everything Is Nice

A Guatemalan Idyll

Camp Cataract

A Day in the Open

A Quarreling Pair

A Stick of Green Candy

Other Stories

Andrew

Emmy
Moore's
Journal

Going to Massachusetts

From the Notebooks

The Iron Table

Lila and Frank

Friday

From the Threepenny Review

Looking for Lane

Se
ñ
orita Cordoba

Laura and Sally

 

 

Introduction

 

Ambivalence was her natural element; to be obliged to make a decision filled her with anguish. The possibilities for a sudden
volte-face
had to be kept open. If something were about to be published, she decided it should not be published: the work was not good enough, and it would be "humiliating" (one of her favourite words) to see it in print. In 1944, a year after the appearance of
Two Serious Ladies
, she was asked for a contribution to a hard-cover anthology being prepared in New York. When she mentioned it to me, she remarked that she was not bothering to reply since she had nothing to submit. I thought then of the long discarded section of the novel. (Originally there had been three serious ladies; then, as the novel took shape, the number was reduced to two, and the entire part dealing with Señorita Cordoba was scrapped.) It seemed to me that there was material here which could be removed from its context and used without a word of rewriting. Jane disagreed. Excerpts cut from anything, particularly from abandoned material, could not be considered finished work. I went ahead nevertheless, excised a passage of
Señorita Cordoba
which I thought made a complete story, and showed it to Jane. She shrugged, fixed me with a mistrustful stare, and said: "You seem to be very interested in having it published."

"I am. Aren't you?"

"It's just a lot of débris. It has no interest."

"Well, I love it," I said. With that, I carried the typescript myself to the offices of Fischer and gave it to the editor with the title "A Guatemalan Idyll". It was published in 1944. The following year the same editor asked for a further piece for a second anthology, and I removed "A Day in the Open" from the same mass of rejected narrative. Twenty years later, when the time came to publish "Plain Pleasures" as a collection in book form, I was thankful that I had gone against her wishes with regard to these two pieces, because the original manuscript had long since disappeared, and had they not been published there would have remained no trace of them.

This constitutional indecisiveness on Jane's part had been reinforced by the critical reception accorded
Two Serious Ladies
when it first appeared. Save for a handful of "sophisticated" critics, the American reviews had qualified the novel as inept and chaotic, a meaningless absurdity. The publisher's blurb on the front flap of the dust-jacket began with the unfortunate sentence: "Here is a startlingly unusual novel that will shock you to attention." Responding to this, one critic wrote: "The only shocking thing about this novel is that it ever managed to find its way into print."

While Jane pretended to take all reviews lightly, favourable or otherwise, she was nevertheless very much aware that even though Knopf had made a second printing, the book had not achieved the success she had envisaged for it. It was easy to lay the blame on bad timing: 1943 was a poor year for a literary début in any country, but she waved away explanations. The novel had been ill-fated, and a failure. From bitter references she made later, in the fifties and sixties, to these early reviews I realized that she had taken them very seriously indeed, even to the point of being persuaded that they had been justified. When we discussed sections of her novel-in-progress
Out in the World
, she said: "I certainly have no intention of repeating myself, if that's what you mean.
Two Serious Ladies
was no good. Bah! Everybody hated it. This has got to be something completely different."

I think it was this insistence upon arriving at the "completely different" mode of expression which made it impossible for her to develop any idea at length without scrutinizing it, analysing it, and thus killing it. If she read me a few pages of her manuscript and I was enthusiastic, she would smile and say: "I know. You like it because it reminds you of
Two Serious Ladies
. I can't leave it this way." My pleas that she refrain from changing it in any way were brushed aside. "You don't really understand what I'm trying to say, that's the trouble.
I
know how I want it to sound."

When the possibility of a British edition of
Two Serious Ladies
was broached, she rejected the idea straightaway: she did not want to be a laughing-stock in London as well as New York. After the customary arguments she agreed to let me send one of the two precious copies we possessed to London.

The book was published, and received perceptive and laudatory notices, but Jane was troubled by a suspicion that all this had been arranged by friends, and more out of sympathy for her because of the state of her health than out of enthusiasm for her work. The following year, when her London publisher suggested a volume of short stories, she informed me triumphantly that she hadn't wanted to tell me before, but all copies of them were lost - they had been in a suitcase that had been left behind several years earlier at a hospital in England. This presented no insurmountable problem: all the material had been published, and I had tear-sheets of everything at hand, including a travel article she had written for
Mademoiselle
. I saw that in ten minutes it could be transformed into a story. As I expected, she refused to consider it. So I did it myself, called it "Everything Is Nice", and included it with the manuscripts to be sent to London. When I showed her the result, she said angrily: "Do whatever you like."

The publication of her
Collected Works
in New York the same year gave her no apparent satisfaction. When a friend asked her to inscribe his copy, she wrote on the flyleaf:
The Collected Works of Dead Jane Bowles
.

In all probability she would have objected strenuously to seeing the last nine pieces included in the present volume. If she were alive and we could discuss it together, I think she would maintain that there was an obvious unfairness in representing a writer by bits and pieces, and I think that for once I should be in agreement. But those of us who have survived her are justified, I believe, in presenting these small scenes as valid examples of her work.

Paul Bowles, Tangier, 1981

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
Plain Pleasures

Alva Perry was a dignified and reserved woman of Scotch and Spanish descent, in her early forties. She was still handsome, although her cheeks were too thin. Her eyes particularly were of an extraordinary clarity and beauty. She lived in her uncle's house, which had been converted into apartments, or tenements, as they were still called in her section of the country. The house stood on the side of a steep, wooded hill overlooking the main highway. A long cement staircase climbed halfway up the hill and stopped some distance below the house. It had originally led to a power station, which had since been destroyed. Mrs. Perry had lived alone in her tenement since the death of her husband eleven years ago; however, she found small things to do all day long and she had somehow remained as industrious in her solitude as a woman who lives in the service of her family.

John Drake, an equally reserved person, occupied the tenement below hers. He owned a truck and engaged in free-lance work for lumber companies, as well as in the collection and delivery of milk cans for a dairy.

Mr. Drake and Mrs. Perry had never exchanged more than the simplest greeting in all the years that they had lived here in the hillside house.

One night Mr. Drake, who was standing in the hall, heard Mrs. Perry's heavy footsteps, which he had unconsciously learned to recognize. He looked up and saw her coming downstairs. She was dressed in a brown overcoat that had belonged to her dead husband, and she was hugging a paper bag to her bosom. Mr. Drake offered to help her with the bag and she faltered, undecided, on the landing.

"They are only potatoes," she said to him, "but thank you very much. I am going to bake them out in the back yard. I have been meaning to for a long time."

BOOK: Everything is Nice
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