Two Serious Ladies

Two Serious Ladies

Jane Bowles

With a new introduction by Francine
du
Plessix Gray

To Paul
,
Mother, and Helvetia

Published by VIRAGO PRESS Limited
1979

First British publication by Peter Owen Limited,
1965

Copyright ©Jane Bowles
1943.
renewed
1976
by Paul Bowles Introduction copyright©
Francine du
Plessix Gray 1976

Introduction

1

2

3

Introduction

'I can't live without her, not for a minute,' a heroine of Jane Bowles's
Two Serious Ladies
says about the teen-age whore she has taken as a companion. 'I'd go completely to pieces.'

To which one of her serious friends replies: 'But you
have
gone to pieces, or do I misjudge you dreadfully?'

'True enough," says Mrs Copperfield, 'I have gone to pieces, which is a thing I've wanted to do for years . , . but I have my happiness, which I guard like a wolf, and I have authority now and a certain amount of daring which, if you remember correctly, I never had before.'

Women's right to self-determination-at-all-cost (even at the cost of going to pieces) has been a dominant theme of feminist literature ever since Charlotte Bronte's chaste
Jane Eyre
was attacked by male critics for 'fostering Chartism and rebellion at home' and I sense that most male readers continue to resist the vision of women who are truly independent from men - spiritual, nomadic, asexual women. One of the ironies of the current porn chic is that it cosily reinforces the ancient and comfortable male myth that we are nothing but a bunch of dependent sexpots. How much more threatening to the male psyche is the celibate freedom of Jean Rhys's heroine when she exclaims, in
After Leaving Mr
McKenzie,
'I wanted to go away with just the same feeling a boy has when he wants to run away to sea!'

Of che twentieth-century novelists who have written most poignantly about modem women's independence from men - Colette, Lessing, Kate Chopin, Jean Rhys, Jane Bowles conic immediately to mind - the last three are consummate artists who have each spent several decades buried in oblivion. Though radically devoid of prurience, Kate Chopin's
The Awakening
(1899), in which a woman artist turns her back on marriage and motherhood because they do not satisfy her search for happiness, was banned from public libraries for scores of years for its explicit statement of female autonomy. Jean Rhys's two finest novels, which deal with women trapped in the solitude of urban poverty, were only resurrected in 1966, after thirty years of obscurity. As for Jane Bowles, whose oeuvre also concerns a redefinition of female freedom, a considerable silence has attended her work, since the production of Iter play
In the Similiter House
twenty-five years ago, notwithstanding the critical acclaim she has received. (Alan Sillitoe called her 'a landmark in contemporary literature'; and Tennessee Williams, perhaps a trifle gushingly, describes her as 'the most important writer of prose fiction in modern American letters.') Because the first biography of this bizarre and marvellous writer is about to appear, and the most complete anthology of her works has just been published, Mrs Bowles seems about to receive the belated recognition accorded not too long ago to Miss Chopin and to Miss Rhys. And one is most grateful to the feminist movement for creating a psychological climate that has favoured the republication of these three important writers.

If there is one common denominator in Mrs Bowles's work, it is women's relentless search for autonomy and self-knowledge, for release from all conventional structures, And a demonic, frenzied search it becomes in Mrs Bowles's hands. In
Camp Cataract
, one of her finest short stories, a spinster who lives with her two sisters chooses to lapse into madness rather than remain in the suffocating shelter of her siblings' domesticity. Holed up in a summer camp in the company of a fat waitress whose greatest ambition is to own a garage, she reaches a dubious new level of freedom, when, on refusing to return her adoring older sister's affection, she drives her to suicide. The denouement of
In the Summer House
deals brutally with a woman engaged in an equally ruthless task of self-definition. The alcoholic Mrs Constable is left bereft of her daughter, whose independence she had tried to destroy for her own selfish ends.

Two Serious Ladies,
Mrs Bowles's only finished novel, documents with extraordinary wit the decline into debauchery of two very different but equally staid women. Miss Goering is a wealthy spinster who has been made solitary since childhood by her ugliness and her severe mystical inclinations; while Mrs Copperfield is trapped in the most respectable and prosperous sort of marriage. Miss Goering eventually sells her worldly possessions to work out 'her own little idea of salvation'; she moves to a small nasty house on Staren Island and commutes to the mainland to lead a new life of bar-crawling in which she ends up as a high-class call girl. Mrs Copperfield, a casual acquaintance of Miss Goering's, accompanies her restless, penny-pinching husband to Panama, and leaves him to take tip with a band of loose women she has befriended in Colon. She eventually returns to New York with a teenage half-breed prostitute called Pacifica, admitting, in the same breath, that she has 'gone to pieces' but has found a new brand of independence and happiness that she guards 'like a wolf'.

The theme of women's independence, and its frequent coefficients of solitude and potential destruction, have more often than not been limned with Lessingesque earnestness in a socio-realistic setting. So Mrs Bowles's oeuvre is all the more unique because of its Grand Guignol hilarity, its constant surprises, and a blend of realism and grotesqueness that occasionally recalls Ronald Firbank. There is extraordinary tension between the sturdy, supernormal physical -world she describes and the gloriously unpredictable, fantastic movements of the eccentric personages who inhabit it. These super-straight middle-aged women going to pot in their ball gowns, leaving home to make war on their inhibitions in landscapes of photographic literalness, speak, move and acquiesce to debauchery as they would in the dream freedom of a Delvaux painting. All 'normal' logic of social behaviour is disbanded. Total strangers decide to move into one another's houses after their first cup of tea together. Railroad conductors forbid passengers from talking to one another, under threat of calling in the police. The siblings in
Camp Cataract
are so unskilled at domestic niceties that they can barely get out of their dining room without crawling under tables. And Mrs Bowles's lithe, feverish dialogue has a blend of childlike integrity, surreal candour and deadly precision often worthy of Lewis Carroll.

'I don't like sports,' says the salvation-bent Miss Goering. 'More than anything else, they give me a terrific sense of sinning.' 'It is absolutely nonsense to move physically from one place to another,' a friend of Miss Goering's remarks, 'because all places are more or less alike.' 'You call yourself an artist,' a father chides his son, 'and you don't even know how to be irresponsible.'

Upon reading the enthusiastic reviews that
Two Serious Ladies
received in 194.3, I was startled to see some critics comparing it to
The Well of Loneliness,
perhaps the only novel in the English language to have previously touched on the issue of lesbianism. Mrs Bowles's acerbic genius for the
outré
does not leave it any grounds for comparison with Radclyffe Hall's sentimental talc. Neither are her heroines' precipitous declines caused by any preference for lesbianism, for they seem as asexual as they are independent and nomadic, turning to the flesh as a symbol of independence without appearing to enjoy one moment of it. Their gloriously uninhibited carousing, their voluptuous liberation from all male discipline ('You'll get indigestion .. . good God!' Mr Copperfield keeps saying) has much more to do with a return to the permissive sexual androgyny of juvenile bonding than with any sexual preference. It is this very childlike playfulness that gives Mrs Bowles's work its fey power and its luminous originality, and that may disconcert readers fond of predictably female, 'mature' heroines.

The little we know about Jane Bowles's life intimates that it was as feverish and singular as that of her heroines. Left lame in her teens by a riding accident, she was married at the age of twenty to the composer and author Paul Bowles. She finished
Two Serious Ladies
at the age of twenty-four, and settled in Tangiers in 1947. At the age of forty, she suffered a cerebral haemorrhage that made reading and writing impossible for her. She died in a convent hospital in Malaga, Spain, in 1973. In a recent interview in
Rolling Stone,
Paul Bowles disclosed a few more details about the last decades of Jane Bowles's life: she drank to excess, and had a passionately dependent relationship with a Moroccan woman servant who, according to Paul Bowles, is suspected of having poisoned her food over a period of years with dangerous Moroccan drugs. Millicent Dillon's biography, scheduled for publication this year at Harper and Row, is bound to shed more light on the links between Jane Bowles's singular life, the magic of her art, and her tragi-comic views of human liberation.

'No one among my friends speaks any more of character,' Mrs Copperfield says in
Two Serious Ladies.
'What interests us most, certainly, is finding out what we are
like.'
In Mrs Bowles's work, the traditional novelistic struggle between weak and strong characters ends inevitably in a draw. The rigorous pursuit of autonomy, and rueful acceptance of its often tragic consequences, is the only heroic goal. For even the strongest are unmade by their failure to take into account 'the terrible strength of the weak', and follow an equally drunken downward path to wisdom. There is a severe avoidance of all moralising. It is left to the individual reader to determine whether Mrs Bowles's heroines were better off in the shelter of their repressive marriages and inhibited spinsterhoods than in the anarchy of their libertinage. I quote from the concluding paragraph of
Two Serious Ladies,
in which Miss Goering reflects on her newfound freedom after leaving one of her one-night stands in the fringes of the underworld:

' "Certainly I am nearer to becoming a saint, but it is possible that part of me hidden from my sight is piling sin upon sin as fast as Mrs Copperfield?" ' This latter possibility Miss Goering thought to be of considerable interest but of no great importance.'

Francine
du
Plessix Gray, Cornwall Bridge, Connecticut 1978

1

Christina Goering's father was an American industrialist of German parentage and her mother was a New York lady of a very distinguished family, Christina spent the first half of her life in a very beautiful house (not more than an hour from the city) which she had inherited from her mother. It was in this house that she had been brought up as a child with her sister Sophie.

As a child Christina had been very much disliked by other children. She had never suffered particularly because of this, having led, even at a very early age, an active inner life that curtailed her observation of whatever went on around her, to such a degree that she never picked up the mannerisms then in vogue, and at the age of ten was called old-fashioned by other little girls. Even then she wore the look of certain fanatics who think of themselves as leaders without once having gained the respect of a single human being.

Christina was troubled horribly by ideas which never would have occurred to her companions, and at the same time took for granted a position in society which any other child would have found unbearable. Every now and then a schoolmate would take pity on her and try to spend some time with her, but far from being grateful for this, Christina would instead try her best to convert her new friend to the cult of whatever she believed in at the time.

Her sister Sophie, on the other hand, was very much admired by everyone in the school. She showed a marked talent for writing poetry and spent all her time with a quiet little girl called Mary, who was two years younger.

When Christina was thirteen years old her hair was very red (when she grew up it remained almost as red), her cheeks were sloppy and pink, and her nose showed traces of nobility.

That year Sophie brought Mary home with her nearly every day for luncheon. After they had finished eating she would take Mary for a walk through the woods, having provided a basket for each of them in which to carry back flowers, Christina was not permitted by Sophie to come along on these walks.

"You must find something of your own to do," Sophie would say to her. But it was hard for Christina to think of anything to do by herself that she enjoyed. She was in the habit of going through many mental struggles—generally of a religious nature—and she preferred to be with other people and organize games. These games, as a rule, were very moral, and often involved God. However, no one else enjoyed them and she was obliged to spend a great part of the day alone. She tried going to the woods once or twice by herself and bringing back flowers, in imitation of Mary and Sophie, but each time, fearing that she would not return with enough flowers to make a beautiful bouquet, she so encumbered herself with baskets that the walk seemed more of a hardship than a pleasure.

It was Christina's desire to have Mary to herself of an afternoon. One very sunny afternoon Sophie went inside for her piano lesson, and Mary remained seated on the grass. Christina, who had seen this from not far away, ran into the house, her heart beating with excitement. She took off her shoes and stockings and remained in a short white underslip. This was not a very pleasant sight to behold, because Christina at this time was very heavy and her legs were quite fat. (It was impossible to foresee that she would turn out to be a tall and elegant lady.) She ran out on the lawn and told Mary to watch her dance.