Jane Bowles, photograph by Carl Van Vechten, 1951
Lost in a haunted
wood,
Children afraid
of the night
Who have never been
happy or good.
Though I’ve read Jane Bowles’ Two Serious Ladies several
times, it remains to me the strangest of novels. I can never fully recall what
happens within its entwined and peripatetic plots, and with each reading the
book seems nearly as surprising and odd as the first time. Certain words and
phrases culled from the text could describe the work itself: “gloriously
unpredictable,” for example, or “a train ride into the blue.” The narrative’s almost
child-like quality contrasts with its close, even dreadful atmosphere, a style suggestive
of the running narrative a couple of precocious and not-so-innocent children
might concoct while playing with dolls.
This disconnect appears on the first page, where a blithe
description of the privileged childhood of one of Bowles’ “serious ladies,”
Christina Goering, swerves dangerously in a single sentence: “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.” At this discordant
note, the reader may give a second thought to the character’s charged family
name, and the uneasy distance only increases when, just afterwards, the child
Goering orders her sister Sophie’s friend into muddy water in order to try to
wash away the girl’s sins.
Describing the action of Two Serious Ladies poses a
challenge to the reviewer. Awash in alcohol, the narrative also includes
dreams, and the novel as a whole possesses a woozy, dream-like ambiance, or as
Miss Goering says of one of her own perceptions, something “like a dream that
is remembered long after it has been dreamed.” Indeed, many of the novel’s sparsely
placed but arresting images arise as though having welled up from subconscious
sources to stand like the puzzling objects in a Giorgio de Chirico painting: a
fire engine glowing red in the night; a blue peacock mosaic on the floor of a depressing
apartment building; a garden enclosed by barbed wire, beneath which a dog is
trying to crawl; a woman with no arms or legs.
Divided into three parts, the narrative follows the adult
Miss Goering as she invites to live with her a Miss Gamelon, the exotically-named
cousin of Miss Goering’s childhood governess. At a party Miss Goering briefly encounters
an old friend – Bowles’ other “serious” lady, Mrs. Copperfield, who admits her
dread of an upcoming trip to Panama – then goes home with another party guest,
Arnold, and meets Arnold’s indignant mother and spry, lively father. At home
later, Miss Goering announces that she intends to leave her fancy house for
“some more tawdry place” on a nearby island. Abandoning this story, the novel’s
second part follows Mrs. Copperfield to Panama, where, as her husband goes off
to explore the jungle, Mrs. Copperfield returns to the run-down hotel/brothel
where she’s befriended a teenage prostitute, Pacifica, and the hotel’s
proprietor, Mrs. Quill. The narrative returns in the third part to Miss
Goering, Miss Gamelon, Arnold and Arnold’s father, now sharing Miss Goering’s
“tawdry” new home, and introduces other characters Miss Goering encounters
during nighttime excursions into the town across from the island. The novel
culminates in a bar in which Miss Goering and Miss Copperfield meet again as
though for the purpose of comparing their respective (mis)adventures.
Despite the novel’s lugubrious atmosphere – Truman Capote described
Bowles’ settings as “every room an atrocity, every urban landscape a
neon-dourness” - Two Serious Ladies repeatedly surprises the reader with
flashes of sharp wit, humorous situational irony, evanescent moments of
happiness or tranquility, and above all a deep quirkiness in its characters
that is both memorable and anchored by a sense of moral force. Conventional,
Bowles’ two serious ladies are not, and indeed they make a point of embracing non-conformity,
as Miss Goering, who has been a typist for famous authors, asserts:
I think, though, that you can make
friends more quickly with queer people. Or else you don’t make friends with
them at all – one way or the other. Many of my authors were very queer. In that
way I’ve had an advantage of association that most people don’t have. I know
something about what I call real honest-to-God maniacs.
The novel is full of oddballs, most perched unsteadily on
the dulled edge of some psychological longing or frustration. Paranoia,
detachment, alienation, misunderstanding – these qualities of relation rub up
against the instant and even fond attachments that coalesce and dissolve throughout
the story. The men in Two Serious Ladies appear largely self-absorbed,
ineffectual, even brutish, their characters and motivations revealed in
withering clarity. Arnold is a milquetoast; Mr. Copperfield seeks out authentic
travel “experiences” while dismissing his wife’s attachments to the local
prostitutes. Toby, a client at the Hotel de Las Palmas who latches onto Mrs.
Quill, proves an unscrupulous profiteer. One of Pacifica’s clients splits her
lip – one of several episodes of violence in Two Serious Ladies. Andy, a
man whom Christina Goering meets in a bar then moves in with briefly, is
presumptuous and washed up. His successor in Miss Goering’s adventures, Ben, a
gangster, makes no bones about seeing women as existing only to satisfy his
every whim. Even the most appealing male character, Arnold’s father, admits to
a tyrannical relationship with a wife he resents and even “knock[s]…around all
day long.” But a few of these men display occasional moments of remorse or
thoughtfulness, as when Arnold’s father pens a beseeching letter to his wife,
or when Andy, when pressed for why he didn’t reveal a morbid sexual obsession
to the girl he once intended to marry, replies that he “wanted the buildings to
stay in place for her and…the stars to be over her head and not cockeyed.”
Against most of Bowles’ characters, her two “serious ladies”
stand out through a drive that impels them to confront their fears and an
awareness of themselves as beings capable of choice and self-determination.
“The idea,’ said Miss Goering, ‘is to change first of our own volition and
according to our own inner promptings before they impose completely arbitrary
changes on us.’” The women’s motivations too are presented starkly, albeit with
qualifiers. Mrs. Copperfield’s “sole object in life,” the narrator tells us, “was
to be happy, although people who had observed her behavior over a period of
years would have been surprised to discover that this was all.” Miss Goering, intent
on working out her “own little idea of salvation,” repeatedly responds to
questions about her behavior by noting that it’s not for fun that she does what
she does, but because “it is necessary.” Attainment of the ideals of both women
is a near constant struggle involving dynamic tensions between autonomy and
dependence, attraction and repulsion, domesticity and travel, safety and
daring, insularity and expansiveness, peace and violence, tyranny and timidity.
Dualities and binaries recur throughout Two Serious Ladies (including,
obviously, in the title), as though Miss Goering and Mrs. Copperfield form a single
dialectical unit representing characteristics and choices both opposed and
complementary.
In their rejection of convention and embrace of asserting
their own volition, and even as they sink to the lower depths, Bowles’ serious
ladies display a questing, even moral quality. They are not eccentric simply to
be eccentric. Christina in particular is determined to conquer her fears; her sojourns
out of the house seem equal parts Homeric odyssey and Dantesque descent, as she
sails, or rather, takes the ferry, across water - a thematic motif running throughout
Two Serious Ladies. Repeatedly, Miss Goering plunges into the water, coercing
others to join her or leaving them behind on an island, including Miss Gamelon,
who admits to an insurmountable inability to cross a big body of water, a fear
that has prevented her from fulfilling her dreams and which, one can surmise,
excludes her from being “serious.” Mrs. Copperfield resists water and is
terrified when her Pacifica offers to teach her how to swim, but submits
nonetheless, her vulnerability poignantly revealed as she hangs on “hard to
Pacifica’s thigh with the strength of years of sorrow and frustration in her
hand.”
But the moral dimension of these women seems unmoored from
any conventional morality. Despite frequent allusions to religion, such as Mrs.
Goering’s quest for sainthood and a reference to Mrs. Copperfield’s being of l’age du Christ, Bowles’ serious ladies
follow a vague internal compass. “It is against my entire code,” proclaims Miss
Goering in response to Arnold’s invitation to spend the night, “but then, I
have never even begun to use my code, although I judge everything by it.” And
when Miss Goering accuses Mrs. Copperfield of having gone to pieces, Mrs.
Copperfield retorts, “I have gone to
pieces, which is a thing I’ve wanted to do for years.” Whither that compass may
lead them and whether it’s in the right direction or not seems nearly beside
the point when a life choice is always of interest, but perhaps not of
importance, as Miss Goering opines, simultaneously wondering if, though she
feels nearer to sainthood, something inside “hidden from my sight is piling sin
upon sin as fast as Mrs. Copperfield.”
Claire Messud’s introduction to a new edition of Two
Serious Ladies, while focusing on the unconventionality of the novel and
the characters, barely skirts the important context in which Bowles’ novel was
born. Bowles composed Two Serious Ladies in the early 1940’s as fascism
marched across Europe. Although aside from the resonant name “Goering” there is
nothing manifest in Two Serious Ladies regarding the dire events
unfolding in the world, anxiety about the war seems as subsumed into the
narrative as the sea seems contained in an oyster. Messud also omits mention of
the “February House” in Brooklyn Heights, the creative furnace in which Bowles lived
with her husband Paul, Carson McCullers, W. H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, the burlesque
and Broadway performer Gypsy Rose Lee, and the house’s founder, the charismatic
editor George Davis, with an almost infinite parade of the most notable artists
and writers of the time passing through, including many, like Klaus and Erika
Mann and Salvador and Gala Dalí, fleeing the horrors of the Europe. W. H. Auden was
particularly involved in inspiring and influencing Bowles’ work on Two
Serious Ladies; the novel’s questions of choice and morality in a world in
which humanity seems abandoned to its own devices and sinking into a terrible conformity echo those found in much of Auden’s most searching work of the time.
Sherrell Tippins, in February House, a study of the community, notes both
authors’ fascination with Franz Kafka, especially Kafka’s implicit questioning
of original sin in a world in which God is non-existent - or arbitrary,
indifferent, asleep.
Two Serious Ladies grapples with difficult questions
and eschews easy answers. Its style is breathtakingly original. Its peculiar
realism, which starkly presents life as a panoply of choices, a grasping in a
world of violence and alienation but also of intrepidness and small kindnesses,
is infused with a strangeness that pushes it towards a haunting surrealism. But
above all, its mesmerizing, complex binary characters are what truly stand out in the novel. In one of the few instances in Two Serious Ladies in
which Bowles actually employs the word “serious” (aside from in the title), Arnold
complains of his “more and more…insupportable” life, wishing to switch to
something “in the book line, or in the painting line,” noting that his family
“doesn’t believe that such an occupation is serious.” Arnold’s father instead dismisses his son as
lacking the capacity to be an artist, which requires “a certain amount of brawn
and pluck and character.” One can see in Bowles’ two serious ladies -
eccentric, courageous, awful, frail, determined, perhaps even damned - no small
amount of brawn and pluck and character, an unfiltered embrace of curiosity regarding the world around them,
a struggle to create themselves anew, horrid warts and all, to wrest a bit of
self-determination and a lot of originality from a darkening world. In delivering
us her only novel, as singular and daring and discomfiting a work as one can
find in any literature, Jane Bowles has displayed the same.
