"Prouder than before to be human" - Paolo Mantegazza's Utopian Novel, The Year 3000. A Dream.

Veduta della città ideale, circa 1480-84, variously attributed to Piero della Francesca, Fra Carnevale, Luciano Laurana, Francecso di Giorgio Martini. Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, USA (Creative Commons licensing)

Now here’s an Italian oddity: an 1897 novel entitled, The Year 3000. A Dream (L’anno 3000. Sogno), by Paolo Mantegazza, a “Renaissance man” once described as a “Physician-surgeon, Laboratory-experimenter, Author-editor, Traveller-anthropologist, Professor, Sanitarian, Senator.” Well-known inside and outside of Italy and respected by Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud and Havelock Ellis among others, Mantegazza wrote some one hundred works including treatises on medicine, psychology and education; travelogues on South America, India, and Lapland; and novels ranging from sentimental romances to the scientific-futuristic work discussed here. The Year 3000, a quintessentially Italian contribution to utopian literature, comes filled with nifty conceits, a few cringe-worthy ideas, and quite a bit of charm and humor. I found myself laughing aloud on numerous occasions.

The Bison Books edition of The Year 3000, the first English translation of the novel, is worth picking up if only for the rich introduction by Nicoletta Pireddu, who offers a masterful assessment not only of Mantegazza’s work but also of utopian literature of the era in general, describing other utopian and science fictions from Italy and elsewhere. Some of these – Folliero De Luna’s The Political Mysteries of the Moon, for example - practically beg one to want to hunt them down. Pireddu also connects Mantegazza’s novel to wider scientific ideas as well as to political debates following Italy’s unification just 36 years before the novel’s publication.

The concept of unification is evident from the novel’s beginning. Europe, united following a war that has ended all wars, by the year 3000 has joined the rest of the world in forming the United Planetary States under a common language, Cosmic. A young Roman couple, Paolo and Maria, leave home in their flying “aerotach” for an extended tour of this new world. Following a trajectory that takes them from Rome to the Ligurian coast then to Egypt, Ceylon and India, the couple arrives in the world’s capital at Andropolis, the former Darjeeling, at the foot of the Himalaya, where they settle for several months to explore its wonders, and where Maria’s impatience over a secret that Paolo has promised to reveal there reaches a climax. Mantegazza uses the couple’s impressions as a means to explore his vision of the fourth millennium and as a platform for advancing his ideas concerning government, religion, education, health, gender, race and culture.

Mantegazza anticipates many technological advances. His world features clean energy, provided both by breaking down water into hydrogen fuel and by organic production of electricity based on a 26^th century discovery exploiting the mechanism of bioluminescence in fireflies. Nearly instantaneous prefab building construction assures universal housing, with a variety of models from which to choose. Communities are meticulously planned. The remarkable medical accomplishments of the 31^st century include the elimination of pain, advanced imaging methods to allow near instant diagnoses, tissue engineering for quick wound repair, and the pantomass, a whole-body massage/workout suit used in gymnasiums, and that in only a month can turn a “pale bookworm weakened by study” (present!) “into a stout traveler.”

Some of Mantegazza’s notions of future technologies, however, seem quaint, even retrograde. Communications employ luminous characters on a screen but also primarily take place thanks to “the ancient telephone…greatly improved.” The first leg of Paolo and Maria’s trip in their aerotach, from Rome to the coastal town of LaSpezia, takes “only a few hours,” as it does today by car. Readers may also be less than impressed to learn that human longevity has been extended to an average age of 60. Exploration of space is limited to more and more powerful telescopes, including one introduced late in the novel that will finally allow humans to see the inhabitants of nearby planets. And though Mantegazza presciently references human impact on the earth’s climate, today’s climate scientists might demur with his treatment of the subject. In the year 3000, humans have “so deftly controlled the forces of nature that it was enough to direct a strong current of warm air towards the poles to melt the immense ice formations that once occupied the polar zone,” thus cooling Europe by replacing the deserts of Africa with a vast new sea, seen lapping at the foot of the pyramids of Giza when Paolo and Maria swing through Egypt.

In terms of human moral, psychological and social development, Mantegazza’s ideas seem more at home and range more extensively, revealing the writer’s intense interest in psychology, evolutionary biology, and an “elastic” and “proteiform” human nature. In fact, in the year 3000, “Philosophy has been banned…even in name, and replaced by psychology and anthropology.” Religious tolerance abounds, but religion as known in the 19^th century has been replaced with belief in “an imaginary God” who serves as a repository for vague spiritual yearnings (the italics are the author’s - readers may be forgiven for laughing at that). Mantegazza’s emphasis is on the practical betterment of humankind, towards which he places enormous faith in individuals gently governed by an elite of the wise.

Among Paolo and Maria’s stops on their travels is Ceylon, known as the Island of Experiments, a living museum of political systems. These include transparently-named metropolises such as the socialistic Equality and the dictatorial Tyrannopolis, as well as less evident smaller agglomerations like Monachia, “a small city made up entirely of nuns devoted to the cult of Sappho.” Something objectionable can be found here for those of almost any political persuasion. These systems, however, allow people to test alternatives to the world government seated at Andropolis, a vision both utopian and dystopian. While governmental power has become extremely de-centralized, the decisions of the elite entrusted with limited central governing include dramatic intrusions into private life, such as ascertaining whether a couple is fit for marriage and parenting and in fact whether babies demonstrate enough fortitude to merit not being incinerated. The book’s most morally ambiguous scene presents a young mother faced with not only the wrenching decision of whether to keep her “weak” baby or have it destroyed, but also a crass doctor who tells her: “Your baby has no awareness that it exists, and its elimination procedure is neither painful nor lengthy. A minute will reduce it to smoke and a small heap of ashes you can keep. You’re young still; you can remarry and bear other children.”

Though Maria in this scene serves as a moral foil to the doctor’s abysmal bedside manner, Mantegazza’s own attitudes towards women express a mixture of liberality and fustiness. All women have the franchise and divorce is a universal right, but the gender roles displayed in the novel are nearly as conventional as Mantegazza’s linear narrative style. Maria defers almost entirely to Paolo, describing herself at one point as “an ignorant little woman” then expressing amazement at her ability to grasp politics. Women, in Mantegazza’s “dream,” seem to have little place in science or industry, and are excluded from certain places, such as Andropolis’ Temple of Deists.

Though a faith in eugenics appears to run through The Year 3000, as is evident in the destruction of frail babies, Mantegazza’s treatment of race and ethnicity appears largely progressive. Increased comingling between different peoples has produced among humans “…a new type, indefinitely cosmopolitan.” However, Mantegazza’s choices in relating the complete disappearance of various ethnicities (sorry, aboriginal Australians and Maori!) may reveal a certain racial tension; the intercourse between the world’s peoples means that “in Africa there is no longer a single pure black person.”

Despite Mantegazza’s faith in cosmopolitanism and globalism, The Year 3000 possesses a charming Italo-centrism. Early on, Paolo revels in translating for Maria from Cosmic into the “dead” language of Italian, asserting that “never did another language have a nobler, greater geneology.” He extolls its having produced among the finest writers in history. Many, if not most, of the historical figures alluded to in The Year 3000 are Italian, and Mantegazza frequently digresses into issues with a particularly Italian flavor.

But perhaps the most charming element in The Year 3000: A Dream is Mantegazza’s depiction of the arts and entertainments of Andropolis, a city of ten million that contains an impressive “fifty theaters” (whatever the merits of Mantegazza’s imagination, his notion of a city of ten million people lacks realistic scale). To give the reader an idea of the capital’s cultural life, the narrator provides a marvelous three-page list of a sample day’s theatrical offerings. These include a production of Hamlet (in Cosmic) at the Theatre of Classical Tragedy; Sophocles’ Oedipus at the Panglosse (in ancient Greek and “reserved for the highly cultured”); a stage spectacular featuring “the cycle of cosmic pleasure, from Homer to the year 3000”; and a show in which the only performers are “speaking flowers, walking plants, and whispering meadows,” and which “depicts the struggle of monocotyledonous of coal-bearing soil against plants of the modern era.” There’s also a kind of electric Kool-Aid acid test sound and light experience and a revue of showgirls. 

And of course there are books. It’s disappointing that Mantegazza doesn’t devote more of his vision to art and literature, but it’s clear where his prejudices lie. While praising Italy as having throughout its history stood at the pinnacle of human artistic expression, the narrator notes a blotch on that record around the end of the 19^th century, when artists turned to impressionism, pointillism and decadence, a period that also witnessed the nadir of Italian literature as decadent writers produced an “epidemic of Preraphaelitism, of the superhuman, that affected very high and powerful minds.” As an example, the narrator offers Gabriele d’Annunzio, who, instead of being “one of the great masters,” became “merely a great neurasthenic of Italian literature.”

Of course, since Paolo and Maria are on vacation, they take along some reading material. Of chief interest to them is a book written “ten centuries earlier by a physician with a bizarre imagination who tried to guess what human life would be like a millennium on,” which Paolo intends to translate as they travel, both out of curiosity as to “how well this prophet guessed the future” and in expectation of finding in the book “some beauties to laugh about.” With another 984 years still left to go until Mantegazza’s future arrives, one can already, in 2016, enjoy both his prophecies and quite a few such “beauties” – perhaps a few more than Mantegazza might have intended.

Mama Dearest: Roberto Alajmo's A Mother's Heart

I’m going to try to write around the conceit at the center of contemporary Sicilian writer Roberto Alajmo’s 2003 novel Cuore di Madre - Un Cœur de mère in the French translation I read, or A Mother’s Heart as I’ll refer to it here. Even though I’m normally inclined to reveal spoilers for novels not yet translated into English, dammit, in this one so much is constructed around the central conflict, which holds such a limited universe of possible resolutions, that I feel I’d be giving too much away. For those of you nonetheless willing to stick around, I’ll try to keep your interest by adding that A Mother’s Heart is one of the funniest novels I’ve read in a long time, as black a comedy as black comedies come, one that probably could have been written nowhere but in Sicily. Its peculiar blend of laugh-out-loud humor with the appalling way a child gets treated in the story might not sit well, for example, with some sensitive American tastes. The novel also contains many specifically Sicilian resonances; in fact, Alajmo’s dark comedy takes aim at what might be Southern Italy’s most crucial social fulcrum: the relationship of a son with his mother. While such territory has been mined by other Sicilian writers, even for comic effect – Vitaliano Brancati comes to mind – Alajmo elevates (correction: descends) the mother/son relationship to serve as an elaborate and devastating metaphor for the status quo of modern Sicily.

One barely gets a whiff of the direction Alajmo’s story will take from its opening pages, which begin by dissecting the possible reasons one Cosimo Tumminia, proprietor of a bicycle repair shop in the dusty village of Calcara south of Palermo, has no clients. Perhaps Cosimo’s social isolation stems from a botched repair job, perhaps from innumerable small events that have accumulated into intractable negative gossip, maybe from a vengefulness born out of some old antipathy, its origins lost to time. Whatever the reason, the villagers keep their distance, and callow youths make rude gestures each time they pass Cosimo’s shop, although they do so “mechanically, like those things one does because one does, without demanding why one does them.”

Cosimo seems not to mind much, or even to notice. Passive, incurious, something of a big lug who lives alone in a house in the countryside, he has few interests. Having long ago failed in his few attempts with women, he keeps pornographic magazines under his bed and visits – albeit rarely – an aging prostitute on the edge of town. The “pillars on which Cosimo’s culture rests” consist almost entirely of the stories, jokes and puzzles included in each issue of Games and Crossword Puzzles Weekly, a habitual form of recreation in which he’s indulged for some twenty years. On occasion, he supplements this thrilling diversion by watching whatever happens to be on television or by listening to a radio show on which long-distance truckers call in to report on their locations.

The single other significant element in this vacuous life is Cosimo’s mother, whom he visits in town every day, largely for the purposes of being attentively reminded of his failings and supplied meals he can take home, which his mother prepares for him with relentless maternal insistence.  

But now another feature has come into Cosimo’s circumscribed world, a tremendous change he’s scarcely capable of acknowledging as a more than a blip in his routine. This obligation he’s unable to refuse, one foisted upon him by a handful of local Mafiosi who’ve seen in his social disconnection the qualities perfectly suited for a patsy in a criminal scheme of which the details – though not the hugely un-ignorable central fact of it – remain obscure to Cosimo. The role assigned to him, compromising everything in his quotidian existence, unexpectedly stretches from a promised “few days” to an indeterminate and increasingly untenable period, with no guarantee that those who’ve placed him in this situation will ever return to get him out of it.  

Much of the comedy in A Mother’s Heart stems from Cosimo’s bumbling inadequacy and incompetence in handling his new responsibility. Much of the rest - predictably - stems from his inability to keep his overbearing mother from getting involved. Though relationships between mothers and sons feature frequently in Italian literature, I can’t think of a work in which such a relationship has been so expertly milked for horrific comic effect. Alajmo is deft at creating little comic touches, for example, in using what passes on television as a repeated, humorous counterpoint to what’s happening in Cosimo’s life, or when he reveals the mother’s pride in a set of progressively-sized food containers into which she daily and dutifully shifts a progressively-shrinking amount of leftovers, or when he zooms in on her obsessiveness over the precise point at which a dish is ready to eat. I suspect that more than a few Sicilian sons may have found this book exceedingly discomfiting; even so, they probably still couldn’t wait to get home for mama’s cooking. Like Andrea Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano mysteries, Alajmo’s novel gleefully indulges in Sicilian food, as Cosimo’s mother prepares dish after dish: meatballs in tomato sauce; pasta with sardines, anchovies or tuna, with and without garlic; fried eggplant; and above all brociolone. I’ll let you look up a recipe for yourselves, but should you happen to have a Sicilian relation coming to dinner I’d advise care in choosing among the variations. Disputes over familial differences in preparing Sicilian specialties can turn deadly.

When Cosimo casually suggests that his mother’s brociolone tastes better the day after it’s been cooked, he missteps into a typically impossible exchange with her:

“Why? You didn’t find it good just now?”

“No, for pity’s sake, it’s very good.”

“What about it didn’t you like? Did the potatoes seem too undercooked?”

“No, never in your life!”

“Well, then why did you say you didn’t like it?”

“Who, me, what did I say?”

“That you didn’t like it. Just now, you said it.”

“But when?”

His mother placed the casserole on the table, a sign that she wanted her hands free in order to get to the bottom of things.

“You take me for an imbecile? Just now, you said it.”

“I said that when I ate it the next day it seemed better…”

“So, today’s…”

“What do they have to do with one another? I was speaking in general. Today’s will be even better tomorrow, but it’s already good now.”

“But that the dish would be better when reheated tomorrow you couldn’t yet know, so when you said that it was good, you’d perceived, in fact, that it wasn’t as good as usual. You don’t have to bother my head about it.”

If such exchanges characterize the mother/son relationship in matters so inconsequential, one can imagine their amplification when it comes to the serious circumstances into which Cosimo has fallen.

Alajmo hews closely and leisurely to details, painting a richly textured portrait of the situation. For example at the beginning, in describing the three hypotheses regarding Cosimo’s ostracism, the third-person narrator takes up an entire four pages, a pace so protracted as to test the reader’s patience. Similarly, a description of the contents of the Games and Crossword Puzzles Weekly stretches over multiple pages. But like the tortoise catching up with the hare, slow and steady wins the race, and Alajmo thus creates an almost giddy tension, such that when the problem reaches critical mass, the narrator’s insistence on unhurriedly relating granular details drags the reader through the full measure of the awfulness involved. This combines with the novel’s great black humor to push the reader into a deliriously appalled state. Rarely have I encountered a novel that uses its pacing so effectively to heighten an intended effect.

A Mother’s Heart would be enjoyable if it only aimed for laughs, but Alajmo’s humor pokes pointedly into the particular Sicilian disease of Mafia influence on daily life as well as into the universal ways ordinary people can inertly submit to domination by becoming trapped into routine, acquiescent, and by extension, complicit. One emerges from Alajmo’s clever novel with a tragic sense of his having pierced into the core of a state of things capable of starving off hope for future generations, one far too deeply and menacingly woven into the fabric of Sicilian life. It’ll take more than a mother’s heart to unravel it – more than this mother’s heart, anyway.

A huge thanks to JLS for having recommended Roberto Alajmo’s books. At the moment, only one of his works appears to be available in English, his delightful non-fiction “anti-travel guide” Palermo, worth reading even if only to get a flavor of Alajmo’s singular humor and great talent. 

Above: Photograph of a photograph by photographer Giovanni Ruggeri installed in a doorway in Catania, Sicily, 2014.

Two Serious Ladies

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.   

  - W. H. Auden, September 1, 1939

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.

 Many thanks to the Dolce Bellezza blog for organizing this group read of Two Serious Ladies!