Two Serious Ladies Read online

  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

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  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 B
owles'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.

  "Now don't take your eyes off me," she said. "I'm going to do a dance of worship to the sun. Then I'm going to show that I'd rather have God and no sun than the sun and no God. Do you understand?"

  "Yes," said Mary. "Are you going to do it now?"

  "Yes, I'm going to do it right here." She began the dance abruptly. It was a clumsy dance and her gestures were all undecided. When Sophie came out of the house, Christina was in the act of running backwards and forwards with her hands joined in prayer.

  "What is she doing?" Sophie asked Mary.

  "A dance to the sun, I think," Mary said. "She told me to sit here and watch her."

  Sophie walked over to where Christina was now twirling around and around and shaking her hands weakly in the air.

  "Sneak!" she said and suddenly she pushed Christina down on the grass.

  For a long time after that, Christina kept away from Sophie, and consequently from Mary. She had one more occasion to be with Mary, however, and this happened because Sophie developed a terrible toothache one morning, and her governess was obliged to take her to the dentist immediately. Mary, not having heard of this, came over in the afternoon, expecting to find Sophie at home. Christina was in the tower in which the children often gathered, and saw her coming up the walk.

  "Mary," she screamed, "come on up here," When Mary arrived in the tower, Christina asked her if she would not like to play a very special game with her. "It's called 'I forgive you for all your sins,' " said Christina. "You'll have to take your dress off."

  "Is it fun?" Mary asked.

  "It's not for fun that we play it, but because it's necessary to play it."

  "All right," said Mary, "I'll play with you." She took her dress off and Christina pulled an old burlap sack over Mary's head. She cut two holes in the burlap for Mary to see through and then she tied a cord around her waist.

  "Come," said Christina, "and you will be absolved for your sins. Keep repeating to yourself: 'May the Lord forgive me for my sins.' "

  She hurried down the stairs with Mary and then out across the lawn towards the woods. Christina wasn't yet sure what she was going to do, but she was very much excited. They came to a stream that skirted the woods. The banks of the stream were soft and muddy.

  "Come to the water," said Christina; "I think that's how we'll wash away your sins. You'll have to stand in the mud."

  "Near the mud?"

  "In the mud. Does your sin taste bitter in your mouth? It must."

  "Yes," said Mary hesitantly.

  "Then you want to be clean and pure as a flower is, don't you?"

&n
bsp; Mary did not answer.

  "If you don't lie down in the mud and let me pack the mud over you and then wash you in the stream, you'll be forever condemned. Do you want to be forever condemned? This is your moment to decide."

  Mary stood beneath her black hood without saying a word.

  Christina pushed her down on the ground and started to pack the burlap with mud.

  "The mud's cold," said Mary.

  "The hell fires are hot," said Christina. "If you let me do this, you won't go to hell."

  "Don't take too long," said Mary.

  Christina was very much agitated. Her eyes were shining. She packed more and more mud on Mary and then she said to her:

  "Now you're ready to be purified in the stream."

  "Oh, please no, not the water—I hate to go into the water. I'm afraid of the water."

  "Forget what you are afraid of. God's watching you now and He has no sympathy for you yet."

  She lifted Mary from the ground and walked into the stream, carrying her. She had forgotten to take off her own shoes and stockings. Her dress was completely covered with mud. Then she submerged Mary's body in the water. Mary was looking at her through the holes in the burlap. It did not occur to her to struggle.

  "Three minutes will be enough," said Christina. "I'm going to say a little prayer for you."

  "Oh, don't do that," Mary pleaded.

  "Of course," said Christina, lifting her eyes to the sky.

  "Dear God," she said, "make this girl Mary pure as Jesus Your Son. Wash her sins away as the water is now washing the mud away. This black burlap proves to you that she thinks she is a sinner."

  "Oh, stop," whispered Mary. "He can hear you even if you just say it to yourself. You're shouting so."

  "The three minutes are over, I believe," said Christina. "Come darling, now you can stand up."

  "Let's run to the house," said Mary. "I'm freezing to death."