My Sister's Hand in Mine Read online

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Preface by Joy Williams

  Introduction by Truman Capote

  TWO SERIOUS LADIES

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  IN THE SUMMER HOUSE

  Act One

  Act Two

  PLAIN PLEASURES

  • 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

  Copyright

  Preface

  In 1966 my mother and father gave me The Collected Works of Jane Bowles for my birthday. I wanted to be a writer and had been studying the “craft” of fiction earnestly, but I had not heard of Jane Bowles. Voyaging for the first time into Two Serious Ladies, I was immediately disoriented. I did not know what to make of this object at all. There was no discernible narrative strategy. There was no way of explaining or analyzing the processes at work. Interpretation was useless. The vistas were dispiriting, the food foul, the wind always howling. Her people were mournful, impulsive, and as erratic in their peculiar journeys’ flights as bats. They were very often drunk. They thought continuously, obsessively, but had no thoughts exactly, no helpful method of perceiving the world or their positions in it. As Miss Goering, one of the serious ladies, remarks just before committing herself to an unsavory adventure, “It is against my entire code, but then, I have never even begun to use my code, although I judge everything by it.” No one knows how to live in these pages; they have developed no mechanisms to assure themselves that the life they have been presented with is their life. (One of Bowles’s many fears was that she would stop believing in her own characters.) Reading Jane Bowles is making the acquaintance not with dread but with dread’s sister, perhaps—a grave, absurd disquietude.

  When you are a young writer, you are ruthless in what you take from older, more experienced writers. You read to learn, to co-opt, even, and to transmute, to justify or strengthen your own flickering vision. But there was nothing, I thought, for the writer to learn from Jane Bowles, who was such an unnatural, original writer. She was scary, she was inimitable. Who would strive to go where she was? It was dangerous there. And lonely as well.

  Of course, this is the most important thing a writer can learn—the necessity of finding one’s own dangerous, inimitable, and lonely place, and writing from there.

  * * *

  Jane Auer was an only child, a rich kid, lame from a fall from a horse and a botched surgery, elfin, dedicatedly odd, a lesbian. She met Paul Bowles, a composer, in New York, in the lobby of the Plaza Hotel, and confided to a friend, “He is my enemy.” Paul found her uncommunicative and less than endearing. He was a precocious only child himself, who claimed he had not even spoken to another child until the age of five. They married the day before Jane’s twenty-first birthday, mostly for amusement and to horrify their families. Rumor has it that they slept together once, early in their marriage.

  Her single novel was written when she was twenty-six. While she was writing it, she’d show Paul sections. He admitted he’d never seen anything like it. So many things were left out, he complained, and it was so messy! (In his autobiography, Without Stopping, Paul wrote, “I doubt that I told her how much I admired it, but perhaps I did.”) By all accounts he helped her considerably with the manuscript, excising several sections, two of which later appeared as the stories “A Guatemalan Idyll” and “A Day in the Open.” The book was published and received with hostility and some praise. Jane professed not to care. She found writing to be the most “loathsome” of all activities. Working on the book had taught her nothing about writing a novel but, ironically, it led Paul away from music and into fiction. He discovered that he wrote rapidly and with great pleasure. While Jane struggled to describe the bridge in “Camp Cataract”—the effort took days and resulted in a single sentence—Paul was confidently building his fine first novel, The Sheltering Sky. He told her her “method of work” was the root of her problem. She refused to use the “hammer and nails” that storytelling provided, convinced she had to manufacture her own hammer and nails. It all had to be difficult from the first paragraph in order for her to have respect for it. After her death, he told the biographer Millicent Dillon that what she wanted to do was “more than she could do, more than perhaps anyone could do.”

  She was having trouble working but she wrote a playlet for puppets, a “bizarrerie,” for the editor of the surrealistic magazine View. She wrote a play, In the Summer House, which, according to Dillon’s excellent biography of the Bowleses, A Little Original Sin, Tennessee Williams found “elusive and gripping … one of those very rare plays which are not tested by the theatre but by which the theatre is tested.” It survived on Broadway for less than two months.

  Still, she was having a great deal of fun in New York and in Tangier, where the Bowleses had more or less settled. Her life there was exotic, dramatic, and somewhat incomprehensible. She favored gin to excess. She drank quantities of it at home and at the Parade, the Atlas, the Monocle, Guitta’s Bar, the Viking, the Café Flores. She had affairs with Helevetia and Marty and Jody and Genevieve and Martha and Lily and Cecil and countless others. She was mad for Renée, who she admitted was afraid to be in the same room with her. She was enamored of Cory, who wore steel-rimmed spectacles and ran a tea room. Jane’s choice of lovers often seemed ludicrous to others, which was apparently her intention. Her most outlandish obsession was with a young Moroccan peasant, Cherifa, who was ferocious, greedy, ugly, and a dabbler in black magic. Cherifa kept a large philodendron in Jane’s house. When Paul discovered a packet filled with dried blood and pubic hair and fingernails—a magic packet—buried amid the plant’s roots, he surmised that the packet was Cherifa’s “stooge” and that she could give it orders before she left and see that they were carried out during the night. She was Jane’s maid, and even Jane described her as a freak, she who once said of Carson McCullers, “Her freaks aren’t real.” Many people suspected Cherifa poisoned Jane, bringing on the stroke she suffered at forty.

  Jane’s stroke was devastating. She became aphasic and partially blind. She was treated in Tangier, London, New York, Lisbon. She tried to work but was unable to read what she wrote. She could not understand what she knew. She began another novel, Going to Massachusetts, the unpromising title of which was suggested by Paul. The primary character is a woman named Bozoe. Jane would write stuff like “She was very conscious of the advantages she enjoyed as a citizen of a democracy.” She filled notebooks with such infelicitous words. She had lost her wit, her style, her crazy grace. It was as if for Jane that dreadful moment had come of which the Kabbalah speaks—when words rebel against us and become only themselves, dead as stones.

  Ten years so passed. She believed God was punishing her for not writing. She took pills for high blood pressure, for anxiety, to prevent convulsions. She drank heavily, found solitude unbearable, worried about money, spent hours buttoning and unbuttoning her
sweater or picking at her wig. It was around this time, 1966, that her collected works were published in the United States, receiving the kind of attention and praise that my parents had noticed. A friend brought her a copy of the book with its crisp geometric pink and red jacket, and she wrote Dead beside her name.

  Diagnosed as a manic-depressive, she was finally committed to the care of nuns at the Clinica de los Angeles in Málaga, Spain. Though heavily sedated, she was frantic there and begged to be released. The doctor suggested shock treatments, and after these were administered, Paul reluctantly brought her back to Tangier. She lay on the floor all day, staring at him as he worked. She frightened people and their friends avoided her now, but in the bars she was popular with American hippies, to whom she gave money. After a few months, an incident occurred which impelled her return to the sanitorium in Málaga, where she would remain until her death, four years later, at the age of fifty-six. She had gone into a bookstore and walked out with two books without paying for them. When one of her Moroccan servants protested, she seized the woman by the throat. In her fiction, where blows are always being struck, such an act would have had no consequences (the sisters in “A Quarreling Pair” resume their strange intimacies after an abrupt act of violence, followed by the tender singing of a song). But this was her life, and the horrid end of her life at that, and characters she had summoned forth in her moody and madcap works of so many years before would neither absorb it nor distract her from it anymore.

  In Two Serious Ladies, Mrs. Copperfield is often cheered by recalling a dream she has “had more than once.”

  She was being chased up a short hill by a dog. At the top of the hill there stood a few pine trees and a mannequin about eight feet high. She … discovered her to be fashioned out of flesh, but without life … Mrs. Copperfield wrapped one of the mannequin’s arms tightly around her own waist. She was startled by the thickness of her arm and very pleased. The mannequin’s other arm she bent upward from the elbow with her free hand. Then the manniquin began to sway backwards and forwards. Mrs. Copperfield clung all the more tightly to the mannequin and together they fell off the top of the hill and continued rolling for quite a distance until they landed on a little walk, where they remained locked in each other’s arms. Mrs. Copperfield loved this part of the dream best; and the fact that all the way down the hill the mannequin acted as a buffer between herself and the broken bottles and little stones over which they fell gave her particular satisfaction.

  After the stroke and the seizures and the years of depression, she wrote, “I can’t think the way I could.” Not did, could. She had, once, the power; the power of the imagination, that peculiar thing so much like life but not of life, an imposing mannequin, unnerving to others, which the artist embraces. Jane Bowles was an original, a mistress of the elliptical, an angel of the odd, who fashioned her uncompleted souls to seek redemption along avenues blessed by neither God nor Kafka.

  In A Little Original Sin, a friend of Jane’s, Marguerite McBey, described her hands: “She had marvelously strange hands. They weren’t terribly feminine. They looked like hands that did something but they were so soft, as though there weren’t bones in them, as if when you touched them, they didn’t resist you.”

  So too is her best work. Marvelously strange. It does not resist the reader’s attention. In so many continually surprising ways, the work is, in fact, irresistible.

  JOY WILLIAMS is the author of four novels—the most recent, The Quick and the Dead, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2001—and three collections of short stories, as well as Ill Nature, a book of essays that was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award for criticism.

  Introduction

  It must be seven or eight years since I last saw that modern legend named Jane Bowles; nor have I heard from her, at least not directly. Yet I am sure she is unchanged; indeed, I am told by recent travelers to North Africa who have seen or sat with her in some dim casbah café that this is true, and that Jane, with her dahlia-head of cropped curly hair, her tilted nose and mischief-shiny, just a trifle mad eyes, her very original voice (a husky soprano), her boyish clothes and schoolgirl’s figure and slightly limping walk, is more or less the same as when I first knew her more than twenty years ago: even then she had seemed the eternal urchin, appealing as the most appealing of non-adults, yet with some substance cooler than blood invading her veins, and with a wit, an eccentric wisdom no child, not the strangest wunderkind, ever possessed.

  When I first met Mrs. Bowles (1944? 1945?) she was already, within certain worlds, a celebrated figure: though only in her twenties, she had published a most individual and much remarked novel, Two Serious Ladies; she had married the gifted composer and writer Paul Bowles and was, together with her husband, a tenant in a glamorous boardinghouse established on Brooklyn Heights by the late George Davis. Among the Bowles’ fellow boarders were Richard and Ellen Wright, W. H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Oliver Smith, Carson McCullers, Gypsy Rose Lee, and (I seem to remember) a trainer of chimpanzees who lived there with one of his star performers. Anyway, it was one hell of a household. But even amid such a forceful assembly, Mrs. Bowles, by virtue of her talent and the strange visions it enclosed, and because of her personality’s startling blend of playful-puppy candor and feline sophistication, remained an imposing, stage-front presence.

  Jane Bowles is an authoritative linguist; she speaks, with the greatest precision, French and Spanish and Arabic—perhaps this is why the dialogue of her stories sounds, or sounds to me, as though it has been translated into English from some delightful combination of other tongues. Moreover, these languages are self-learned, the product of Mrs. Bowles’ nomadic nature: from New York she wandered on to and all over Europe, traveled away from there and the impending war to Central America and Mexico, then alighted awhile in the historic ménage on Brooklyn Heights. Since 1947 she has been almost continuously resident abroad; in Paris or Ceylon, but largely in Tangiers—in fact, both Jane and Paul Bowles may now safely be described as permanent Tangerinos, so total has their adherence become to that steep, shadowy-white seaport. Tangiers is composed of two mismatching parts, one of them a dull modern area stuffed with office buildings and tall gloomy dwellings, and the other a casbah descending through a medieval puzzlement of alleys and alcoves and kef-odored, mint-scented piazzas down to the crawling with sailors, shiphorn-hollering port. The Bowles have established themselves in both sectors—have a sterilized, tout confort apartment in the newer quarter, and also a refuge hidden away in the darker Arab neighborhood: a native house that must be one of the city’s tiniest habitations—ceilings so low that one has almost literally to move on hands and knees from room to room; but the rooms themselves are like a charming series of postcard-sized Vuillards—Moorish cushions spilling over Moorish-patterned carpets, all cozy as a raspberry tart and illuminated by intricate lanterns and windows that allow the light of sea skies and views that encompass minarets and ships and the blue-washed rooftops of native tenements receding like a ghostly staircase to the clamorous shoreline. Or that is how I remember it on the occasion of a single visit made at sunset on an evening, oh, fifteen years ago

  A line from Edith Sitwell: Jane, Jane, the morning light creaks down again—. This from a poem I’ve always liked, without, as so often with the particular author, altogether understanding it. Unless “morning light” is an image signifying memory (?). My own most satisfying memories of Jane Bowles revolve around a month spent in side-by-side rooms in a pleasantly shabby hotel on the rue du Bac during an icy Paris winter—January, 1951. Many a cold evening was spent in Jane’s snug room (fat with books and papers and foodstuffs and a snappy white Pekingese puppy bought from a Spanish sailor); long evenings spent listening to a phonograph and drinking warm applejack while Jane built sloppy, marvelous stews atop an electric burner: she is a good cook, yessir, and kind of a glutton, as one might suspect from her stories, which abound in accounts of eating and its artifacts. Cooking is but one of her extracurric
ular gifts; she is also a spookily accurate mimic and can re-create with nostalgic admiration the voices of certain singers—Helen Morgan, for example, and her close friend Libby Holman. Years afterward I wrote a story called Among the Paths to Eden, in which, without realizing it, I attributed to the heroine several of Jane Bowles’ characteristics: the stiff-legged limp, her spectacles, her brilliant and poignant abilities as a mimic (“She waited, as though listening for music to cue her; then, ‘Don’t ever leave me, now that you’re here! Here is where you belong. Everything seems so right when you’re near, When you’re away it’s all wrong.’ And Mr. Belli was shocked, for what he was hearing was exactly Helen Morgan’s voice, and the voice, with its vulnerable sweetness, refinement, its tender quaver toppling high notes, seemed not to be borrowed, but Mary O’Meaghan’s own, a natural expression of some secluded identity”). I did not have Mrs. Bowles in mind when I invented Mary O’Meaghan—a character she in no essential way resembles; but it is a measure of the potent impression Jane has always made on me that some fragment of her should emerge in this manner.

  During that winter Jane was working on In the Summer House, the play that was later so sensitively produced in New York. I’m not all that keen on the theater: cannot sit through most plays once; nevertheless, I saw In the Summer House three times, and not out of loyalty to the author, but because it had a thorny wit, the flavor of a newly tasted, refreshingly bitter beverage—the same qualities that had initially attracted me to Mrs. Bowles’ novel, Two Serious Ladies.

  My only complaint against Mrs. Bowles is not that her work lacks quality, merely quantity. The volume in hand constitutes her entire shelf, so to say. And grateful as we are to have it, one could wish that there was more. Once, while discussing a colleague, someone more facile than either of us, Jane said: “But it’s so easy for him. He has only to turn his hand. Just turn his hand.” Actually, writing is never easy: in case anyone doesn’t know, it’s the hardest work around; and for Jane I think it is difficult to the point of true pain. And why not?—when both her language and her themes are sought after along tortured paths and in stony quarries: the never-realized relationships between her people, the mental and physical discomforts with which she surrounds and saturates them—every room an atrocity, every urban landscape a creation of neon-dourness. And yet, though the tragic view is central to her vision, Jane Bowles is a very funny writer, a humorist of sorts—but not, by the way, of the Black School. Black Comedy, as its perpetrators label it, is, when successful, all lovely artifice and lacking any hint of compassion. “Camp Cataract,” to my mind the most complete of Mrs. Bowles’ stories and the one most representative of her work, is a rending sample of controlled compassion: a comic tale of doom that has at its heart, and as its heart, the subtlest comprehension of eccentricity and human apartness. This story alone would require that we accord Jane Bowles high esteem.