The Beat Century — post 39 of 100. Jane Bowles, Two Serious Ladies (1943).
Jane Bowles published one novel in 1943, watched it meet uncomprehending reviews, and was later called the finest modern writer of fiction in any language by John Ashbery.
Alfred A. Knopf published Two Serious Ladies in 1943. It was Jane Bowles’s first book and, as it turned out, her only novel. The reviews were mostly uncomprehending. Her complete body of work amounts to one novel, one play and six short stories — an output so small that any assessment of her has to rest almost entirely on this book.
It has held up under that weight for eighty years, and the reason is that nobody has since written anything much like it. The novel follows two upper-class women, Christina Goering and Frieda Copperfield, as they proceed by separate routes into what the plot summaries politely call debauchery. What the summaries cannot convey is the tone, which is the entire point.
A Sentence That Tells You Nothing
The novel opens: “Christina Goering’s father was an American industrialist of German parentage and her mother was a New York lady of a very distinguished family.” It is a flawlessly conventional first sentence — the opening of a social novel, promising a world of inheritance and drawing rooms and consequences. Nothing that follows honours a single one of those promises, and the reader spends the next two hundred pages waiting for a machinery that never engages.
The book then declines to write that novel, or any other recognisable one. The parentage is never load-bearing. The distinguished family evaporates. What follows instead is a sequence of encounters governed by a logic the reader is never given access to, narrated in the same unruffled register throughout. Bowles’s method is to maintain the sentence-level composure of realist fiction while withdrawing every one of realism’s guarantees.
Two Directions, No Destination
Miss Goering, pursuing an obscure private salvation, sells her house and moves progressively toward squalor and toward men who are obviously bad for her, treating each degradation as a rung on a ladder. Mrs Copperfield goes to Panama with her husband, abandons him for a prostitute named Pacifica, and installs herself in a waterfront hotel, having found something she declines to explain to anyone.
Both women are doing something that looks like a spiritual quest conducted with entirely wrong equipment. Neither achieves anything a reader could call a resolution. The two plots barely touch. The novel has been fairly described as a spectacular enigma that ought not to work — inscrutable characters, careless plotting — held together by prose that is simply mesmerising. That combination is why the 1943 reviewers had nothing useful to say. There was no available vocabulary for a book whose surface was calm and whose interior obeyed no known rules.
The Admirers
The writers who caught it caught it completely. Tennessee Williams, her friend, called Bowles the most important writer of prose fiction in modern American letters, named Two Serious Ladies his favourite book, and elsewhere called her the most underrated writer of fiction in American literature. John Ashbery wrote: “It is to be hoped that she will be recognized for what she is: one of the finest modern writers of fiction in any language.” John Waters, decades later, put the novel among the finest ever written.
The composition of that list is instructive. Williams, Ashbery, Waters — a playwright of thwarted women, a poet who built a career on syntax that refuses to arrive, and a filmmaker devoted to the deranged surface of respectability. Bowles is a writer’s writer in the exact sense: little known to the general public, with a small and intensely devoted following, admired most by people who understood how hard the effect is to produce.
The Life That Came After
She was born Jane Sydney Auer in 1917 and married Paul Bowles, who was involved in editing Two Serious Ladies and who — in one of the sourer ironies in American letters — began writing fiction himself shortly afterward and was published immediately and with great distinction. She worked on the novel in Mexico, where she met Helvetia Perkins, who became her lover. She later moved with Paul to Tangier. A stroke in 1957 effectively ended her writing life. She died in 1973.
Her reputation has climbed steadily since, sustained by reissues and by the periodic rediscovery of the novel by writers who cannot believe it is not better known. The relationship to this series is oblique but real: Tangier, Paul Bowles, and the circle that drew Burroughs and Ginsberg there place her at the geographical origin of a good deal of Beat mythology, generally as the wife in the background. She got there first, wrote the strangest book any of them produced, and was, in Williams’s estimate, the best writer in the room.
The Comedy Nobody Mentions
One quality gets lost in the standard account of Bowles as a difficult modernist, which is that the book is extremely funny. The humour comes from the gap between the characters’ announced motives and their observable behaviour, and from dialogue in which two people conduct entirely separate conversations while appearing to converse. Bowles reportedly worked at the sentence level for years, and the finish shows: there is no loose writing anywhere in the book, only loose consequences.
The women speak in flat declaratives about their spiritual requirements, then act on impulses they never mention. Nobody in the novel is surprised by anybody. That deadpan — everyone treating the deranged as unremarkable — is the technique later readers recognised, which is why John Waters found the book and why it reads as considerably more contemporary than its publication date suggests. Her contemporaries were writing war novels, and she was writing this.
It is to be hoped that she will be recognized for what she is: one of the finest modern writers of fiction in any language.
John Ashbery on Jane Bowles
Where to go next
Follow it with Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky, published six years later, and consider which of the two Bowleses was the more original writer.
Previous: Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Pictures of the Gone World. Next: Amiri Baraka, Blues People. One hundred books from the Beat Generation and the writers around them — the ones who got famous, the ones who got written out, and the ecological writing that grew out of the same soil. A new one every other day.
Sources
- Two Serious Ladies — Wikipedia
- It’s Time to Start Taking Jane Bowles Seriously — Review 31
- The Best Book of 1943: Two Serious Ladies — Kathryn Scanlan, Granta
- Two Serious Ladies — Internet Archive full text
- Two Serious Ladies — A Public Space reading notes
CD Damitio writes at indignified.substack.com — essays on utopias, dystopias, and the spaces between. Free to read. No algorithm, no sponsored content. His books can be found on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/CD-Damitio/author/B001JP7NWA
CD Damitio writes INDIGNIFIED — utopias and dystopias explored. Free to read.
