Jane Bowles as Serious Lady

Jane Bowles as Serious LadyThe Collected Works of Jane Bowles by Jane BowlesReview by: James KraftNOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Spring, 1968), pp. 273-277Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1345168 .

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Review Essay Jane Bowles as Serious Lady

JAMES KRAFT

The Collected Works of Jane Bowles1 includes one novel, one play, and seven short stories, which is all she has written since 1943 when she published her first and only novel. Although her publication is limited, Jane Bowles has had a small but faithful reading public, and it is not difficult to see why she excites the attention of a coterie. She is, simply, stylistically and thematically too eccentric to appeal to a larger public. She obviously relishes taking her special viewpoint and expressing it in an oddity of style. Here are the first two paragraphs of her novel, Two Serious Ladies:

Christina Goering's father was an American industrialist of German par- entage 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.

This calculated prose, so certain of itself, seems to lean energetically forward, to move directly like Christina Goering, to express at once a compression and a thrust. "As a child Christina had been very much disliked by other children." This sentence is made deliberately suggestive to lead us to the next: "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," and so forth. By this time we are caught up in this firm, clear, blunt world, which makes everything so uncertain with its peculiar, suggestive tension. We are ready for the danger that crops up in the next sentence with the word "fanatics": "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."

1 Jane Bowles, The Collected Works of Jane Bowles, intro. Truman Capote (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), pp. xii + 431, $6.95.



NOVEL SPRING 1968

This is the beginning of Mrs. Bowles' best work. It concerns first Miss Christina

Goering and then Mrs. Frieda Copperfield: "Mrs. Copperfield had a sharp little face and very dark hair. She was unusually small and thin. She was nervously rubbing her bare arms and looking around the room when Miss Goering seated herself in the chair beside her. They had met for many years at Anna's parties and they occasionally had tea with each other." They meet at a party at the start of the novel and at a restaurant at the end. In between they pursue their strangely personal existences, neither with apparent success but both with some realization of what they are. The novel is about this pursuit of self against the forms that are laid down for us. These are the forms that we pick up and carry, until we throw them away-perhaps rashly or too late-trying to be what we are. Miss Goering and Mrs. Copperfield, Christina and Frieda, two different but related women, contrast two possible ways in life: the one certain, hard, and firm; the other frightened, nervous, and confused. Mrs. Copperfield's speech quickly defines her side:

"Oh, I'm sure," said Mrs. Copperfield, "that you wouldn't want to hear about it. You can't possibly have any respect for me, but that doesn't make any difference because I have the utmost respect for you. I heard my husband say that you had a religious nature one day, and we almost had a very bad fight. Of course he is crazy to say that. You are gloriously unpredictable and you are afraid of no one but yourself. I hate religion in other people."

Mrs. Bowles' style is prosaically flat and yet richly poetic. Everything has its meaning, first for what it is, then for what it is made into, and finally for what it could become. If Christina is anything at all she is just what the opening paragraphs, moving forward, bluntly, flatly, clearly, and inexplicably, are. Every "thing" in these paragraphs is part of her, applies to her, yet nothing expresses her so much as the style that leaves possible in its clearness so much meaning. And nothing shows Mrs. Copperfield like the nervous movement of her quixotic speech. She-and not Christina-will be the unexpected.

Such a style is deliberately suggestive, and capable of much meaning. It is also limited. Mrs. Bowles writes the same story every time-with two possible excep- tions that will be noted later-as if she must have a Christina-Frieda contrast in order to construct her sense of reality. Miss Goering and Mrs. Copperfield are the two warring sides of the female personality. Sometimes Mrs. Bowles makes the two women sisters, as in the story, "Camp Cataract." Sometimes she doubles the contrast, as in her play, In the Summer House, where the adult ladies have two daughters who reverse roles with their mothers. A short puppet play-"A Quar- reling Pair"-involves the conversation of two antagonistic sisters. There are two women in "A Guatemalan Idyll," one of whom has contrasting daughters. There are sister-like whores in "A Day in the Open," again representing the Christina- Frieda difference.

In each of these contrasts one woman tries to dominate a weaker figure, but in the end emerges as strangely inadequate, oddly more insecure and dependent. Men never play a central role in this fiction. Men can save women from other women,

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but in doing so men also keep women from confronting what they are. The fiction is distinctly about women; men only exist to show the difference in women-the difference between power to control, which is a weakness, and the weakness of being controlled, which is really the admission of inner strength. This attitude seems distinctly feminine.

The theme of Mrs. Bowles' work is not in this contrast alone, but in where it leads the characters. Each is seeking to be free of the formal confines of the world that hold the self in place-the forms spoken of above. These forms include family love where there is no love, social conventions that do not apply, sexual attitudes that do not work, genteel manners and methods of speech that are meaningless. If this is her theme one can understand why she creates a style that moves the reader into a strange new world of personal expression. Her style expresses her theme more clearly than the retelling of any narrative could do. It is for this reason that Mrs. Bowles can bear repeated readings. Not only must her special symbols be understood-one must know that going out, to a restaurant for instance, is a sign of breaking the forms of family security and gentility-but one must read her again and again to sense the world she wants to express, for this world is in her moving style. As an example, here is perhaps the extreme point of stylistic creation in her fiction. It is a letter Frieda's husband sends just before she leaves him. What will happen in the novel is here, the movement that must take place, which the prose is trying to capture:

I do not mean to be cruel but I shall write to you exactly what I consider to be your faults and I hope sincerely that what I have written will influence you. Like most people, you are not able to face more than one fear during your life- time. You also spend your life fleeing from your first fear towards your first hope. Be careful that you do not, through your own wiliness, end up always in the same position in which you began. I do not advise you to spend your life surrounding yourself with those things which you term necessary to your exist- ence, regardless of whether or not they are objectively interesting in themselves or even to your own particular intellect. I believe sincerely that only those men who reach the stage where it is possible for them to combat a second tragedy within themselves, and not the first over again, are worthy of being called mature. When you think someone is going ahead, make sure that he is not really standing still. In order to go ahead, you must leave things behind which most people are unwilling to do. Your first pain, you carry it with you like a lodestone in your breast because all tenderness will come from there. You must carry it with you through your whole life but you must not circle around it. You must give up the search for those symbols which only serve to hide its face from you. You will have the illusion that they are disparate and manifold but they are always the same. If you are only interested in a bearable life, perhaps this letter does not concern you. For God's sake, a ship leaving port is still a wonderful thing to see.

It is fair to ask where one ends with such an experiment with stylistic movement-for it ends at that: to be is to be moving, thrusting oneself forward. The

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"wanderlust" is one of her terms for this movement, yet as she indicates in the pas- sage above, all her terms hide one face, all her symbols conceal and reveal one image-the movement of life. For this reason none of the endings in her works is "satisfactory"; nothing neatly finishes. In fact much goes on just as before, or perhaps even worse. Christina and Frieda are hardly better off at the end of Two Serious Ladies; but their presence as seeing selves is a measure of advance-even if what is seen is horribly less than they want. To have moved into a position of vision makes them "serious," and to be serious is to matter, for no other reason than that. Two serious ladies are such because they make the search for themselves, seriously, passionately. Christina tells Frieda at the end of the novel that she -Frieda-has gone to pieces. Here is Frieda's response:

"True enough," said Mrs. Copperfield, bringing her fist down on the table and looking very mean. "I have gone to pieces, which is a thing I've wanted to do for years. I know I am as guilty as I can be, 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."

Christina is no better, no worse, in the final paragraph:

"Certainly I am nearer to becoming a saint," reflected Miss Goering, "but is it possible that a 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.

The last sentence epitomizes the novel's marvelous style and theme. What we would observe is so, but it is not important. The importance is in the movement, in the processes of constant observation, continually made.

This special style and theme may explain why so little has been written by Mrs. Bowles. Her field of interest is temperamentally limited to women and her ideas are limited to a particular sense of movement that is growth. All but three of her seven stories were written in the 1940s. The most recent of the three, "A Quar- reling Pair," continues the Christina-Frieda contrast; but the other two are slightly different. They are more static in style and poetically somewhat flat, but more important, they seem to diverge from her earlier concepts. In the first, "Everything Is Nice," there is one heroine only; in the second, "A Stick of Green Candy," a child openly glimpses what one must call maturity. If the direction is towards a synthesis of duality and an expression of both process and the arrived state of maturity, perhaps Mrs. Bowles has been waiting in order to say better what she wants rather than repeat what she has said. Perhaps she now sees more than duality and movement and is looking for a new way to express herself.

Whatever the case, Jane Bowles is a fascinating writer whose vision remains fragmented, special, almost childlike; her work itself now needs to move and co- here. She has certainly had time in which to mature; one would like to quote Mrs. Bowles to Mrs. Bowles on the necessity of being-which implies not only movement, but also the mature arrival she seems to seek:

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You must give up the search for those symbols which only serve to hide its face from you. You will have the illusion that they are disparate and manifold but they are always the same. If you are only interested in a bearable life, perhaps this letter does not concern you. For God's sake, a ship leaving port is still a wonderful thing to see.

Perhaps no one knows better than Mrs. Bowles the quality and weakness of her fiction. She is trying to find the way to move so as to arrive at maturity. The under- lying conflict in "Camp Cataract," one of her most "complete" works, suggests the issues in this problem. As this story was written in 1949 one has good reason to believe that Jane Bowles is aware of what she must do and is attempting to do it. It would seem that Mrs. Bowles is one of her own serious women.



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Jane Bowles as Serious Lady