Praise for Jane Bowles and Two Serious Ladies

‘The book I give as a gift is the novel Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles. Her sentences are so surprising, the plot is like something from a dream, and her mind is deeply unfathomable, precise, funny, earnest and otherworldly. It feels like giving someone an exotic fruit’

Sheila Heti, author of Motherhood

‘Readers who’ve not yet read Jane Bowles are almost to be envied, like people who’ve still to read Austen or Mansfield or Woolf, and have all the delight, the literary satisfaction, the shock of classic originality, the revelation of such good writing, still to come’

Ali Smith

‘A modern legend … A very funny writer … with at [her] heart the subtlest comprehension of eccentricity and human apartness’

Truman Capote

‘My favourite book. I can’t think of a modern novel that seems more likely to become a classic’

Tennessee Williams

‘One of the finest modern writers of fiction in any language’

John Ashberry

‘A landmark in twentieth-century American literature’

Alan Sillitoe

’With Two Serious Ladies, Bowles joined the small company of women modernists who celebrated their freakishness in the highest style’

Lorna Sage

‘A thoroughly original mind – a mind at once profoundly witty, genuinely unusual in its apprehensions, and bracingly, humanely true’

Claire Messud

Introduction

If you, too, are bored of the priggish claim that all experience is instructive; the Hollywood creed that life improves everyone; the doctrine that artists mustn’t portray our fellow sinners without finally punishing or redeeming them; then boy, have I got a book for you.

Maybe I shouldn’t introduce this novel. Maybe I should just quote it. Here’s an exchange on a beach in Panama:

“Look,” he said, “isn’t this an amusing stone? It’s really quite beautiful. I thought you would like to see it, so I brought it to you.” Mrs. Copperfield examined the stone and said: “Oh, it is beautiful and very strange. Thanks ever so much.”

I want to thank Jane Bowles for her strange and beautiful stone.

Two Serious Ladies (1943) is the only novel of American writer Jane Bowles. At its heart are two wealthy women, Christina Goering and Frieda Copperfield. Miss Goering and Mrs Copperfield meet at a New York party. Then Miss Goering goes to live on an island with Lucy Gamelon, and Mrs Copperfield takes up with Pacifica, a teenage prostitute she meets in Panama. There are also a few men. Eventually Miss Goering and Mrs Copperfield reconvene. That’s the plot, and that’s all the plot needed.

Why does convention state that all events in novels must be made to seem inevitable? In real life all manner of fascinating things occur by chance, and there’s nothing forcing us to notice that they’ve happened at all. Jane Bowles knew that, and had fun. Where another novelist might have drummed up a feeling of destiny around the two women eventually meeting, Bowles has Miss Goering do something she could plausibly have done at many earlier points: she rings Mrs Copperfield to see if she is back from Panama yet. Wise perhaps to the conventions of the kindred-souls-change-each-other novel, Miss Goering flirts with a parting epiphany after the two women’s reunion on the last page. ‘She stood on the street and waited to be overcome with joy and relief. But soon she was aware of a new sadness within herself. Hope, she felt, had discarded a childish form forever.’ Miss Goering wonders if Mrs Copperfield’s trajectory mirrors her own, but concludes the question is ‘of considerable interest but of no great importance’. This is the kind of question that has provoked millions of novels, but few are able to accept that although it is interesting it is not important. We are free to disregard it, just as we might disregard any number of beach stones that would come on examination to seem special.

The titular ladies are sometimes serious, but more often they are callous and weird. It’s great. Bowles’s characterisation comes at a remove: the narrator passes judgement. The Austenian distance brings you paradoxically closer. You feel, since the narrator is already holding the characters accountable, that you don’t have to come down hard on them. Here’s a description of Miss Goering at the novel’s opening:

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. […] 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.

Haven’t we all been that child? Even the shyest kid has a tyrant in them, poised to lunge. Comic characterisation takes some vice we all have a little of and blows the trait up so it fills a character, balancing resonant authenticity with a distance that allows us to laugh. Jane Bowles knew what she was about.

The generally detached third-person narrator delves haphazardly into different characters’ thoughts, with neither consistent intimacy nor nineteenth-century omniscience. ‘Arnold’s mother, who was a very gauche woman, did not offer Miss Goering any of the cake’; Miss Goering’s ‘very gauche’ sneaks into an interaction where she is the one expecting cake in someone else’s home. It is with these sleights of hand that Bowles builds her characters.

Throughout the novel, characters defamiliarise social convention by stating how it works. Here’s corporate babble put plainly: ‘In your letter you stated that you had some suggestions whereby you thought we could profit, as well as yourself, of course.’ And here’s murky acquaintance made clear: ‘Of course, I would like to have you come over to our table and join us, but the situation is hard to explain. Most of us here are close friends, and when we see each other we tell each other everything that has happened.’

So many observations ring true. In the novel’s skirmishes between strangers, Bowles anticipates how online discourse treats all personal experiences as geopolitically significant and up for debate. ‘After all’, Miss Goering says, ‘I have paid sufficient attention to what happens inside of me and I know better than you about my own feelings.’ Having been born three-quarters of a century after Bowles, I don’t much remember life before social media, so perhaps we’ve always been this annoying. Then and now, in scrambling to appear contented, we end up seeming the opposite: ‘Mrs. Copperfield’s sole object in life 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.’ And the more we force it, the worse it gets: ‘Well, your life is still very hard and you are always trying to make it easy. That’s the hardest part even of your life.’

What to make of Bowles’s syntax? The characters combine commonplace words in jarring ways. ‘I think this is very, very pleasant indeed’, Miss Goering says. To me ‘very pleasant’ has the same redundantly intensified phoniness as ‘very excellent’. (If I tell you a novel is ‘very excellent’, please bin it.) ‘Very very pleasant’ is odder still. And ‘very, very pleasant indeed’ looks as if it were run through translation software multiple times between English and Istro-Romanian. (I could find only one other use of the phrase in literature: the third act of Elijah Barwell Impey’s Cumnor, Or The Bugle-horn, a Tragedy, published at the playwright’s own expense in 1822.) But I trust Bowles intends to show Miss Goering’s passive-aggressive tone.

I trust, too, that there’s a reason the novel gives two very different lobbies imitation yellow marble floors. I trust the narrator’s leaps and dives between perspectives. I trust that I’m not meant to like the characters – not because I’m ‘meant’ to find them alien either, but because Bowles trusted her reader to engage with art in ways that aren’t so shallow. I trust the choppy language, and I trust it when events just happen. I like it, and that’s all we mean when we say things feel deliberate.

Then there’s Bowles’s confident dialogue-heaviness. It’s like reading a play. One character’s ‘bathrobe cords … partially chewed away’ expand, Method-style, into a long speech over multiple pages – a Tennessee Williams-esque background story about losing ‘a dog and a future, and a girl’. (No wonder Williams liked Two Serious Ladies.) Elsewhere, Miss Goering responds to an admirer’s declaration of love without specified affect: ‘“Perhaps some other time you’ll tell me about your life,” said Miss Goering, beginning to walk up and down very quickly.’ Was she speaking anxiously, given the pacing? We can’t wonder long, since she carries on talking.

To me, this is slice-of-life stuff. I cannot read faces, I’m not much better on tone, and I don’t have time to interpret either when I’m speaking to someone. Is it like that for you? Maybe it was like that for Jane Bowles.

I first read Two Serious Ladies while writing my own debut novel in early 2017. Bowles’s sparseness gave me confidence. For dialogue, I’ll add non-verbal notes to keep the reader picturing actual human bodies, but my interest in cheek flushes and eye twitches is decidedly secondary to the words uttered. I’d burdened previous work with dutiful description, for no better reason than to show I could write it. (Two Serious Ladies pokes deadpan fun at pat non-verbal exposition: ‘The veins in Andy’s forehead were beginning to bulge, his face was redder, and the wings of his nostrils were sweaty. “All this must really mean something to him,” thought Miss Goering.’) Bowles led me to ask: why is that there? Do I need it, or am I painting by numbers? Two Serious Ladies is for any writer who wants to do their own thing. There’s much to learn from an author who didn’t care about rote conceptions of ‘craft’.

Finally, one cannot but note that this book is very gay. What do we make of this?

“Oh, I think this is terribly, terribly gay,” said Miss Goering. “This rainbow and this sunset and all these people jabbering away like magpies. Don’t you think it’s gay?” Miss Goering was addressing Arnold’s father.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “It’s a real magic carpet.”

Gertrude Stein knew the homosexual meaning of ‘gay’ by the 1920s, Cary Grant knew by his 1938 film Bringing Up Baby, and I suspect Jane Bowles – who had many same-sex affairs, as did her husband – knew by 1943. Then there’s Mrs Copperfield’s passion for Pacifica, Lucy Gamelon’s pull on Miss Goering, and the overall campness of the novel’s self-serious, otherwise-flamboyant characters, who never admit to playing anything up. In the world of Two Serious Ladies, dominant narratives need not serve or rule you. Not every action comes with an unspoken demand that others copy it.

No one can imitate Two Serious Ladies. Reading it might help you, like Miss Goering, work out something for yourself. ‘“Well, you’re all crazy’”, a character observes, ‘“but I’m rooting for you”’. Quite.

— NAOISE DOLAN,

2021