Collected Writings: Two Serious Ladies / In the Summer House / Stories & Other Writings / Letters

Library of America #288

by Jane Bowles, Millicent Dillon (Editor)

In a brilliant handful of works, Jane Bowles (1917–1973) fashioned an uninhibited avant-garde style, a dazzling compound of spare prose and vivid dialogue that has enjoyed an outsized literary influence. Tennessee Williams called her “the most important writer of prose fiction in modern American letters”; Truman Capote said she was a “modern legend”; and for John Ashbery she was “one of the finest modern writers of fiction in any language.”

To celebrate her centenary, Library of America presents the definitive collected edition of Bowles’s incomparable fiction, supplemented with an extensive selection of her frank, funny, and often devastating letters. The modernist classic Two Serious Ladies (1943), a novel inspired by the author’s honeymoon in Mexico with her husband, the writer and composer Paul Bowles, follows two bourgeois American women in Panama as they jettison sexual and cultural norms in search of happiness and liberation: newlywed Frieda Copperfield, who seeks love and comfort in the arms of a young Panamanian girl, and Christina Goering, a wealthy spinster whose unorthodox pursuit of salvation leads her into a world of shiftless men and seedy bars. Witty, moving, and bizarre, Two Serious Ladies is a landmark work that retains its capacity to mesmerize.

In the Summer House (1954), a play about two mothers, one selfish and ruthless, despising her dreamy daughter, the other gentle and dominated by her strong-minded daughter, was performed on Broadway in 1953 and reflects Bowles’s complicated relationship with her own mother. Tennessee Williams considered it “not only the most original play I have ever read, I think it is also the oddest and funniest and one of the most touching. It is one of those rare plays which are not tested by the theater but by which the theater is tested.”

These major works are joined by an unprecedented collection of Bowles’s shorter writings, including all the published stories, never-before-published song lyrics, a section of Two Serious Ladies cut from an earlier draft, four abandoned stories, and an unfinished play. Also included is the nonfiction sketch “East Side: North Africa,” which Paul Bowles refashioned into a short story, “Everything Is Nice,” published under Jane’s name in 1966; the story is presented here as an appendix.

Rounding out the volume are 133 letters, introduced with headnotes by editor Millicent Dillon, offering candid portraits of such friends and acquaintances as John Ashbery, William Burroughs, Truman Capote, Aaron Copland, Ira Gershwin, Allen Ginsberg, Carson McCullers, Sylvia Plath, Paul Robeson, Susan Sontag, Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, Alice Toklas, Carl Van Vechten, Gore Vidal, Eudora Welty, and Tennessee Williams.

Genres: Fiction

815 pages, Hardcover

Published January 31, 2017

About the author

Born Jane Sydney Auer, Jane Bowles's total body of work consists of one novel, one play, and six short stories. Yet John Ashbery said of her: "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." Tennessee Williams called her the most underrated writer of fiction in American literature. During her lifetime and since her death in 1973, she has been considered a writer's writer, little known to the general public but with a loyal following of intensely devoted readers.

She was born in New York City on February 22, 1917, the daughter of Sidney Auer and Claire Stajer Auer. Her childhood was spent in Woodmere, Long Island. On her father's death in 1930, Jane and her mother moved back to Manhattan. As an adolescent she developed tuberculosis of the knee. Her mother took her to a sanatorium in Leysin, Switzerland, where she was put in traction for many months. During this time she developed an intense love of literature and an equally intense series of obsessions and fears. Upon her return to New York she began to experiment with writing a novel and with sexual adventures with men and women, though primarily with women.

In 1937 she met Paul Bowles, and in the following year they were married and set off for a honeymoon in Central America, which was to be, in part, the locale of her novel Two Serious Ladies. The Bowleses went on to Paris, where she started writing and at the same time visited lesbian bars. The marriage remained a sexual marriage for about a year and a half, but after that Jane and Paul lived separate sexual lives. After returning to New York in 1938, the Bowleses went on to Mexico, where Jane continued to work on her novel and also met Helvetia Perkins, who was to become her lover.

Two Serious Ladies was published in 1943. The reviews were mostly uncomprehending. Soon, Paul, who had been involved in the editing of Two Serious Ladies, began to write short stories, which were immediately published with great distinction. Jane, having published a few short stories, began to work on a novel, but ran up against a serious writer's block.

In 1947 Paul went to Morocco to work on The Sheltering Sky. Jane followed him there the following year. She continued to struggle to work, and published several short stories, including her masterpiece, "Camp Cataract," and began to work seriously on her play In the Summer House. In Tangier, where the Bowleses resided, Jane fell in love with a Moroccan peasant woman.

In the Summer House was performed on Broadway in 1953 to mixed reviews. Jane returned to Tangier and continued to try to write a novel, but her attention was primarily devoted to her love affair with Cherifa, the Moroccan woman, to affairs with other women and also to a social life in which she did a considerable amount of drinking.

In 1957 she suffered a serious stroke, which affected her sight and her capacity to imagine. Nevertheless, notebook after notebook attests to her still continuing struggle to try to write. Her condition worsened, and after hospitalizations in England, New York and Málaga, Spain, she was confined in the Clinica de Los Angeles in Málaga, where she died in 1973.

Yet it should be noted that despite this tragic story, her personality captivated many people. She was brilliant and witty, always doing and saying the unexpected thing. She was in every way as surprising as her work, one moment mystical, the next moment hilariously funny.

Copyright © 2003, by Millicent Dillon

Reviews

[Sam Oxford · Rating 4 out of 5]

Don't reaaaallyyy know what to rate this and read most but not all of it, which I will explain later. Jane Bowles was such a fucking weirdo and such a funny weirdo. It has been some time since I read the stories, play, and fiction fragments that are incredibly worth reading, and if this was just a collection of this, to bring star ratings into this, it would be five stars. The way she writes dialogue is, for lack of a better word, incredibly autistic, with characters either blissfully uncaring of any sort of norms whatsoever, or, hyperaware of the fact that they are speaking to another person and then elaborately altering their responses to try and save face and falling flat on their face in the process. There's an immense amount of nervous energy in her writing and in her fragments, something self-conscious in the way she describes things. There is something uncomfortable in her writing, you get the sense of her really wrestling with each sentence. But it works. Her sense of humor is strange and oblique but truly marvelous, like a lighthearted Tennessee Williams.

Her letters, and, more specifically, the amount of her letters that were included is way too much considering just how many of them were her asking for money. I could not finish them. There are fragments of the letters where she talks about her writing and her chronic writer's block that really help explain why her characters speak the way they do and why she writes the way she does. The way she talks about language reminds me of the linguistic discomfort I see in stuff like Samuel Beckett, just approached from a different angle.

[Sere · Rating 4 out of 5]

Irksome.
How much can you realise, claim of yourself keeping free from societal norms without becoming self destructive? What are the limits of the human spirit within the confines of a body that must live in community with others? What does really constitute as self destruction?

I had meant to read Jane Bowles since my trip to Tanger: the wife of Paul Bowles (writer), an invert (like me), that goes through life losing more and more control, tormented by her obsession for Cherifa (her Moroccan lover), falling sick with alcohol abuse and with a total loss of self-care.
A falling star. Very hard with herself.
I was intrigued, so I read.

It's the story of Miss Goering and Mrs. Copperfield's search for their own true selves and happiness. Two stories that develop in parallel and only barely intertwine; each character with her own spin on creating change. As the book unravels, the two women live up to what happens inside their head over what's expected from social norms. This doesn't play well in society: claiming their own identity (not like you'd see in any modern narrative) incapacitates them from living with others; they stand alone. Both deemed crazy and self-destructive.
Even between the 2 of them a relationship of any kind is impossible: one detached from reality, living in a fantasy, and the other destroying physical herself.

I feel like there is so much about Jane in both characters. It's disturbing but has its pull on me. Like her husband's work, this book left me with a sense of unease and a creeping need for more. I really liked it. Irksome.

[M · Rating 3 out of 5]

p. 347 -356 East side, North Africa

[Martin Bihl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Two Serious Ladies - finished

In The Summer House - finished 11.05.23

Letters - finished 09.21.24

Stories & Other Writings - finished 04.26.25

[Mills College Library]

Fiction B787c 2017