JANE BOWLES: A TENDER IMBALANCE
Luis Antonio de Villena
Published in Hässler, Rodolfo, ed. Jane Bowles. Últimos años. Málaga: Instituto Municipal del Libro, Área de Cultura del Excmo. Ayuntamiento de Málaga, 2010.
I heard about Jane Bowles (1917-1973) before I had a chance to read her work. Like everybody else, I knew she had been the wife of Paul Bowles (whom I later met in Tangier), and a writer as well. Yet in the Spanish literary scene, the idea that she was a minor writer – stemming from sheer ignorance – still hovered over the fact that she had written little and that her life had always been difficult. It was Emilio Sanz de Soto (1924-2007), the illustrious Tangier writer and a good friend, who righted my mistake.
“A minor writer? What nonsense, dear, a woman whose essential novel fascinated Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams, how can you say that she was a ‘minor writer’? I met her in Tangier and I loved her dearly because she was a helpless, delicate, and tender creature, and yes, somewhat odd and complicated, but… don’t we like that and aren’t we fascinated by it? One might say that Janie [Emilio always called her that] was a frustrated writer because she didn’t write much, and during the last years of her life, well, during quite a few of her last years she couldn’t finish anything she started, and there were certainly fragments of stories or novels that she threw away, either because she was a bit modest or because she had some sort of inferiority complex, but from there to call her a “minor writer,” what nonsense. Read her work, please, and you’ll tell me…”
Then Emilio loaned me (I think it was in 1981) Two Serious Ladies, and I loved it; especially one of the two ladies, Mrs. Copperfield, when she leaves with the prostitute Pacifica… Later I found out that even though it had been published in 1943 and was probably read even later by her professed admirers, the novel had been written in 1940.
It seems that Jane (whose maiden name was Auer and was a New Yorker of Jewish descent) always wanted to be a writer. In a trip to Europe before the war she met Céline, who was a great writer despite everything, and even wrote a play in French. Then she returned to the Bohemian New York of the 1930s and 1940s, and met Paul Bowles, who was more musician and poet than writer at that time (he had published in famous avant-garde journals). They got along well. They married in 1937, shortly after they met, and left for Mexico, more specifically, for Taxco, where there was a flourishing artist colony.
They knew that they were different and complementary – she, a lesbian, and he, a gay man in his cold way – but that did not matter to them. They maintained a de facto marriage for all of Jane’s life, although they spent long stretches of time apart. Their separations were due to Paul’s love for traveling (which Jane did not quite share), the love affairs of both, and finally, because Jane had to be admitted to a mental sanitarium or to a health clinic. Paul would send money, but I do not believe he visited much. He always claimed that he wrote his autobiography Without Stopping, published in 1971, to be able to pay for her medical expenses, first in England and then in Spain.
“Jane,” continued Emilio, “drank a lot, like most Americans in Tangier, but Paul smoked kief or hashish, and I don’t think she did, or if so, only occasionally. It was incredible, they all ended the night drunk, but if you went to the Farhar (where most of them lived) in the morning, you found them hard at work. You would hear the sound of their typewriters and of some musical instruments… something unthinkable in the case of the Spaniards. She did drink a lot, but she was also chaotic, and full of odd fears. She certainly liked to travel, but less and less so, because she was frightened, as I said, and she took pills for anxiety, or depression, I think… Besides the short stories (some of them splendid) that were later published in a volume titled Plain Pleasures, Jane only wrote a play, odd, it seems, that opened in New York in 1953 and played only for a few days, titled In the Summer House. [Emilio never saw it or read it, and it is the only work by her that I could not find.] Yet Jane’s main problem at her arrival in Tangier, or a little later, in 1948 or 1949, was that she liked Arabic or Moroccan women, with their veils and their apparently hidden sensuality, but these women, used to living almost in gynaecea, do not understand lesbianism, or at least not the Western style of lesbianism. So they accepted her but did not understand her… And then Cherifa arrived, a strong, somewhat terrifying woman. Nobody knew whether she took care of Jane (because she gave Jane many gifts), or was against her out of incomprehension. Nonetheless, Jane had some, I don’t know what to call them, mental disorders seems too strong, but yes, as I told you before, fear, insecurity, neurosis… One morning I found her on the street holding her bag very tightly and looking troubled, almost. She told me that Paul was away, and she didn’t know what to do, because she couldn’t go home with the things she had in her bag… I told her to calm down, and offered my help. We went into the Claridge hotel. We sat down, and she gave me the bag. I opened it carefully. Inside I found a lot of loose, scattered lentils, a dead bird, and a broken mirror… ‘Isn’t this terrible?’ she asked me. And she was terrified. I answered with my best smile, but very seriously, ‘Look, Jane, I will solve this. We will gather the lentils and put them in a bag, and I’ll take them home with me. As to the bird, we’ll go to a garden and bury it, and the mirror pieces we’ll throw into the sea.’ And that’s what we did. We took a cab to the port, and there, at the edge of the pier, I threw the mirror fragments into the sea (with my back to the water). Then we went to a public garden, I made a hole in the ground, and we buried the bird. As far as the lentils were concerned, she had nothing to worry about, because they were already in my bag. Jane was ecstatic: ‘Emilio, Emilio, mon cher!’ she screamed when we parted, ‘I owe you my life, love, I owe you my life…!’ Yes, that was Jane. But with so much gentleness and so much magic! It is true that she may have shown some jealousy or something like that because of Carson McCullers’s success, but if they had something in common – their fragility – they were also very different…”
It is evident that her love/hate relationship with Cherifa had hurt Jane Bowles. Jane believed she was under the spell of that rough, hard-looking woman. It is true that Moroccan popular culture believes in things like sorcery and the evil eye, but Jane? The fact is that between her drinking, the Cherifa affair, and her bouts of depression, Jane Bowles’s psychic health went from bad to worse, even though one couldn’t say she was mad. That is when she ceased to be able to write, or she hardly started anything new. (By the way, the ambience story in Plain Pleasures that shows the Western woman’s astonishment regarding the closed world of Arab women is called “Everything Is Nice”: “The highest street of the blue Muslim town ran by the edge of a hill …”).
When Jane’s illness clearly worsened, Paul took her to a psychiatric institution in England. I believe she was admitted to more than one, and was treated with electroshocks. Improvements were apparently very short lived. In addition to her psychiatric illness, diagnosed as “manic-depressive psychosis,” she suffered from somatic symptoms as well. Finally, Paul decided to take her to a clinic near Malaga that was managed by nuns. The Spanish physicians confirmed their British colleagues’ diagnosis. Little by little, Jane Bowles
withdrew and withered in a country (sunny, that is true) where she was not well known yet. She died on May 4, 1973, at 66. I do not know (I did not want to ask) whether Emilio saw her then, or if he was frightened or embarrassed to return (from far away) to that dear, devastated friend. It would not be until the early 1980s that her original and brief work would become known in Spain. And it is true that it was on the year of Jane’s death that Emilio Sanz de Soto moved from Tangier to Madrid for good. That whole world of rare gold was left behind…
Jane Bowles had another Spanish friend in Tangier, but this one (himself quite silent and a hard drinker as well) did not have the time or the chance to talk about that partner in drinking and mental imbalance. I am referring here to Ángel Vázquez, the singular author of La vida perra de Juanita Narboni (The Wretched Life of Juanita Narboni). According to Emilio, Vázquez and Jane were soul mates, and that is how they felt when they were together. I think that she would have also been close to another occasional Tangier resident (her husband, Cerezales, was the next to last editor of the Tangier newspaper España). I am talking about Carmen Laforet, who lived there for a few years in the 1960s. On second thought, they may have met, but I don’t have any details. In any case, even though they were both good friends of Emilio’s, this period coincided with the worsening of Jane’s condition and her trips to England for treatment. I met Carmen Laforet, and found that she evinced the same gentle and somewhat depressive or desperate tone. These women were very close, even though one of them was not a lesbian.
It is not easy to say that Jane Bowles (an alcoholic, a depressive, and a lesbian) was not an incomplete writer who never reached her full potential. She could certainly have done more than what she left us. Yet it is clear that her two books (I leave her play aside, since I have not read it), Two Serious Ladies and Plain Pleasures, amply deserve our trip toward a writer who, in addition, does not even disappoint us with her bittersweet or dire biography in red and black. My final thanks go to the dear Emilio Sanz de Soto, who led me to Jane Bowles, and shortly after, but this time in the flesh, to Paul, with a note of introduction. I met Paul in Tangier, a city that is not what it was, but where I had such a good time as well…
Madrid, October 2009.
Luis Antonio de Villena
Published in Hässler, Rodolfo, ed. Jane Bowles. Últimos años. Málaga: Instituto Municipal del Libro, Área de Cultura del Excmo. Ayuntamiento de Málaga, 2010.
I heard about Jane Bowles (1917-1973) before I had a chance to read her work. Like everybody else, I knew she had been the wife of Paul Bowles (whom I later met in Tangier), and a writer as well. Yet in the Spanish literary scene, the idea that she was a minor writer – stemming from sheer ignorance – still hovered over the fact that she had written little and that her life had always been difficult. It was Emilio Sanz de Soto (1924-2007), the illustrious Tangier writer and a good friend, who righted my mistake.
“A minor writer? What nonsense, dear, a woman whose essential novel fascinated Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams, how can you say that she was a ‘minor writer’? I met her in Tangier and I loved her dearly because she was a helpless, delicate, and tender creature, and yes, somewhat odd and complicated, but… don’t we like that and aren’t we fascinated by it? One might say that Janie [Emilio always called her that] was a frustrated writer because she didn’t write much, and during the last years of her life, well, during quite a few of her last years she couldn’t finish anything she started, and there were certainly fragments of stories or novels that she threw away, either because she was a bit modest or because she had some sort of inferiority complex, but from there to call her a “minor writer,” what nonsense. Read her work, please, and you’ll tell me…”
Then Emilio loaned me (I think it was in 1981) Two Serious Ladies, and I loved it; especially one of the two ladies, Mrs. Copperfield, when she leaves with the prostitute Pacifica… Later I found out that even though it had been published in 1943 and was probably read even later by her professed admirers, the novel had been written in 1940.
It seems that Jane (whose maiden name was Auer and was a New Yorker of Jewish descent) always wanted to be a writer. In a trip to Europe before the war she met Céline, who was a great writer despite everything, and even wrote a play in French. Then she returned to the Bohemian New York of the 1930s and 1940s, and met Paul Bowles, who was more musician and poet than writer at that time (he had published in famous avant-garde journals). They got along well. They married in 1937, shortly after they met, and left for Mexico, more specifically, for Taxco, where there was a flourishing artist colony.
They knew that they were different and complementary – she, a lesbian, and he, a gay man in his cold way – but that did not matter to them. They maintained a de facto marriage for all of Jane’s life, although they spent long stretches of time apart. Their separations were due to Paul’s love for traveling (which Jane did not quite share), the love affairs of both, and finally, because Jane had to be admitted to a mental sanitarium or to a health clinic. Paul would send money, but I do not believe he visited much. He always claimed that he wrote his autobiography Without Stopping, published in 1971, to be able to pay for her medical expenses, first in England and then in Spain.
“Jane,” continued Emilio, “drank a lot, like most Americans in Tangier, but Paul smoked kief or hashish, and I don’t think she did, or if so, only occasionally. It was incredible, they all ended the night drunk, but if you went to the Farhar (where most of them lived) in the morning, you found them hard at work. You would hear the sound of their typewriters and of some musical instruments… something unthinkable in the case of the Spaniards. She did drink a lot, but she was also chaotic, and full of odd fears. She certainly liked to travel, but less and less so, because she was frightened, as I said, and she took pills for anxiety, or depression, I think… Besides the short stories (some of them splendid) that were later published in a volume titled Plain Pleasures, Jane only wrote a play, odd, it seems, that opened in New York in 1953 and played only for a few days, titled In the Summer House. [Emilio never saw it or read it, and it is the only work by her that I could not find.] Yet Jane’s main problem at her arrival in Tangier, or a little later, in 1948 or 1949, was that she liked Arabic or Moroccan women, with their veils and their apparently hidden sensuality, but these women, used to living almost in gynaecea, do not understand lesbianism, or at least not the Western style of lesbianism. So they accepted her but did not understand her… And then Cherifa arrived, a strong, somewhat terrifying woman. Nobody knew whether she took care of Jane (because she gave Jane many gifts), or was against her out of incomprehension. Nonetheless, Jane had some, I don’t know what to call them, mental disorders seems too strong, but yes, as I told you before, fear, insecurity, neurosis… One morning I found her on the street holding her bag very tightly and looking troubled, almost. She told me that Paul was away, and she didn’t know what to do, because she couldn’t go home with the things she had in her bag… I told her to calm down, and offered my help. We went into the Claridge hotel. We sat down, and she gave me the bag. I opened it carefully. Inside I found a lot of loose, scattered lentils, a dead bird, and a broken mirror… ‘Isn’t this terrible?’ she asked me. And she was terrified. I answered with my best smile, but very seriously, ‘Look, Jane, I will solve this. We will gather the lentils and put them in a bag, and I’ll take them home with me. As to the bird, we’ll go to a garden and bury it, and the mirror pieces we’ll throw into the sea.’ And that’s what we did. We took a cab to the port, and there, at the edge of the pier, I threw the mirror fragments into the sea (with my back to the water). Then we went to a public garden, I made a hole in the ground, and we buried the bird. As far as the lentils were concerned, she had nothing to worry about, because they were already in my bag. Jane was ecstatic: ‘Emilio, Emilio, mon cher!’ she screamed when we parted, ‘I owe you my life, love, I owe you my life…!’ Yes, that was Jane. But with so much gentleness and so much magic! It is true that she may have shown some jealousy or something like that because of Carson McCullers’s success, but if they had something in common – their fragility – they were also very different…”
It is evident that her love/hate relationship with Cherifa had hurt Jane Bowles. Jane believed she was under the spell of that rough, hard-looking woman. It is true that Moroccan popular culture believes in things like sorcery and the evil eye, but Jane? The fact is that between her drinking, the Cherifa affair, and her bouts of depression, Jane Bowles’s psychic health went from bad to worse, even though one couldn’t say she was mad. That is when she ceased to be able to write, or she hardly started anything new. (By the way, the ambience story in Plain Pleasures that shows the Western woman’s astonishment regarding the closed world of Arab women is called “Everything Is Nice”: “The highest street of the blue Muslim town ran by the edge of a hill …”).
When Jane’s illness clearly worsened, Paul took her to a psychiatric institution in England. I believe she was admitted to more than one, and was treated with electroshocks. Improvements were apparently very short lived. In addition to her psychiatric illness, diagnosed as “manic-depressive psychosis,” she suffered from somatic symptoms as well. Finally, Paul decided to take her to a clinic near Malaga that was managed by nuns. The Spanish physicians confirmed their British colleagues’ diagnosis. Little by little, Jane Bowles
withdrew and withered in a country (sunny, that is true) where she was not well known yet. She died on May 4, 1973, at 66. I do not know (I did not want to ask) whether Emilio saw her then, or if he was frightened or embarrassed to return (from far away) to that dear, devastated friend. It would not be until the early 1980s that her original and brief work would become known in Spain. And it is true that it was on the year of Jane’s death that Emilio Sanz de Soto moved from Tangier to Madrid for good. That whole world of rare gold was left behind…
Jane Bowles had another Spanish friend in Tangier, but this one (himself quite silent and a hard drinker as well) did not have the time or the chance to talk about that partner in drinking and mental imbalance. I am referring here to Ángel Vázquez, the singular author of La vida perra de Juanita Narboni (The Wretched Life of Juanita Narboni). According to Emilio, Vázquez and Jane were soul mates, and that is how they felt when they were together. I think that she would have also been close to another occasional Tangier resident (her husband, Cerezales, was the next to last editor of the Tangier newspaper España). I am talking about Carmen Laforet, who lived there for a few years in the 1960s. On second thought, they may have met, but I don’t have any details. In any case, even though they were both good friends of Emilio’s, this period coincided with the worsening of Jane’s condition and her trips to England for treatment. I met Carmen Laforet, and found that she evinced the same gentle and somewhat depressive or desperate tone. These women were very close, even though one of them was not a lesbian.
It is not easy to say that Jane Bowles (an alcoholic, a depressive, and a lesbian) was not an incomplete writer who never reached her full potential. She could certainly have done more than what she left us. Yet it is clear that her two books (I leave her play aside, since I have not read it), Two Serious Ladies and Plain Pleasures, amply deserve our trip toward a writer who, in addition, does not even disappoint us with her bittersweet or dire biography in red and black. My final thanks go to the dear Emilio Sanz de Soto, who led me to Jane Bowles, and shortly after, but this time in the flesh, to Paul, with a note of introduction. I met Paul in Tangier, a city that is not what it was, but where I had such a good time as well…
Madrid, October 2009.
