The Price of Being Jane Bowles
MERKIN, DAPHNE
Waiters & Writing THE PRICE OF BEING JANE BOWLES by daphne merkin I'm not sure I'll come out on top there are so many things against me," 20-year-old Jane Bowles wrote in a letter to a cousin....
...I n February 1937 Jane Auer met the 26-year-old composer Paul Bowles, of whom she later wrote: "The first time I saw him I said to a friend: He's my enemy...
...It's almost the cocktail hour.'" Unlike Paul, too, Jane's talent flourished in close, familiar quarters...
...Living with her mother in a hotel on West 58th Street, Jane embarked on a bohemian existence, doing the rounds of bars and artistic parties in the Village...
...It is massively-detailed, involved with its subject to the point of unease, yet ultimately retreats into a kind of hushed accounting of an unaccountable presence...
...the heat and the primitiveness suited his much reiterated aversion to Western culture, and unleashed his literary art...
...I said to her, 'It's a dangerous game you're playing...
...The clue to her decline...
...The ensuing years saw her slide in and out of depressions, each boul more disabling than the last, and in April 1967, on the advice of her doctor, Paul had Jane admitted lo a psychiatric sanatorium in Malaga, Spain, where she was administered shock treatment...
...Cherifa was known to be a woman of "wild rages...
...Possessed of a literary vision so grounded in solitude it verged on autism, Jane Bowles spent her adult years seeking refuge from her own company at every opportunity...
...for most of her final two years...
...they saw and needed each other's paradoxes...
...Paul took her back to Tangier several months later...
...She was a prima donna who had to have things her own way...
...During the '40s, she lived on West 10th Street while Paul was discovering North Africa, a country after his own heart, and fell in love with Helvetia Perkins, an older woman of rather severe intellectual tastes...
...She could not deal with her own fears, but for others she could take decisive action...
...They were, it appears, genuine "soul-mates," linked by a similarly-rooted (if differently manifested) aloofness from the world...
...Woe, though, unto aging elves: Their friends desert them and the laughs fail to get them through the night...
...The most telling indication of this-and it worsened as she grew older, until her private furies finally overcame her-was an inability to be alone for any length of time...
...Nature in general horrified her," Paul tells Dillon...
...Superficially, there was a good reason for the move, although Dillon is wearyingly polite throughout the book on this score: With the example of Andre Gide before them, everybody who was anybody who was gay passed through Morocco in the '50s...
...Jane's mother, Claire, referred to her daughter as her "million-dollar baby," however, and sought to give the child all the culture and refinements she lacked herself...
...Truman Capote described Jane Bowles as "thai genius imp, that laughing, hilarious, tortured elf...
...For to be an elf, even a tortured ell, is line as long as one is young and quick-footed...
...as the biography we now have inadvertently suggests, no achievement-not even a shelf full of books reaching beyond the troubled author's painfully small, shining output-can compensate for the ruin of an entire life...
...It washer final effort to cleanse herself of "a little original sin," which she felt had tainted her sineechildhood...
...She could be divinely charming and funny, and then suddenly she'd be difficult...
...He had learned how to deal with his own fears, but the fears of others-out of his control-he turned away from resolutely...
...Before the term was out, Jane fell from a horse and broke her right leg, which she had limped on since childhood...
...Paul was attracted to the physical, as well as emotional, climate...
...They began spending time together...
...They travelled," Dillon notes, "as if they were going to Central Africa in the 1890s...
...The photograph on the cover of A Little Original Sin shows a mop-haired gamine with a cigarette crooked in one hand, staring rather malignantly into the camera-a cross between Tom Sawyer and Holly Golightly...
...She'd say 'Yes, yes, they're beautiful, but it's terrible...
...After the father's death, mother and daughter moved to Manhattan...
...She had a terrible existence, in good part by choice, but seems always to have retained about herself the aura of a feral Wunderkind...
...She filled notebooks and started projects-a novel, a play, stories-but the woman w ho at 24 had realized Two Serious Ladies was reduced a decade and a half later to writing adjuring notes to herself:" 1 am going to write this BOOK...
...she continued to behave ungovernably and was in and out of clinics...
...With them they had two wardrobe trunks, twenty-seven suitcases, a typewriter, and a record player...
...The reader has the impression that Dillon is too often ceding territory rightfully her own to the elliptical-ly-inclined writer...
...For the next two years she recuperated in a sanatorium in Switzerland...
...Jane attended public high school for one semester, then Claire decided to send her to Stoneleigh, an exclusive girls' school in Massachusetts...
...In place of the usual, they had in common an attraction to members of their own sex and an unusually evolved eccentricity...
...She wooed a Moroccan peasant woman, Cherifa, who came and lived with her in return for money and goods...
...I don't want to look at it, thank you...
...She was often difficult,"Oliver Smith is quoted as saying...
...There are many silences in this voluble book, many closings of the shutter over scenes too painful or private to bear observation, despite the biographer's duty to tug the truth out of such resistances...
...To her he appears to have represented the world "out there," more judging, perhaps, than loving...
...Married on February 21, 1938, Jane and Paul set out the next day for Panama...
...It is a novel dipped in silver, pristinely intentioned and executed with the lightest of touches...
...He was fearless in going to strange, even threatening places, but he was always worried about his health...
...The following fall Jane converted to Catholicism...
...Millicent Dillon's A Little Original Sin (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 464 pp...
...several observers believed, Paul among them, that she practiced black magic upon Jane, possibly even poisoning her...
...On theother hand shewaseasygoingand lovable...
...there are points of no return in pcrsonalit ics as well as histories, moments when an individual draws her fatelul card, Jane's decision at the beginning of the '50s to live in Tangier with Paul was one of those moments...
...Someday you'll really go nuts.'" The photographer Karl Bissingersawalotol her after he shot her for Harper's Bazaar and felt that "she was on the edge of hysteria every minute of her life...
...But none did more damage than a profound self-dislike...
...Amid the partying, drinking and despair (she attempted sui-cidein 1942) Jane continued to write, working on her play, In the Summer House (about dominance and submission, the inextricable webs families weave) and having a short story called " Plain Pleasures" appear in Harper's Bazaar...
...She was the only child of upper-middle-class Jewish parents who lived in Woodmere, Long Island...
...The sea or storms frightened her...
...the tuberculosis in her knee was treated by keeping the leg in traction...
...Many elements did indeed conspire in her destruction: booze, drugs, genuine ill health, Morocco, her singular marriage to Paul Bowles...
...A few of her admirers were struck by the terror such buoyant spirits masked...
...18.95) records Bowles' story, dispelling rumors and sorting out facts from the many fancies that have sprung up around her...
...1 suspect, lies as much in that description as in anything else...
...Sidney Auer, Jane's father, died in 1930 when she was 13...
...During the spring of 1969, in a state of nearly catatonic melancholy, she was brought to another clinic just outside of Malaga, this one run by nuns...
...Nevertheless, as Dillon reports, "Most critics found it incomprehensible...
...She paid too dearly for her gift...
...So starkly antagonistic an appraisal of her future husband undoubtedly appealed to Jane's penchant for the perverse, but in a complex sense her intuition was borne out...
...Dillon portrays her as burdened with a need for self-expiation from the start, although nothing in her youthful circumstances goes far toward revealing the origin of this impulse...
...Jane, by contrast, was a born urbanite, soothed by the inane chit-chat of social gatherings-those same rituals of advanced civilization that Paul sought to escape...
...The couple looked to each other for a more basic assuaging than sex could provide, for an alter ego to fill in personal gaps...
...In the spring of l943,Knopf published Two Serious Ladies, the manuscript Jane had been working on in various cafes as she accompanied the restlessly-traveling Paul...
...Upon her return to New York, the afflicted knee joint was artificially stiffened to spare her the pain of bending it...
...She may have been intrigued by the Arab women and gratified that she had the courage to move to Tangier, yet her creative energy dwindled along the way...
...This would presumably have been an equally desirable situation for both Paul and Jane, except for one important difference...
...A year later she suffered a second stroke there and shortly afterward went blind...
...She acted as if her body were invulnerable, yet she was terrified of almost any new landscape...
...The next two decades prior to her death at the age of 56 were one long, appalling descent...
...In her early '40s Jane suffered a stroke that left her eyesight permanently diminished...
...She also proclaimed herself a writer, but none of her crowd actually saw her work...
...Let's go inside...
...Shediedon May3,1973, having failed to respond to most people, including her mother...
...She had developed a cult around her by this time, a group of people-some artists, some rich, some merely bored-who were fascinated by her feckless charm, the way she had of burning her candle at both ends and making a joke of it...
...Predictably, after a short period at the beginning, the marriage "broke apart sexually...
Vol. 64 • October 1981 • No. 19
