My Sister's Hand in Mine: The Collected Works of Jane Bowles

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In 1966 my mother and father gave me The Collected Works of Jane Bowles for my birthday. I wanted to be a writer and had been studying the “craft” of fiction earnestly, but I had not heard of Jane Bowles. Voyaging for the first time into Two Serious Ladies, I was immediately disoriented. I did not know what to make of this object at all. There was no discernible narrative strategy. There was no way of explaining or analyzing the processes at work. Interpretation was useless. The vistas were dispiriting, the food foul, the wind always howling. Her people were mournful, impulsive, and as erratic in their peculiar journeys’ flights as bats. They were very often drunk. They thought continuously, obsessively, but had no thoughts exactly, no helpful method of perceiving the world or their positions in it. As Miss Goering, one of the serious ladies, remarks just before committing herself to an unsavory adventure, “It is against my entire code, but then, I have never even begun to use my code, although I judge everything by it.” No one knows how to live in these pages; they have developed no mechanisms to assure themselves that the life they have been presented with is their life. (One of Bowles’s many fears was that she would stop believing in her own characters.) Reading Jane Bowles is making the acquaintance not with dread but with dread’s sister, perhaps — a grave, absurd disquietude.

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