prophets of the ordinary
Jane
Bowles Two Serious Ladies in My Sister's Hand in Mine: An Expanded
Edition of the Collected Works of Jane Bowles (New York: The Ecco Press,
1978)
The two serious ladies of Jane Bowles'
title, are, in many ways, as different as they could be; and, although they
know one another slightly, they are not good friends. Bowles presents us with a
brief history of Christina Goering, daughter of a wealthy American
industrialist. Even as a child Christina was not appealing, most children
refusing to play with her because of in the puritanical religious games she
demanded along with a bizarre series of punishments, in one case involving
being packed in mud before swimming in a small stream.
But hardly has this tale begun, with its completely unexpected results,
before Bowles interrupts it to tell another story, about Mrs. Copperfield. The
two meet momentarily at the party, but other than that, there seems to be
little connection, and one can only wonder at the structural logic of Bowles'
fiction.
For all that, we do, however, sense a link between the two other than
the authorial declaration of them both being "serious" ladies. Mrs.
Copperfield is far more hesitant in doing new things than is Miss Goering, yet
it is she who actually travels, with her husband, to Panama. And once she is
ensconced into the run-down hotel in the middle of town to which he has taken
her—determined to forgo the expense of the more popular tourist hotel—she
appears far more adventuresome than anyone else in the fiction.
Certainly her first foray into Colón street life is characterized as a
Kafka-like nightmare:
They were walking through
the streets arm in arm. Mrs. Copperfield's
forehead was burning hot
and her hands were cold. She felt something
trembling in the pit of
her stomach. When she looked ahead of her the
very end of the street
seemed to bend and then straighten out again...
Above their heads the
children were jumping up and down on the wooden
porches and making the
houses shake. Someone bumped against Mrs.
Copperfield's shoulder
and she was almost knocked over. At the same
time she was aware of the
strong and fragrant odor of rose perfume. The
person who had collided
with her was a Negress in a pink silk evening dress.
..."Listen," said the Negress, "go down the next street
and you'll like it
better. I've got to meet
my beau over at that bar." She pointed it out to them.
"That's a beautiful
barroom. Everyone goes in there," she said. She moved up
closer and addressed
herself solely to Mrs. Copperfield. "You come along
with me, darling, and
you'' have the happiest time you've ever had before.
I'll be your type. Come
on."
....The Negress
caressed Mrs. Copperfield's face with the palm of her hand. "Is
that what you want to do
darling, or do you want to come along with me."
....:Wasn't that the
strangest thing you've ever seen?" said Mrs. Copperfield
breathlessly.
It is precisely scenes like this, or
even more normal-seeming meetings wherein the characters say totally
unpredictable things that entice us into Bowles' story and helps us to
comprehend Mrs. Copperfield's actions. For no sooner has she encountered this
strange world than she is truly sucked up into it, joining, ultimately, the
prostitute Pacifica, who encourages her to move into the Hotel de las Palmas
where she lives.
Giving up her husband's hotel, and, finally, even her husband himself,
the timid and frightened Mrs. Copperfield discovers the friendship and love of
the local prostitutes and shares time with them drinking in bars. By the end of
her story, we recognize that she, like Miss Goering, is a woman on a mission to
challenge herself, to alter her life, and survive in conditions she might never
have imagined. Similar to Miss Goering, this serious woman is rushing into the
unknown as a kind of punishment and test for her own fears. As Mr. Copperfield
writes, in his goodbye letter to his wife:
Like most people, you are not able to face
more than one fear during your
lifetime. You also spend
your life fleeing from your first fear towards
your first hope. Be careful
that you do not, through your own wiliness,
end up in the same position
in which you began.
In short, as we are about to discover,
Mrs. Copperfield—although a much more charming and, at times, disarmingly
sensual woman, is of the same breed as Miss Goering, both of them being strong
strictly-raised women of great eccentricity testing themselves over and over
again to challenge the patterns of their lives.
When we return to the story of Miss Goering, accordingly, we read her
increasingly bizarre shifts in reality with the knowledge that, as in the case
of Mrs. Copperfield, it can result in significant sensual changes.
Yet, as we have been told, Miss Goering's seriousness is more of the
religious type than Mrs. Copperfield's inconsistencies. She is determined to
challenge almost all her fears. She sells her lovely house, despite the outcry
of the parasitic Miss Gamelon and challenges of the t dependent Arnold, moving
to an industrial island near Staten Island into a house with little charm and
hardly any heat.
When a third man, Arnold's father, determines to join their strange
little community, Christina begins traveling to the larger island, visiting a
local derelict bar and accepting the offers of its male customers to join them
in bed.
After her first adventure, she reports that she intends to return,
admitting that she may not come immediately come back. One by one, the
remaining trio who have lived with and off of her fortune, abandon the house,
Arnold having discovered a new love, Miss Gamelon having moved into another
house, and Arnold's father returning to his wife. In the end Miss Goering, who
has gone off with a ugly man who believes she is a prostitute, must face a
future even more undetermined than Mrs. Copperfield, who has returned to New
York with Pacifica in tow—although it does appear that Pacifica may not soon
bolt.
Even Miss Goering, although believing that the challenges she has set
before her, has made her "nearer to becoming a saint," wonders if she
hasn't been piling "sin upon sin as fast as Mrs. Copperfield." For
these strong women have both become dependent upon the flesh.
The marvel of Bowels' strange tale is its complete originality.
Although, the events she tells are often strange, even a bit surreal, they are
played out in a seemingly logical way that they seem the more incredible for
their occurring. Most important, the central figures speak in the linguistic
pattern, mixing a kind of nineteenth century rhetoric with a language which
might be at home on the street. In a very odd way, Bowles' language is as
outlandish as is Damon Runyon's—except that although these characters, like
Runyon's, are not particularly educated, their talking is a process of thought
instead of simple communication. And in that sense, they are always
participating in a dialogue—socially or interiorized—with everyone around them,
with the entire world.
At times, in fact, it seems that the whole world might potentially be
pulled into Bowles' tale as the two serious ladies travel about, gathering up
friends and lovers as they go. Both are heavy drinkers, who prefer to sit at
the bar and seem able to attract anyone to them with whom they speak. Critics
have mentioned the pattern of twos and threes that accumulate around Mrs.
Copperfield and Miss Goering, but I would argue that while the two do tend to
alternate between duos and trios, like magnets they might equally attract
dozens of willing partners, men and women. And, in that sense, these highly
wrought women are a bit like latter-day prophets, missionaries who in preaching
to the natives, willingly take on the attributes and behavior of those whom
they might seek to save, transforming themselves, in the end, into absolutely
ordinary human beings. Yet both, strangely, have become something larger simply
through their abilities to change their lives.
Los
Angeles, November 29, 2011
Reprinted from EXPLORINGfictions (December 2011).
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