Fragments of a Gentle Despair

By Melvin Maddocks

A LITTLE ORIGINAL SIN: THE LIFE AND WORK OF JANE BOWLES by Millicent Dillon; Holt, Rinehart & Winston; 464 pages; $18.95

When Jane Bowles was just turning 20, she wrote a childhood friend: "Life suddenly seems as short as a pistol shot." She must have meant the good parts. The achievements of her 56 years--a funny, excruciating novel, Two Serious Ladies, a haunted, talky play, In the Summer House, and a handful of short stories--were chiefly completed before she was 30. These bits and fragments of rather gentle despair, jagged as broken glass, brilliant as diamond chips, have made Jane Bowles a minor cult figure (Tennessee Williams has called her "the most underrated American writer of this century"). But it was Bowies' life that made her a legend even before she died in 1973.

Millicent Dillon, a novelist herself, has taken all the melancholy details and produced much more than a horror story, thanks to a steady refusal either to romanticize or merely to pity her subject.

The description of Jane as a child fitted her throughout most of her life: "An elf with large luminous eyes and a ski-jump nose." At parties she loved to sit on men's laps, and was known to dance on tables--a flapper too late for the jazz age.

Jane began cruising gay bars in Greenwich Village at the age of 18, but she was unfamiliar with the ways of men when she married the composer Paul Bowles in 1938 at the age of 20. All her life people found something simultaneously "prim and outrageous" about her. Friends tended to adopt Jane as if she were a slightly dangerous exotic pet. Her wit came with sharp little teeth--she was a devastating mimic--and she could turn in an instant from purring flirtation to inexplicable rage. Yet, in an oddly old-fashioned way, she dispensed food, hospitality and unstinting affection to those who, like herself, found life difficult.

Behind the amusing, naughty little girl, capable of charming the likes of E.E. Cummings, Aaron Copland and Truman Capote, there squirmed an agonized idealist. She believed that everything in life was a moral choice, yet remained so indecisive that she could hardly select a meal in a restaurant.

Writing involved the most torturous choices of all. She found the process "nauseous" and her writing materials so menacing that she referred to blank paper and her pens as "Nazis." All her indecisiveness came out in writing, as she immersed herself now in one character, now in another--then, as often as not, reversed them. Indecisiveness was the torment of her life, and the living center of her art. "What shall we do?" Williams recalls the question, frivolous Millicent Dillon and terror-stricken, as her leitmotiv.

She hated to travel, and she traveled everywhere: Mexico, Paris, Ceylon, North Africa. Nowhere did she find peace, least of all in Tangier, where the Bowleses made their home from 1948 on. She took woman after woman as lover, yet her last amour doubted that Jane had ever experienced much satisfaction.

She was afraid of almost everything --the sea, closed doors, fire, elevators, the people she loved. "He's my enemy," she declared on first meeting her future husband, who was certainly also her best friend, playing with her until the end the Fellini-like games of make-believe that --along with alcohol and drugs -- helped her endure reality.

By all standards of mercy, Jane deserved a quick and early death. In 1957, at the age of 40, she suffered a stroke that cruelly afflicted her with aphasia -- the in ability to write or grasp the meaning of some of the simplest words. One of her doctors said of Jane's illness: "If you were to devise how best to undermine the mind of a writer, you couldn't think of a better means than this." She lingered on through cycles of recovery and deterioration for over 15 years, witnessing the success of Paul as a novelist -- not missing out, it seemed, on a single turn of the screw. As her final humiliation, she wound up in a psychiatric clinic in Malaga.

The lines she wrote for Mrs. Copperfield in Two Serious Ladies sum up: "I have gone to pieces, which is a thing years." I've wanted to do for years."

But, as Dillon never forgets, Bowles brought a gallantry to her out matched struggle with her life. It is strangely fitting that her last major stroke occurred while she was dancing at a party in her madhouse, thus earning herself her own brave and touching epitaph: "I have never yet enjoyed a day, but I have never stopped trying to happiness." arrange for -- By Melvin Maddocks

Excerpt

"She and the students got to talking about brothels. She told them that she'd never seen one, but had always wanted to. The students agreed to take her, and they went to a house at the edge of the city. A large man in uniform entered with a pistol in his holster. He was the chief bodyguard of the dictator of Guatemala. Looking around the room he saw Jane and said, 'That's the one I want.' The students tried to protest. 'This is a tourist,' they said. The proprietor offered him one of the other women. 'No,' he said, 'I want that one.' The prostitutes sneaked Jane into a back room and got her out of a window into an empty lot behind the brothel. She would say nothing to Paul about what had happened to her. In secrecy she was still finding her absolution."

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