‘A Guatemalan Idyll’ by Jane Bowles

I’ve read a lot of Paul. I’m new to Jane. And I don’t know how else to put this: Jane Bowles and her writer-composer husband Paul Bowles shared a brain. There’s no point asking who fed from whom. Two subtly distinct sensibilities, at a formative period in their lives, shared a space that I suspect bore a more than passing resemblance to Gerald Kersh’s “abominable little furnished room” — only in their case it was situated abroad, in a world that the traveller in Jane’s story “had always imagined as a little boy to be inhabited by assassins and orphans, and children whose mothers went to work.”

A North American traveller arrives in a one-horse town in central America and makes exactly the mistake Kipling’s “Boy” makes in the story ‘Thrown Away’. He takes everyone there far too seriously, falls in love, gets into pointless arguments about money — the full nine yards.

Here, though, we see his behaviour through the eyes of the people who live here, and for whom “not taking things seriously” turns out to be a code of behaviour more strange, arcane and violent than any our Traveller, bless him, could ever imagine.

Paul and Jane’s work is gendered in a way that is at once welcome and enriching. Where Paul reaches for the knife, the hammer and the nail in the ear, Jane contents herself with a slap — only it’s a slap turned up to a sort of Bad News Tour 11, “a terrible blow in the face, using the hand which held the pills, and thus leaving them sticking to the child’s moist skin and in her hair”. (If slaps are your thing, incidentally, go straight to ‘Camp Cataract’.) Paul’s alter egos caper and rattle off-stage toward their Shakespearean catharsis. Jane’s Traveller stays pinned, squirming, to the surface of things, beaten into submission by “a formless but militant sounding piece” of dance music (he’s dancing! with a woman! he’s having an idyll!) “which came to many climaxes without ending,” rather like this story, which is not so much a trap for its character (though it is that) so much as it is a test of strength for the reader, because I ask you, just how much anxiety can a body take?

First appeared in Mademoiselle, April 1949, and collected in Plain Pleasures, Peter Owen, London, 1946

‘A Stick of Green Candy’ by Jane Bowles

Mary plays alone in a clay pit, preparing her regiment of imaginary soldiers for war. She is at that tipping point where her inner life is fracturing under pressure from an adult world she both despises and desires. This beautifully internal and restrained story was the final one in Bowles’ collection, Plain Pleasures. It was also final in another sense. She wrote this in 1949 – and carried on writing for another two decades – but never completed another piece of fiction.

First published in Vogue, 1957, then collected in Plain Pleasures, Peter Owen, 1966. Available to read here

‘Camp Cataract’ by Jane Bowles

I am constantly surprised that Jane Bowles’s fiction is less well-known (and less regarded) than her husband, Paul’s (though, like many readers, I came to her by way of Paul). This is in part a matter of scale: Jane’s published stories number less than ten to Paul’s excess of one hundred (though the collection Everything is Nice brings together fragments, sketches, and an excised section of her novel, Two Serious Ladies, that works brilliantly as a self-contained narrative). But where Paul is inconsistent, each of Jane’s stories is a perfectly formed strangeness, a queered, compelling insight into small, daily actions that give way to yawning depths.

Her descriptions of the waterfall in ‘Camp Cataract’ showcase her ability to summon the sublime not through poetic description but brief, alienating observations. And though the characters in this story might superficially resemble the outsider-protagonists of Carson McCullers’ stories, I am inclined to agree with Bowles’ assessment: that McCullers’ “freaks aren’t real”—at least, they aren’t as real as Jane’s isolated, unconventional women.

Collected in Plain Pleasures, Peter Owen 1966, and republished in Everything is Nice, Sort of Books 2012