Jane Bowles - Brilliant, surprising at every turn, and special in its unexpected dialogue and rare attitudes:it is against my entire code, but then, I have never even begun to use my code, although I judge everything by it

Jane Bowles, My Sister's Hand in Mine: The Collected Works of Jane Bowles, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.







"Though she wrote only one novella, one short play, and fewer than a dozen short stories over a roughly twenty-year span from the early 1940s to the mid-1960s, Jane Bowles has long been regarded by critics as one of the premier stylists of her generation. Enlivened at unexpected moments by sexual exploration, mysticism, and flashes of wit alternately dry and hilarious, her prose is spare and honed, her stories filled with subtly sly characterizations of men and, mostly, women, dissatisfied not so much with the downward spiral of their fortunes as with the hollowness of their neat little lives. Whether focused on the separate emergences of Miss Goering and Mrs. Copperfield from their affluent, airless lives in New York and Panama into a less defined but intense sexual and social maelstrom in the novella Two Serious Ladies, or on the doomed efforts of the neighbors Mr. Drake and Mrs. Perry to form a connection out of their very different loneliness in "Plain Pleasures," or on the bittersweet cultural collision of an American wife and a peasant woman in Morocco in "Everything Is Nice," Jane Bowles creates whole worlds out of the unexpressed longings of individuals, adrift in their own lives, whether residing in their childhood homes or in faraway lands that are somehow both stranger and more familiar than what they left behind."


"Though she wrote only one novella, one short play, and fewer than a dozen short stories over a roughly twenty-year span from the early 1940s to the mid-1960s, Jane Bowles has long been regarded by critics as one of the premier stylists of her generation. Enlivened at unexpected moments by sexual exploration, mysticism, and flashes of wit alternately dry and hilarious, her prose is spare and honed, her stories filled with subtly sly characterizations of men and, mostly, women, dissatisfied not so much with the downward spiral of their fortunes as with the hollowness of their neat little lives. Whether focused on the separate emergences of Miss Goering and Mrs. Copperfield from their affluent, airless lives in New York and Panama into a less defined but intense sexual and social maelstrom in the novella Two Serious Ladies, or on the doomed efforts of the neighbors Mr. Drake and Mrs. Perry to form a connection out of their very different loneliness in "Plain Pleasures," or on the bittersweet cultural collision of an American wife and a peasant woman in Morocco in "Everything Is Nice," Jane Bowles creates whole worlds out of the unexpressed longings of individuals, adrift in their own lives, whether residing in their childhood homes or in faraway lands that are somehow both stranger and more familiar than what they left behind.
Jane Bowles has long had an underground reputation as one of the truly original writers of this century. Born in New York City in 1917, she lived in Tangier, Morocco, with her husband, Paul Bowles, from 1952 until her death in 1973. Though she wrote only one novella, one short play, and fewer than a dozen short stories over a roughly twenty-year span from the early 1940s to the mid-1960s, Jane Bowles has long been regarded by critics as one of the premier stylists of her generation. Enlivened at unexpected moments by sexual exploration, mysticism, and flashes of wit alternately dry and hilarious, her prose is spare and honed, her stories filled with subtly sly characterizations of men and, mostly, women, dissatisfied not so much with the downward spiral of their fortunes as with the hollowness of their neat little lives. Whether focused on the separate emergences of Miss Goering and Mrs. Copperfield from their affluent, airless lives in New York and Panama into a less defined but intense sexual and social maelstrom in the novella Two Serious Ladies, or on the doomed efforts of the neighbors Mr. Drake and Mrs. Perry to form a connection out of their very different loneliness in "Plain Pleasures," or on the bittersweet cultural collision of an American wife and a peasant woman in Morocco in "Everything Is Nice," Jane Bowles creates whole worlds out of the unexpressed longings of individuals, adrift in their own lives, whether residing in their childhood homes or in faraway lands that are somehow both stranger and more familiar than what they left behind. "It is hoped that she will be recognized for what she is: one of the finest writers of fiction in any language . . . No other contemporary writer can consistently produce surprise of this quality, the surprise that is the one essential ingredient of great art. Jane Bowles deals almost exclusively in this rare commodity."—John Ashbery


"For years, I've heard about Jane Bowles, what a good writer she is, and now it is no longer necessary to wonder about her." - Anatole Broyard

"Jane Bowles’ sole and singular novel, Two Serious Ladies, published in 1943, is brilliant, surprising at every turn, and special in its unexpected dialogue and rare attitudes; it is like no other novel written before or since. But as it was Bowles’ only novel, she has not been taken up by the academy. How to teach a one-novel author? Even one whose only novel is a work of genius. So, it is up to us writers to carry her work, including her unique short stories, to new readers. Writers from Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, to Deborah Eisenberg have come under the distinctive spell of Jane Bowles. But she is not just a writer’s writer, though her name among many writers is sacred; she’s a writer for smart and sensitive readers. Jane Bowles’ writing proves that quality is more important than quantity, even in our supersized America." - KGB Bar

"Jane Bowles is a writer whose career follows a familiar trajectory for women experimentalists: a brilliant debut with a seminal work that garners the praise of other writers (her novel, Two Serious Ladies), a lack of continuing critical attention and understanding, a decline in productivity, a critical "forgetting," then a revival or series of revivals. The response to her work has raised many of the salient critical issues of the canonization of modernist writers, especially women experimentalists, such as Stein, Barnes, Rhys, and Nin. These issues include generic consistency of the author's work, size of oeuvre, productivity, woman-centered subjects, taboo sexuality--and the creation of a legendary biography that controls readings of the works. This essay will examine the stories told about Bowles that constitute her legend, how those stories have shaped critical reception, and how a critical analysis of the legend is necessary to scholarly biography and criticism of her work. There are three interrelated legends associated with the career of Jane Bowles: the bohemian legend of artistic genius, the legend of self-destruction, and the legend of the glamorous couple.
The Jane Bowles legend begins with her own conscious shaping of her life and art in the context of early-twentieth-century bohemia, conceived of as the crucible of avant-garde art. As outlined by historians such as Roger Shattuck, Jerrold Seigel, and Norman F. Cantor, the legend of the artist is a communal myth which came into being with the creation of bohemia in nineteenth-century Paris and profoundly influenced the early-twentieth-century avant-garde in which many modernist American writers participated. Cantor states unequivocally in his history of the twentieth century that "This neo-bohemianism is central to the life of modernism" (161). The now century-old legend of the artist is a familiar story, which may be briefly summarized as follows.
The legend is a quest narrative in which the hero feels alienated from "normal" middle-class life and identifies his difference with society's outsiders. In the "free" space of bohemia (sometimes an expatriate colony) he explores new social, sexual, or psychological territory (especially what is condemned by the respectable bourgeois) and through this exploration discovers a vision that provides the basis for innovative art. Becoming an avant-garde artist, the hero constantly struggles to keep his vision alive; his art is a continual renewal of his original vision; as artist he plays the role of permanent rebel and leader of the avant-garde. In this story of artistic genius, the bohemian life-style is essential to the creation of innovative art, and, as Shattuck has pointed out, the avant-garde artist's practice of "living up to" his art was part of the total artwork the artist created (39). Similarly, Seigel observes that, in the early-twentieth-century avant-garde artist, "the old Bohemian fusion of art and life... began to appear as the substance of artistic activity itself" (310). The artist-hero has been referred to as male in the foregoing summary because the legend of the artist was assumed to be a male quest narrative with women playing supporting roles as muses, mistresses, or wives. As has been pointed out by feminist critics of modernism such as Shari Benstock, Marianne DeKoven, Christine Brooke-Rose, and Susan Suleiman, the avant-garde has been a male-dominated phenomenon which, for all its transgressions of bourgeois norms and revolutionary formal experiments, has subordinated women." - Jennie Skerl

"My Sister's Hand In Mine: The Collected Works Of Jane Bowles (1970) offers readers the rewarding opportunity of entering the strange but oddly homey world of its author. The volume contains Bowles' only novel, Two Serious Ladies, her single work for the theater, the uneven In the Summer House, and thirteen short stories and unfinished pieces. The book's real strengths are Two Serious Ladies and the long story Camp Cataract, works that compliment one another and successfully define the unique landscape of Bowles' vision.
Married to the more famous novelist, composer, and expatriate Paul Bowles, Jane was an apparently bisexual woman with strong lesbian leanings. Though her liveliness and wit were widely appreciated by other artists of the period, most of whom were also ardent admirers of her talent, Bowles' life was compromised by anxiety, and her final years were marked by severe illness and tragedy.
The individualistic Bowles was probably an introvert in Jung's original definition of term. Her character's fears largely revolve around the idea of "passage into the outside world," the states of existence that most people must inevitably face, embrace, and accept beyond the personalized state of the home and the nuclear family. But while confronting the outer world is a unpleasant necessity for most of Bowles' characters, family life, far from a paradise, remains a sentimentally idealized but claustrophobic circle in hell. Achieving and maintaining states of grace was also an important matter for the author, though her unsettlingly tragicomic approach to both these themes has historically kept her work from being widely understood and accepted as mainstream American literature. While other idiosyncratic writers like the vastly more prolific Muriel Spark have enjoyed decades of popularity and critical and commercial success and thus the opportunity to carefully evolve their personal vision, Bowles found the act of writing difficult, and her readership during her lifetime, in commercial terms, almost nonexistent.
Two Serious Ladies concerns Christina Goering and Frieda Copperfield, casual acquaintances who synchronistically strike out on no longer avoidable quests for personal salvation after meeting at a Manhattan party.
While Mrs. Copperfield seems to be seeking fulfilling love and all kinds of meaningful sensual pleasure, the independently wealthy Miss Goering apparently seeks spiritual development through material sacrifice, meager living, and confrontation with her fears in their social and public forms. Both women are simultaneously asexual and semi-consciously lesbian in their preferences; the married Mrs. Copperfield enthusiastically chases the love and company of other women in a Central American village, while the somewhat sheltered but more confident Miss Goering, who shares her home with both a woman and a man in an ambiguous arrangement, actively pursues first a failed businessman and then a gangster in the name of achieving her goals. Both women are weirdly naive, and Bowles never allows the reader a clear understanding of how knowledgeable, sophisticated, or self aware either character is. Both encounter and embrace a hilarious assemblage of oddball characters and misfits; like Miss Goering and Mrs. Copperfield, these eccentrics often seem incapable of objective or comparative perception, and may thus be doomed to lives of starchy parochialism. Only Mr. Copperfield, a figure unmistakably based on Paul Bowles, seems stable, clear-headed, and rationally self-motivated.
Unstable, indeterminate social conventions and mores haunt Bowles' characters. Routine train rides, visits to relative's homes, evenings out in taverns and restaurants, business meetings, and even the simple act of purchasing become comic war zones in which all present seem to enjoy a vastly different understanding of what behavior is appropriate and acceptable. Misunderstandings, breaches of etiquette, emotional hypersensitivity, and insults are common in The Collected Works Of Jane Bowles; fluid, trusting, easy, and healthy communication is sadly unknown.
The grueling Camp Cataract concerns a shrewd, secretive, and uncommonly self aware adult woman, Harriet, who is quietly and carefully planning a final break from her smothering and unconsciously incestuous sister Sadie. Unlike Two Serious Ladies, Camp Cataract contains surreal elements, fugue states, and odd flights of fantasy, but is also more far more specific about the intentions and inner workings of its characters: Harriet's desperate motivations are laid bear in a way that neither Miss Goering's and Mrs. Copperfield's ever are. During her alternately forlorn and energetic pursuit of her sister, Sadie is unpleasantly forced to confront the devouring public world she fears as well as the heavily repressed psychosexual underpinnings of her character. Though wildly funny, few works of fiction can cause readers to twist and squirm like Camp Cataract.
Throughout, the writing is simple, subtle, admirably crisp, and compellingly readable; Bowles is also a master of peculiar, perfectly timed dialogue, a talent she uses to great effect throughout. Also notable are A Guatemalan Idyll, originally a section of Two Serious Ladies, and A Stick Of Green Candy, in which a young girl learns that violating the fidelity of her creative imagination brings about the permanent end of innocent fantasy." - J. E. Barnes at Amazon.com

"Eighteen months ago John Self very kindly offered me a copy of Two Serious Ladies (1943) by Jane Bowles, in its beautiful reprint by Sort Of Books (responsible for the recent Tove Jansson editions too, most of which are newly-commissioned translations.) He thought it might be my sort of thing - and he was definitely right. It just took a while for me to get around to reading it... (By the by, Sort Of Books - I love you, I love your production standards and your choice of titles - but... only one lady on the cover of a book called Two Serious Ladies - really?)
I know John Self read the novel, but can't find a review of it on his blog, so perhaps it never got that far. In fact, despite being a celebrated novel, there isn't a great deal of coverage of it in the blogging world - perhaps because it is essentially a very strange book. You know I love me some strange, now and then, so I was more than happy with that - but it isn't one that I would recommend to everyone. Bowles writes quite like Muriel Spark, but without the ironic authorial comment. The unsettling dialogue never settles into the expected, the sparse narrative offers very little guidance, and the whole novel is deliciously disconcerting and unusual. And yet it's still often very funny. If you like beginning-middle-end and naturalised conversations between characters, then look away. If you like Muriel Spark, Barbara Comyns, or even Ivy Compton-Burnett - then you could well be in for a treat.
The females of the title only meet twice, briefly, in Two Serious Ladies - towards the end of the first and third sections, of three. The ladies in question are Christina Goering and Frieda Copperfield - always called, by the narrative, Miss Goering and Mrs. Copperfield; one of the novel's most subtle strangenesses. Lorna Sage's excellent introduction reveals that there was once to have been a third serious lady, Senorita Cordoba, which might have made the unusual structure less striking - but would have thus robbed Bowles.
We first see Miss Goering as a child, attempting to inveigle a straightforward friend into an elaborate and invented religious ritual. The reader might, not unnaturally, expect to follow Miss Goering throughout her life - but we quickly fast-forward to Miss Goering as a "grown woman" (age unspecified) and stay there. She is unsociable, uncompromising, selfish and violently honest - yet not truly malicious. Her character is so open and amorally direct that she reminded me of Katri from Tove Jansson's The True Deceiver. Oddly, suddenly (so much in this novel is odd and sudden) Miss Goering invites Miss Gamelon, the cousin of her governess, to live with her. They are never amiable companions, and although they depend upon one another to an extent, their relationship is never reliable and neither even attempts to understand the other. It is a mystery why either would want to live with the other - but a mystery neither of them care to address. Here is the sort of conversation they have:
"I don't like sports," said Miss Goering; "more than anything else, they give me a terrific feeling of sinning."
"On the contrary," said Miss Gamelon, "that's exactly what they never do."
"Don't be rude, Lucy dear," said Miss Goering. "After all, I have paid sufficient attention to what happens inside of me and I know better than you about my own feelings."
"Sports," said Miss Gamelon, "can never give you a feeling of sinning, but what is more interesting is that you can never sit down for more than five minutes without introducing something weird into the conversation. I certainly think you have made a study of it."
I know I shouldn't be attempting a piece of close reading, as that's not what you've come to read, but I think that excerpt would be fascinating to analyse. One example - that word 'certainly' in the final sentence. How many authors would have included that? And what a transformative effect it has on the sentiment, and on the character speaking it - she becomes that much more combative, and idiomatic, and faux-dramatic. She is speaking for effect, for drama, rather than with simply honesty. Even if I'd only read these sentences, Miss Gamelon would stand fully-formed before me.
Nearly all the characters and their conversations are piercingly honest, unswervingly self-absorbed, and insistently irrelevant. Rarely do they seem to have paid the remotest attention to what their interlocutor has replied. If they have, it is solely as a means of flatly refuting it. Forster's Howards End is renowned for the mantra 'only connect' - Two Serious Ladies proffers the opposite doctrine, especially where Miss Goering is concerned. She does go out with a weak man called Arnold, whom she openly despises - although, again, without intending malice. Jane Bowles excels at portraying awkward conversations and unhappy exchanges - if they lean too much towards the morosely disjointed to claim verisimilitude, then at least it makes a change to the neat patter of many novels.

"Since you live so far out of town," said Arnold, "why don't you spend the night at my house? We have an extra bedroom."
"I probably shall," said Miss Goering, "although it is against my entire code, but then, I have never even begun to use my code, although I judge everything by it." Miss Goering looked a little morose after having said this and they drove on in silence until they reached their destination.
Miss Goering bumps into her acquaintance Mrs. Copperfield at a party, and the narrative passes the baton on. Mrs. Copperfield is about to embark on a trip to Panama with her husband.
This section of the novel is equally interesting, although I jotted down fewer notes while reading it... where Miss Goering is indifferent and jaded, Mrs. Copperfield has an ingenuous lust for experience. She is not an intelligent woman, but is easily captivated, and dashes around Panama - befriending the inhabitants of a brothel along the way. Here she has just met a flighty girl named Peggy, whose appearance in the novel is fleeting:
"Please," she [Peggy] said, "be friendly to me. I don't often see people I like. I never do the same thing twice, really I don't. I haven't asked anyone up to my room in the longest while because I'm not interested and because they get everything so dirty. I know you wouldn't get everything dirty because I can tell that you come from a nice class of people. I love people with a good education. I think it's wonderful."
"I have so much on my mind," said Mrs. Copperfield. "Generally I haven't."
How are these ladies serious? Lorna Sage suggests that Bowles uses the word to mean 'risking the possibility that you were meaninglessly weird'. I think perhaps it is these ladies' choice not to laugh at life, but determinedly to live it, and see what happens. But, truth be told, Jane Bowles doesn't seem to have a grand theme to Two Serious Ladies. Miss Goering and Mrs. Copperfield are not part of a philosophical quest; there is no sense of purpose or conclusion. Questions are not answered; they are scarcely posed. In many ways the novel doesn't follow any progression at all - the ladies merely experience a great deal, whether grasping at it enthusiastically or raising an ambivalent eyebrow at life. Bowles' astonishing talent is creating a dynamic that, if not unique, is highly unusual - strange, surreal, and yet grounded to the mundane. Her ear for dialogue is astonishing - dialogue which is almost never realistic, but always striking.
And Two Serious Ladies is a brilliant novel. As I said, it would not suit many readers - but anybody who chose writing style over plot in my recent post on the topic would be quite likely to appreciate this book. It is a huge shame that Bowles only wrote one novel. The one she has created ought to be enough to assure her a sort of immortality - Bowles is one novelist we should be taking seriously." - Stuck in a Bookk

"A good friend recently became a better one still by urging me to read Jane Bowles, whose writing inspired her husband Paul, previously known as a composer, to take up prose. Jane Bowles (née Auer), who was born in New York in 1917 and died in Malaga in 1973, wrote comparatively little – one novel (La Phaeton Hypocrite, a piece of juvenilia, notwithstanding), one play, and one short story collection – but her small oeuvre is distinguished by its quality and innovation.
The stories that make up Plain Pleasures, written between 1944 and 1951, are typical in their juxtaposing of domineering and weak women, and frequent preoccupation with moments of psychological crisis. There might be nothing distinctive about that, perhaps, but Bowles's ability to convey a mind in flux is powerfully discomfiting. In part this is due to the feeling, which infuses her stories, that such a chaotic state is a more or less permanent feature of existence. Some argue that the alienation forced on her by her sexuality was partially responsible for this, but both her unconventional marriage (she and Paul were bisexual, with Paul preferring men and Jane women) and life in Tangiers afforded relative freedom in this regard.
A more interesting explanation was suggested by Paul Bowles – always an astute judge of Jane's work – in a 1971 interview with Oliver Evans, when he noted her ability "to see the drama that is really in front of one every minute – the drama that follows living". Navigating by such lights, her fiction charts some of the territory explored by Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys. Her style, however, is closer to the reportorial terseness of Hemingway, but leavened with a dry wit that his prose lacks.
Humour is superficial in Bowles's work, however. Much like the waterfall through whose roar Sadie, the doomed spinster in Camp Cataract (1949), believes she can hear "someone pronounce her name in a dismal tone", the febrile thoughts of her characters seem to be suspended above yawning depths. Blank stares and non sequiturs abound, from the moment where Señora Ramirez's memory "seemed suddenly to have failed her" during the seduction in A Guatemalan Idyll (1944), to the bizarrely stuttering, ambiguously homoerotic conversation between an American and a Moroccan in Everything Is Nice (1951).
According to Truman Capote, Bowles found writing "difficult to the point of true pain". Paul Bowles concurred, remarking in an interview that it "cost her blood to write … Sometimes it took her a week to write a page". She preferred socialising, drinking, conversation and promiscuity. Her original impulse to write was inspired by sociability, following as it did a meeting with Louis-Ferdinand Céline on a transatlantic crossing when she was 17.
But her difficulties were as much a product of an uncompromising determination to avoid convention as they were the result of being temperamentally unsuited to the writer's lifestyle. For all that, though, the chief reason for Bowles's modest output was a terrible series of strokes, the first of which she suffered in Morocco in 1957. After this she was incapable of producing anything of worth and, already an alcoholic, proceeded to drink so much that her lucid spells occurred only between periods of insanity and something resembling a vegetative state.
In her preface to My Sister's Hand in Mine, the 1978 collected edition of Bowles's work, Joy Williams notes that writing "had to be difficult from the first paragraph in order for her to have respect for it". Post-1957, however, such things were beyond the reach of her crippled faculties. In a letter to the poet Ruth Fainlight, Bowles wrote:
"I haven't the energy to read since it's always a bit difficult for me because of the hemianopia trouble resulting from the stroke which you know about and which, although it is a thousand times improved, slows down my reading so much that I fall asleep with the light on. I managed to stay awake for one week reading a book called Plain Girl, a book for children with large print."
Following the publication of her magnificent novel Two Serious Ladies in 1943, Bowles outlined her concerns regarding her isolation in a letter to her husband: "I am serious but I am isolated and my experience is probably of no interest at this point to anyone." Despite Capote, Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers and John Ashbery all professing their admiration, Bowles was never widely read. As the latter noted in a 1967 New York Times article, "When a London publisher wanted to reprint [Two Serious Ladies] three years ago, even Mrs Bowles was unable to supply him with a copy." Although things are better now, it seems likely she will remain a cult interest; a major talent with a minor readership." - Chris Power

"Though she wrote only one novel, one play, and a few short stories, Jane Bowles has long been admired as a “writer’s writer;” her work has never received significant popular attention, but Bowles has often been cited as a major influence by other writers, including Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams. Her work, the whole of which fills only one slender volume, is often described as strange and surprising. In Bowles’s writing there is an “extraordinary tension between the sturdy, supernormal physical world she describes and the gloriously unpredictable, fantastic movements of the eccentric personages who inhabit it.” Her work wasn’t always well received by critics; in a review of Two Serious Ladies, one critic complained that the novel “strains too hard to startle and to shock and that it all too often is merely silly.” Because her work was witty and peopled with charming characters, some critics compared it to the novels of Carl Van Vechten.
Bowles’s play, In the Summer House, was produced on Broadway in 1953, starring Judith Anderson. The play investigates the complexities of the mother-daughter relationship, reflecting, many believe, Bowels’s complicated relationship with her mother. Like Two Serious Ladies, the play received mixed reviews. Though it did not appeal to audiences, some critics included it on their “best of the year” lists. Tennessee Williams is said to have called In the Summer House “one of the most original plays I have ever read.”3 In recent years, the play has been revived in several American theaters, receiving enthusiastic reviews. “Bowles uses interior monologue spoken aloud, like O’Neill and metaphoric, disoriented dialogue, like Tennessee Williams,” William A. Henry III wrote in 1993. He continued, “her lurching narrative would suit Ionesco; her shackled hysteria echoes Lorca.”
In New York City during the 1930s, Bowles was a peculiar character; she dyed her hair bright red, dressed in men’s clothes, and walked with an obvious limp (the result of a childhood injury). A regular at the city’s lesbian bars, Bowles carried on a number of affairs; at one time she had a passionate crush on the famous torch singer, Helen Morgan. In 1938, she married Paul Bowles, an openly gay musician. The couple traveled in the city’s gay literary and artistic circles with writers Tennessee Williams, Allen Ginsberg, and Gregory Corso. At one time, the couple lived in a New York boarding house where the other tenants included Carson McCullers and W.H. Auden. Though they spent time in New York, the couple lived a largely expatriate lifestyle; they traveled extensively in Europe, Central America, and Mexico. Eventually, they settled in Tangiers.
Bowles was highly dramatic (some might say melodramatic) and her love affairs were often complicated, passionate, and ultimately painful. One such affair led her to leave her husband and, when the relationship began to fail, to attempt suicide. In Tangiers, her love affair with a Moroccan servant caused her various problems, including financial difficulties, and eventually led to a permanent split with her husband. If Paul Bowles’s suspicion that her lover was feeding her exotic Moroccan poisons was true, that relationship may also have contributed to Bowles’s poor health. After a stroke in 1957, Bowles was no longer able to write. She began to drink excessively and to abuse prescription medications. She ended up living in the streets of Tangiers, harassing people and starting fights in bars. Unable to care for her himself, Paul Bowles was forced to have her admitted to a hospital, where she died in 1973." -Extravagant Crowd

The Gathering Spirit of Jane Bowles by Jon Carlson


The Portable Paul and Jane Bowles by Irving Malin


Cataract: Appreciating Jane Bowles by Jane Miller