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The Portable Paul and Jane Bowles
Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1995 by Irving Malin
Although I continued to read Faulkner, I read at about the same time (I was about 15) an odd, perverse story called "Pages from Cold Point" - dangerous, explosive reading for a teenager. I still remember the anxiety of those Gothic days; Paul Bowles's cold sentences chilled me: "Life is usually too hideous for one to make the attempt to preserve it. Let it go." I recount these "cultural experiences" - isn't "culture" merely another autobiographical fiction we construct to deceive others? - to demonstrate that we choose the authors who seem to speak (or "write") to us.
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Thus I discovered the Gothic. But one writer was missing - Poe. And, of course, I couldn't avoid him. At first I thought these three "imps" were merely "psychological" writers. I didn't think of their philosophical meanings. I decided I'd have to confront them. And I did. In addition to my work on Faulkner and Poe, in 1986 I edited a collection of essays on the work of Bowles. Then I found that I was writing letters to my "master." He was writing back! And he kindly allowed me to publish his letters!
Since 1986 Bowles has been everywhere. He is mentioned in books on the Beats or on little magazines or on the short story. And he has been canonized - at least in my canon. He is the subject of critical biographies, of a wonderful bibliography and of a collection of letters edited by Jeffrey Miller. But Millicent Dillon was there first. In 1981 she published a definitive biography of Jane Bowles. She had known Paul Bowles; she is now writing a memoir of him.
This Viking Portable is the first one devoted to two authors. But as Alfred Chester said - does anyone read his Gothic fiction? - "meeting the Bowleses was like encountering two parts of the same being." Dillon's excellent collection is an extraordinary event. She has alternated the fiction of Jane and Paul Bowles so that we get for the first time an insight into their shared stylistic, philosophical concerns.
She has now made me understand that they were married and divorced at the same time. Their stylistic treatments of religion, travel, psychology were different. Jane wrote about meeting Paul for the first time: "He wrote music and was mysterious and sinister. The first time I met him I said to a friend, 'he's my enemy.'" Most people don't marry their enemies - or do they? - but most people don't write lasting fiction.
Dillon's alternation gives us a new way of understanding the Bowleses' "marriages." Here, for example, is a typical selection from Jane. It comes from Two Serious Ladies, which Paul "edited": "Does your sin taste bitter in your mouth? It must." The lines are surely odd. Although they are clearly written, they are terrifying and comic. What is a taste of sin? Is the taste bitter? Dillon recognizes that Jane secretly liked the "bitter taste" of sin; her fiction is, however, a search for "plain pleasures," pleasures exemplified by recurring images of sweetness. Her last story-title is "A Stick of Green Candy."
Paul, of course, has always known that we need not be worried by a taste of sin. He lacks a sweet tooth. And he recognizes that "you are not I." But at the same time he understands that language is deceptive. Can "I" not be "you" if "I" write it?
This Viking Portable returns me to Poe. He recognized that we are "oval portraits," that we are both light and dark (see the Ushers). Although I am not sure that this is the best Portable, I see it as a subtle, subversive text. Dillon has not simply edited a book; she has given us a masterpiece of sorts - an anti-collection.
And you, my dear reader, can now see the reasons for this anti-review.
IRVING MALIN City College of New York
COPYRIGHT 1995 Studies in Short Fiction
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
