Tangier is composed of two mismatching parts, one of them a dull, modern area stuffed with office buildings and tall, gloomy dwellings, and the other a Casbah descending through a medieval puzzlement of alleys and alcoves and kif-odored, mint-scented piazzas down to the crawling-with-sailors, ship-horn-hollering port.
The Bowleses have established themselves in both sectors—have a sterilized, tout confort apartment in the new quarter and also a refuge hidden away in the darker Arab neighborhood: a native house that must be one of the city’s tiniest habitations—ceilings so low that one had almost literally to move on hands and knees from room to room; but the rooms themselves are like a charming series of postcard-sized Vuillards—Moorish cushions spilling over Moorish-patterned carpets, all cozy as a raspberry tart and illuminated by intricate lanterns and windows that allow the light of sea-skies and views that encompass minarets and ships and the blue-washed rooftops of native tenements, receding like a ghostly staircase to the clamorous shoreline. Or that is how I remember it on the occasion of a single visit made at sunset on an evening, oh, fifteen years ago.
A line from Edith Sitwell: Jane, Jane, the morning light creaks down again—This from a poem I’ve always liked without, as so often with the particular author, altogether understanding it. Unless “morning light” is an image signifying memory(?). My own most satisfying memories of Jane Bowles revolve around a month spent in side-by-side rooms in a pleasantly shabby hotel on the rue du Bac during an icy Paris winter—January, 1951.
Many a cold evening was spent in Jane’s snug room (fat with books and papers and foodstuffs, and a snappy white Pekingese puppy bought from a Spanish sailor); long evenings spent listening to a phonograph and drinking warm applejack while Jane built sloppy, marvelous stews atop an electric burner: she is a good cook, yessir, and kind of a glutton, as one might suspect from her stories, which abound in accounts of eating and its artifacts.
Cooking is but one of her extracurricular gifts; she is also a spooky accurate mimic, and can re-create with nostalgic admiration the voices of certain singers—Helen Morgan, for example, and her close friend Libby Holman. Years afterward I wrote a story called Among the Paths to Eden, in which, without realizing it, I attributed to the heroine several of Jane Bowles’s characteristics: the stiff-legged limp, her spectacles, her brilliant and poignant abilities as a mimic. (“She waited, as though listening for music to cue her; then, ‘Don’t ever leave me, now that you’re here! Here is where you belong.
Everything seems so right when you’re near. When you’re away it’s all wrong.’ And Mr. Belli was shocked, for what he was hearing was exactly Helen Morgan’s voice, and the voice, with its vulnerable sweetness, refinement, its tender quaver toppling high notes, seemed not to be borrowed, but Mary O’Meaghan’s own, a natural expression of some secluded identity.”) I did not have Mrs. Bowles in mind when I invented Mary O’Meaghan—a character she in no essential way resembles; but it is a measure of the potent impression Jane has always made on me that some fragment of her should emerge in this manner.
That winter Jane was working on In the Summer House, the play that was later so sensitively produced in New York.
I’m not all that keen on the theater: cannot sit through most plays once; nevertheless, I saw In the Summer House three times, and not out of loyalty to the author, but because it had a thorny wit, the flavor of a newly tasted, refreshingly bitter beverage—the same qualities that had initially attracted me to Mrs. Bowles’s novel Two Serious Ladies.
My only complaint against Mrs. Bowles is not that her work lacks quality, merely quantity. The volume in hand constitutes her entire shelf, so to say. And grateful as we are to have it, one could wish that there was more. Once, while discussing a colleague, someone more facile than either of us, Jane said, “But it’s so easy for him. He has only to turn his hand. Just turn his hand.”
Actually, writing is never easy: in case anyone doesn’t know, it’s the hardest work around, and for Jane, I think it is difficult to the point of true pain. And why not?—when both her language and her themes are sought after along tortured paths and in stony quarries: the never-realized relationships between her people, the mental and physical discomforts with which she surrounds and saturates them—every room an atrocity, every urban landscape a creation of neon-dourness.
And yet, though the tragic view is central to her vision, Jane Bowles is a very funny writer, a humorist of sorts—but not, by the way, of the Black School. Black Comedy, as its perpetrators label it, is, when successful, all lovely artifice and lacking any hint of compassion. Her subtle comprehension of eccentricity and human apartness as revealed in her work requires us to accord Jane Bowles high esteem as an artist.
EXTREME MAGIC (1967)
August, 1966! Aboard the Tritona. Others aboard: Gianni and Marella Agnelli (hosts), Stash and Lee Radziwill, Luciana Pignatelli, Eric Nielsen, Sandro Durso, Adolfo Caracciolo, his daughter Allegra and his nephew Carlo. Seven Italians, one Dane, one Pole, and two of us (Lee et moi). Hmm.
Point of departure: Brindisi, a rather sexy seaport on the Italian Adriatic. Destination: the islands and coast of Yugoslavia, a twenty-day cruise ending in Venice.
It is now eleven P.M., and we had hoped to sail at midnight, but the captain, a no-nonsense gentleman from Germany, complains of a rising wind and thinks it unsafe to risk the sea before sunrise. Never mind!—the quay alongside the yacht is awash with café lights and piano sounds and Negro and Norwegian sailors browsing among brigades of pretty little purse-swinging tarts (one a really speedy baby with pimiento-colored hair).
Groan. Moan. Oh oh oh hold on to the wall. And crawl, Jesus, please. Please, Jesus. Slowly, slowly, one at a time: Yes, I am crawling up the stairs from my cabin (where green waves are smashing against the portholes), crawling toward the presumed safety of the salon.
The Tritona is a luxurious craft constructed on a wide-bottomed principle of a Grecian caïque. The property of Conte Theo Rossi, who lent it to the Agnellis for their cruise, it is furnished throughout like the apartment of an elegantly humorous art collector: The salon is a greenhouse of flowering plants—a huge Rubens dominates the wall above an arrangement of brown velvet couches.
But on this particular morning, the first day of the voyage, as we crossed the swelling seas between Italy and Yugoslavia, the salon, when at last I’ve crawled my way to it, is a rocking wreck. A television set is overturned. Bottles from the bar are rolling on the floor. Bodies are strewn all over like the aftermath of an Indian massacre. One of the choicest belongs to Lee (Radziwill). As I crawl past her, she opens a seasick eye and, in a hospital whisper, says: “Oh, it’s you. What time is it?”
“Nine. Thereabouts.”
Moan. “Only nine? And this is going to last the whole day. Oh I wish I’d listened to Stash. He said we shouldn’t have come. How do you feel?”
“Maybe I’ll live.”
“You look incredible. Yellow. Have you taken a pill? They help. A little.”
Eric Nielsen, lying face-down and somewhat askew, as though he’d been felled from behind by an ax murderer, says: “Shut up. I’m worse off than either of you.”
“The trouble,” says Lee, “the trouble with the pills is they make you so thirsty. And then you’re dying for water. But if you drink water, that only makes you sicker.”
How true—as I learned after swallowing two pills. Thirst is not the word; it was as if one had been a prisoner in the Sahara half a year or more.
A steward had arranged a buffet breakfast, but no one has gone near it—until presently Luciana (Pignatelli) appears. Luciana, looking impossibly serene and lovely—her slacks immaculate, every strand of golden hair just so, and her face, the eyes particularly, a triumph of precise maquillage.
“Oh, Luciana,” says Lee in a grieving, drowning tone, “how ever did you do it?”
And Luciana, buttering a slice of toast and spreading it with apricot jam, says: “Do what, darling?”
“Put on your face. I’m trembling so—I can’t hold a lipstick. If I’d tried to do what you’ve done to your eyes—all those Egyptian lines—I would have blinded myself.”
“Trembling?” says Luciana, crunching her toast. “Oh I see. You are troubled by the motion of the boat. But really it is not so bad, no?”
Eric says: “Shut up, girl. I’ve been on hundreds of boats, and I’ve never been seasick before.”
Luciana shrugs. “As you like.” Then she calls for the steward, who arrives careening to and fro. “May I have an egg, please?”
Lee says: “Oh, Luciana. How can you?”
At dusk this day the sea calmed as the Tritona approached the stony Montenegro coast. Everyone, feeling vastly better, is on deck staring down at the green-crystal depths skidding below. Suddenly a trio of sailors, standing in the ship’s prow, start to shout and gesture: An immense porpoise is racing
