Two Serious Ladies
by Jane Bowles
1943, reprinted 2014
Two Serious Ladies was originally published in the 1940s, and has been kept alive since then by what appears to be a mix of historical curiosity and truly passionate fandom. From a historical standpoint, author Jane Bowles' husband Paul was an author and composer. I'd never heard of him, but apparently he's moderately famous in the literary world - he was friends with Gertrude Stein and her circle, one of his novels has been made into a movie, etc. So for someone interested in Paul Bowles specifically, or that literary milieu more generally, reading Two Serious Ladies could provide some extra context.
I don't remember exactly how I found the book, but it must've been a tip from a true fan. If you go looking for Two Serious Ladies online, you won't find a lot of stand alone reviews, but it shows up over and over in lists of recommended titles. Its cult following seems to be large enough that if you go looking for someone to tell you about their lesser-known faves, you're sure to find somebody trying to press a copy into your hand - especially if you're interested in "forgotten" women authors or books about women living unconventional lives. It was an interesting read for me, but I won't be counting myself among its evangels.
Two Serious Ladies follows two middle-aged women, Miss Goering and Mrs Copperfield, who are acquaintances but not friends in the same set of New York WASPs, as they each spontaneously and independently embark on a personal experiment to live differently, no longer bound by tradition or the norms for women of their social class.
The first chapter introduces us to Miss Goering, who lives alone in a big Victorian mansion. The sister of her childhood nanny shows up one day, they get along well, and Miss Goering invites her to move in. Later she goes to a party, briefly chats with Mrs Copperfield, and allows herself to get picked up by a guy who still lives with his elderly parents.
In chapter 2, we follow Mrs Copperfield on vacation to Panama with her husband. (I'll admit this caught me by surprise; I'd presumed the new housemate was the second serious lady, and that we'd continue following the characters we'd been properly introduced to.) Mrs Copperfield is very anxious, and doesn't seem to enjoy going outside or being on vacation, while her husband is very energetic, wants to walk the whole city and then hike the jungles, and basically ignores his wife's discomfort. While he's out exploring, she ends up in a hotel in the red light district, where she befriends the elderly madame and one of the young prostitutes. She keep staying there even after her husband comes back, and tells him to leave without her at the end of the trip.
In chapter 3, we return to Miss Goering. She's abandoned her big house in the city and moved into a shack outside a small town on one of the islands near New York. Her housemate and the guy she met at the party live with her, though they both seem unhappy about it. The guy's dad abandons the city to move in with them too. Miss Goering takes a ferry to a slightly larger town, meets a guy loitering on the street, goes drinking with him, and then comes back the next day to move in with him. Her other housemates are pretty shocked that she's leaving them. She lives with the guy for a week, then dumps him in favor of a gangster, who presumes she's a prostitute. The gangster takes her home with him, then out to a nice restaurant where he has a business meeting.
While Miss Goering is bored at the restaurant, she calls Mrs Copperfield, who is coincidentally back from her trip for a few days, with her new prostitute friend tagging along, before moving back to Panama permanently. Mrs Copperfield shows up at the restaurant wildly drunk with her friend in tow. Miss Goering is appalled by her, and then the gangster leaves to go do business, abandoning her. The end.
The plot of the book is very odd, because neither Miss Goering nor Mrs Copperfield seem to be acting on any kind of plan or ideology. They each have an inchoate sense of wanting to do something different, and enough money to basically do whatever they want, and so they both advance toward their unseen goals over the objections of the people around them.
Most of what happens is just people talking, just chitchatting, or talking about how they live or what they want to do, or trying to convince someone to go into business or on a date. It all seems pretty prosaic, not like anyone is the embodiment of any particular viewpoint. Our two serious ladies listen, then say vague things about how they think it's nice to do this, or they don't want to do that. They're impervious to persuasion or browbeating. But they don't really espouse any viewpoint of their own. If there's a genuine philosophical argument about how to live hidden in this dialogue, it's couched in terms we might think of as vaguebooking or subtweeting. I'm not sure it's there at all. Also everyone in the book drinks heavily, pretty much constantly. A lot of the dialogue sounds like what you'd hear a bar.
Bowles's writing deals almost exclusively with what people say and do. There's almost no interiority, no mention of what anyone thinks or feels, beyond someone occasionally saying something to themselves, like an aside to the audience during a play. It makes the women's already sort of mysterious actions seem even more opaque. I say sort of mysterious because what they're doing doesn't especially seem to make them happy, and we don't really learn any other motive or goal.
Another thing I read in this style was the short story "An Hour of Last Things" by George P Elliott, who is best known for having almost the same name as a much more famous author. In that, a woman's husband dies, she goes out to buy an expensive stereo system, and throws herself a big party, and like Mrs Copperfield, it's implied but not stated that the widow is attracted to a younger woman. Barbara Comyns' book Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead is similarly almost Behaviorist in its refusal to depict interiority, but is a much stronger book overall, in my opinion. I'd happily swap it for Two Serious Ladies on any list recommending short, strange midcentury novels by overlooked women writers.
Just because it's not for me though, doesn't mean it's not for anyone, and women breaking with convention in pursuit of their own pleasure are certainly having a literary moment right now. There's even another new reprint of Two Serious Ladies, with a new intro and new cover art, out just last year. I'm certain the cult following will continue. If you're in the mood, I'd suggest sipping gin during Mrs Copperfield's chapter and whiskey for Miss Goering, perhaps starting off listening to Helen Kane sing "I Want to be Bad" to set the mood.
Two Serious Ladies was originally published in the 1940s, and has been kept alive since then by what appears to be a mix of historical curiosity and truly passionate fandom. From a historical standpoint, author Jane Bowles' husband Paul was an author and composer. I'd never heard of him, but apparently he's moderately famous in the literary world - he was friends with Gertrude Stein and her circle, one of his novels has been made into a movie, etc. So for someone interested in Paul Bowles specifically, or that literary milieu more generally, reading Two Serious Ladies could provide some extra context.
I don't remember exactly how I found the book, but it must've been a tip from a true fan. If you go looking for Two Serious Ladies online, you won't find a lot of stand alone reviews, but it shows up over and over in lists of recommended titles. Its cult following seems to be large enough that if you go looking for someone to tell you about their lesser-known faves, you're sure to find somebody trying to press a copy into your hand - especially if you're interested in "forgotten" women authors or books about women living unconventional lives. It was an interesting read for me, but I won't be counting myself among its evangels.
Two Serious Ladies follows two middle-aged women, Miss Goering and Mrs Copperfield, who are acquaintances but not friends in the same set of New York WASPs, as they each spontaneously and independently embark on a personal experiment to live differently, no longer bound by tradition or the norms for women of their social class.
The first chapter introduces us to Miss Goering, who lives alone in a big Victorian mansion. The sister of her childhood nanny shows up one day, they get along well, and Miss Goering invites her to move in. Later she goes to a party, briefly chats with Mrs Copperfield, and allows herself to get picked up by a guy who still lives with his elderly parents.
In chapter 2, we follow Mrs Copperfield on vacation to Panama with her husband. (I'll admit this caught me by surprise; I'd presumed the new housemate was the second serious lady, and that we'd continue following the characters we'd been properly introduced to.) Mrs Copperfield is very anxious, and doesn't seem to enjoy going outside or being on vacation, while her husband is very energetic, wants to walk the whole city and then hike the jungles, and basically ignores his wife's discomfort. While he's out exploring, she ends up in a hotel in the red light district, where she befriends the elderly madame and one of the young prostitutes. She keep staying there even after her husband comes back, and tells him to leave without her at the end of the trip.
In chapter 3, we return to Miss Goering. She's abandoned her big house in the city and moved into a shack outside a small town on one of the islands near New York. Her housemate and the guy she met at the party live with her, though they both seem unhappy about it. The guy's dad abandons the city to move in with them too. Miss Goering takes a ferry to a slightly larger town, meets a guy loitering on the street, goes drinking with him, and then comes back the next day to move in with him. Her other housemates are pretty shocked that she's leaving them. She lives with the guy for a week, then dumps him in favor of a gangster, who presumes she's a prostitute. The gangster takes her home with him, then out to a nice restaurant where he has a business meeting.
While Miss Goering is bored at the restaurant, she calls Mrs Copperfield, who is coincidentally back from her trip for a few days, with her new prostitute friend tagging along, before moving back to Panama permanently. Mrs Copperfield shows up at the restaurant wildly drunk with her friend in tow. Miss Goering is appalled by her, and then the gangster leaves to go do business, abandoning her. The end.
The plot of the book is very odd, because neither Miss Goering nor Mrs Copperfield seem to be acting on any kind of plan or ideology. They each have an inchoate sense of wanting to do something different, and enough money to basically do whatever they want, and so they both advance toward their unseen goals over the objections of the people around them.
Most of what happens is just people talking, just chitchatting, or talking about how they live or what they want to do, or trying to convince someone to go into business or on a date. It all seems pretty prosaic, not like anyone is the embodiment of any particular viewpoint. Our two serious ladies listen, then say vague things about how they think it's nice to do this, or they don't want to do that. They're impervious to persuasion or browbeating. But they don't really espouse any viewpoint of their own. If there's a genuine philosophical argument about how to live hidden in this dialogue, it's couched in terms we might think of as vaguebooking or subtweeting. I'm not sure it's there at all. Also everyone in the book drinks heavily, pretty much constantly. A lot of the dialogue sounds like what you'd hear a bar.
Bowles's writing deals almost exclusively with what people say and do. There's almost no interiority, no mention of what anyone thinks or feels, beyond someone occasionally saying something to themselves, like an aside to the audience during a play. It makes the women's already sort of mysterious actions seem even more opaque. I say sort of mysterious because what they're doing doesn't especially seem to make them happy, and we don't really learn any other motive or goal.
Another thing I read in this style was the short story "An Hour of Last Things" by George P Elliott, who is best known for having almost the same name as a much more famous author. In that, a woman's husband dies, she goes out to buy an expensive stereo system, and throws herself a big party, and like Mrs Copperfield, it's implied but not stated that the widow is attracted to a younger woman. Barbara Comyns' book Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead is similarly almost Behaviorist in its refusal to depict interiority, but is a much stronger book overall, in my opinion. I'd happily swap it for Two Serious Ladies on any list recommending short, strange midcentury novels by overlooked women writers.
Just because it's not for me though, doesn't mean it's not for anyone, and women breaking with convention in pursuit of their own pleasure are certainly having a literary moment right now. There's even another new reprint of Two Serious Ladies, with a new intro and new cover art, out just last year. I'm certain the cult following will continue. If you're in the mood, I'd suggest sipping gin during Mrs Copperfield's chapter and whiskey for Miss Goering, perhaps starting off listening to Helen Kane sing "I Want to be Bad" to set the mood.
