Everything is Nice

by Jane Bowles

  Jane Bowles

  Everything Is Nice: The Collected Stories

  Is the first publication of the complete short stories of Jane Bowles, including three previously uncollected.

  WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY PAUL BOWLES

  Published by Virago Press Limited 1989

  Plain Pleasures, Other Stories and from the Noteooks first published in Great Britain in The Collected Works of Jane Bowles by Peter Owen Ltd., 1984 Copyright © 1970, 1972, 1976,1977, 1978 by Paul Bowles

  This edition Copyright © Virago 1989

  Introduction Copyright © Paul Bowles 1989

  'Andrew', 'Emmy Moore's Journal* and 'Going to Massachusetts* Copyright © 1970,1972, 1976, 1977 by Paul Bowles; the material first appeared in Antaeus and was included in Feminine Wiles, published by Black Sparrow Press.

  The Iron Table', 'Lila and Frank' and 'Friday' copyright © 1977 by Paul Bowles; first published in Antaeus.

  Plain Pleasures Copyright © 1946, 1949, 1957,1966 by Jane Bowles; first published in Great Britain by Peter Owen Ltd 1966. 'Plain Pleasures' and 'Camp Cataract' first appeared in Harper's Bazaar, 'A Stick of Green Candy' first appeared in Vogue.

  'Looking for Lane' Copyright © The Threepenny Review, 1984] 'Señorita Cordoba', Copyright © The Threepenny Review, 1985; 'Laura and Sally' Copyright © The Threepenny Review, 1987. The three stories from The Threepenny Review are previously uncollected and were selected from the notebooks of Jane Bowles by Millicent Dillon, edited by Millicent Dillonand Paul Bowles.

  JANE BOWLES

  was born in New York in 1917 and began writing at the age of fifteen. In 1938 she married the composer and writer Paul Bowles and they spent the first year of their married life in the famous Brooklyn Heights boarding house in New York, also tenanted by Richard and Ellen Wright, W. H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Carson McCullers and Gypsy Rose Lee. The Bowles then spent many nomadic years—in Europe, in Central America and Mexico, in Ceylon—before settling more or less permanently in Tangiers in 1947.

  One of the most celebrated literary figures of the 40s, Jane Bowles was a writer's writer. Her literary output was small, her career ending abruptly in 1957 when, aged only forty, she suffered a cerebral haemorrhage which made reading and writing impossible for her. After a long illness she died in Malaga, Spain, in 1973.

  With a tragi-comic view of life expressed with biting wit and cool compassion, a literary style of immense precision, constantly surprising, often hilarious, she is a Magritte among twentieth-century writers—as her friend Truman Capote described her, 'a modern legend'.

  JANE BOWLES

  Introduction

  Plain Pleasures

  Everything Is Nice

  A Guatemalan Idyll

  Camp Cataract

  A Day in the Open

  A Quarreling Pair

  A Stick of Green Candy

  Other Stories

  Andrew

  Emmy Moore's Journal

  Going to Massachusetts

  From the Notebooks

  The Iron Table

  Lila and Frank

  Friday

  From the Threepenny Review

  Looking for Lane

  Señorita Cordoba

  Laura and Sally

  Introduction

  Ambivalence was her natural element; to be obliged to make a decision filled her with anguish. The possibilities for a sudden volte-face had to be kept open. If something were about to be published, she decided it should not be published: the work was not good enough, and it would be "humiliating" (one of her favourite words) to see it in print. In 1944, a year after the appearance of Two Serious Ladies, she was asked for a contribution to a hard-cover anthology being prepared in New York. When she mentioned it to me, she remarked that she was not bothering to reply since she had nothing to submit. I thought then of the long discarded section of the novel. (Originally there had been three serious ladies; then, as the novel took shape, the number was reduced to two, and the entire part dealing with Señorita Cordoba was scrapped.) It seemed to me that there was material here which could be removed from its context and used without a word of rewriting. Jane disagreed. Excerpts cut from anything, particularly from abandoned material, could not be considered finished work. I went ahead nevertheless, excised a passage of Señorita Cordoba which I thought made a complete story, and showed it to Jane. She shrugged, fixed me with a mistrustful stare, and said: "You seem to be very interested in having it published."

  "I am. Aren't you?"

  "It's just a lot of débris. It has no interest."

  "Well, I love it," I said. With that, I carried the typescript myself to the offices of Fischer and gave it to the editor with the title "A Guatemalan Idyll". It was published in 1944. The following year the same editor asked for a further piece for a second anthology, and I removed "A Day in the Open" from the same mass of rejected narrative. Twenty years later, when the time came to publish "Plain Pleasures" as a collection in book form, I was thankful that I had gone against her wishes with regard to these two pieces, because the original manuscript had long since disappeared, and had they not been published there would have remained no trace of them.

  This constitutional indecisiveness on Jane's part had been reinforced by the critical reception accorded Two Serious Ladies when it first appeared. Save for a handful of "sophisticated" critics, the American reviews had qualified the novel as inept and chaotic, a meaningless absurdity. The publisher's blurb on the front flap of the dust-jacket began with the unfortunate sentence: "Here is a startlingly unusual novel that will shock you to attention." Responding to this, one critic wrote: "The only shocking thing about this novel is that it ever managed to find its way into print."

  While Jane pretended to take all reviews lightly, favourable or otherwise, she was nevertheless very much aware that even though Knopf had made a second printing, the book had not achieved the success she had envisaged for it. It was easy to lay the blame on bad timing: 1943 was a poor year for a literary début in any country, but she waved away explanations. The novel had been ill-fated, and a failure. From bitter references she made later, in the fifties and sixties, to these early reviews I realized that she had taken them very seriously indeed, even to the point of being persuaded that they had been justified. When we discussed sections of her novel-in-progress Out in the World, she said: "I certainly have no intention of repeating myself, if that's what you mean. Two Serious Ladies was no good. Bah! Everybody hated it. This has got to be something completely different."

  I think it was this insistence upon arriving at the "completely different" mode of expression which made it impossible for her to develop any idea at length without scrutinizing it, analysing it, and thus killing it. If she read me a few pages of her manuscript and I was enthusiastic, she would smile and say: "I know. You like it because it reminds you of Two Serious Ladies. I can't leave it this way." My pleas that she refrain from changing it in any way were brushed aside. "You don't really understand what I'm trying to say, that's the trouble. I know how I want it to sound."

  When the possibility of a British edition of Two Serious Ladies was broached, she rejected the idea straightaway: she did not want to be a laughing-stock in London as well as New York. After the customary arguments she agreed to let me send one of the two precious copies we possessed to London.

  The book was published, and received perceptive and laudatory notices, but Jane was troubled by a suspicion that all this had been arranged by friends, and more out of sympathy for her because of the state of her health than out of enthusiasm for her work. The following year, when her London publisher suggested a volume of short stories, she informed me triumphantly that she hadn't wanted to tell me before, but all copies of them were lost - they had been i
n a suitcase that had been left behind several years earlier at a hospital in England. This presented no insurmountable problem: all the material had been published, and I had tear-sheets of everything at hand, including a travel article she had written for Mademoiselle. I saw that in ten minutes it could be transformed into a story. As I expected, she refused to consider it. So I did it myself, called it "Everything Is Nice", and included it with the manuscripts to be sent to London. When I showed her the result, she said angrily: "Do whatever you like."

  The publication of her Collected Works in New York the same year gave her no apparent satisfaction. When a friend asked her to inscribe his copy, she wrote on the flyleaf: The Collected Works of Dead Jane Bowles.

  In all probability she would have objected strenuously to seeing the last nine pieces included in the present volume. If she were alive and we could discuss it together, I think she would maintain that there was an obvious unfairness in representing a writer by bits and pieces, and I think that for once I should be in agreement. But those of us who have survived her are justified, I believe, in presenting these small scenes as valid examples of her work.

  Paul Bowles, Tangier, 1981

  Plain Pleasures

  Alva Perry was a dignified and reserved woman of Scotch and Spanish descent, in her early forties. She was still handsome, although her cheeks were too thin. Her eyes particularly were of an extraordinary clarity and beauty. She lived in her uncle's house, which had been converted into apartments, or tenements, as they were still called in her section of the country. The house stood on the side of a steep, wooded hill overlooking the main highway. A long cement staircase climbed halfway up the hill and stopped some distance below the house. It had originally led to a power station, which had since been destroyed. Mrs. Perry had lived alone in her tenement since the death of her husband eleven years ago; however, she found small things to do all day long and she had somehow remained as industrious in her solitude as a woman who lives in the service of her family.

  John Drake, an equally reserved person, occupied the tenement below hers. He owned a truck and engaged in free-lance work for lumber companies, as well as in the collection and delivery of milk cans for a dairy.

  Mr. Drake and Mrs. Perry had never exchanged more than the simplest greeting in all the years that they had lived here in the hillside house.

  One night Mr. Drake, who was standing in the hall, heard Mrs. Perry's heavy footsteps, which he had unconsciously learned to recognize. He looked up and saw her coming downstairs. She was dressed in a brown overcoat that had belonged to her dead husband, and she was hugging a paper bag to her bosom. Mr. Drake offered to help her with the bag and she faltered, undecided, on the landing.

  "They are only potatoes," she said to him, "but thank you very much. I am going to bake them out in the back yard. I have been meaning to for a long time."

  Mr. Drake took the potatoes and walked with a stiff-jointed gait through the back door and down the hill to a short stretch of level land in back of the house which served as a yard. Here he put the paper bag on the ground. There was a big new incinerator smoking near the back stoop and in the center of the yard Mrs. Perry's uncle had built a roofed-in pigpen faced in vivid artificial brick. Mrs. Perry followed.

  She thanked Mr. Drake and began to gather twigs, scuttling rapidly between the edge of the woods and the pigpen, near which she was laying her fire. Mr. Drake, without any further conversation, helped her to gather the twigs, so that when the fire was laid, she quite naturally invited him to wait and share the potatoes with her. He accepted and they sat in front of the fire on an overturned box.

  Mr. Drake kept his face averted from the fire and turned in the direction of the woods, hoping in this way to conceal somewhat his flaming-red cheeks from Mrs. Perry. He was a very shy person and though his skin was naturally red all the time it turned to such deep crimson when he was in the presence of a strange woman that the change was distinctly noticeable. Mrs. Perry wondered why he kept looking behind him, but she did not feel she knew him well enough to question him. She waited in vain for him to speak and then, realizing that he was not going to, she searched her own mind for something to say.

  "Do you like plain ordinary pleasures?" she finally asked him gravely.

  Mr. Drake felt very much relieved that she had spoken and his color subsided. "You had better first give me a clearer notion of what you mean by ordinary pleasures, and then I'll tell you how I feel about them," he answered soberly, halting after every few words, for he was as conscientious as he was shy.

  Mrs. Perry hesitated. "Plain pleasures," she began, "like the ones that come without crowds or fancy food." She searched her brain for more examples. "Plain pleasures like this potato bake instead of dancing and whisky and bands. . . . Like a picnic but not the kind with a thousand extra things that get thrown out in a ditch because they don't get eaten up. I've seen grown people throw cakes away because they were too lazy to wrap them up and take them back home. Have you seen that go on?"

  "No, I don't think so," said Mr. Drake.

  "They waste a lot," she remarked.

  "Well, I do like plain pleasures," put in Mr. Drake, anxious that she should not lose the thread of the conversation.

  "Don't you think that plain pleasures are closer to the heart of God?" she asked him.

  He was a little embarrassed at her mentioning anything so solemn and so intimate on such short acquaintance, and he could not bring himself to answer her. Mrs. Perry, who was ordinarily shut-mouthed, felt a stream of words swelling in her throat.

  "My sister, Dorothy Alvarez," she began without further introduction, "goes to all gala affairs downtown. She has invited me to go and raise the dickens with her, but I won't go. She's the merriest one in her group and separated from her husband. They take her all the places with them. She can eat dinner in a restaurant every night if she wants to. She's crazy about fried fish and all kinds of things. I don't pay much mind to what I eat unless it's a potato bake like this. We each have only one single life which is our real life, starting at the cradle and ending at the grave. I warn Dorothy every time I see her that if she doesn't watch out her life is going to be left aching and starving on the side of the road and she's going to get to her grave without it. The farther a man follows the rainbow, the harder it is for him to get back to the life which he left starving like an old dog. Sometimes when a man gets older he has a revelation and wants awfully bad to get back to the place where he left his life, but he can't get to that place—not often. It's always better to stay alongside of your life. I told Dorothy that life was not a tree with a million different blossoms on it." She reflected upon this for a moment in silence and then continued. "She has a box that she puts pennies and nickles in when she thinks she's running around too much and she uses the money in the box to buy candles with for church. But that's all she'll do for her spirit, which is not enough for a grown woman."

  Mr. Drake's face was strained because he was trying terribly hard to follow closely what she was saying, but he was so fearful lest she reveal some intimate secret of her sister's and later regret it that his mind was almost completely closed to everything else. He was fully prepared to stop her if she went too far.

  The potatoes were done and Mrs. Perry offered him two of them.

  "Have some potatoes?" she said to him. The wind was colder now than when they had first sat down, and it blew around the pigpen.

  "How do you feel about these cold howling nights that we have? Do you mind them?" Mrs. Perry asked.

  "I surely do," said John Drake.

  She looked intently at his face. "He is as red as a cherry," she said to herself.

  "I might have preferred to live in a warm climate maybe," Mr. Drake was saying very slowly with a dreamy look in his eye, "if I happened to believe in a lot of unnecessary changing around. A lot of going forth and back, I mean." He blushed because he was approaching a subject that was close to his heart.

  "Yes, yes, yes," said Mrs. Perry.
"A lot of switching around is no good."

  "When I was a younger man I had a chance to go way down south to Florida," he continued. "I had an offer to join forces with an alligator-farm project, but there was no security in the alligators. It might not have been a successful farm; it was not the risk that I minded so much, because I have always yearned to see palm trees and coconuts and the like. But I also believed that a man has to have a pretty good reason for moving around. I think that is what finally stopped me from going down to Florida and raising alligators. It was not the money, because I was not raised to give money first place. It was just that I felt then the way I do now, that if a man leaves home he must leave for some very good reason—like the boys who went to construct the Panama Canal or for any other decent reason. Otherwise I think he ought to stay in his own home town, so that nobody can say about him, 'What does he think he can do here that we can't?' At least that is what I think people in a strange town would say about a man like myself if I landed there with some doubtful venture as my only excuse for leaving home. My brother don't feel that way. He never stays in one place more than three months." He ate his potato with a woeful look in his eye, shaking his head from side to side.

  Mrs. Perry's mind was wandering, so that she was very much startled when he suddenly stood up and extended his hand to her.

  "I'll leave now," he said, "but in return for the potatoes, will you come and have supper with me at a restaurant tomorrow night?"

  She had not received an invitation of this kind in many years, having deliberately withdrawn from life in town, and she did not know how to answer him. "Do you think I should do that?" she asked.

  Mr. Drake assured her that she should do it and she accepted his invitation. On the following afternoon, Mrs. Perry waited for the bus at the foot of the short cement bridge below the house. She needed help and advice from her sister about a lavender dress which no longer fitted her. She herself had never been able to sew well and she knew little about altering women's garments. She intended to wear her dress to the restaurant where she was to meet John Drake, and she was carrying it tucked under her arm.