(Paul Bowles:) "Her own method of work was at fault. The weight of the work was too
heavy for her to pull. She didn't know how to get into training to pull
such a heavy load all at once. What she wanted to do was more than she
could do, more than perhaps anyone could do.
"She never had a sense
that she had a body of work behind her. It was as if each new work she
began was from scratch....She didn't want to have learned from past
experience, because the past experience didn't come up to her
expectation."
He remembers that she said to him, "Every word is like chiseling in granite."
(Jane
Bowles, writing to her language therapist:) "I don't know whether or not
I understood you correctly --- But it seems if I am correct --- you
asked me to write compositions for you. I can not. Please try to find some other way. I cannot write a composition. If I could I would. I
don't think I have been able to for years anyway --- and then a this
time it is completely impossible. If it is a failure of the will ---
then my will is sick --- it is not lazyness. I am trying to read and I
must say that I am doing well in that. If I could write a composition I
would find my way out. But there is such a thing as a failure of the
will which is agony for the person who suffers with it. I did not suffer
a stroke for nothing at my age at age --- and I have gone far away down
the path of no return. I must have started down that path when I was
very young. I know that you want me to write something different --- but
I can't. I know that there are years of suffering ahead and that nobody
can look into my brain."
(Jane Bowles): "Even if I could
explain what it is that is missing it would help because I would still
be where I am --- no better off. There are no accounts to settle."
There
is something about daily life -- domestic daily life -- that resists
narration in biography or fiction. It is a telling of another sort:
Today I got up, I had breakfast, I read the paper, I went out....When
tomorrow is today, again: I got up, I had breakfast....
Narration
has the implication of a forward movement toward change. But daily life
is the structure through which things can go on and on as they have
been. It creates continuity without change, even as it allows the
present to renew itself. It forms a background so habitual that it can
be taken for granted. And the lives of others around us in our homes --
and even the domestic animals -- enforce that repetition and that
continuity.
Before her stroke Jane had always lived in terror of
the future. At the same time she had forced herself to go out and do
that which frightened her. But there was also that in Jane that needed
the security of daily life as a buttress against her terror. It is as if
she always had a double narration in her life, the narration of the
world of terror and the unchanging story which she had herself to create
out of daily existence. She lived wth the sense of being on an edge
between them.
Now, after the stroke, her daily life assumed a
desperate urgency. What others could take for granted -- the habitual
background of existence -- she had to patch together minute by minute
each day. Any action or gesture could reveal the world she had to evade
-- the world of her illness and the terror beyond the illness that the
illness had come to replace. To the extent that these events and
gestures were held safely within daily life, they guaranteed her own
continuing existence. So that daily life, now, became her primary work.
To get back to work and still protect
herself was what was necessary, to have her daily life and yet once
again do what she needed to do, to give form to her imaginative life in
language. But then, so much of her energy was consumed in allaying her
fears of what was still to come. (What was still to come was never out
of her mind for long, no matter how daily life held.)
(Paul Bowles, writing to Jane:) "Of course everything's a mess, but please forget the mess now and then each day, because otherwise you won't ever
work. The mess is just the decor in which we live, but we can't let
decor take over, really."
(Jane's doctor:) "It wasn't a matter of laziness in her that she didn't work. There was a
basic instability. That was why she didn't read, why she didn't learn
Braille. And the time became very hard for her to fill."
David Herbert went to visit Jane in the sanitorium. He brought her a group of excellent reviews of The Collected Works.
"As reading was such an effort, Jane made me read them to her. She
looked very sad and, for a little while, said nothing, then, hopelessly,
she said:
"'I know you mean this kindly, darling, but you couldn't have done anything more cruel!'
"I was aghast.
"'You see,' Janie went on, 'it all makes me realize what I was and what I have become.'"
descensus Averno facilis est