Customer Reviews

A Little Original Sin: The Life and Work of Jane Bowles

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This is a wonderfully well-written biography. It traces the interesting, complicated, humorous and intriguing life of the writer Jane Bowles. Married to writer and composer, Paul Bowles, it follows them on their many travels and their many friendships. Bowles approached life in her own peculiar way, and this aspect is captured by Dillon. The frustrations, anxieties and insecurities are caught in Bowles' many letters to friends. Dillon does a great job researching the illnesses that plagued Bowles near the end of her life, and Dillon is sensitive to how these roadblocks affected a deeply talented writer.

It's hard not to appreciate the elbow grease Millicent Dillon put into assembling the facts of Jane Bowles's tumultuous life just a few years after her death in 1973. Dillon includes generous excerpts from Bowles's letters and interviews most of the major players in her circle. But I found myself wishing she'd take more of a stab at finding a larger interpretation or meaning to Bowles's career, working her into a wider context that would help make sense of her writing and her times. The roots of Bowles's desperate alcoholism, her fear of writing in the shadow of Paul's success, her original, highly unusual approach to sexuality & gender in a more stringent time and place, her tangled relationship with Judaism, her fascination with the culture (and women) of Tangier: Dillon touches on these topics, but her reluctance to take Jane's life on any terms other than the author's own, or those of her close-knit circle, give the biography a sad, claustrophobic feel: it seems like a lot of ink to spill on someone who spent much of her life searching for ways to avoid writing. I can't believe I'm saying this, but I think Bowles would benefit from a biographer more plugged in to the academic world, someone familiar with contemporary issues in queer studies or gender theory or Jewish-American lit, to really bring Jane's achievement to life.

A little Original Sin is a superb biography of Jane Bowles, the child-woman whose outre lifestyle both energized and sometimes overshadowed her fiction. She and husband, composer Paul Bowles, manned an outpost of American bohemia in Morocco where they played host to such luminaries as Tennessee Williams, Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Gore Vidal and Truman Capote.

When she met Bowles in 1937, Jane was as-yet unpublished. She had been crippled in one knee by polio; he from the psychological abuse of a tyrannical father. It's possible that their marriage -- arranged to shock their families -- was never consummated. They do seem to have enjoyed a tender and childlike camaraderie. According to biographer Dillon, the two relished role-playing games. (A favorite plotline included a parrot whose single utterance, "bupple," became their pet name for one another.)

Although Jane's literary reputation rests upon a slender body of work -- a novel, a play, and a collection of short stories -- her "originality" dazzled the likes of Gertrude Stein. Fragile, kittenish and indecisive, JB could also be a headstrong explorer and beguiling conversationlist. Ironically, it was the publication of her first novel, Two Serious Ladies, that encouraged her husband to write fiction. His own first novel, The Sheltering Sky, was a literary and commercial success. As Paul grew more productive, Jane became distracted by drink, drugs and an obsessive desire for an Arabic lesbian who milked her for cash and possibly poisoned her. Her decline is harrowing, but A Little Original Sin offers a tantalizing glimpse of ex-patriot life in the International Zone of Tangier in the 1950s as well as a trip into Jane's truly extraordinary mind.

(If you enjoyed this book, check out JB's collected works in, My Sister's Hand in Mind. Farrar, Straus and Giroux Classics.)

Great biography about a great character. Dillon's book is full of accurate info about one of the most original writers of all time. She mixes perfectly well literature and life. Also we can see all her friends and contemporaries: Paul Bowles, Tenese Williams, Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, Harper Lee, ...
So what you will find find is the perfect autodestruction of a creative mind surrounded by omens, terrors and obsessions, and the incredible pulsion of living. The good thing is that after reading this book you will feel the necessity of reading her works, and then you wil encounter the most incredible masterpieces of the 20 century. Good luck

I have loved biographys for a long time now, this is one of my favorates. Her life style is intreaging, and it boggles me to know that each page in this book is true. Jane is far from being a good person, but her passion for life, love, and writing supass any wrongs she has done. If you love life read this book; and if you don't, find out what your missing.