Lynne Tillman | Issue 22

On Two Serious Ladies

Dec 22, 2022

In the late 1980s I desperately wanted to make a film of Jane Bowles’ novel Two Serious Ladies. Set on being a novelist, I believed I could simultaneously write and direct movies; I had already written and, with Sheila McLaughlin, co-directed an independent feature, Committed, about film actress Frances Farmer.

Jane Bowles is best known for a single and singular novel Two Serious Ladies (1943); on its publication, a success d’estime praised exuberantly by Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and John Ashbery. Two Serious Ladies’ protagonists, Miss Goering and Mrs. Copperfield, leave home, bearing opposite psychologies: Ms. Goering strikes out, wanting bold adventures, while Mrs. Copperfield trails after her husband, an unwilling traveler/tourist, full of fear. At the end of this seminal, tragi-comic, picaresque novel, they both return home, something their author never did, to the U.S., that is.

Making Committed was a grueling experience. Still, in my mind I could see Two Serious Ladies as a film, a movie of my imagination. Jane Bowles’ Two Serious Ladies made seriously inimitable protagonists, Miss Goering and Mrs. Copperfield, had invaded me, and I fantasized projecting them onto a screen that was not just my own.

There turned out to be insuperable legal issues, and I gave in; my lawyer urged me to keep fighting, he was litigious for me. The other side never made the film, a sad outcome, really, but now I’m glad I lost out. It probably would have taken years from my writing and my life, such as it was.

My last-ditch effort to film the novel came in 1987 and landed me in Tangiers, where I met Paul Bowles, author of The Sheltering Sky. Paul and I had corresponded for years, at a time when people wrote letters; he had a beautiful, tidy script that didn’t reflect the emotional chaos of his stories.

Paul and Jane had married in 1938 and stayed together, living in separate apartments in the same building. She had died years earlier. In my letters I hadn’t discussed making the film until a month before I arrived. On the afternoon we met, I handed him a copy of the script. The next day he told me he liked it, especially because it was faithful to the novel and had used so much of Jane’s dialogue—brilliant, startling, sui generis in American letters. Then Paul said he couldn’t help me with the legal business, and that’s the precise moment when I dropped the project.

Jane also wrote some extraordinary stories, but her alcoholism did her in, finally; she had several strokes, and by the late sixties was hospitalized in Spain. In 1972 her publisher forgot to renew the copyright of Two Serious Ladies. Jane was forgotten in most ways, and she died in 1973 at the age of fifty-six. The script I wrote and this excerpt from it are meant as an homage to Jane Bowles and her great American novel.

Excerpt 1

Excerpt 2

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Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short story writer, and cultural critic. Her novels are Haunted Houses; Motion Sickness; Cast in Doubt; No Lease on Life, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and American Genius, A Comedy. Her nonfiction books include The Velvet Years: Warhol’s Factory 1965–1967, with photographs by Stephen Shore; Bookstore: The Life and Times of Jeannette Watson and Books & Co.; and What Would Lynne Tillman Do?, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and an Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Arts Writing Fellowship. Tillman is Professor/Writer-in-Residence in the Department of English at The University of Albany and teaches at the School of Visual Arts’ Art Criticism and Writing MFA Program in New York. She lives in Manhattan with bass player David Hofstra.

Her most recent book is Mothercare: On Obligation, Love, Death, and Ambivalence (Penuin Random House, 2022)

Issue #22 of Send My Love to Anyone

December 2022 Gatherings

Excerpt from The Opportunist by Elyse Friedman

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