MOVING ALONG WITH the outlaw lit series, I picked up this 1943 novel. We do not learn until almost the end of the novel that the first serious lady, Christina Goering, is acquainted with the second, Mrs. Copperfield, but they have a good deal in common. Both like a drink; both attract hangers-on; both prefer the company of women to that of men.
The word "lesbian"never occurs, and nothing explicitly sexual surfaces in the text, but slowly one gets the impression that Christina Goering and Mrs. Copperfield have that in common, too. Just as Henry Blake Fuller's Bertram Cope's Year (1919) seems like the kind of novel one could write about gay men in a time when no fiction about gay men could be openly published, Two Serious Ladies seems its lesbian counterpart.
The main attraction here, though, might be Bowles's style: deadpan but hilarious, dry and exact and corrosively witty, swift on its feet, confident, distinctive. Mr. and Mrs. Copperfield, who in the novel's middle episode are traveling together-but-apart in Central America, reminded me much of the Moresbys in The Sheltering Sky, the 1949 novel buy Jane Bowles's husband Paul, but Jane's tone of dark farce differs greatly from Paul's post-war blend of dread and ennui. At this point, hard not to prefer Jane.
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