I was informed by my agent, after she studied the novel’s copyright notice, that the book might be in the public domain. I asked the Library of Congress to do a copyright check, in fact three, and each time the book turned up in the public domain. Still unconvinced, I traveled to Washington, D.C., to that great house of copyrights, where I was brought to a room the size of a football field and shown the file cabinet that held the card for Jane Bowles’s only novel. The copyright had not been renewed by her publisher in 1973—the year she died. They’d forgotten. The book was like Shakespeare, the library told me.
I wrote the script and, with the Library’s authorization, received two grants to make the movie. I was slowly moving forward when one day I received a call from a lawyer who told me his client owned the rights, that the book was not in the public domain in Europe, and that they would stop me from showing the film. Confused, I hired a lawyer, and the sorry story continued.
I met Buffie Johnson, a painter friend of the Bowleses, and visited her in her apartment in SoHo. She offered to introduce me to Paul in Tangier, where she summered. Though I didn’t need an introduction — everyone drops in on him in the afternoon and we’d been corresponding for years — I accepted her offer gratefully, eagerly. Buffie had had an affair with Jane Bowles in the 1940s. Jane dropped her, she said, because Jane liked older women, and she and Jane were the same age. Buffie told me that in those days homosexuals married each other and that Jewish people, like Jane, kept their religion quiet. After I commented that Mrs. Copperfield, in Two Serious Ladies, could have been code for Mrs. Goldberg, Buffie continued, in a lower register, that before the war everyone was a little anti-Semitic.
A disturbing event happened just weeks before I left for Tangier. I received a copy of a letter Jane Bowles’s agent had sent Paul Bowles. It warned of my imminent arrival, that I was trying to steal Jane Bowles’s work, that I was, in short, a thoroughly bad character. The letter was meant to deter me, I suppose. But how did the agent know I was going to Tangier? What network was I in, who had betrayed me? All along I’d been writing to Bowles about my dealings with the agent and the Library of Congress, detailing my mostly futile attempts at getting to the bottom of things, where truth supposedly resides. I felt I had nothing to hide. Obviously, I was naive. If I make any money from the film, I wrote him, I’d be happy to give you half. He had not profited from the recent sale of the rights, and the idea that I was in this for the money was grotesquely amusing.
The situation had become byzantine. Everything connected closely to Paul Bowles, I would discover, was and wouldn’t be a surprise to him. He knew much worse characters, perhaps, than I could ever be or aspire to — Cherifa, for instance, Jane’s Moroccan lover. She was rumored to have poisoned Jane. I didn’t believe this and hoped Paul Bowles didn’t, either, just as I hoped he wouldn’t believe I was the mercenary, flawed character the agent described. David Hofstra, a musician and the man I live with, accompanied me to Tangier. We took a room in the famous — now defunct — Hotel Ville de France. Matisse had stayed there and painted the view out of his hotel window. David and I went immediately to see Buffie. She was waiting for us in the apartment Jane Bowles had lived in years before, just above Paul’s. (The Bowleses kept separate apartments.) Then, like a security guard, Buffie escorted us to Paul’s apartment, and walking down the stairs, my breathing became stuck in me or suspended. My life was about to change or stay shockingly the same.
We knocked, the door opened, we entered and were introduced to Bowles. He was, he said, about to go to the beach. Would we come back tomorrow afternoon? I handed him the script, we left and I breathed. I didn’t know what he was wearing or even what he looked like. If I had an image of him, it wasn’t contested by the reality of seeing him. I hadn’t seen him. He might be running away from me, I thought, but when he was there the next day, I decided he wasn’t. Maybe just stalling for time. (Later I was told that days before, another writer had rushed from London to Tangier, to advise him not to sell the rights. But did he have them to sell?)
He liked the script, Bowles told me; it was faithful to the book. But, he said firmly, I can’t help you. My lawyer had asked the other lawyer for evidence, a document authenticating ownership of the rights. None was ever produced. My lawyer believed Paul Bowles could exercise his rights as the inheritor of Jane Bowles’s estate, if he wanted. Yet what Bowles had once written me spun another cautionary literary tale. A publisher had gone to Spain to see Jane in the hospital. The publisher asked Paul to leave the hospital room, so he could be alone with her, and when the publisher emerged, he held a piece of paper in his hand. The publisher had gotten Jane to sign something, when she didn’t know what she was signing. On this scrap of paper, the film rights to the book rested. That was the story. Bowles never contested the publisher’s claim. He lived in Tangier, it was explained to me, precisely because he didn’t want to become involved in ordinary and tawdry matters like fights over rights.
Now, a little numb or stunned, with the film out of the way, or dead, I could try to have a good time. There I was, sitting with Paul Bowles in his darkened living room, drinking tea served by the taciturn Mohammed Mrabet, Bowles’s companion. I’d read Mrabet’s stories, which Bowles had taped and written down. They were published in Mrabet’s name, but bore the mark of Bowles’s spare, elegant style. Mrabet, I found out later, had once asserted that Bowles was merely his typist.
I greedily listened to Bowles’s stories about Jane and himself. In 1943, during the war, when Jane was living in New England with her lover, Helvetia, he told us, he was in Mexico. He was still writing music and needed one of his instruments — a drum. But he couldn’t remember where it was. He wrote Jane and asked if it was in Staten Island, or with her in New England, or in their apartment in New York? There was some urgency to his request, and Jane Bowles sent a telegram in return: Drum not in basement, not on Staten Island, not in New York. Drum can’t be found. The day after, the doorbell rang at Jane’s residence. It was the FBI.
FBI: Your husband was in Morocco in the spring of 1942?
Jane: Yes.
FBI: And in South America in the fall of that year?
Jane: Yes.
FBI: He’s in Mexico now?
Jane: Yes.
FBI: Why does he travel so much?
Jane: I guess he’s restless.
By now Helvetia, at Jane’s request, was burning some of their papers in the fireplace, though it was the summer. But after questioning her a little longer, the FBI was mollified. It turned out that there was a colonel in the army named Drum, and her telegram had been intercepted — all telegrams were read during the war. The FBI thought they might have uncovered an underground group plotting to assassinate Colonel Drum.
In Bowles’s darkened living room, above the couch, was a single bookshelf. On it were all of Jane Bowles’s books, all the editions, in all the languages into which they’d been translated. The shelf was a shrine to her, and I felt her presence in his life and in the room through her books. I plucked up the courage to question him about her novel. Why had Jane Bowles named one of the serious ladies Miss Goering? Bowles looked amused and said: That was Jane’s little joke.