Note: If you’ve been patiently waiting for my next TV movie post, I apologize for returning tonight with something bookish instead. Between the Parkinson’s stuff, which isn’t going well, and the recent death of a close friend, I’ve not felt funny enough to review — or emotionally resilient enough to endure — another Cheryl Ladd movie. But I’ll be back soon, with Suzanne Somers, Victoria Principal, and Lisa Whelchel titles among those on my to-do list.

A few weeks ago, while searching my inbox for something unrelated, I was reminded of a 2013 email exchange with Millicent Dillon, the physicist-turned-author and biographer of both Jane and Paul Bowles, a lavender literary power couple for the ages.* That was the summer my ex commandeered my new Kindle for its wi-fi connection, which allowed her to stay up all night devouring Dillon’s A Little Original Sin: The Life and Work of Jane Bowles through the Internet Archive’s Open Library. 

My own bedtime reading was frequently interrupted so she could share outrageous tales of Jane’s inexplicable romantic thrall to Cherifa, a comically mismatched partner best described by Negar Azimi as “a gorgonish, hirsute grain seller with whom Jane fell madly in love.” The younger Cherifa, butch and boorish, was essentially a hustler whose indifference and casual cruelty drove the deeply neurotic writer daffy with demented desire; perhaps if I’d paid more attention to what Ex put on my Kindle (including a Joan Collins autobiography and Behind the Candelabra, Scott Thorson’s Liberace tell-all), I might’ve been spared some heartache of my own.**

But this isn’t about that or even about Cherifa herself. It’s about Dillon, whose New York Times obituary caught my attention this evening — she died last week at 99, and her life is well worth reading about — and the elusive Lady Frances, a pseudonymous paramour of Jane’s whose true identity was a mystery that gripped my household for several weeks. Though I was unable to crack the case, Dillon graciously replied to my query and shared a few details about her meeting with Frances, who didn’t want to be outed. Here’s our correspondence, for anyone else curious about Lady Frances.

Hello Millicent,

I apologize for disrupting the peace of your inbox with this strange e-mail, but when I saw that you have an Internet presence I had to take a chance. My partner, who recently fell in love with Jane Bowles via “My Sister’s Hand in Mine,” is nearing the end of “A Little Original Sin.” She finds it so absorbing — she feels that nothing else she has read about Jane has been as respectful of her as your book — that I’ve alternately been going to bed alone while she stays up all night reading, and falling asleep to the strains of her excitedly sharing the things she just read.  

This morning she was consumed by the mystery of the identity of “Lady Frances,” and enlisted my help in Googling clues. That proved futile, as did our searching various names that showed up on the Texas Archival Resources web page that inventories your papers at the Harry Ransom Center. My question, which is admittedly quite silly in the grand scheme of things, is whether the world will ever learn who Frances really was. While I am content to let history have its mysteries (if there are any that Jessica Fletcher didn’t solve on “Murder, She Wrote“), this is driving my partner, a nervous and obsessive type who rarely makes it through an episode of “Mad Men” without first reading spoilers, up the wall. I’m half-expecting to come home from work one day to find she has jetted off to the University of Texas to study all your research in person.

You should feel free, of course, to shake your head at the absurdity of this question and promptly erase this e-mail from both your computer and your memory; I will not be offended. And of course I must thank you for all the great work you have done, which is invaluable to anyone interested in Paul, and especially Jane, Bowles.

Respectfully,
[Cranky]
http://crankylesbian.blogspot.com/

The next day, Dillon sent this reply:

Dear [Cranky]:

Thank you for your e-mail. I am delighted to hear of your partner’s excited interest in Jane Bowles. I am only sorry that there are not more people in the U.S. who feel the same way. For reasons that are not clear to me, not many readers  are interested in Jane at this time. Of course, she was never a wildly popular author but I am sad to see the decline in interest in her work. (Recently, however, in Britain there has been a renewed interest in her work, following the reissuing of her books.)

As to your partner’s question about Lady Frances: I remember going to visit her in her apartment in New York, in Greenwich Village in 1978 or 79. I remember it as so packed with items, things falling off of sofas, piled up on tables, etc. But for the life of me, I cannot remember her real name. She begged me not to use it. At the time, that kind of publicity would have been devastating to her personally. So I did not use her name. I am sure that somewhere in my papers at HRC in Texas, there are letters to her but those papers are probably a jumble by now.

One of the things that I learned in doing the biography of Jane and of the two other biographies I did, was that I would have to at some point admit that there were certain things I would never know about the life of my subject. Poor consolation to your friend, I admit, but that’s all I can say at the moment.

Best wishes to you both,
Millicent 

There you have it, Bowles nerds, and all these years later it’s easier than ever to request Dillon’s papers online — here you’ll find an inventory and an addition, with more presumably still to come. Finally, my condolences to Dillon’s family, including her daughters and grandchildren. It’s clear that, much like Bowles herself, she was a fascinating and accomplished woman.

… But wait, there’s more!

Pleasantly surprised by interest in this post, I decided to revisit A Little Original Sin and share a couple of its funnier Frances-centric passages in hopes it might prompt curious readers to learn more about its subject. Though Frances was only a small part of the story of Jane’s life and an even smaller part of the book, she managed to make quite an impression.

In February 1962 Jane met a woman we shall call Lady Frances. Frances was English, a writer, the daughter of a countess. She was very tall and thin, her face angular, the bones sharply defined, her manner self-assertive. She had published several works of fiction, which had been well received in England.

Jane would visit the Gerofis and talk about her passion, “but never in a regular sentence. Often there would be great sighs and she would say, ‘Love is the most important thing in life.'” The Gerofis thought, though they were not quite sure, that it was another of Jane’s jokes. Paul too thought of it as a joke. He found Frances unendurable (as he found all of Jane’s lovers).

“She thought herself terribly intellectual. I remember having dinner with Jane and her downstairs many times, when I couldn’t escape. Jane would be sitting there, slightly giggling to me, in an apologetic way, yet also sitting there thinking what a marvelous character she was. Frances would say, ‘I shall now give you my impression of James Joyce,’ and then she would hold forth for a half-hour. It was excruciating. Jane loved to have me at the table being horrified by her. And she would look across the table at me as if to say, ‘I can’t stop her.'”

— “A Little Original Sin: The Life and Works of Jane Bowles,” by Millicent Dillon

Six years later, as Jane’s health deteriorated, Paul wrote the following to Libby Holman (yes, that Libby Holman, another eccentric bisexual who’d nursed her own interest in Paul):

Dr. Roux writes me that Jane isn’t well, and had a series of convulsions last month. Of course, Lady Frances was there, and I suspect that unwittingly she was the cause. She drives Jane literally mad every time she appears; I wish to hell she’d keep away…

I’ll leave you to discover Cherifa’s reaction to Frances yourselves.

* Technically, they were bisexual and consummated their marriage, though their interests laid elsewhere (so to speak). 

** Azimi continued: “Dillon, in her biography, writes of the fantastic hold that Cherifa–‘this wild creature, this illiterate but powerful peasant girl nineteen or twenty years old, a descendant of the patron saint of Tangier’—had over Jane. Their relationship was odd. Barely sexual, it was mostly built around mutual need: Jane’s for Cherifa’s acceptance and Cherifa for Jane’s cash.” 

Related Reading: Adventures in the Phil Andros Book Trade; Ivy Compton-Burnett’s Love for Margaret Jourdain; Hedy Lamarr’s “Ecstasy and Me”

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn a small commission from qualifying purchases.