Culture
Millicent Dillon, Chronicler of Jane and Paul Bowles, Dies at 99
Millicent Dillon, a novelist and prizewinning short-story writer who was best known for nonfiction that chronicled the eccentric, expatriate American literary couple Jane and Paul Bowles, died on Monday in Daly City, Calif. She was 99.
Her death, in a memory-care facility, was confirmed by the writer Wendy Lesser, her daughter.
Ms. Dillon trained as a physicist and worked at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee after World War II before she turned to writing after. Disturbed by the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, she told an interviewer for the blog The Awl in 2016, “By the end of the war I knew I had to search elsewhere for my work in life.”
Ms. Dillon won the coveted O. Henry Award five times for her stories, but she devoted most of her writing career to the Bowleses — especially Jane, the neglected wife of the much better known Paul, whose 1949 novel, “The Sheltering Sky,” is widely regarded as a classic. “The Sheltering Sky” is set in North Africa, where the Bowleses lived for decades, mainly in Tangier, Morocco.
Ms. Dillon’s efforts enhanced the status of Jane Bowles as a “literary cult figure,” as the critic Susan Jacoby described her in assessing Ms. Dillon’s “A Little Original Sin: The Life and Work of Jane Bowles” in The New York Times Book Review in 1981.
“A Little Original Sin” marked the beginning of a sustained project by Ms. Dillon to bring Jane Bowles’s small but significant literary output into the public eye. Over the next two decades, she would edit “Out in the World: Selected Letters of Jane Bowles, 1935-1970” (1985), “The Portable Paul and Jane Bowles” (1994) and, for the Library of America, “Jane Bowles: Collected Writings” (2017). She also wrote the biography “You Are Not I: A Portrait of Paul Bowles” (1998).
Ms. Dillon’s focus on Jane Bowles reflected an unusual level of devotion to a writer who had produced only one novel, one full-length play and a handful of stories, “all of which read like promising first drafts,” as the critic Donna Rifkind wrote in The Times Literary Supplement in 1988.
That novel, “Two Serious Ladies,” published in 1943, before Ms. Bowles turned 30, chronicled the tumultuous misadventures, sexual and otherwise, of two bourgeois women, mirroring the constant emotional turmoil, heavy drinking and numerous lovers, mostly women, of the author’s own foreshortened life. (Paul Bowles was bisexual, and the couple had an open marriage.)
Ms. Dillon said she felt a unique bond with Jane Bowles, who died in 1973 at 56.
“From her first words something about what she told, something about what she withheld, her unique style and language, moved me deeply,” she recalled in an interview with the Library of America in 2017. She added: “The notion of time in the work has as much to do with the evasion of time as with time passing. Even as her characters talk about food and plain pleasures, they are obsessed with thoughts of sin and salvation.” (Gore Vidal once wrote of Jane Bowles, “She thought and talked a good deal about food and made powerful scenes in restaurants.”)
Ms. Dillon’s biography is an unusual interweaving of her own life with that of Ms. Bowles. In a prologue, she wrote about a series of coincidences that tied her to her subject. Ms. Bowles broke her right leg in 1931, Ms. Dillon wrote, and “I broke mine the same year.”
Commenting on Ms. Dillon’s biography in The London Review of Books in 2013, Lidija Haas criticized “the temptation to romanticize or over-identify with Bowles,” noting that the author “names the many Bowles acquaintances she encountered in her research who remarked on ‘how much I looked like Jane.’”
In her review in The Times Literary Supplement, Ms. Rifkind was also critical: “Dillon,” she wrote, “has traded certain standard requirements of biography — a coherent narrative, an intellectual curiosity which penetrates beyond the mere facts of a person’s life — for a drifting prose technique. The book is a potpourri, a compendium of information with no structure to contain it.”
Nonetheless, writing in The New Yorker in 2014, Negar Azimi, a senior editor of Bidoun, an arts and culture magazine about the Middle East, called Ms. Dillon’s biography “essential” for understanding Jane Bowles.
Ms. Dillon followed the same technique in her book about Paul Bowles, who was a composer as well as an author, interspersing accounts of her meetings with him in Tangier with facts about his life. “Why indeed had he gotten sick the very day of my arrival?” she asked in relating the outset of these encounters.
Ms. Dillon’s involvement with the Bowleses came after years in which she had concentrated on her own fiction, including the novels “The One in the Back Is Medea” (1973), “The Dance of the Mothers” (1991), “A Version of Love” (2003) and “Harry Gold” (2000), about a real-life spy, in which “Dillon the biographer inserts herself into the novel as a first-person narrator,” Elena Lappin wrote in The Times Book Review. She also wrote numerous stories, some of which were published in The Threepenny Review, a journal edited by her daughter Ms. Lesser.
Millicent Gerson was born in New York City on May 24, 1925, one of five children of Claire Gerson, a nurse, and Ephraim Gerson, who Ms. Lesser said abandoned the family when Ms. Dillon was a teenager.
Millicent attended Hunter College High School in Manhattan and received a degree in physics from Hunter College in 1944. She worked as a junior physicist on a government project at Princeton University from 1944 to 1945, was an assistant physicist at Oak Ridge in 1947, and became a staff writer for the Association of Scientists for Atomic Education in New York in 1948.
“Physics itself gave me great satisfaction because of the accuracy of the answers that told me how and why things in the physical world behaved as they did,” she told The Awl in 2016, but the news of Hiroshima “stunned” her.
She later enrolled in the creative writing program at San Francisco State University and, after receiving a master’s degree in 1966, taught creative writing at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, Calif. She was an academic writer for Stanford University’s news and publications office from 1974 to 1983, the year she embarked on a full-time writing career.
In addition to Ms. Lesser, she is survived by another daughter, Janna Lesser; three grandchildren; and one great-grandchild. Her marriages to Murray Lesser and David Dillon ended in divorce.
In her interview with the Library of America, Ms. Dillon recalled returning to Jane Bowles’s work after an interval of some years and being reminded of what had enthralled her to begin with.
“I was stunned,” she said, “as I had been in my first reading, by the originality and emotional power of her work. In my rereading I came upon passages where there would be an unexpected turn in thought that would make me laugh out loud. Once again I was reminded of the remarkable alternation in her work between the ludicrous and the mystical.”
Alain Delaquérière contributed research.
Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.
Now: What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?
Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.
Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.
Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.
As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.
Are those worlds real?
Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.
Until then, we find consolation in fangles.
When the director Rob Reiner cast his leads in the 1986 film “Stand by Me,” he looked for young actors who were as close as possible to the personalities of the four children they’d be playing. There was the wise beyond his years kid from a rough family (River Phoenix), the slightly dim worrywart (Jerry O’Connell), the cutup with a temper (Corey Feldman) and the sensitive, bookish boy.
Wil Wheaton was perfect for that last one, Gordie Lachance, a doe-eyed child who is ignored by his family in favor of his late older brother. Now, 40 years later, he’s traveling the country to attend anniversary screenings of the film, alongside O’Connell and Feldman, which has thrown him back into the turmoil that he felt as an adolescent.
Wheaton has channeled those emotions and his on-set memories into his latest project: narrating a new audiobook version of “The Body,” the 1982 Stephen King novella on which the film was based.
A few years ago, Wheaton started to float the idea of returning to the story that gave him his big break — that of a quartet of boys in 1959 Oregon, in their last days before high school, setting out to find a classmate’s dead body. “I’ve been telling the story of ‘Stand By Me’ since I was 12 years old,” he said.
But this time was different. Wheaton, who has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One,” says he has come to enjoy narration more than screen acting. “I’m safe, I’m in the booth, nobody’s looking at me and I can just tell you a story.”
The fact that he, an older man looking back on his younger years, is narrating a story about an older man looking back on his younger years, is not lost on Wheaton. King’s original story is bathed in nostalgia. Coming to terms with death and loss is one of its primary themes.
Two days after appearing on stage at the Academy Awards as part of a tribute to Reiner — who was murdered in 2025 alongside his wife, Michele — Wheaton got on the phone to talk about recording the audiobook, reliving his favorite scenes from the film and reexamining a quintessential story of childhood loss through the lens of his own.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I felt really close to him, and my memory of him.”
Wheaton on channeling a co-star’s performance.
There’s this wonderful scene in “Stand By Me.” Gordie and Chris are walking down the tracks talking about junior high. Chris is telling Gordie, “I wish to hell I was your dad, because I care about you, and he obviously doesn’t.”
It’s just so honest and direct, in a way that kids talk to each other that adults don’t. And I think that one of the reasons that really sticks with people, and that piece really lands on a lot of audiences, and has for 40 years, is, just too many people have been Gordie in that scene.
That scene is virtually word for word taken from the text of the book. And when I was narrating that, I made a deliberate choice to do my best to recreate what River did in that scene.
“You’re just a kid,
Gordie–”
“I wish to fuck
I was your father!”
he said angrily.
“You wouldn’t go around
talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was!
It’s like
God gave you something,
all those stories
you can make up, and He said:
This is what we got for you, kid.
Try not to lose it.
But kids lose everything
unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks
are too fucked up to do it
then maybe I ought to.”
I watched that scene a couple of times because I really wanted — I don’t know why it was so important to me to — well, I know: because I loved him, and I miss him. And I wanted to bring him into this as best as I could, right?
So I was reading that scene, and the words are identical to the script. And I had this very powerful flashback to being on the train tracks that day in Cottage Grove, Oregon. And I could see River standing next to them. They’re shooting my side of the scene and there’s River, right next to the camera, doing his off-camera dialogue, and there’s the sound guy, and there’s the boom operator. There’s my key light.
I could hear and feel it. It was the weirdest thing. It’s like I was right back there.
I was able to really take in the emotional memory of being Gordie in all of those scenes. So when I was narrating him and I’m me and I’m old with all of this experience, I just drew on what I remembered from being that little boy and what I remember of those friendships and what they meant to me and what they mean to me today.
“Rob gave me a gift. Rob gave me a career.”
Wheaton recalls the “Stand By Me” director’s way with kids on set, as well as his recent Oscars tribute.
Rob really encouraged us to be kids.
Jerry tells the most amazing story about that scene, where we were all sitting around, and doing our bit, and he improvised. He was just goofing around — we were just playing — and he said something about spitting water at the fat kid.
We get to the end of the scene, and he hears Rob. Rob comes around from behind the thing, and he goes, “Jerry!” And Jerry thinks, “Oh no, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble because I improvised, and I’m not supposed to improvise.”
The context for Jerry is that he had been told by the adults in his life, “Sit on your hands and shut up. Stop trying to be a cutup. Stop trying to be funny. Stop disrupting people. Just be quiet.” And Jerry thinks, “Oh my God. I didn’t shut up. I’m in trouble. I’m gonna get fired.”
Rob leans in to all of us, and Rob says, “Hey, guys, do you see that? More of that. Do that!”
The whole time when you’re a kid actor, you’re just around all these adults who are constantly telling you to grow up. They’re mad that you’re being a kid. Rob just created an environment where not only was it supported that we would be kids — and have fun, and follow those kid instincts and do what was natural — it was expected. It was encouraged. We were supposed to do it.
They chanted together:
“I don’t shut up,
I grow up.
And when I look at you I throw up.”
“Then your mother goes around the corner
and licks it up,”
I said, and hauled ass out of there,
giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went.
I never had any friends later on
like the ones I had when I was twelve.
Jesus, did you?
When we were at the Oscars, I looked at Jerry. And we looked at this remarkable assemblage of the most amazingly talented, beautiful artists and storytellers. We looked around, and Jerry leans down, and he said, “We all got our start with Rob Reiner. He trusted every single one of us.”
And to stand there for him, when I really thought that I would be standing with him to talk about this stuff — it was a lot.
“I was really really really excited — like jumping up and down.”
The scene Wheaton was most looking forward to narrating: the tale of Lard Ass Hogan.
I was so excited to narrate it. It’s a great story! It’s a funny story. It’s such a lovely break — it’s an emotional and tonal shift from what’s happening in the movie.
I know this as a writer: You work to increase and release tension throughout a narrative, and Stephen King uses humor really effectively to release that tension. But it also raises the stakes, because we have these moments of joy and these moments of things being very silly in the midst of a lot of intensity.
That’s why the story of Lard Ass Hogan is so fun for me to tell. Because in the middle of that, we stop to do something that’s very, very fun, and very silly and very celebratory.
“Will you shut up and let him tell it?”
Teddy hollered.
Vern blinked.
“Sure. Yeah.
Okay.”
“Go on, Gordie,”
Chris said. “It’s not really much—”
“Naw,
we don’t expect much from a wet end like you,”
Teddy said,
“but tell it anyway.”
I cleared my throat. “So anyway.
It’s Pioneer Days,
and on the last night
they have these three big events.
There’s an egg-roll for the little kids and a sack-race for kids that are like eight or nine,
and then there’s the pie-eating contest.
And the main guy of the story
is this fat kid nobody likes
named Davie Hogan.”
When I narrate this story — whenever there is a moment of levity or humor, whenever there are those brief little moments that are the seasoning of the meal that makes it all so real and relatable — yes, it was very important to me to capture those moments.
I’m shifting in my chair, so I can feel each of those characters. It’s something that doesn’t exist in live action. It doesn’t exist in any other media.
“I feel the loss.”
Wheaton remembers River Phoenix.
The novella “The Body” is very much about Gordie remembering Chris. It’s darker, and it’s more painful, than the movie is.
I’ve been watching the movie on this tour and seeing River a lot. I remember him as a 14- and 15-year-old kid who just seemed so much older, and so much more experienced and so much wiser than me, and I’m only a year younger than him.
What hurts me now, and what I really felt when I was narrating this, is knowing what River was going through then. We didn’t know. I still don’t know the extent of how he was mistreated, but I know that he was. I know that adults failed him. That he should have been protected in every way that matters. And he just wasn’t.
And I, like Gordie, remember a boy who was loving. So loving, and generous and cared deeply about everyone around him, all the time. Who deserved to live a full life. Who had so much to offer the world. And it’s so unfair that he’s gone and taken from us. I had to go through a decades-long grieving process to come to terms with him dying.
Near the end
of 1971,
Chris
went into a Chicken Delight in Portland
to get a three-piece Snack Bucket.
Just ahead of him,
two men started arguing
about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife.
Chris,
who had always been the best of us
at making peace,
stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat.
The man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions;
he had been released from Shawshank State Prison
only the week before.
Chris died almost instantly.
It is a privilege that I was allowed to tell this story. I get to tell Gordie Lachance’s story as originally imagined by Stephen King, with all of the experience of having lived my whole adult life with the memory of spending three months in Gordie Lachance’s skin.
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights offbeat television shows that began as comic books. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the comics and their screen versions.
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