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.
Judith Barnard, a freelance writer who stumbled on a second career as a best-selling author at 50, when she teamed with her husband, Michael Fain, a onetime aerospace engineer, to publish a potboiler novel under the pen name Judith Michael, died on May 6 in Chicago. She was 94.
Her death, at a hospital near her home, was caused by heart failure, her daughter, Cynthia Barnard, said.
Combining their first names to create the pseudonym Judith Michael, the couple published 11 commercially successful novels over the years, starting with “Deceptions,” an out-of-nowhere hit, in 1982.
Equal parts romance and thriller, “Deceptions” concerned identical twin sisters — Sabrina, a globe-trotting socialite living in London, and Stephanie, a suburban Illinois housewife — whose fleeting experiment with swapping lives proved to be less fleeting than expected.
Entertaining, yes. A Kirkus review called it “a strenuously inventive, big-budget” romance.
High literature? Not so much. The same review described the book as “glossily seamless nonsense” but noted its potential as fodder for a TV movie — an observation that proved prescient when NBC adapted it in 1985 as a two-part mini-series with Stefanie Powers, of “Hart to Hart” fame, playing the twins.
Then again, their plan had never been to give Thomas Pynchon a run for his money.
Ms. Barnard had already taken a stab at a literary career, publishing her first novel, “The Past and Present of Solomon Sorge,” in 1967. An introspective tale about a Midwestern university professor whose wife of 30 years abruptly abandons him, the book sold only a few thousand copies, leading Ms. Barnard to turn to freelance work on educational films and textbooks, as well as writing articles for Chicago magazines and newspapers.
Her literary horizons expanded after she married Mr. Fain, her second husband, in 1979. “We were looking for something we could do together,” she recalled in a 1991 interview with The Chicago Tribune. “Michael had written technical articles and liked the process but hadn’t found a field he was happy in.”
They began by writing articles about marriage and family for newspapers and magazines, including Good Housekeeping and Redbook. “We had such a good time working together that one day Michael said, ‘Enough of this! Why don’t we write a book?’” Ms. Barnard recalled in a 1999 interview with The Ledger of Lakeland, Fla.
With “Deceptions,” they discovered a winning formula that they employed with many of their following books — what they called universal fantasies, about ordinary, if strong-willed, people who, by a stroke of fate, escape a quotidian existence to taste a life of wealth and adventure, only to face unforeseen challenges along the way.
In “Possessions” (1984), for example, a Vancouver mother of two, whose shady businessman of a husband vanishes, begins a glamorous new life as a jewelry designer in San Francisco, only to fall in with the wealthy family that he had concealed from her.
Similarly, in “Pot of Gold” (1993), a Connecticut housewife must learn for herself whether more money really does mean more problems after she wins a $60 million lottery.
Like their characters, Ms. Barnard and Mr. Fain found their lives transformed by unexpected success. As novel after novel climbed the best-seller lists, they traveled the world to research their books and divided their time between a spacious 16th-floor apartment overlooking Lincoln Park in Chicago and a second home in Aspen, Colo.
Also like their characters, they learned that success can be complicated — in their case, because it required juggling the usual pressures of marriage with the inevitable Lennon-McCartney-style tug of war that comes with creative collaboration.
As Ms. Barnard told The Ledger, “It’s very difficult to have a working relationship with this person who you think has done really dumb things that day and is going to be in your bed.”
Judith Goldman was born on Feb. 17, 1932, in Denver, the elder of two children of Samuel Goldman, who owned a shoe store, and Ruth (Eisenstat) Goldman.
After her parents divorced when she was a child, her mother married Harry Barnard, a prominent historian and biographer, and moved with her children to Chicago.
The family temporarily relocated to Ohio when she was in high school, and she graduated from Fremont Ross High School in 1949. She earned a bachelor’s degree in English from the Ohio State University in 1953. The same year, she married Jerre Papier, an electrical engineer. They divorced in 1970.
She met Mr. Fain by chance at a hospital, where both were visiting his ailing mother, a friend of Ms. Barnard’s. “Bittersweet times, as Michael’s mother was dying and we were falling in love,” she told The Ledger.
Once the couple decided to bet on a publishing career, there was no turning back. “We burned all our bridges, both quit our jobs, lived on our savings for one year,” Ms. Barnard said in a 1997 interview with The Oklahoman newspaper of Oklahoma City.
“We didn’t know how hard it would be,” she added. “We just thought it would be wonderful to work together. And it was, after a while.”
In addition to her daughter, Ms. Barnard is survived by Mr. Fain; her son, Andrew Sharpe; five grandchildren; and a brother, David Barnard.
It helped that the couple adhered to a strict division of labor. After what could be months of plotting and laying down a basic outline together, Ms. Barnard then did the writing, while Mr. Fain served as the editor.
“He’s a superb one,” she said in a 1988 interview with The Houston Chronicle. “And sometimes a harsh critic.”
Each book might require five or six drafts, with endless fiddling. When the inevitable disagreements arose, Mr. Fain, an amateur photographer, would disappear into his darkroom to cool off, he told The Ledger, while Ms. Barnard headed to the kitchen to “knead bread and take out her aggressions.”
Then again, their shared career also proved a marital blessing.
As Ms. Barnard once put it, “It probably kept us married because we always had a book to finish.”
As a lifelong fan of romantic comedies, my list of favorite “sweet” romances is extensive.
Not because I have a spice aversion — but because the rom-coms I love most, with that classic cinematic vibe, often come with fewer peppers on the spice scale.
Some people refer to these books as “closed door.” I prefer to think of them as “in the hall” romances (though that admittedly doesn’t roll off the tongue quite the same way). The reader is there for all the swoon, the burn and the banter — but when things head to the bedroom, the reader remains out in the hallway. With less focus on what happens inside the boudoir, all that juicy heightened tension and yearning really shine. Here are a few of my favorites.
SEEK THE TRAITOR’S SON, by Veronica Roth
I read Veronica Roth’s new novel for adults, “Seek the Traitor’s Son,” over one weekend and had a hard time putting it down, and not just because I was procrastinating on my house chores.
There’s much about the novel one would expect from Roth, the author of the Divergent series, one of the hottest dystopian young adult series of the 2010s. Thematically, the novels are similar. Like “Divergent,” this new book is also set in an alternate, dystopian version of our world; it is also packed with vivid, present-tense prose full of capitalized labels to let you know that something different is going on; and it also centers on a classic “Chosen One” who is burdened by the mantle of savior she carries.
These are classic tropes, but I, like many other genre fiction fans, enjoy that familiarity. Still, I’m always hoping for a subversion, a tornado twist that sucks me into imagination land.
In “Seek the Traitor’s Son,” our Chosen One is Elegy Ahn, the spare heir of the most powerful woman in Cedre. Elegy likes her life, even if it’s filled with danger. See, some time ago, a virus took over the world. The contagion is strange: Everyone who is infected dies, but 50 percent of the people who die come back to life with mysterious cognitive gifts.
After the outbreak, Earth split into two factions: The dominant Talusar, who worship the Fever, believe it is a divine gift, willingly infect themselves with it and consider anyone who does not submit to it a blasphemer; and Cedre, a small country made up of everyone who rejects the virus and the dogma around it. They are, naturally, at war.
Early in the book, Elegy, solidly on the Cedre side, and Rava Vidar, a brutal Talusar general, are summoned by an order of prophets who tell them: One of you will lead your people to victory over the other, and one of the deciding factors involves an unnamed man whom Elegy is prophesied to fall in love with.
Elegy doesn’t want this. But the prophecy spurs the Talusar into action, and so her mother assigns her a Talusaran refugee as a knight and forces her into the fray as the Hope of Cedre.
If that seems like a lot of setup, don’t worry. That’s just the first few chapters. Besides, if you know those dystopian novel tropes, you’ll get the hang of it. Roth gets through the world exposition quickly, and after a rather jarring time skip, the plot takes off, effectively and entertainingly driving readers to the novel’s exhilarating end.
The strength of “Seek the Traitor’s Son” is Roth’s character work. Elegy is a dynamic heroine. She has a lot to lose, and she leads with love, which is reflected in the intense grief she feels for the people she’s lost in the war and the life the prophecy took from her. It’s love that makes her stop running from her destiny and do what she thinks is right to save the people she has left.
Many authors isolate their characters to back them into bad decisions, so it’s refreshing that Roth has given Elegy a community to support her. Her sister Hela in particular is a treat. She’s refreshingly grounded, and often gives a much needed reprieve from the melodrama of the other characters’ lives. (She has an important subplot that has to do with a glowing alien plant, but the real reason you should pay attention to her is that she’s funny, loves her sister so much, has cool friends and listens to gay romance novels.) Hela and Elegy’s unwavering loyalty to each other casts a positive illumination on both characters.
My favorite character is Theren, Elegy’s knight, who is kind and empathetic to everyone but himself. As the obvious romantic lead, his character most diverges from genre standard because of the nuanced depiction of his trauma. He has been so broken by his experiences that he thinks what he can do with his body is all he can offer, and it’s worth nothing to him.
But like I said, I need subversion, and for all the creative world-building, I didn’t quite get it. The most distinct part of the novel was the setting and structure of alternate Earth, as well as the subcultures born from that setting. But after ripping through the novel, I found that those details didn’t provide nourishment for thought, and the general handwaviness of the technology and history of Earth was distractingly easy to nitpick.
I am a greedy reader, so I want my books to have everything: romance, action, an intellectual theme, novel ideas about the future, and character development. “Seek the Traitor’s Son” comes close. The novel is the first in a series, and I’m willing to hold my reservations until I read the next book. Elegy and Theren are worth it.
SEEK THE TRAITOR’S SON | By Veronica Roth | Tor | 416 pp. | $29
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