When the first stories of Paul Bowles appeared in
New York at the end of the 1930s critics noted the emergence of a remarkable
new talent. Subsequently Bowles was to make his reputation on only a handful
of books: four novels and five collections of stories. But what novels and
what stories! Stories that Gore Vidal considers "among the best ever
written by an American, with few equals in the 20th century -- even though
he is odd-man out for American academics because he writes as if Moby Dick
never existed." Likewise his friend of many years Tennessee Williams
claimed that Bowles was a better writer than Hemingway and Faulkner.
I had the good fortune to meet Paul Bowles in a cold, rainy winter in the
middle 1980s in Tangier. I had just read his novels Under The Sheltering
Sky and Let It Come Down and his collection of stories in The
Delicate Prey and was already a convert to his works. After an exchange
of several letters to establish the timing -- for years he had no phones,
no faxes or such, only a post box at Tanger Socco -- I spent a week in Tangier
for an extended interview with the mystical cult figure.
I was as excited about meeting him as the many others who traveled to Tangier
had been during the 1960s. However, by the 1980s figures like Allan Ginsberg,
William Burroughs, Truman Capote, Jean Genet and the Rolling Stones no longer
crowded the Moroccan scene and young people no longer made the pilgrimage
to exotic Tangier to search for the strange man who lived in exile among his
Moroccan friends. The Tangier craze was over.
By then Bowles had been living in Tangier since 1947, the last 30 years
in the same apartment just opposite the residence of the American Consulate
on the hill of Marshan over the old town. He had suggested in his last letter
that I drop by each afternoon after he had finished his day's work: he
was then transcribing a group of his early songs for publishing in the United
States.
When I arrived on the first day at around six the tape of a piece for oboe
by his friend Aaron Copeland was playing. Paul Bowles was waiting at the door
of his fourth-floor apartment. A fire was blazing, the unpretentious Moroccan-European
salon inviting. The elegant maestro did not appear at all mysterious. His
warmth and simplicity contrasted with his exotic reputation and the unreal
world of his art. It was the aura around him that was mysterious, not the
person. In the United States he was considered mysterious chiefly because little
was known about him since he lived his life abroad and wrote little about
the American experience.
My host first proposed a cup of tea, only to discover he had no cooking gas.
But in that moment his friend the Moroccan writer Mohammed Mrabet arrived,
put in a full bottle of gas, and water was soon boiling. His Spanish speaking
chauffeur then walked in and took a seat along the wall as if it were his
assigned place. He was followed by two servants who set in cleaning rather
ineffectually. Paul blithely didn't seem to care.
While we were drinking tea and smoking kif -- fresh kif-filled cigarettes
were always drying by the fireplace as every afternoon in the Bowles household
-- the door banged open and another Bowles literary discovery entered:
Mohammed Choukhri, whose stories like those of Mrabet have been published
in various languages. Choukhri presented Bowles with his latest essay on Jean
Genet, which he on the spot dedicated to his friend, drank a cup of tea, smoked
a kif cigarette, and hurriedly left.
Unexpected entertainment was then offered by a "jilala" musician,
the quaspah player, Abdalmalek, an illiterate for whom Bowles had promised
to write a letter. Bowles explained to me that when a sick or depressed Moroccan
says "I think I need to dance," it means he needs "jilala"
therapy. Abdalmalek provides it. His music-therapy group plays the flute-like
quaspah, bendir drums and bronze castanets called quarquaba until the frenetically
dancing patient falls into a trance and leaves his body so that his saint
can enter and clean house. Scenes like that appear not infrequently in Bowles
literature.
"Probably no worse than many other treatments," Bowles commented
at the end of the impromptu 15-minute concert.
I never understood if Bowles had staged this Moroccan theater to impress
the visiting journalist. I still doubt it.
***
Paul Bowles went to Morocco the first time in 1931 on the recommendation
of his new friend, Gertrude Stein. "I had spent that spring in Berlin
studying music with Aaron Copeland," he recalled. "In Paris I told
Gertrude that I planned to pass the summer in Villefranche. She found that
idea frankly absurd. Alice Toklas said: ‘Tangier!' And Gertrude
said: ‘That's the right place.' So Aaron and I came here together
and rented a house. That summer he worked on his 'Short Symphony' and I composed
my first piece -- 'Sonata For Oboe and Clarinette' -- that was played that
winter in London."
Though that part of his life is often forgotten by his literary admirers,
music was always important for Bowles. Yet contrary to some critics who noted
the influence of music on his literature -- the French critic, Marc Saporta,
mentions the influence of American music forms like jazz and spirituals --
Bowles said that he never felt that. "I don't have such highfalutin
ideas. I just try to write as simply and clearly as possible. I'm not
thinking about rhythm or music. I just try to get it into proper English.
French critics haven't a clue," he added with a playful smile. "The
French can't play my music either."
Nonetheless, during the 30s and 40s and occasionally afterwards Bowles was
to compose a lot of music. He did the music for Tennessee Williams' "The
Glass Menagerie," "Sweet Bird of Youth," "Summer and Smoke,"
and "The Milkman Doesn't Stop Here Anymore," for William Saroyan's
"Love's Old Sweet Story," Orson Welles's "Dr. Faust"
and others, for Arthur Koestler's "Twilight Bar," for Jose
Ferrer's film "Cyrano de Bergerac." He composed a Mexican ballet
and "Yankee Clipper" for the American Ballet Theater, an opera based
on Garcia Lorca's "Asi Pasen Cinco Anos" [1943] directed by
Leonard Bernstein in New York's Museum of Modern Art, and an opera, "Yerma"
[1958]. His compositions were performed in at Lincoln Center, which was to
be his last visit to the United States.
Like a character from a classical novel, his was a precocious biography.
He was 21 on that first visit to Tangier but he had already been exposed to
the Old World two years earlier. "I then thought Paris was the center
of the world and I wanted to be there. College in America was boring. One
way or another I had to get out. Since I was under age and my parents refused
to sign for my passport, I got one under false pretenses and shipped out to
France in 1929. I worked in Paris as a telephonist and the only people I met
were the surrealist Tristan Tzara and his wife….I was impressed by his
wonderful collection of African art."
The die was cast. Music studies with Copeland in New York and Berlin, with
Nadia Boulanger in Paris. Young Bowles had already frequented an art school
in New York and written poetry in college. "I knew I wanted to be in
the arts but I didn't know in which art."
And in fact, until 1945, music was the chief field of the future writer,
precisely in the period when critics were saying that music and literature
should be combined. Later Gore Vidal was to see that combination of arts in
Bowles's stories as "something most writers don't have, the
result of which are his disturbing stories like nothing in English literature."
***
In those years Paul Bowles remained the inveterate traveler -- North Africa,
Latin America, Asia -- until his final escape in 1947 when he returned for
good to his beloved Morocco. He returned to Tangier with a literary reputation.
He was a writer. Three of his first stories in particular had caused a stir
in the New York literary world -- "Pages From A Cold Point," "The
Delicate Prey" and "A Distant Episode," which proposed one
of his main themes: how inhabitants of alien cultures regard creatures of
the civilized world. In those stories he tells Poe-like stories of horror,
told so gently that you hardly realize the horror.
When I met him in Tangier, Paul Bowles was certainly no guru. It was more
a question of involvement. And of a man torn between diverse worlds. He helped
his friends -- "I can never get enough of them," he said -- and
they helped him to bridge the gap between those worlds. Involvement with Mrabet
was a long-standing one. Bowles translated the Moroccan writer's first
collection of stories, "Love With A Few Hairs" [1968] and helped
him with the six subsequent books. Mrabet spent much time in Bowles'
apartment where he had his work desk.
***
Another evening: from downtown the walk uphill along the Boulevards Mohammed
V Pasteur to the Marshan became as familiar as the warmth chez Bowles. The
same dogs were always barking opposite his house. "Careful of those dogs,"
he often warned me, "Packs of them right here in town." When I asked
him about the presence of dogs in his works he explained that he'd had
a rabies scare after one bit him.
The fire was right, the tea pot full and a row of kif cigarettes ready on
the hearth when Bowles began recalling the old days in Tangier. "Morocco
was a magic land when I first came. But it had changed radically when I returned
in the 40s. It had become very Europeanized. After the war artists came here
because of the monetary advantages and the cheap life.
Tennessee Williams, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Alan Sillitoe, Cecil Beaton
all passed through post-war Tangier yet, there was never a real Tangier group.
"It was a fluid affair, with much coming and going. I was the only constant
and I simply observed that movement. I was never a beat poet as some critics
believe. I never felt close to Kerouac at all. I saw that group in New York
and they came here for visits and I once took Allan Ginsberg to Marrakech
but that doesn't make me a beat poet. I knew them personally but I was
not associated with the movement."
Bowles seemed to enjoy reminiscing about old friends and that fantastic
Tangier period that still has a limited literature. "Tennessee had lent
his name to be used on the stationery of some ‘red network' organizations
and Senator McCarthy was breathing on his neck. In December of 1949 his agent
asked me to get him out of the country, so we came here. He brought his car
and we traveled to Fez and to south Morocco before he went on to Rome. He
returned here many times though. You know, Tennessee was always rootless,
he didn't belong anywhere and had to move about. But he wouldn't
travel alone. Unlike me, the only good way to travel is alone.
"Then was Daisy Valverde!" -- a character in his novel about Tangier
in the 1950s, Let It Come Down. "Daisy was mad. And very rich.
Her wild parties were famous all over Europe. For one party she installed
a whole Berber tribe in the ballroom and an entire village on the roof.
"After 1965 the hippies arrived! They came chiefly to smoke kif or
to look for LSD. Marrakech was the big attraction. They were romantics and
felt at one with Moroccans … but they didn't really know anything
about them."
***
Let It Come Down is Bowles's most existentialist novel. A young
American swept up in that Tangier life is attempting to establish his real
identity in a world he sees as made of winners and losers. Alienated, with
no character, no authority, above all no volition, he is a born loser. He
commits a murder and that, ironically, is by accident, not by choice. High
as a kite on majoun and kif, he confuses the ear of his sleeping friend with
a banging door and drives a nail into it.
"That really happened in France," Bowles said. "Sounded like
a good book ending. Yes, I'm an existentialist, but not of the Sartrian
type. [He, by the way, was the translator of Sartre's play, "Huis
Clos," which he entitled "No Exit," Daniel Halpern reports
because of that phrase written over a subway gate that blocked his way.] I'm
closer perhaps to Camus. I liked L'Etranger. I believe that that
which is to happen will happen. In the early years I found it hard to write
fiction because I couldn't identify with the motivation of human beings.
But then I don't see man as naturally isolated, not any more than he
wants to be."
Yet, despite the daily visitors to his apartment that week, I thought of
him as isolated. A hermit. In a kind of a permanent, self-imposed exile. He
didn't travel any more. He said that he only liked to travel with huge
amounts of luggage, impossible today. So why move?
During those days I kept wondering where his ideas came from. Was he even
an American writer? Or simply a writer who by chance wrote in English? The
only thing he wrote about America was in his autobiography.
"Yes, I'm an American writer," he claimed. "I loved
the New York of the 1930s, until the FBI and later McCarthy began pestering
me about my 20-month stay in the Communist Party in 1938-39. I always wanted
freedom … chiefly freedom from my parents. Like many things in my life,
I joined the Communist Party to spite my parents. That was the worst thing
I could have done to them, except go to jail! I was never a Marxist. It was
all a personal matter. No, I'm not de-Americanized. I'm delighted
to be an American. Still I don't write about American themes. What I
remember of America is of three decades ago. But I can write about expatriated
Americans because they don't change much. Anyway I've never thought
autobiographical material proper for fiction! My idea is to write about things
I've never experienced."
The Bowles artistic world is thus non-American. Alien. The setting is primitive,
in the jungle or in the desert or on the edge of Europe. His tension results
from the clash between civilized man and an alien environment. The Westerner
is inevitably defeated by primitive man. For Bowles, modern man is lost. And
therefore he is searching.
But in the jungle or in the desert he is not only lost but also a victim
of the primitive environment. Like the sage linguistics professor in The Delicate
Prey: savages cut out his tongue and make of him a dancing clown for their
entertainment. Or in the novel The Spider's House the 15-year old Amar
of Fez wins out over the American writer. Natural man is superior and defeats
the neurotic product of technological society. Someone called Bowles's
modern-man protagonists "fellow-travelers of primitive society":
they search it out, love it, need it, but in the end are defeated by it. For
Bowles they are two incompatible cultures. And that is his theme.
"Perhaps this has no significance," he said and reached for another
of the kif cigarettes that seem to keep him going. "I simply want to
show how badly prepared the average Westerner is when he comes into contact
with cultures he doesn't know -- or only thinks he knows. The more
he tries to penetrate it, the worse it gets. Primitive man has retained things
that western man has lost and can operate in natural surroundings. Americans
are less prepared than Europeans in such circumstances because they think
everyone must do it the American way. Therefore it's hard for them to
establish real contact with others. It's a paradox that self-subsistent
primitive man is more adapted for communal life than is dependent western
man, whose attempts at communal life are disasters.
"Primitives have a communal life. No one owns anything. Everything
belongs to all. This couldn't work in advanced societies. As soon as
personal property appears, you have to invent another system. Before arriving
in the desert, Port -- in Under The Sheltering Sky -- said he didn't
need a passport to prove he is a member of mankind. But when he loses his
passport traveling around in the desert. He loves and needs the primitive
world and seeks salvation in it, but he is demolished by the loss of his passport.
He is lost. He says he is only half a man without it, that he no longer knows
who he is. Like his wife, who likes to spread her things around the room and
look at them; by observing familiar objects she regains her identity."
***
Dinner at Bowles'. He cooked roast chicken and rice in a non-American
kitchen, haphazardly, distractedly but with great delicacy, claiming that
he cooks only to survive. I believed he liked the preparation and the intimate
ceremony more than the actual consumption. Thin, wiry, resilient and underneath
tough, he only nibbled at his food.
"I've had about every disease," he claimed, "from typhoid
to hepatitis to dysentery but I think I'm healthy. I don't even
want to think about illness for there are no doctors here and little medicine.
I'd have to go abroad if I fell ill. If it comes, it comes, I don't
worry about it." Let it come down was his philosophy.
He was sitting on the floor with his back to the fire while we dined from
a low Moroccan table. The room was half dark, the logs crackled and we could
hardly hear the rain, for me omnipresent in his literature -- which he denied.
Instead we talked about the desert, the setting of his first novel, Under
The Sheltering Sky.
"I had written poetry about the desert before I visited it the first
time. I had a feeling for it. It has always provided me with many materials.
The desert for me is exciting, more romantic than the sea, hard to encompass
in words. I had always imagined the desert with dunes every place; it isn't
like that at all. Few dunes, mostly wasteland."
His desert is endless. In the same novel about an American couple in the
Sahara, each is seeking -- the minor characters, too -- himself in that
primitive world. "They made the fatal error," Bowles said rather
distantly as if it no longer concerned him, "of treating time as non-existent.
They imagined that nothing would ever change, that it didn't matter if
you did something this year, or in ten years. Perhaps those who live here
a long time begin to think that way.
"But what can we do about time? It goes very fast and I'll soon
be dead. [He was in his late seventies then and passed away froma natural
causes on November 18, 1999.] I regret that our life span is limited but I
can do nothing about it. When you get to the end you have to accept it.
"Despite the grim endings in my stories I'm not interested in
death except in that it puts an end to life. Everyone shares that fate. I
can't really think about it because for me it is non-existence. I'm
only interested in what can be seized by consciousness. Once that's gone,
there's nothing left. If you think there is life after death then you
can fear death. If not, then there is nothing to fear except the act of dying.
You can hope for a quick death. That's the moment when you're most
alone. Of course if one is not certain there is nothing afterwards, it's
another matter. You believe what you want. A matter of volition. I just think
about how long it will take.
"I've never been tempted by suicide but I have thought about it.
My wife Jane -- the writer Jane Bowles -- was sick for a long time
before she died. She begged me to end it all for her. And I would have done
it if there were no law against it, for I believe in euthanasia."
Volition is a word Bowles used frequently. However, not didactically. His
existentialism, he said, derived from instinct rather than from active intellectual
search. Yet he was not anti-religious as such. "Although religious ideas
permeate everything, they have played little role in my life. I never had
religious instruction as a child since my parents and grandparents were agnostics.
I'm not even anti-Christian and I don't think Christianity is negative;
all religions offer something. Christianity interests me in the same way as
do Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism or Islam. Islam is no better than Christianity.
"I think each religion is made for certain people. Religions, unlike
invented political ideologies, sort of grew along with man. Religions are
part of man. But if I say that all religions are interesting, in general I
would say it's better to leave them alone."
***
I remember my feelings of nostalgia and a certain sense of incompleteness
when I left Bowles' apartment the last day. Nostalgia for the former
times he experienced in his life; incompleteness for the little I had learned
about this complex man. Paul Bowles, outwardly exquisitely polite and considerate,
was distant from the world. He didn't need it any longer.
I read from a faded draft of my interview with Paul Bowles: "It's
dark and drizzling walking down from the Marshan. A light fog hangs over the
rooftops of the elegant El Minzah Hotel on Rue de la Liberte, one of Bowles'
locales. But he doesn't go to such places anymore. No more trips to the
desert. No more walks through the old cities. His life is now quiet and meditative.
The Bowles path leads across the Zocco Grande into the labyrinth of his Tangier
medina, to the Cafe Tingiz, ringed by a maze of passages, the Casbah above,
the port below, the setting of Let It Come Down. Bowles knows every
nook and corner of it. He doesn't have to visit it anymore. Nor does
he visit the great Fez medina, the background of The Spider's House.
They somehow belong to him."
A Note from the Author:
At the time I published the interview with Paul Bowles on the cultural pages
of the Dutch newspaper, NRC Handelsblad, under the title "Stranger
In A Strange Land," and later in a shorter version in the Rome weekly
magazine, Espresso. Since then books and many articles, like "The
Last Existentialist" by the poet Daniel Halpern in the New York Times
Book Review, have been published about this still mysterious American
writer.
If the totality of Paul Bowles' literary production is not voluminous,
his works taken together nonetheless constitute a consistent statement about
life -- an accomplishment for any artist.
Gaither Stewart
Rome, Italy
October, 2000
Editor's Note:
The photographs of Paul Bowles used in this edition of Critique have been provided courtesy the International Paul Bowles Society. The organization is currently laying foundations for The Paul Bowles Museum, which they hope to extablish in Tangier within the next 12 months. You can get more information about Paul Bowles, the organization, and philanthropical donations at the IPBS's website.
Gaither Stewart. a native of Asheville, North Carolina, has lived most of his life in Europe. He served as Italian correspondent for the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad and wrote for publications in various countries. Recently, he lived over a year in Mexico to research and work on a novel that takes place in Italy and Mexico. He recently returned home to Rome.
