Virginia Spencer Carr’s life of Bowles is no substitute for reading Bowles’s irresistible novels and stories with their sullen menace and their lyrical landscapes. It is a competent but pedestrian account, the early chapters based largely on Without Stopping, itself a deliberately low-key affair. And there is a curious hole in it where the subject’s actual work ought to be. The reader gains little idea of what Bowles’s music sounds like, of how the stories read, how they differ from the novels and so on. All you get is the publishing history, print runs, details of reviews. This seems to be a besetting sin of modern literary biography. In the life of a general or a politician you find a thorough account of our hero’s campaigns, but in the life of a poet or novelist you learn virtually nothing about what makes the subject worth writing about in the first place.
But that is not all. At the very end of Paul Bowles: A Life, something peculiar and rather horrible happens. The book begins to turn into the life of Paul Bowles with Virginia Spencer Carr. She comes to stay with him in Tangier. He goes to stay with her in Atlanta to recuperate from an operation on his leg. She asks him where he wants to be buried. He says (obviously to tease her), the animal cemetery in Tangier. In fact he has already specified, rather to everyone’s surprise, that he wants his ashes to be interred, not in Tangier at all but alongside his parents at Glenora, New York, his great-aunt’s place where he had spent happy holidays as a child. Then he dies, and we hear how Virginia Spencer Carr, now in full flow, speaks at two memorial services for him and is also the guest speaker at a ‘Biographers’ Brunch at the Unterberg Poetry Center’. The wheel of fate has come full circle. The ashes are safely banked in upstate New York and the ladies’ brunch club has reclaimed its own. Mrs Rainmantle is revenged. Inshallah.
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