The Americans come off the boat. They may come singly, or in couples or even in a threesome, but there is no safety in numbers, for their fate is sealed the moment they step down the gangplank. The Americans are innocent of course, but they are not very nice. As a rule in the world of Paul Bowles, they tend to be mean-spirited and tight-fisted, and there is also a kind of eerie blankness about them. They think of themselves — Porter Moresby in The Sheltering Sky for example — as travellers, not tourists, belonging no more to one place than another and moving slowly from one part of the earth to another, taking no account of time. Their aim is to be taken out of themselves as they press deeper into the Sahara or the Amazonian jungle, though these estranged, hollowed-out beings do not seem to have much self to be taken out of. They are looking for that one moment when like Nelson Dyar in Let It Come Down, scudding across the sea out of Tangier with a bundle of stolen currency, ‘he sniffed the wet air, and said to himself that at last he was living’. Kit Moresby leaves her husband’s corpse in the hospital and hitches a ride into the desert with a camel train and is ravished twice daily to her tingling pleasure by two impassive Bedouin chiefs. One way or another, these dissatisfied wanderers end up raped or insane, drugged or dead, or several of the above. In Up Above the World, Mrs Rainmantle, the garrulous lecturer to ladies’ clubs, is not only poisoned but set on fire. Their fate is both completion and come-uppance. For the natives who usually inflict these sticky ends, it is all in a day’s work. The natives are not innocent, but they are not very nice either.
Paul Bowles’s four novels (the three mentioned plus The Spider’s House) and his 100 short stories are bleak and modernist in technique but also unashamedly melo- dramatic, at the same time exercises in alienation and yarns that never cease to rattle: Albert Camus meets the Sheikh of Araby. When The Sheltering Sky came out in 1949, it sold 40,000 copies in Britain alone. Penguin keeps almost all his work in print to this day.
From the start Bowles himself was something of a phenomenon. The son of a New York dentist, he was reading aloud from cereal packets at the age of two and wrote his first story a year later. By his 17th birthday he had published his first poem in the Surrealist magazine transition. He taught himself musical notation and without formal musical training was instantly accepted by Aaron Copland as an equal rather than a student. By 21, he had run off to Paris and become an intimate of Gertrude Stein, Pound, Gide and Cocteau, while at the same time rehearsing his Sonata for Oboe and Clarinet at the Aeolian Hall with Copland and Virgil Thomson. He could turn his hand to most things, with an instinctive grasp of what was wanted, writing film, theatre and ballet scores for Tennessee Williams, Lincoln Kirstein and the equally precocious Orson Welles.
His willpower was as formidable as his talents. ‘I always managed not to feel a sense of obligation to anyone,’ he boasted in his autobiography Without Stopping, known to his friends as Without Telling, for from an early age he had vowed to conceal from intruders everything that mattered in his private life. Perpetuating an air of mystery and keeping the other person off balance became lifelong pastimes. He was never happier than deflecting, with the utmost courtesy, earnest inquirers who came to seek enlightenment over a pipe of kif from the sage of Tangier.
This carefully constructed persona —charming, graceful, stoical, impassive — concealed some red-hot magma beneath its tranquil crust. For a start, there was Dr Claude Bowles. Paul claimed that he could never remember a time when he did not hate his father. When he told his parents he was going to marry Jane Auer, who was Jewish, Claude exploded, ‘It’s not enough to have a crippled kike in the White House but you have to go and marry one.’ Paul took particular pleasure in telling his father that he and Jane had joined the American Communist party. They could not be bothered to finish the course on Marxism-Leninism but they went to a lot of Russian films, and Paul took a strict Stalinist line on the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. And in a sense his fiction toes the party line too. His fellow Americans are pretty consistently represented as dehumanised products of a warped civilisation.
In fact his hatred for Claude elided easily into his revulsion against his homeland: ‘I hate America because I feel attached to it and I don’t want to feel that way.’ His fastidiousness took him as far away as possible from the suburbs of his childhood and indeed from most forms of human intimacy. Like his hero Gide, he detested the family and applauded the acte gratuit, the spontaneous action which is not driven by material calculation or desires of the flesh.
When he married Jane, they agreed that they should both be free to follow their fancy without any duty to remain faithful. When Jane was off drinking with her girlfriends at Le Monocle, Paul was duty-bound to keep away. In any case, he claimed that places had always been more important to him than people. ‘I never really saw people or thought about them, since for me they were manipulatable objects to be used or somehow got around in order to continue my trajectory.’ One cannot help sympathising with Tennessee Williams when he said that it was not the Arabs he was afraid of in Tangier, it was Paul Bowles.
In part, Bowles’s distaste for human contact was physical. Echoing Lord Chester- field, he asserted that ‘defecation and copulation were the two activities which made a human being ridiculous’. He hated it when Copland seduced him on the boat from Marseilles to Morocco and vowed never to allow himself to be abused again in this manner. In 1940, although he passed the Draft Board’s physical examination, he was classified 4-F by the psychiatrist after Bowles told him that ‘I could not sleep in a room or barracks with other men and that I had always without exception slept alone with my door locked’.
But he was scarcely a wimp. On the contrary, Bowles’s determination to defend his space could erupt in a startling pugnacity. When he returned home once, he threw a meat knife at his father and regretted only his loss of self-control. In the space of a few pages of this new biography, Bowles punches a loudmouthed literary agent, hurls a glass (while in hospital suffering from typhoid) at a friend’s mother who had encouraged his Arab protégé to steal his clothes, and in Algiers hits on the nose ‘a yokel from the Casbah’ who insists on following him around.
Bowles’s attitude towards the Arabs among whom he lived most of his life was perhaps not quite as natural and relaxed as he gave out. The kasbah was the background against which he chose to define himself. Its people were realists and fatalists, content to survive without pretence or pretension and certainly without moral disapproval. And their beauty shone all the more among the stench and squalor and corruption. He honestly believed that ‘as much as I was capable of loving anyone, I loved Yacoubi with an intense passion heretofore unknown to me’.
But of course he was also a seigneur, as he freely admitted. After a holiday in Ceylon, where he later settled for a time, he remarked, ‘There is no such thing as service in Europe or America after one has been attended to by Sinhalese.’ When he and Jane went on honeymoon, they took two wardrobe trunks and 27 suitcases. Yet he was taken aback to learn later that Gertrude Stein had described him as the most spoiled, insensitive and self-indulgent young man she had ever seen and had declared that ‘his colossal complacency in rejecting all values appalled her’. In one of those killing phrases with which she could annihilate her follower s, she described him as a ‘manufactured savage’.
In the end, one begins to feel that Bowles liked Tangier above all not because it was so handy for sex and hashish but because the Arabs did not bother him. It was the perfect home for a practising fatalist. His favourite motto was Inshallah — God willing.
He managed to make it appear that this life so enviably free of constraint was also free of effort. He was living for his compatriots as the American ambassador to the land of kif. And how wonderful he could make it all sound. Writing from Fez, for example:
But it was never as easy as it looked, and it got harder. Jane, having taken heavily to the bottle, suffered a stroke when barely 40. He reflected later, ‘I did not know it but the good times were over.’ After Jane’s death, the illnesses of old age began to bombard him, and he had to call on the reserves of stoicism that he genuinely did possess.I am in bed in the streaming sun, all windows open, birds screeching outside, the parrot’s cage in the window, the city below, very slowly disengaging itself from the morning mist and smoke, while a million cocks crow at once, constantly. There is also the faint sound of water in the fountains of the palace gardens. The human voices make the most beautiful sound of all when the muezzin calls during the night, especially the one for dawn.
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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