PAUL BOWLES is a distinguished American Writer who has done most of his writing abroad. Born in 1910, he comes at the end of a great wave of expatriate American literature. He ran away from a brutal father and an education that seemed to him parochial and philistine in order to breathe the air of Gertrude Stein’s Paris, and he ended up in Tangier.
His novels and stories are nowadays more easily found in French and Spanish than in English. Novels like The Sheltering Sky and Let it Come Down had a considerable American vogue in their day, when Americans at home were fascinated to read about Americans abroad, but fashion changed and the great fictional theme became the turmoil and contradictions of urban America – from Bellow’s Chicago to Tom Wolfe’s Bronx. Bowles for a time seemed to be the parrain of the Beats – Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac – and he certainly smoked kif with them. But he was absorbed into Morocco while they merely exploited its drug and sex possibilities.
His most interesting later work had been the transcription into English of tales told to him in Moghrabi Arabic. Occasionally he has denied being a writer, professing, which is chronologically true, to be primarily a composer. His music is not now much heard. As for his songs, I am always around to accompany if not sing them. They are charming and show a fastidious concern with the pitching of vowels and the accommodation of prosody to musical rhythm. Pierre Boulez and Luciano Berio would find their melodies too tonal and their harmonies old-fashionedly Ravelian, but, as a young musician, Bowles was the protégé of Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson.
If he had, like other American composers, submitted to the discipline of Nadia Boulanger in Paris, he might have made a large musical name. But he remained something of a dilettante, better at incidental music for the stage than at knotty quartets or loud symphonies. His music is cool; some would say cold. It expresses his temperament.
It was the coolness of Bowles’s prose that impressed its first readers, particularly when it dealt in nightmare or atrocity. There is a description of a man cutting off another man’s penis, and then gouging a hole in his belly to accommodate the floating member, which is positively refrigerated. The coolness could be diagnosed partly as a Puritan trait inherited from the Mayflower, partly as a symptom of sexual insufficiency. Tangier still is a great centre of pederastic activity, but it is doubtful if Bowles ever felt the lure, as the Beats did, of willing brown bodies ready to be sodomised for a couple of dirhams. His marriage to Jane Auer tells much of the sexual story, for she was openly lesbian and the ménage was blanc from the start to finish. She was also an alcoholic and a drug-taker, unstable and dangerous when she tried to import her inversion to a land where homosexuality was strictly for males. Her passion for a souk girl named Cherita led her into a morass of filthy magic and harsh servitude. Jane had literary talent but she was too mixed up and too self-destructive to achieve more than sporadic success. Bowles dutifully pursued her from psychiatric clinic to drying-out ward, remaining cool despite his own distress. This book is the portrait of a stoic.
Though coolness if normally associated with extreme rationality, it was irrationality, the ambages of the unconscious, that fascinated Bowles. Tangier was a good place to get in touch with the darker layers of the mind, possessing what used to be known as a drug culture. Bowles at first got no kick from kif, since he was a non-inhaling smoker, but majoun, which is a kind of jam with a cannabis base, provided the liberation of the imagination which made his first novels magical. But this concern with the irrational has to be antedated to his youthful discovery of music. Music says nothing to the reason: it is a kind of closely structured nonsense. It is a turbulence of the id, so Freud thought, and it has to be approached with ruled bar-lines and carefully penned notes. Music led Bowles very early on to surrealism. He was at school when he first discovered transition and read the Surrealist Manifesto of André Breton. Bowles, writing verse like ‘A fresh mist drowns plantlice / as sprucetrees dribble resin’, actually got into transition 12 when he was only 18. Such a success was bound to Europeanise him prematurely. He never really came to terms with his native culture.
So he must be considered an odd man out in American letters, also a curiously transitional figure in cisatlantic modernism. Gertrude Stein helped him, in her eccentric way, but he was young enough to absorb something of the next modernist wave. He met Isherwood in Berlin; we learn now where Sally Bowles got her name. But his musical talent drew him to a radicalism which made him neither traditional nor modernist – merely unique. He became fascinated by Hispanic rhythms, both in Latin America and Iberia, and was led to a deeper fascination with the folk music of North America, which, with no help from the newly independent ‘modernising’ regimes, he collected on tape. This ended with his getting the tales of Mohammed Mrabet and Driss Ben Hamed Charhadi on tape and thence on to printed paper. He ends as a lonely aloof figure, still living in Tangier, not inhospitable but unavailable by telephone, handsome and still cool in old age, above all stoical.
I recommend his 1982 book, Points in Time, a non-fictional study of Morocco, a work which, as one of his British critics said, ‘seems to insert a needle into a country’s heart and draw off its life-blood for us.’ Whether he described a sunset or a decapitation, Bowles sustains his old coolness, the bar-lines neatly drawn, the notes exactly penned. It was not a financial success, and America virtually ignored it. Neither critics nor publishers like books hard to categorise. Bowles himself evades all categorisation.
Observer, 23 July 1989
Review of An Invisible Spectator: A Biography of Paul Bowles by Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno (London: Bloomsbury, 1989)