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Paul Bowles: a study in contradictions - author
USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), March, 1997 by Gena Dagel Caponi
If, as former Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin wrote, a celebrity is someone who is well-known for his well-knownness, author Paul Bowles has become an anti-celebrity, famous for not being more famous. He has been called "contradictory," "enigmatic," "elusive," and "eleborately paradoxical," as well as "conservativelyy dapper, politely love-key." Interest in his work took off with a boost from Bernardo Bertolucci's 1990 film version of Bowles' novel, The Sheltering Sky. Since then, he hhas been lauded as a writer and, in September, 1995, in a concert series and symposium at New York's Lincoln Center and the New School for Social Research, rediscovered as a composer. Those who have touted his books passionately for the past 35 years were surprised to learn of his previous career as a composer; those who attended concerts in his honor applauded him for his achievements in literature.
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Contradictions have obscured his place in American culture, perhaps the most striking one being the fact that the American Bowles has spent most of his life outside the U.S., in France, Mexico, Ceylon, and Morocco, where he has lived since 1947. At that point, he was just beginning to become known for his fiction. He had published several short stories in various magazines, including View, Harper's Bazaar, and Mademoiselle, but it was when his story "A Distant Episode" appeared in Partisan Review in January, 1947, that he felt he legitimately could consider himself a serious writer. So, Bowles left for Tangier and wrote the novel that made him famous and for which he still is best-known. For 11 weeks in 1950, The Sheltering Sky was on the best-seller list. Author William Carlos Williams included it on his New York Times Book,Review list of "The Best Books I Read This Year."
Bowles went on to publish three more novels, several essays on India and North Africa, a book he calls a "lyrical history" of Morocco, and translations of Moroccan tales. He also has published many volumes of short stories that author Gore Vidal called "among the best ever written by an American."
Most readers, though, have little awareness of Bowles' other career as a self-taught composer. Even with such teachers as composers Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson at his disposal, Bowles more or less taught himself. He began working with Copland at the age of 18, but Copland told me Bowles was not "a student in the sense of a beginner. It was like showing things to a professional friend." Bowles joined Copland at the artists' retreat, Yaddo, in the autumn of 1930; later, they traveled to Berlin, Paris, and Tangier.
Bowles fell in love with Tangier and Morocco; Copland did not. "Up here on the mountain there are drums that beat a lot. That worries Aaron, as he cannot get it out of his head that the Arabs are grieved about something, and are all set to go on the warpath," Bowles wrote to his friend, author Gertrude Stein. Copland premiered Bowles' "Sonata for Oboe and Clarinet" at London's Aeolian Hall in 1931. A year later, he introduced Bowles' "Six Songs" at Yaddo. "You're on the map now, and don't you forget it," Copland wrote the 20-year-old Bowles.
In Paris, in 1931, Bowles introduced himself to Virgil Thomson, who never forgot the youth's arrival with his friend Harry Dunham, "both with yellow hair and wearing yellow overcoats with long, yellow scarves. It was like a double bolt of sunshine," said Thomson. A now famous exchange of letters between Copland and Thomson reveals an intensely personal interest in their precocious young friend: "He is learning by doing and all the lesson he needs he gets from you and me and others by showing the finished piece and saying `What's wrong here?,"' Thomson assured Copland. "I play the role of the worrier," Copland responded. "You encourage him and I'll worry him and together we'll do very well by him."
Later, in New York, Thomson recommended Bowles for a job writing incidental music for Orson Welles' production of the Labiche farce, "Horse Eats Hat." Thomson helped him with the orchestration, but insisted he never gave Bowles lessons. "He learned by himself," Thomson explained in 1984. "I worked for him, really. Paul had a gift for the theater. There are people who understand the stage and people who don't. Mozart did; Bach and Beethoven, very little. You either have it or you don't. Paul did."
Bowles wrote scores for more than 30 plays, six in 1946 alone, while reviewing music for the Herald Tribune. He composed in a variety of other forms, including film scores, chamber music, three ballets, three operas, two cantatas, and a large body of song literature. Although he certainly wrote more words than music after leaving New York, it is a myth that he left his music for his writing, one that results from the curious notion that genius can be mined only one vein at a time. Bowles has said, "I never really left music. It was a very slow melding so that at any one time I might be writing both music and a novel on the same day. That seemed the natural state of affairs but eventually I was writing more words than notes."
