Paul Bowles: a study in contradictions - author

Yet, Bowles remains a curiosity and, to some, a contradiction in terms--a non-verbal artist who writes or a verbal artist who also expresses himself through sounds. Of the two aspects of his career, Bowles has said, "I had always felt extremely circumscribed in music. It seemed to me there were a great many things I wanted to say that were too precise to express in musical terms. Writing music was not enough of a cathartic. Nor, perhaps, would writing word,s be if I should do it exclusively. The two together work very well."

Then, there is the contradiction of the person and the work. Bowles is the height of low-key grace and charm. Still possessed of thick white hair and a fine-boned hardsomeness and always well-dressed, even in bed, which is where he spends most of his time these days, he is witty, but unassuming and soft-spoken, with a bit of a hiss to his sibilant consonants. He is a master of physical humor, a marvelous mimic who can segue from an imitation of writer Truman Capote to one of a camel, without missing a beat and without the least self-consciousness.

It is perhaps understandable that Bowles objects to the perception that his fiction is gruesome or violent. "Maybe 10 of the stories are about violence," he maintains. Yes, but what violence that is. In "A Distant Episode," a linguist visiting North Africa is captured by a group of desert tribesmen who men who cut his tongue and force him to perform weird and obscene dances. In "The Delicate Prey," published in 1949, a robber mutilates and then murders a desert boy in a scene so gruesome that playwright Tennessee Williams, who read the story while the two were traveling by ship to Morocco, told him, "It is a wonderful story, but if you publish it, you're mad." As Bowles tells the story, "I said, `Why?' He said, `Because everyone is going to think you are some sort of horrible monster when they read ft.' And I said, `I don't care. I have written it and I'm going to publish it.' And he said, `You're wrong, you're wrong to publish it. You will give people the wrong idea.' But I disagreed with him on that. Perhaps now everyone does think I'm a monster. I still disagree with him. I think if you write something, you should publish it."

Some of the contradictions of Paul Bowles are a result of his having lived a very long life. He is not a snapshot, frozen in time, but a moving, growing, evolving, complex--that is to say, human--being. Virgil Thomson once wrote to someone inquiring about Bowles, "Please try not to view his life as a planned career. He had more spontaneity than that, and he was always resistant to pressure, both from others and from his own convictions about `duty' or calculations about `advantage.' He is as `free' a man as I have ever known, even when accepting an obligation, which he does strictly on his own, never under pressure." Bowles' explanation is more existential: "There is a truth for everyone, and no one truth carries all the others away."

I started reading Paul Bowles when a friend lent me his novel, The Sheltering Sky, the story of a young American couple. Port and Kit, trying to find a way to repair their relationship while on a trip through the North African desert. Despite Bowles' many protests to the contrary, it obviously is based on his relationship with his wife, writer Jane Bowles. I once found a copy of the novel belonging to a friend of Bowles, in which the author had inscribed, "The only `interesting' thing I can think of to say is that all the characters in the book exist, some with the same names used here."