Paul Bowles: a study in contradictions - author

The book also is the story of the meeting of two disparate cultures: modern, intellectual America and the timeless, sensual Sahara. It is a travel book through states of consciousness wherein dreams, hallucinations from typhoid fever, and, finally, insanity all play an important part.

Although the desert is so prominent in the novel that some writers have called it a major character, the dominant image is the sky. Port says to Kit, "The sky here's very strange. I often have the sensation when I look at it that it's a solid thing up there, protecting us from what's behind."

"But what is behind?"

"Nothing, I suppose. Just darkness. Absolute night."

The characters in this book find solace nowhere--not in themselves, each other, society, nature, or the universe beyond.

In the early 1970s, during a skirmish in the battle between the sexes, I remember reading an essay by a male writer proposing to answer the question, "What do men want from women?" In a list of about 10 items that included children, a sense of humor, and "slack" was the suggestion: "sanctuary," which the writer defined in the words of a popular Bob Dylan song, "Shelter from the Storm." Apparently, we all want shelter. Yet, according to Bowles, there is no shelter; there is only storm, or there is nothing.

Kit and Port both find out what is behind the sheltering sky. Port dies of typhoid fever and drifts off into nothingness. Kit wanders into the desert, where she loses her mind. Death and madness, nothingness or chaos--these are the alternatives Bowles believes await anyone who tries to pierce the veil of our ordinary, daily illusions.

The Sheltering Sky is just one of many writings in which Bowles has articulated his views, but an important one, because it was popular in its day and stands as the finest American expression of existentialism. Bowles remains important, not as a cultural icon from the 1950s, but as a nearly flawless prose stylist, whose philosophical commitment to detachment reaches contemporary readers as powerfully as it did his first audience.

Existentialism in general, and Bowles' version in particular, was at the core of the generation of American writers known as the "Beats"--Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, John Clellon Holmes, William Burroughs--who generated much of the social and artistic protest of the 1950s and 1960s. To the Beat writers, Bowles was an inspiration, a guru, and they all journeyed to Tangier to see him and to pay their respects. Author Norman Mailer once wrote, "Paul Bowles opened the world of Hip. He let in the murder, the drugs, the incest, the death of the Square . . . the call of the orgy, the end of civilization." In Bowles, expatriate and enigma, we find a major inspiration for post-war countercultural America.

In "The Wild One," the title character portrayed by Marlon Brando is asked, "What are you kids rebelling against?" He replies, "I dunno. Whatta ya got?" From his exile in Morocco, Bowles personifies a similar wholesale rejection of the status quo and celebration of rebellion. To a friend, he wrote in 1948, "When I arrived . . . I discovered a ridiculous, libelous article about me in the Echo d'Alger, describing me as distant, chilly, and eccentric, and, even worse, describing my parrot as skinny and featherless, which is certainly not the case. So that the staff of the Hotel Saint Georges seemed frightened to let me loose in the lobby, because as soon as I signed my fiche they all knew I was the crazy American from the desert. Of course I was really delighted. No one can ever heap enough insults upon me to suit my taste. I think we all really thrive on hostility, because it's the most intense kind of massage the ego can undergo."