Paul Bowles: a study in contradictions - author

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.

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."

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."

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."

There are signs that existentialism is experiencing a comeback. Albert Camus, always more popular in the U.S. than among its French readers, has risen from the dead with the publication of his final novel, The First Man. Existentialism is perfect for Americans, consummate individualists, because it places ultimate responsibility on the individual. It also is pragmatic, its central tenet being existence precedes essence. What you do defines who you are.

As for his own assessment, Bowles is typically laconic. When asked how he would summarize his life's work, he answers, "I've written some books and some music. That's what I've achieved." When pressed to elaborate, he says, "I don't want anyone to know about me. In the first place, 'I' don't exist. I disapprove very much of the tendency in America and everywhere to make an individual out of the writer to such an extent that the writer's life and his choices and his taste are more important than what he writes. If he's a writer, the only thing that counts is what he writes. The man who wrote the books didn't exist. No writer exists. He exists in his books, and that's all."

A final contradiction is that, for the past 30 years, Bowles has been taping and translating the tales of Moroccan storytellers and has published more works by these unlettered artists than of his own. He claims to believe in the superiority of the pre-literate mind and once wrote, "I conceived of originality as a quality which a happy few succeeded in retaining, in spite of having been forced through the process of education."

Perhaps the contradiction goes even deeper. Perhaps Paul Bowles finally has found a way to write without existing.

Dr. Caponi, assistant professor of American studies, The University of Texas at San Antonio, is author of Paul Bowles: Romantic Savage.

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