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Paul Bowles: Romantic Savage
Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1995 by Irving Malin
Although she offers a complete account of his childhood, she refuses to reduce it to a simple Freudian pattern. She is precise about the houses in Queens in which he lived; she reveals much about his entire family. She makes much of his Aunt Mary: "Aunt Mary combined Madame Blavatsky's theosophy with her own insights to offer 'Correspondence Lessons in the Fine Art of Living.'" Although we have read much about Bowles's parents, we have never met this aunt who was a spiritualist. Nor, for that matter, have we known that Claude Bowles, Paul's father, "awoke one morning to discover that a hemorrhage had destroyed his sight in one eye. Because he was a dentist, his livelihood depended upon no one knowing of his impairment. From that day on he guarded his secret viciously." Thus Bowles's interest in secrecy, spiritualism, and deception allowed him to become an "expert of deceit, stage-managing his reaction to convey the opposite of his true feelings."
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And his personality - distressed by "true" and "false" feelings - split. Caponi observes that "splitting" is a "mechanism whereby one defends against unwanted parts of the self or the environment by 'splitting-off' the unwanted portion, placing it outside the self (projection) or internally disowning it." "Splitting" suggests the reasons Bowles was attracted by other cultures, and by Jane. He saw them as Other, refusing to see his own longings for secret parts of himself.
Although critics have mentioned the musical compositions, they have never really read (or listened?) to them. The compositions are significant for many reasons. Here is a notebook entry by Bowles: "The text of The Wind Remains is a contraction of Garcia Lorca's most personal and incidentally controversial play. . . . [I]ts Surrealist technique fitted it for the fragmented kind of treatment I wanted to give it." I stress the references to Garcia Lorca and Surrealism. Bowles has been indebted to Spanish writers - to Spain itself (where Jane is buried) - and to Surrealism, a movement based on decoding messages from the "other side" of the ego.
Caponi is a brilliant reader of the fiction. I need only mention the manner in which she reads the word "shelter"; in a sentence she links a juvenile poem passage to the title of his first novel: "Lying dark under the burning moon / The air simmers like a brazen bowl; / And I cannot move from thirst." Does the sky provide shelter (comfort) or does it enclose the novel's characters in a dangerous embrace?
One of the most interesting passages in this book suggests that Bowles plays with codes: "First he listed several situations he had heard about or observed that year in Morocco and assigned each one a letter from A to K. Then he created a pattern for three groups of letters (A, B, G, K; C, D, H; E, F, I, J) and used this formula to create three stories." The passage - I have used only one part - suggests that Bowles plays with chance elements; he, after all, introduced Burroughs to Gysin and the cut-up methods.
I could continue to cite examples of startling brilliance in this book, but I must stop. Caponi's study is, perhaps, the central text for an understanding of Bowles as "character" and artist. It is hypnotic and enlightening.
IRVING MALIN City College of New York
COPYRIGHT 1995 Studies in Short Fiction
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
