PAUL BOWLES THE OUTSIDER OF THE AVANT-GARDE
AN INVISIBLE SPECTATOR
A Biography of Paul Bowles
By Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno Weidenfeld & Nicholson.
501 pp. $24.95
A DISTANT EPISODE
The Selected Stories B
y Paul Bowles The Ecco Press.
352 pp. Paperback, $11.95
IN THE INTRODUCTION to the 1980 edition of his second novel, Let It Come Down, Paul Bowles calls one of its characters, Richard Holland, "a caricature of myself." Holland, it turns out, occupies a mere handful of paragraphs in a book of almost 300 pages. So far as he is revealed, he strikes the reader as a chatty cynic, but only a psychic would feel confident of having fathomed him even as a sketch. That in itself -- the guardedness of Bowles' self-caricature -- speaks volumes about a man whose fiction Gore Vidal has trumpeted, whose music Ned Rorem reveres and whose biography Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno has told in this well-proportioned book.
Born in New York City in 1910, Bowles came by his reticence at an early age. His father, a dentist, was a throwback to Theobald Pontifex, the tyrannical paterfamilias of Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh. One of the father's inflictions was to insist that Paul Fletcherize his food -- chew it some 40 times before swallowing it, in accordance with a health kick of the day. The elder Bowles had himself been diverted from a musical career by his father's disapproval; in turn he ridiculed Paul's artistic leanings, and the boy, an only child, withdrew into a private realm of creativity. After a furtively precocious childhood (he composed an opera at the age of 9), the young Bowles enrolled at the University of Virginia, in part because his beloved Poe had studied there. At 17 he had a poem published in an avant-garde Parisian magazine and promptly dropped out of college to pursue the arts in that mecca. The first trip abroad was a flop, but a year later, after becoming so provoked with his father as to throw a meat knife at him, he returned to Europe. There he doggedly parlayed connections proffered by his music teacher, Aaron Copland, into friendships with many of the continent's leading artists. Among his coups were Gide, Miro, Cocteau, Stein and Isherwood, who borrowed the young American's surname for the anti-ingenue of his Berlin Stories. It was Stein who first steered Bowles to Tangier, the "dream city" where he eventually took up residence in 1947.
During the late 1930s he traveled extensively, made a name for himself as a composer (notably of incidental music for productions staged by Orson Welles and later for plays by Tennessee Williams), joined the Communist Party and met the charming but contrary Jane Auer. Acting on mutual whim, they married in 1938. Jane was lesbian, Paul seems to have had as much homo- as heterosexual experience at the time, and they may never have consummated the marriage. Yet they grew to need each other, and, with many separations and much anguish, the marriage endured until Jane's death in 1973.
After (though not necessarily because) Jane published a novel, Two Serious Ladies, Bowles began to write fiction. His early efforts included "The Delicate Prey," the brutally beautiful reworking of an anecdote someone had told him, about a Moroccan murderer who was caught and left buried in desert sand up to his chin by the victims' kinsmen. Like most of his fiction, it is couched in what Sawyer-Laucanno aptly describes as Bowles' "detached narrative style, as precise, cold and delicate as cut crystal." To this Bowles often adds a divagating plot, which he may invent with the aid of majoun or kif, two marijuana-related drugs. The result is the impression that, unlike most authors, who shape their work with calculated artifice, Bowles simply records human vagaries as they swirl about him. If Isherwood's celebrated storyteller is a camera, the typical Bowles narrator is a Polaroid.
IN HIS first novel, The Sheltering Sky, Bowles gave quintessential expression to the prevalent theme in his work: how a primitive society is liable to destroy civilized interlopers who thrust themselves into it unprepared. The book was a best seller of 1950, and though he has never stopped composing, since then Bowles has worked primarily as a writer. While Jane declined into alcoholism and madness, Paul waged an energetic campaign to preserve Moroccan folk culture by criss-crossing the country with a tape recorder and translating the tales spun for him by a series of proteges. He also wrote an autobiography, Without Stopping, which is so tight-lipped about himself that his friend William Burroughs calls it Without Telling.
In all he has published four novels, dozens of short stories, volumes of poetry and travel essays and Points in Time, the extended meditation on Moroccan history that Sawyer-Laucanno considers his masterpiece. Now in his 80th year, he shows no interest in revisiting his homeland. Today almost everything Bowles has written is back in print, thanks to Black Sparrow, a small West Coast press, and Ecco, one that specializes in books by neglected authors. (The music is unavailable on record save for a few piano pieces, and Sawyer-Laucanno makes a strong case for reviving it.) Bowles' reputation as a writer will rest largely on The Sheltering Sky (the other novels suffer from flat portrayals of flaccid characters) and the stories. Ecco's new Selected Stories complements but does not supersede Black Sparrow's Collected Stories of a decade ago: the later anthology omits several stories from the earlier and picks up some fine ones written in the interval between them. Taken as a whole -- and read with Bowles' outsider status in mind -- they suggest an affinity with another great American dissenter and miniaturist who had a flair for putting violence to literary effect: Ambrose Bierce. (This connection sprang, I imagine, from an infra-rational, Bowlesian source -- the adjacency of their works in my AmLit bookcase.) Written with Bowles' half-hearted cooperation, The Invisible Spectator seems just the right length, with thorough but not laborious coverage of each phase in his life. Never does Sawyer-Laucanno, a teacher of languages and literature at MIT, fall delicate prey to the biographer's syndrome: the tendency to become so wrapped up in one's subject as to lose a sense of how much the reader wants to know about him. Paul Bowles will likely survive by virtue of a coterie, whose members hunt his books in antiquarian shops and urge them on their friends. There are worse fates for a writer.
Dennis Drabelle is a Washington writer and editor.
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