Copyright and Use of This Thesis This Thesis Must Be Used in Accordance with the Provisions of the Copyright Act 1968

COPYRIGHT AND USE OF THIS THESIS This thesis must be used in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. Reproduction of material protected by copyright may be an infringement of copyright and copyright owners may be entitled to take legal action against persons who infringe their copyright. Section 51 (2) of the Copyright Act permits an authorized officer of a university library or archives to provide a copy (by communication or otherwise) of an unpublished thesis kept in the library or archives, to a person who satisfies the authorized officer that he or she requires the reproduction for the purposes of research or study. The Copyright Act grants the creator of a work a number of moral rights, specifically the right of attribution, the right against false attribution and the right of integrity. You may infringe the author’s moral rights if you: - fail to acknowledge the author of this thesis if you quote sections from the work - attribute this thesis to another author - subject this thesis to derogatory treatment which may prejudice the author’s reputation For further information contact the University’s Director of Copyright Services sydney.edu.au/copyright Paul Bowles’ Aesthetics of Containment Surrealism, Music, the Short Story Sam V. H. Reese A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Faculty of Arts The University of Sydney 2014 Acknowledgments 3 Introduction 5 Chapter 1: Bowles, Freedom and America Bowles and the Critics 13 Freedom and Liberal Criticism 26 Patterns of Words 41 Narratives of Containment 61 Chapter 2: Bowles and Surrealism American Surrealist? 74 Surrealism in America 93 Violence as a Gateway to the Surreal 103 A Dream Logic 118 Chapter 3: Bowles and Music “Essentially American” 131 “Hack work was often the rule” 148 “The Culmination of Beauty” 160 Fragments of Culture 173 Chapter 4: Bowles and the Short Story as Genre Bowles and the Question of Genre 187 Bowles and Poe 202 Composition and Intoxication 212 Fragmentation and the Short Story 231 Conclusion 239 Bibliography 248 2 Acknowledgments This thesis grew out of two general interests of mine: the short story, and surrealism in literature. I want to thank my supervisor, Prof. Paul Giles, for his guidance, advice and support throughout its development, from those rather abstracted beginnings to its final incarnation. His wisdom, and seemingly limitless knowledge were balanced with a consistent faith in my abilities, and I am grateful for both the free rein he allowed me, and for his astute interventions. My associate supervisor, Prof. Peter Marks, deserves thanks too, especially for the perspective he gave me on the project in its final stages. More broadly, I would like to thank the English Department at the University of Sydney for the constant support I received throughout my candidature. Parts of this thesis were presented at the MSA conference in 2013, while other parts developed out of archival research completed at the University of Delaware archives; these trips would have been impossible without the funding provided by the University, for which I am very grateful. Outside of the University, I would like to thank the special collections staff at the library of the University of Delaware for their help with my archival research. This thesis also benefitted from the insights of Joanna Pawlik, editor of Papers of Surrealism, and Jana Argersinger, co-editor of Poe Studies, whose journals provided venues for me to develop sections of this thesis. Throughout this thesis, I was extremely lucky to have the support of my family, and I thank Jo, Kate, Jessy, Linda, Rebekah, Kaitlyn and Nicky for their love and friendship. Particular thanks to go to Mark, Kent and Rafe for proofreading parts, if not all, of the thesis in its final stages, and to my friends for listening to endless Paul Bowles anecdotes. 3 Most importantly, I want to thank my wonderful wife, Alexandra. She has been there for me from the very beginning, offering constant support and love; I owe to her both my happiness and sanity. 4 Introduction During the 1930s and 1940s, Paul Bowles enjoyed an almost singularly diverse artistic career. A prominent classical composer, responsible for the ‘Tennessee Sound’ that accompanied Tennessee Williams first major theatrical successes, Bowles was also a highly regarded translator, whose profile was such that Jean Paul Sartre commissioned him to translate his play Huis Clos, which Bowles rendered in tellingly claustrophobic terms as No Exit.1 His poetry was published in major avant-garde magazines, such as transition, and he was an important contributor to the American surrealist magazine View. The short stories he wrote over this period, which he would continue to consider as his most important works throughout his life, found publication in such venues as Harper’s Bazaar and Mademoiselle, alongside the intellectual redoubt of The Partisan Review. The significance of this work, however, and the implications of the context within which it was produced, have been overlooked by critics thus far, and in this thesis I hope to provide some balance to the critical framework within which Bowles’ writing is understood. The relatively limited focus with which critics have considered Bowles’ writing can be attributed in large part to his long-term residence in Tangiers. Indeed, his popular image and later career were both shaped by this self-imposed exile in Morocco, where he lived for more than half a century. As his residence in Tangiers extended, the criticism of his works increasingly took his place of residence as its reference point, to the extent that the first book-length study of his work, the 1974 Paul Bowles: the Illumination of North Africa by Lawrence D. Stewart, was framed 1 Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit, trans. Paul Bowles (New York: Samuel French 1958). 5 explicitly as a work as much about North Africa as it was about Bowles.2 Stewart’s title suggests, moreover, the fundamental relationship that critics have posited within his work: the mediation of ‘Eastern’ Morocco to ‘The West’. Such a perspective, which renders Bowles predominantly as a cultural conduit, tends to subsequently consider Bowles within the parameters of Orientalism. Since Stewart’s book was published, the body of criticism on Bowles has grown steadily. Brian Edwards has shown how “Bowles played a significant part in imagining the relationship of Americans to the foreign in general and to Europe’s former colonies in particular”, and argues that “Bowles’s career challenged the circumscribed sense of what counts as American literature”.3 In the same vein, Raj Chandarlapaty has suggested that Bowles’ writings “mark a beginning for countercultural synthesis [of east and west]” within American letters, and that “discussion of Bowles’s later works… are certainly substantial ground in the context of rapidly growing and internationally proactive American ‘counterculture’”.4 Along similar lines, Rob Wilson has more recently framed Bowles within the context of the Beat movement, exploring the “ethos of self- denial at the core of the life and work of Bowles from his first more to Tangier in 1947 until his death in 1999”.5 All of these perspectives, however, focus on the connection between the site of Bowles’ literary production, and the ideals with which he engages; Edwards posits that Bowles’ “residence in Tangier... corresponds with a deep involvement in Moroccan affairs by the US government during which Bowles wrote frequently about North African politics and culture”.6 The focus of Bowles 2 Lawrence D. Stewart, Paul Bowles: the Illumination of North Africa (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1974). 3 Brian T. Edwards, Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 307. 4 Raj Chandarlapaty, The Beat Generation and Counterculture: Paul Bowles, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 19, 66. 5 Rob Wilson, “Masters of Adaptation: Paul Bowles, the Beats, and ‘Fellaheen Orientalism’,” Cultural Politics 8.4 (2012): 194. 6 Edwards, Morocco Bound, 307. 6 criticism, therefore, has been skewed by the facts of his biography, and by the enduringly romantic image of Morocco. Along with the question of geography, however, the focus of criticism can also be attributed to the forms in which different examples of Bowles’ works were produced. Certainly, the works that have received most critical attention have been those set in Morocco or North Africa; although at the start of his career Bowles used Latin America and even the US as the setting for his writing, over the long term his writing increasingly reflected his involvement in the culture of North Africa, particularly Tangiers. Equally, however, these North African works were published in a form that critics have been predisposed to prefer: the novel. Not only were all of Bowles’ first three novels set in North Africa, the work that occupied the latter stage of his authorial career was also decidedly novelistic. Beginning in 1964 with the text A Life Full of Holes, Bowles enjoyed a secondary literary career recording, transcribing and translating Moroccan oral storytellers, whose work Bowles generally produced into the form of ‘novels’; over the next 30 years, Bowles translated and published over 20 works by Moroccan authors.7 Given the intersection of North African setting and novelistic form, it is not surprising that Bowles’ work within the genre of the short story has been critically occluded. Looking specifically at the case of Ernest Hemingway, Robert Lamb has described the place of the short story in academia as “something of a bastard stepchild”, “rarely… appreciated in the context of genre”.8 Although the last 20 years have yielded two general, longitudinal studies of Bowles’ short fiction, one in English and one in German, the focus of critical attention has been shaped nonetheless by a 7 Driss ben Hamed Charhadi, A Life Full of Holes, trans.

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