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Home , Paul Bowles

INTRODUCTION

In the past decade, since has become an in- ternational legend, he has been the subject of many inter- views and articles as well as several full-scale biographies. Yet, for all this reportage, he remains elusive. The complex being who is Paul Bowles deflects direct inquiry. I came to know Paul Bowles through indirection. My first contact with him was in 1976, when he responded to a letter from me that told of my interest in writing about the life and work of his wife, , who had died at age fifty-six in 1973. In answer he wrote that my project was of the greatest interest to him. Almost gratuitously, he added that Jane's life had nothing to do with her work, a remark perhaps more indicative of the feeling he wanted to convey about his own life and work. In March 1977 I went to . On that first visit of six weeks, I spent four to five hours each day talking to Paul about Jane. Only later was I to learn that after her death others had refrained from speaking to him of Jane, in response to an unstated message from him. As a stranger, unaware of this prohibition, I came to know him in a very paradoxical way, one that was deeply intimate and at the same time impersonal. Jane was my subject, but he was my primary source of information. To see her, I had to see

ix through him. In our conversations he had the remarkable capacity to be forcefully present in his own right and yet to be almost transparent to my gaze at the same time. On several occasions I brought him information about her life and her work that he had never known. I returned to Tan- gier in late 1977 and again in 1979 to consult with him further. After the biography of Jane (A Little Original Sin) was published in 1981, Paul and I continued to correspond. In 1992 once again I returned to Tangier. This time I was in search of Paul, to write of his life and work. Now that I was looking at him, he was, of course, no longer transparent. Gazed at directly, for all that he had expressed eagerness about my doing this project, he became a master of opacity. One generally thinks of the process of interviewing as tracing an arc of knowing. That is, you expect that you will accumulate information and presumably knowledge of the subject from beginning to end. In my work with Paul, however, the arc of knowing was made up of starts and stops, of reversals and sudden leaps and reversals again. In my new relationship to him, the more I questioned him, the less, it often seemed, I knew. As much as my inquiry was a going forward, it was also a retracing, a stumbling back over feelings and facts and memories. Everything was made more complex by what I thought I knew but didn't know and by what I didn't think I knew but may well have known. In the portrait of Paul Bowles that follows, I have, in my own turn, resorted to indirection. Rather than relying on the traditional mode of revealing biographical information, I have interwoven factual material with conversations and speculations. I have been willing to surrender the solidity of chronological factual material in order to render the

x fluidity of his being and his presence as well as the atmo- sphere that he himself is constantly in the process of cre- ating. I have been in search of a different kind of know- ing—one that is consonant with secrecy, one that, now I come to think of it, is more akin to the knowing one has of a character in a work of fiction. At the same time, what follows is a meditation on the nature of biography. Those elements that provide the struc- ture and basis for traditional biography but that usually remain hidden from the reader are here opened up to view. In that sense, this portrait is a biography turned inside out. My own subjectivity is admitted: it becomes the way "into" my narrative, starting with my earliest trip to Tangier, where, in search of Jane, I began to "find" Paul.

I do, of course, recognize that any reader, myself included, cherishes the reassuring solidity of fact before jumping into uncharted and possibly muddy waters. So let me present here a brief account of the life of Paul Frederick Bowles. He was born in Jamaica, Long Island, on December 30, 1910, of New England parentage. His father was a dentist; his mother, a homemaker. An only child, brought up in a severely disciplined household, isolated from other small children, he began composing music and writing stories at a very early age. By the time he was sixteen, his work had been published in the avant-garde European literary mag- azine transition. In early 1929, after less than a year's study at the Uni- versity of Virginia, Paul decided to leave the U.S. Without a word to his parents or to the university officials, he went to New York, borrowed money for his passage, and took a boat to France. Returning to the U.S. briefly, he began studying composition with in 1930. The

xi following year he returned to Europe, where he met Ger- trude Stein and many important artists in the literary and musical world. It was on Stein's advice that he went to with Copland to work on his music. There he encountered a world that influenced him so profoundly he would return to it sixteen years later and make it his per- manent home. In 1937, once again in the U.S., already recognized as an important young composer, Paul met Jane Auer. Born in 1917 in , Jane was also an only child. She was of German-Jewish heritage through her father, Hun- garian-Jewish through her mother. The twenty-year-old Jane that Paul encountered was wild, witty, unpredictable, fey, and gaminelike. She had had affairs only with women; he had had affairs with women and men. They were married in 1938 and set off on a honeymoon to Central America. At Paul's instigation, they soon left the cities behind and went farther and farther into primitive places that he loved but that she feared. From Central America they traveled to , where Paul continued to work on his musical compositions and Jane began a novel based in part on their visit to Central America. Later that year they returned to New York for Paul to compose music for a theatrical farce produced by . In New York the marriage changed, and from that point onward they lived separate sexual lives. The marriage was to endure, however, through journeys that would be taken together and separately and through casual and not so casual affairs with others. Shuttling from New York to Mexico, back to New York, to Staten Island, and to Mexico again, Paul worked assiduously on a wide variety of musical forms—chamber works, operas, incidental music for the theater, and songs—while Jane continued to work errati- cally on her novel.

xii One day in Mexico in the fall of 1941, Jane brought Paul the disordered typescript of her novel. He went over the manuscript with meticulous care, suggesting a number of changes and excisions. The novel, Two Serious Ladies, was published in 1943. It was not a success, though even at the time it had enthusiastic admirers, particularly among writ- ers. By 1945, profoundly affected by his experience of work- ing on the novel with Jane, Paul found himself wanting once again to enter into the imaginative world of fiction, a world he thought he had long since abandoned. Still deeply immersed in his work as a composer, he produced several brilliant and terrifying short stories, set in the exotic locales he had visited. The stories were published, and in 1947, armed with a contract to write a novel, he set out for Morocco. In 1948 Jane joined him there. Upon its publication in 1949, The Sheltering Sky became an international best-seller. Soon after, The Delicate Prey, Paul s first collection of short stories, was published to great critical acclaim. In the next few years, traveling alone from Ceylon to India to Morocco to Spain and back to Mo- rocco, he completed his second novel, Let It Come Down, which was published in 1952. In March of the following year, Paul arrived in New York, accompanied by the young Moroccan artist , to write the music for Jane's play In the Summer House. (It was not a success, but, like her novel, it had a coterie of devoted followers.) For a period of time after his return to Morocco, Paul wrote short stories and travel es- says as well as a series of musical compositions. In 1955 he published his third novel, The Spider's House, an exami- nation of the religious, moral, and political conflict within Morocco through the eyes of an American and a young Moroccan boy.

xiii In 1957, while Paul was traveling in East Asia with Ah- med Yacoubi, Jane, who had stayed in Tangier, suffered a stroke. Her capacity to read and write as well as her ability to function in daily life were impaired. As a result of Jane's illness, Paul was no longer able to travel so frequently. Liv- ing in the apartment directly above Jane's, he was often called upon to deal with problems arising from her dis- ability. In the next few years, as Jane's condition seemed to stabilize, Paul completed another novel, Up Above the World, which details the physical and emotional disintegration of an American couple traveling in an unspecified country in Latin America. He published a series of translations of tales by Moroccan authors, including those by his protégé, Mo- hammed Mrabet, and recorded an album of native Moroc- can music for the . In the late 1960s, after Jane's physical and emotional con- dition worsened, Paul took her to Málaga, Spain, where she was confined to a sanatorium. Though she returned several times to Tangier, in 1969 she was permanently in- stitutionalized in Málaga. During her final illness, Paul continued to work on travel articles and wrote his auto- biography, Without Stopping. He also produced further translations of Mrabet's tales. For some years after Jane's death in 1973, Paul's work went into abeyance. But by the late 1970s he was once again writing stories. During the early 1980s, his new work and his earlier work, which had previously gone out of print, were published in many languages throughout the world. The release in 1992 of 's film of The Sheltering Sky, in which Paul played a part, served to intensify the legendary aura of his reputation.

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