THE FASCINATION OF PAUL BOWLES

ALLEN HIBBARD

This essay addresses the question “What is it about Paul Bowles that continues to fascinate us?” The first topic discussed is the tantalizing quality of Bowles’s artistic production, particularly his stories, marked by profound psychological insight, vivid descriptions of foreign landscapes, bracing journeys, and a precise, tight style. Bowles’s adventurous life with at times relentless traveling (Paris, Morocco, Latin America, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and elsewhere) and an unwavering pursuit of personal freedom is another source of our fascination. Finally, Bowles’s sustained interaction with and portrayal of Morocco make his life and work especially relevant and significant in a period of history during which tensions between the Arab/Islamic world and the West continue to escalate.

There are numerous points of entry into the life and work of Paul Bowles, reflecting the wide variety of Bowles’s production that continues to circulate in contemporary culture. Bertolucci’s film adaptation of Bowles’s novel The Sheltering Sky is one possible entrance. Or, one might enter through his musical compositions such as “Music for a Farce,” or “The Wind Remains,” a zarzuela inspired by Federico Garcia Lorca, or songs setting Tennessee Williams lyrics to music; or through his renditions of Moroccan stories – Larbi Layachi’s A Life Full of Holes, or one of the dozen or so books by Mommad Mrabet such as The Lemon; or through his early grisly, gothic stories such as “The Delicate Prey” or “A Distant Episode”; or through his life story – an American writer who went off to Morocco and lived there for more than five decades, more than half of his life – conveyed through one of the handful of biographies of Bowles (by Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno, or Gina Dagel Caponi, or Millicent Dillon, or Virginia Spencer Carr) or through his own unrevealing autobiography, Without Stopping, which William S. Burroughs dubbed Without Telling, or through one of the fine documentaries

54 Allen Hibbard focusing on his life and work, such as Catherine Warnow and Regina Weinreich’s The Complete Outsider or Owsley Brown’s Night Waltz: The Music of Paul Bowles; or through seeing his name mentioned along side those of other famous figures of the 20th Century Aaron Copland, Gertrude Stein, Tennessee Williams, and so many others; or through his recordings of indigenous Moroccan music, made for the Library of Congress; or from reading the remarkable novel Two Serious Ladies by his wife Jane Bowles. Regardless of what portal one goes through to gain access to Paul Bowles, it is quite likely that this initial encounter will produce a desire to know more about this fascinating figure. In this essay I would like to reflect upon what Bowles means for us today, on the 100th anniversary of his birth. By now, I think we can say with confidence that Bowles has secured an enduring place in American letters. What it is about Bowles that attracted us to him and continues to fascinate us, hold our attention? What does Bowles have to say in 21st Century, as he continues to speak through his work and his interpreters? My own fascination began with my acquaintance with his short stories. I have always felt that Bowles was best at short forms, both in music and literature. Among my favorite musical compositions are the Latin American piano pieces, which I prefer to his sprawling Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra. He will be remembered above all, I believe, for his stories. While his novels may continue to have some appeal, they often seem–upon rereading–as lodged very much in their historical moment. I thus begin with this first source of fascination: the work itself, particularly the stories. As I wrote in Paul Bowles: The Short Fiction: “Generally, the Bowles story is told in a fairly straightforward, linear manner, yielding a hard, smooth surface that supports no moral comment on the actions that take place” (xiii). “The good storyteller,” Bowles himself wrote in the introduction to Larbi Layachi’s A Life Full of Holes, which he translated, “keeps the thread of his narrative almost equally taut at all points” (9). Bowles’s aesthetic principles are similar to those proposed by Edgar Allan Poe in his criticism of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales, and “The Philosophy of Composition.” The way this distance is achieved is demonstrated in Bowles’s semi-autobiographical story, “The Frozen Fields.” We are told of Donald, the young protagonist, after his father had roughly rubbed his