Edmund White on Paul Bowles and the mysterious pull of the desert

In the July 14 issue of The New York Review of Books (subscription req'd for full article) Edmund White revisits the work of Paul Bowles to explore the peculiar attraction the desert can have for a writer:

Bowles embraced the desert as a Christian saint embraces his martyrdom. His self-abnegation and his love of traditional culture made him one of the keenest observers of other civilizations America has ever had. Unlike some of his countrymen he did not brashly set out to improve the rest of the world. For Bowles, Americanization was the problem, not the solution.

After spending several weeks in the Sahara in 1952, Bowles wrote about what can happen if you go to the desert, alone, at night, and give yourself up to it in his 1953 essay “Baptism of Solitude”:

Presently, you will either shiver and hurry back inside the walls, or you will go on standing there and let something very peculiar happen to you, something that everyone who lives there has undergone and which the French call le baptéme de la solitude. It is a unique sensation, and it has nothing to do with loneliness, for loneliness presupposes memory. Here, in this wholly mineral landscape lighted by stars like flares, even memory disappears; nothing is left but your own breathing and the sound of your heart beating. A strange, and by no means pleasant, process of reintegration begins inside you, and you have the choice of fighting against it, and insisting on remaining the person you have always been, or letting it take its course. For no one who has stayed in the Sahara for a while is quite the same as when he came.

Like Bowles, White found that “the absolute solitude of the desert may exert a strong appeal, but that magnetism is not necessarily salutary.” Bowles dramatized this through the fateful travels of the characters of Port and Kit in his 1949 novel The Sheltering Sky. Port is seriously ill but rather than seek help, the couple head farther and farther into the desert. In The Married Man (2000) White writes a story that ends with the same obsessive trek into the desert, but his was inspired not by Bowles’s novel, which he had read, but by White’s own experiences traveling in Africa in the last months of his lover’s life.

White found rereading The Sheltering Sky this year painful: “The feeling of living through a death in an alien world was all too familiar.” Yet there were new discoveries:

I was also struck by how different our books are, not to mention that Bowles’s book is a work of genius. There is lots of humor in my novel and none in The Sheltering Sky . . . Bowles writes in a cool metaphysical dialect whereas mine is all human, circumstantial, psychological. All of which is a way of saying how extreme and unusual Bowles’s book is, which is also what is remarkable about it.

But he closes with the fundamental mystery unresolved:

What is it about the desert that attracts the ill and the dying? Could Bowles be right that it represents a taste for the absolute? And what does that mean?

Also of interest:

• “All Parrots Speak,” by Paul Bowles, a previous Story of the Week.
• Celebrate the 2010 centennial of Paul Bowles, author, composer, translator, a previous Reader’s Almanac post
• A tribute sparks a memory about Paul Bowles, a previous Reader’s Almanac post

Related LOA works: Paul Bowles: The Sheltering Sky, Let It Come Down, The Spider's House; Paul Bowles: Collected Stories and Later Writings (includes “Baptism of Solitude”)

Celebrate the centennial of Paul Bowles, author, composer, translator

Today is the 100th birthday of Paul Bowles, expatriate writer, composer, and translator. For the last fifty-two years of his life Bowles lived in Tangier, Morocco, with his wife, writer Jane Bowles. Jane Bowles died in 1973, Paul in 1999.

In the opening to his essay “’Without Stopping’: The Orient as Liminal Space in Paul Bowles,” Timothy Weiss encapsulates the range of Bowles’s achievements:

Bowles is unique among North American authors, and perhaps among twentieth-century Western artists, for he distinguished himself not only as a writer of fiction but also as a composer of piano concertos, sonatas, opera, ballets, film scores, and incidental music for the theatre. During the course of these artistic pursuits Bowles also became the United States’ pre-eminent expatriate, travelling and sojourning in Europe, Africa, Asia, and Central America, and living in Tangier, Morocco, for a period of more than fifty years. In his fiction and travel writings about North Africa (the Maghreb), Bowles brought a new perspective from the “periphery” to American literature and contributed to bringing international attention to Maghrebine cultures by way of his numerous translations from Moghrebi into English and his collaborations with local writers and artists.

Gore Vidal, in his introduction to the 1979 edition of Collected Stories: 1939–1976, celebrated Bowles’s story-telling:

His short stories are among the best ever written by an American . . . As a short story writer, he has had few equals in the second half of the twentieth century.

In 2000 Brian T. Edwards sought to assess Bowles’s impact on Moroccan culture and singled out one of his achievements for praise:

Bowles's translation projects may be his most lasting legacy in Morocco. Mohamed El Gahs, writing in Libération, notes that though Bowles was clear that he didn't write for a Moroccan audience, he did bring attention to Moroccan authors. "Perhaps if we must pay homage to this man," El Gahs writes grudgingly, "it would be for his capacity to give a push to the vocations of others while sacrificing his own." In forwarding Moroccan narrative, Bowles's translations represent a significant turn away from the colonialist tone of his earlier writing and demonstrate the deep respect he developed for the intricacies of the Moroccan voice. For a novelist, that is no mean tribute.

Nomadics’s post today also applauds Bowles’s efforts to promote the work of Moroccan writers.

Also of interest:

• Yesterday Regina Weinrich, co-producer and director of Paul Bowles: The Complete Outsider, posted a commemoration of Bowles.
• Earlier this month Geoff Wisner devoted a week to posts about Bowles. See, in particular, Bowles on New York City.
• Story of the Week recently featured “All Parrots Speak,” an article by Bowles about his adventures with parrots.
• Last month The New York Times reported the rediscovery of a print of “You Are Not I,” Sara Driver’s 1983 film of a Bowles short story.
• Check out the authorized Paul Bowles site for more about the Centennial celebrations.
• Watch a clip (preceded by a brief advertisement) from Paul Bowles: The Complete Outsider:

Related LOA works: Paul Bowles: The Sheltering Sky, Let It Come Down, The Spider's House; Paul Bowles: Collected Stories and Later Writings

Paul Bowles centennial year: A tribute sparks a memory (updated)

This year marks the centennial of the birth of Paul Bowles (1910–1999), expatriate novelist, story writer, poet, composer, and translator. The author of four novels and dozens of short stories, Bowles is best known for his first novel, The Sheltering Sky (1949)—the haunting story of the misadventures of three young Americans trekking across the Sahara—and for his travel writing. His collection of travel essays Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue chronicles the 25,000 miles he traveled in Morocco in 1959 on a Rockefeller Foundation grant to record indigenous music for the Library of Congress. It regularly appears on lists of best travel books (most recently on World Hum’s 100 Best Travel Books).

A social outsider, Bowles spent the last 52 years of his life in Morocco. Critics often find it difficult to categorize Bowles. Robert Craft has called him “the last of the ‘Lost’ Generation and the first of the ‘Beats’.” Edmund White puts it more simply: “one of the four or five best writers in English in the second half of the twentieth century.”

Little Augury’s appreciative blog post yesterday about Paul Bowles’s and Cherie Nutting’s collaborative book, Yesterday’s Perfume: An Intimate Memoir of Paul Bowles, prompted the book’s designer Elizabeth Avedon to recall her meeting with Bowles and Nutting to discuss the assignment:

Yesterday's Perfume holds the last work of Paul Bowles. I was fortunate to be invited to visit him in Tangier, Morocco, where he'd lived for 52 years, by Cherie and Paul about a year before he died in 1999. He’d liked a book I designed for photographer Peter Beard, Longing For Darkness: Kamante's Tales From Out of Africa, and I believe he mistakenly thought I needed to meet him to be able to design a book for them. I didn't tell anyone it wasn't necessary to travel to Morocco to design a book, I just packed my bags and filled them with a long list of sought-after American items he missed. He was very frail, but insisted on hosting the most wonderful dinner parties for me in Jane Bowles’ apartment, upstairs or downstairs from his own. He dressed for these occasions in an elegant Ralph Lauren robe and slippers. Sitting opposite me on the couch, he charmed me with fascinating stories about his travels in Mexico.

Readers can find information about upcoming events celebrating the centennial (in Portugal, Morocco, and Santa Cruz, California) at the official Paul Bowles site.

Update (8/15): Cherie Nutting recently sent along her own recollections of how Yesterday's Perfume came about:

In 1986, on my first visit to Tangier, I mentioned to Paul my idea to make a scrap book. He handed me Peter Beard's book (which Elizabeth had designed) and thought I might like it. I did. But it was actually Bruce Weber who, more than a decade later, urged me to contact “Betty” Avedon.

I contacted Elizabeth and asked her to design my book, and I showed her my ideas. I invited her to come to Tangier. I thought by coming to Tangier and meeting Paul, it would give her a better feeling for the work. Paul graciously invited her for tea in his apartment, which he had for himself and any guests each afternoon at 4. Paul Bowles didn't have dinners for others in his own apartment, because he was too old, but neighbors downstairs in Jane Bowles's apartment invited Paul, Elizabeth, and me for a few dinners during her stay in Morocco.

I was very pleased with Elizabeth's work. She transformed my ideas into a work of art.

Related LOA works: Paul Bowles: Collected Stories and Later Writings (includes Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue); Paul Bowles: The Sheltering Sky, Let It Come Down, The Spider's House