Sketch by Don Bachardy

Like any Romantic, I have always been vaguely certain that sometime during my life I should come into a magic place, which in disclosing its secrets, would give me wisdom and ecstasy—perhaps even death. 
—Paul Bowles in Without Stopping, on his first approach to North Africa.

Tangier has been Paul Bowles’ home for the past thirty years, though he first visited it fifty years ago, in 1931, on the advice of Gertrude Stein and in the company of his friend and tutor, Aaron Copland. The city which greeted him in those days with its promise of “wisdom and ecstasy” bears little resemblance to the Tangier of the 1980s. The frenetic medina, with its souks, its endless array of tourist boutiques, its perennial hawkers and hustlers is still there, of course, though fifty years ago it had already been dwarfed by the European city and its monuments to colonialism: the imperious French Consulate, the Café de Paris, luxury hotels in the grand style (the Minzah, the Velasquez, the Villa de France), the now forlornly abandoned Teatro Cervantes, and the English church with its cemetery filled with the remains of knight commanders, baronets, and the prodigal sons of former empires. The days of Tangier as the wide-open international city of intrigue are gone forever. Today it is simply one city of a third-world country in flux, slowly but steadily coming to grips with the twentieth century.

For those of a romantic bent, however, the power of Tangier to evoke images of the inscrutable East remains potent, despite the ravages of modernity. It still seems an appropriate place to find Paul Bowles, whose name and fiction have been associated with the remotest corners of the globe: North Africa, South America, Ceylon, the Far East. Any American who comes to Tangier bearing more than a casual curiosity about Morocco and a vague concern for music and literature considers a visit with Bowles an absolute must; for some, it even assumes the reverential character of a pilgrimage. In no way, however, does Bowles see himself as an object of special interest. Indeed, such an attitude strikes him as being amusingly naive, if not downright silly; to him it in no way relates to what he regards as the routine circumstances of his present life.

Since 1957, he has been living in a three-room apartment in a quiet residential section of Tangier. His flat, located in a Fifties-Futuristic building in sight of the American consulate, is comfortably unimposing, though it does testify to his days as a world traveler: souvenirs from Asia, Mexico, Black Africa, as well as Morocco; a bookcase lined with personally inscribed volumes by Burroughs, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Vidal; an entryway in which vintage trunks and suitcases are stacked shoulder high, as if a voyage of indefinite length were perpetually in the offing.

Our first meeting took place in the summer of 1976, within a month of my coming to live and work in Morocco. Having set a tentative date to see him, I arrived at his door in the early afternoon of an August weekend carrying my tape-recorder, a notepad filled with questions and, for autograph purposes, a copy of his first novel, The Sheltering Sky. I found him newly awakened, his thick white hair tousled and pale blue eyes slightly bleary; he was obviously surprised that anyone would come to call at that hour of the day. As he finished his breakfast and lighted up his first cigarette, his thin, somewhat wiry frame relaxed noticeably and he became increasingly jovial. He asked about my impressions of Morocco and easily slipped into colorful reminiscences of his early days in Tangier and, at my prodding, of personalities who had particularly intrigued me: Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, André Gide, Djuna Barnes.

Evidently, however, my timing hadn’t been particularly good. The tape recorder had just begun to roll when a series of visitors announced themselves with persistent rings of the doorbell: his chauffeur, his maid, a woman friend from New York, an American boy who’d taken the apartment downstairs, and, eventually, Mohammed Mrabet, the Moroccan story-teller whose works Bowles has been translating for over ten years. Each visit represented a break in the rhythm of our conversation, involving lengthy asides conducted in three languages: English, Spanish, and Arabic. Mrabet, handsome in a rugged and obscurely brooding way, was in a sardonically loquacious mood. Before leaving he asked me to bring him, on my return to Tangier, a pistol with nine chambers as there were apparently nine people upon whose elimination he was intent at that time. As it turned out, I had reason to be grateful for those interruptions. They enabled me to return and talk at length with Bowles that evening, the next day, and two more times over the following year and a half. This extra time also gave me the opportunity to reflect more intelligibly upon the details and effects of his long career as a writer, composer, and compulsive traveler. 

An only child, born in New York City in 1911 and raised amid the respectable conventionalism of middle-class professionals with a Unitarian background, Paul Bowles’ youth was marked by a willful determination to realize himself as an artist. Between stints at the University of Virginia he managed, at age 18, to make his first trip to Europe where, besides writing and composing, he worked for the Herald Tribune in Paris and met a number of established artists, including Tristan Tzara. He returned to the States within a year and went to live in Greenwich Village; while writing music and surrealist poetry he supported himself by working at Dutton’s Bookshop on Fifth Avenue. One of his friends of that period, Henry Cowell, introduced him to Aaron Copland with whom Bowles began to study. Parental influence forced him to resume his coursework at the University, though he was shortly to leave it again, never to return. In 1931, at age 20, he accompanied Copland to Berlin for the purpose of studying music in earnest. This he did, both with Copland in Berlin and, in Paris, with Nadia Boulanger. His experience in Europe brought him into contact with some of the greatest literary names of the time: Gertrude Stein, André Gide, Jean Cocteau, Ezra Pound. His love of independence and his self-acknowledged lack of discipline must have been a prominent element of his personality in those days. Gertrude Stein once remarked to him: “If you were typical it would be the end of our civilization. You’re a manufactured savage.”

By the mid-1930s he had returned to New York where his circle of friends and acquaintances came to include John Hammond, Joseph Losey, George Antheil, E. E. Cummings, and Georgia O’Keeffe. He focused his energies on developing a musical career, writing scores for Project 891 of the Federal Theater Project where he worked with Orson Welles. By the mid-1940s he had written scores for Saroyan’s Love’s Old Sweet Song, Philip Barry’s Liberty Jones, Lillian Hellman’s Watch on the Rhine, Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, and for the Theatre Guild’s production of Twelfth Night (starring Helen Hayes and Maurice Evans), as well as three original ballets, Yankee Clipper and Pastorelas for the American Ballet Caravan and Colloque Sentimentale for the Ballet International, a one-act opera entitled The Wind Remains, and numerous sonatas and cantatas. He was also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. His project was a musical interpretation of Garcia Lorca’s Así Que Pasen Cinco Años. 

The thirties and early forties formed a period of leftist political involvement which Bowles now terms “a bit of soft-headedness.” He joined the Communist Party at the end of 1938 and left it at about the time that Germany invaded Russia. “At the time I left the Party,” he explains, “I was not totally disillusioned; I was merely less passionate, and at the same time much busier in my own life.”

He’d met Jane Auer in New York City in 1937 and married her a year later. For several months, while he was working on his ballets, he and Jane Bowles lived in a communal house (dubbed “February House” by Anaïs Nin) run by W. H. Auden and George Davis for the support of serious artists of every description. They took rooms which had been occupied by Gypsy Rose Lee. Their co-communalists included Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, Oliver Smith, and Thomas Mann’s younger son, Golo.

It was observing the birth of his wife’s novel, Two Serious Ladies, that reawakened Bowles’ interest in fiction-writing. When Bowles went to live permanently in Tangier in 1947, to be joined by Jane Bowles the following year (the permanence of this move was determined more by chance than by actual planning), he had decided to “cut the composing cord.” Although he returned to New York on several occasions to work on Broadway projects, including Tennessee Williams’ Summer and Smoke, The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, and Sweet Bird of Youth, Garcia Lorca’s Yerma, and Jane Bowles’ In the Summer House, writing has been his primary concern for the past thirty years. During that time he has produced four novels: The Sheltering Sky, Let It Come Down, The Spider’s House, and Up Above the World; four volumes of short stories: The Delicate Prey, The Time of Friendship, Things Gone and Things Still Here, and Midnight Mass (published this year); and two travel books: Yallah! and Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands are Blue. His autobiography, Without Stopping, appeared in 1972. In 1976, City Lights published his translation of the stories of Isabelle Eberhardt under the title The Oblivion Seekers. He has been the consulting editor of Antaeus magazine since he founded it in 1970. Since living in Morocco, he has done a considerable amount of translating from the Moghrebi dialect, most notably the stories of Mohamed Mrabet. 

The following conversation was tape-recorded during the course of four visits to Mr. Bowles’ home in Tangier.

INTERVIEWER

For many people, the mention of your name evokes romantic images of the artist’s life in exotic, faraway places. Do you see yourself as a kind of consummate expatriate?

            PAUL BOWLES

I’m afraid not. I don’t see myself as a consummate anything. I don’t see myself, really, I have no ego. I didn’t find the United States particularly interesting and once I found places that were more interesting I chose to live in them, which I think makes sense.

INTERVIEWER

Was this decision to leave the United States an early one?

BOWLES

I made it at seventeen, so I guess you’d say it was an early decision. Some people absorb things more quickly than others, and I think I had a fairly good idea of what life would be like for me in the States, and I didn’t want it.

INTERVIEWER

What would it have been like?

BOWLES

Boring. There was nothing I wanted there, and once I’d moved away I saw that all I needed from the States was money. I went back there for that. I’ve never yet gone there without the definite guarantee of making money. Just going for the pleasure of it, I’ve never done.

 INTERVIEWER

Since your contact with foreign places has so obviously nurtured your writing, perhaps you would never have been a writer if you had stayed in the States.

 BOWLES

Quite possibly not. I might have gone on as a composer. I cut the composing cord in 1947, when I moved here, although, as I say, I went back several times to write scores for Broadway.

 INTERVIEWER

Did you cut the composing cord because writing and music were getting in each other’s way?

 BOWLES

No, not at all. You do them with separate parts of the brain, I think. And you derive different kinds of pleasure from them. It’s like saying, “Is it more fun to drink a glass of water when you’re thirsty or eat a good meal when you’re hungry?” I gave up composing professionally simply because I wanted to leave New York. I wanted to get out of the States.

 INTERVIEWER

Did giving up an entire career because you disliked life in America leave you feeling hostile toward the place?

 BOWLES

No, no. But when you say “America” to me, all I think of is New York City where I was born and brought up. I know that New York isn’t America; still, my image of America is New York. But there’s no hostility. I just think it’s a great shame, what has happened there. I don’t think it will ever be put right; but then again, I never expect anything to be put right. Nothing ever is. Things go on and become other things. The whole character of the country has changed beyond recognition since my childhood. One always thinks everything’s got worse—and in most respects it has—but that’s meaningless. What does one mean when one says that things are getting worse? It’s becoming more like the future, that’s all. It’s just moving ahead. The future will be infinitely “worse” than the present; and in that future, the future will be immeasurably “worse” than the future that we can see. Naturally.

 INTERVIEWER

You’re a pessimist.

 BOWLES

Well, look for yourself. You don’t have to be a pessimist to see it. There’s always the chance of a universal holocaust in which a few billion people will be burned. I don’t hope for that, but it’s what I see as a probability.

 INTERVIEWER

Can’t one also hope for things like a cure for cancer, an effective ban on nuclear arms, an upsurge of concern for the environment, and a deeper consciousness of being?

 BOWLES

You can hope for anything, of course. I expect enormous things to happen in the future, but I don’t think they’ll be things which people born in my generation will think are great and wonderful. Perhaps people born in 1975 will think otherwise. I mean, people born in 1950 think television is great.

 INTERVIEWER

Because American technology has already contributed so much to making what you regard as an inevitably undesirable future, I guess it’s understandable that living outside your indigenous culture became almost a compulsion with you.

 BOWLES

Not almost; it was a real compulsion. Even as a small child, I was always eager to get away. I remember when I was six years old, I was sent off to spend two weeks with someone—I don’t know who it was or why I was sent—and I begged to stay longer. I didn’t want to go home. Again, when I was nine and my father had pneumonia, I was sent off for a month or two and I kept writing letters asking, “Please, let me stay longer.” I didn’t want to see my parents again. I didn’t want to go back into all that.

 INTERVIEWER

In Without Stopping, you were quite frank about your feelings toward your parents in describing the fondness you had for your mother and your estrangement from your father.

 BOWLES

I think most boys are fond of their mothers. The hostility involved with my father was very real. It started on his side and became reciprocated, naturally, at an early age. I don’t know what the matter was. Maybe he didn’t want any children. I never knew the real story of why he was so angry with me, although my maternal grandmother told me it was simply because he was jealous. She said he couldn’t bear to have my mother pay attention to this third person, me. It’s probably true.

 INTERVIEWER

Did this negative relationship with your father affect your becoming a traveler and an artist?

 BOWLES

Probably, I don’t know. I’ve never really gone over it in my mind to see what caused what. I probably couldn’t. It’s obvious that a shut-in childhood is likely to make an introverted child and that an introverted child is more likely to be “artistic.”

 INTERVIEWER

Your parents weren’t enthusiastic about your going off to Europe when you were only eighteen?

BOWLES

It wasn’t a matter of their being enthusiastic or not, inasmuch as they knew nothing about my going. I had the money for my passage to France, plus about twenty-five dollars.

 INTERVIEWER

Were you running away from something?

 BOWLES

No, I was running toward something, although I didn’t know what at the time.