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Paul Bowles

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Paul Frederic Bowles (December 30, 1910 – November 18, 1999) was an American composer, author, translator, and expatriate.

Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making various trips to Paris in the 1930s. He studied music with Aaron Copland and in New York wrote music for various theatrical productions, as well as other compositions. He achieved critical and popular success with the publication in 1949 of his first novel The Sheltering Sky, set in what was known as French North Africa, which he had visited in 1931.

In 1947 Bowles settled in Tangier, Morocco, and his wife, Jane Bowles followed in 1948. Except for winters spent in Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) during the early 1950s, Tangier was his home for the remainder of his life.

Paul Bowles died in 1999 at the age of 88 and is buried in upstate New York.

Life

Family and education

Paul Bowles was born in Jamaica, Queens, New York City the only child of Rena (née Rennewisser) and Claude Dietz Bowles, a dentist. His childhood was materially comfortable, but Bowles senior was a cold and domineering parent, opposed to any form of play or entertainment, feared by both his son and wife. According to family legend, he had tried to kill his newborn son by leaving him exposed on a window-ledge during a snowstorm; the story may not be true, but Bowles believed it was, and it encapsulates his relationship with his father. Such warmth as there was in his life as a child came from his mother, who read Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe to him - it was to the latter that he later attributed his own desire to write stories like "The Delicate Prey," "A Distant Episode," and "Pages from Cold Point"

Bowles could read by the time he was 3 and within the year was writing stories. Soon, he wrote surrealistic poetry and music. In 1922, at age 11, he bought his first book of poetry, Arthur Waley's A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems, and at age seventeen one of his poems, "Spire Song," was accepted for publication in the twelfth volume of "Transition", a literary journal based in Paris that served as a forum for some of the greatest proponents of modernism — Djuna Barnes, James Joyce, Paul Éluard, Gertrude Stein and others. His interest in music also dated from his childhood, when his father bought a phonograph and classic records (Bowles was interested in jazz but such records were forbidden in the house). His family bought a piano and the young Bowles studied musical theory, singing, and piano. When he was 15 a performance of Stravinsky's The Firebird at Carnegie Hall made a profound impression: "Hearing The Firebird made me determined to continue improvising on the piano when my father was out of the house, and to notate my own music with an increasing degree of knowing that I had happened upon a new and exciting mode of expression."

Bowles entered the University of Virginia in 1928, where his interests included T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Prokofiev, Duke Ellington, Gregorian chants, and the blues. He also heard music by George Antheil and Henry Cowell. In April 1929 he dropped out without informing his parents and sailed with a one-way ticket for Paris and no intention of ever returning - not, he said later, running away, but "running toward something, although I didn't know what at the time."] Nevertheless, by July he returned to New York and took a job at Duttons Bookshop in Manhattan, where he began work on an unfinished book of fiction, Without Stopping (not to be confused with his later autobiography of the same title). At the insistence of his parents he returned to the University of Virginia, but left after one semester to go back to Paris with Aaron Copland, with whom he had been studying composition.

1931-1949: France and New York

In France, Bowles became a part of Gertrude Stein's literary and artistic circle. On her advice he made his first visit to Tangier with Copland that summer, where, entranced by North African life and a society tolerant of homosexuality, Bowles produced his first musical compositions. From there he traveled to Berlin, where he met Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood, before returning to North Africa the next year to travel throughout other parts of Morocco, the Sahara, Algeria and Tunisia.

In 1937 he returned to New York, and over the next decade established a solid reputation as a composer, collaborating with Orson Welles, Tennessee Williams and others on music for stage productions as well as orchestral pieces. In 1938 he married the author and playwright Jane Auer. It was an unconventional marriage: their intimate relationships were with people of their own sex, but they maintained close ties to each other.. After a brief sojourn in France they were prominent among the literary figures of New York throughout the 1940s, with Paul working under Virgil Thomson as a music critic at the New York Herald Tribune. His light opera The Wind Remains, based on a poem by García Lorca, was performed in 1943 with choreography by Merce Cunningham and conducted by Leonard Bernstein.

In 1945 he unexpectedly began writing prose again, beginning with a few short stories including A Distant Episode. His wife Jane, he said, was the main influence upon his taking up fiction as an adult, and he did not begin writing the tales for which he was later known until after Jane had published her first novel, Two Serious Ladies (1943). He also translated Jorge Luis Borges at this time, and his translation Sartre's play No Exit (Huis-clos), directed by John Huston, won a Drama Critic's Award. The subsequent year, he received an advance for a novel, and began writing The Sheltering Sky. Published in 1949, the book quickly rose to the New York Times best-seller list.

Tangier

In 1947 Bowles moved permanently to Tangier, and his wife Jane followed him there in 1948. Here he concentrated on writing novels, short stories and travel pieces, and also wrote incidental music for nine plays presented by the American School of Tangier. The Bowleses became fixtures of the American and European expatriate scene in Tangier. Visitors included Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal. The Beat writers Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Gregory Corso followed in the mid-1950s and early 1960s. In 1951, Bowles was introduced to the Master Musicians of Jajouka, having first heard the musicians when he and Brion Gysin attended a festival or moussem at Sidi Kacem. Bowles' continued association with the Master Musicians of Jajouka and their hereditary leader Bachir Attar is described in Paul Bowles' book, a diary entitled Days: A Tangier Journal. In 1952, Bowles bought the tiny island of Taprobane, off the coast of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where he wrote much of his novel The Spider's House, returning to Tangier in the warmer months.

In 1961, Bowles began tape-recording and translating Moroccan authors and story-tellers including stories by Mohamed Choukri, Ahmed Yacoubi, Larbi Layachi (under the pseudonym Driss ben Hamed Charhadi), and Mohammed Mrabet. Oddly, Bowles spent one semester at the English Department of the San Fernando Valley State College, (now California State University, Northridge) in 1968, lecturing on existentialism and the novel. Most of the time however, he remained in Tangier with brief interludes overseas. He also translated short stories and diary entries by Swiss adventurer and writer Isabelle Eberhardt (The Oblivion Seekers).

Paul Bowles also was a music ethnologist. He was fascinated by Moroccan traditional music, including the jilala, gnaoua, aissaoua, hamadcha, and others.

Later years

After the death of Jane Bowles in 1973 in Málaga, Spain, Bowles continued to live in Tangier, writing and receiving visitors to his modest apartment. He made a cameo appearance in the Bernardo Bertolucci film adaptation of his novel The Sheltering Sky in 1990. In 1991 Paul Bowles was awarded the Rea Award for the Short Story.

In 1995 Paul Bowles made a rare and final return to New York for a festival celebrating his music at the Lincoln Center and a symposium and interview held at the New School for Social Research.

Bowles was interviewed by Paul Theroux in 1994, documented in the last chapter of Theroux's travel book, The Pillars of Hercules. Bowles' last known interview, conducted by Stephen Morison, Jr., appeared in "Poets & Writers Magazine," July/August 1999.

Bowles died of heart failure at the Italian Hospital in Tangier on November 18, 1999 at the age of 88. He had been ill for some time with respiratory problems. The following day a full-page obituary appeared in The New York Times. Although he had lived in Morocco for 52 years, he was buried in Lakemont, New York, next to the graves of his parents and grandparents.

Achievement

In an essay written in 1979 Gore Vidal ranked Paul Bowles' short stories "among the best ever written by an American," praising his ability to evoke "the horrors that lie beneath". Bowles's writing, "mart, ironic, precise", is shot through with violence, sensuality and the clash of irreconcilable cultures: his most famous novel, "The Sheltering Sky" concerns an American woman transformed through becoming the sex-slave of a desert sheikh (Bertolucci's film version brings out the full awfulness of the underlying concept); his famous short story "A Distant Episode" concerns a German professor of linguistics who has his tongue cut out by desert tribesmen - the professor is last seen capering and gibbering in front of some French soldiers who might rescue him, if only he could make them understand. Lack of self-knowledge, whether the professor's cultural arrogance or Kit Porter's repressed sexual desires, erupt into violence, despair, and a final revelation of isolation.

Bowles has been anthologised as a gay writer on the strength of "Pages From Cold Point"; one of his most famous short stories, it revolves around a boy's seduction of his father. Bowles regarded being typecast as a "gay" writer both absurd and irrelevant to most of his life.

His music, in contrast, is "as full of light as the fiction of dark...almost as if the composer were a totally different person from the writer." During the early 1930s he studied composition (intermittently) with Aaron Copland; his music from this period "is reminiscent of Satie and Poulenc." Returning to New York in the mid-30s, he built a successful career as a composer of incidental music for the theatre, "show exceptional skill and imagination in capturing the mood, emotion, and ambience of each play to which he was assigned." In his own words, incidental music allowed Bowles to present "climaxless music, hypnotic music in one of the exact senses of the word, in that it makes its effect without the spectator being made aware of it.” At the same time he continued to write concert music, his style assimilating some of the melodic, rhythmic, and other stylistic elements of African, Mexican, and Central American music.

Selected writings

Bowles published fourteen short story collections, three volumes of poetry, numerous translations, travel articles and an autobiography.

Music

  • 1931 - Sonata for Oboe and Clarinet
  • 1937 - Yankee Clipper, ballet
  • 1941 - Pastorela, ballet
  • 1944 - The Glass Managerie, play
  • 1946 - Cabin, words by Tennessee Williams, music by Paul Bowles
  • 1946 - Concerto for Two Pianos
  • 1947 - Sonata for Two Pianos
  • 1949 - Night Waltz
  • 1953 - A Picnic Cantata
  • 1955 - Yerma, opera
  • 1979 - Blue Mountain ballads, words by Tennessee Williams, music by Paul Bowles.
  • 1992 - Black Star at the Point of Darkness
  • 1995 - Baptism of Solitude

Novels

Collections of short stories

  • 1950 - A Little Stone
  • 1950 - The Delicate Prey and Other Stories
  • 1959 - The Hours after Noon
  • 1962 - A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard
  • 1967 - The Time of Friendship
  • 1968 - Pages from Cold Point and Other Stories
  • 1975 - Three Tales
  • 1977 - Things Gone & Things Still Here
  • 1979 - Collected Stories, 1939-1976
  • 1982 - Points in Time
  • 1983 - Midnight Mass
  • 1988 - Unwelcome Words: Seven Stories

Poetry

  • 1933 - Two Poems
  • 1968 - Scenes
  • 1972 - The Thicket of Spring
  • 1981 - Next to nothing: collected poems, 1926-1977

Translations

Among his life's accomplishments were translations of stories from the oral tradition of native Moroccan storytellers including Mohammed Mrabet, Driss Ben Hamed Charhadi (Larbi Layachi), Abdeslam Boulaich, and Ahmed Yacoubi. He also translated the Moroccan author Mohamed Choukri.

Travel pieces and autobiography

  • 1957 - Yallah, text by Paul Bowles, photos by Peter W. Haeberlin
  • 1963 - Their Heads are Green, travel
  • 1972 - Without stopping; an autobiography
  • 1995 - In Touch - The letters of Paul Bowles, edited by Jeffrey Miller

Film appearances and interviews

  • Paul Bowles in Morocco (1970), produced and directed by Gary Conklin
  • In 1990 Bernardo Bertolucci adapted The Sheltering Sky into a film in which Bowles has a cameo role and provides partial narration.
  • "Let It Come Down" 1998, Requisite Productions, Zeitgeist Films, pub. 72 minutes, not rated. - this film is likely the definitive portrait of the author late in life. Directed by Jennifer Baichwal, includes footage of the final meeting between Bowles, William Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg which took place in 1995 in New York.

Posthumous collections

  • 2002 - The Sheltering Sky, Let It Come Down, The Spider's House (Daniel Halpern, ed. Library of America) ISBN 1-931082-19-7
  • 2002 - Collected Stories and Later Writings (Daniel Halpern, ed. Library of America) ISBN 1-931082-20-0

Sources

  1. Virginian Spencer Carr, University of Delaware Special Collections: Paul Bowles: An Introduction
  2. New York Times obituary for Paul Bowles, 19 November 1999
  3. Allen Hibbard, "Paul Bowles: A Biographical Essay"
  4. Virginian Spencer Carr, University of Delaware Special Collections: Paul Bowles: An Introduction
  5. New York Times obituary for Paul Bowles, 19 November 1999
  6. New York Times obituary for Paul Bowles, 19 November 1999
  7. BBC World: obituary for Paul Bowles, 19 November 1999
  8. Holland, Patrick (2002). "Bowles, Paul", glbtq: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture. Retrieved June 12, 2008.
  9. Carr.
  10. Gore Vidal, Introduction to The Collected Stories, 1979, reprinted 1997.
  11. Bronski, review of "Paul Bowles: Novels and Collected Stories, vols. 1 & 2"
  12. Philip Ramey, "A Talk With Paul Bowles"
  13. Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno, "An Invisible Spectator: A Biography of Paul Bowles", (1999)
  14. Paul Bowles, Biographical Dictionary of American Composers.

External links

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