venerdì 2 luglio 2010

Paul Bowles: Profile


FROM TELEGRAPH
Barry Miles celebrates the surreal, ecstatic life of the writer and composer Paul Bowles, a friend of Gertrude Stein, Orson Welles and Gertrude Stein

By Barry Miles

Paul Bowles’s life is the story of 20th-century American modernism. He knew everyone from Gertrude Stein and Marcel Duchamp to Francis Bacon and James Baldwin; pre-war expatriates in New York, Paris and Berlin and the post-war Beat Generation in Tangier. His life divides into two distinct halves: 1910 until 1947, during which he was primarily a composer, writing music for Broadway plays for Orson Welles, Tennessee Williams, William Saroyan and other incidental music, travelling extensively and engaging in a frenetic social life with a largely gay group of writers and composers. And from 1947 until his death in 1999, when he settled in Tangier and concentrated on writing four full-length novels and many collections of short stories, poems and translations. Travels: Collected Writings, 1950-93 has just been published in his centenary year.

Born on December 30 1910, Paul Frederic Bowles grew up in Jamaica, Long Island. His upbringing was very strict; he was not allowed to speak to or play with other children, and instead retreated into his own world of drawing and writing: he could read at the age of two and wrote his first two-page story when he was three. His mother taught him how to empty his mind in order to enter a blank state. This was how she shut out the outside world and her authoritarian husband and how Bowles developed his internal life.

The emotional distance Bowles set up between himself and his parents persisted throughout his life in his relations with other people. Reserve, dissociation and isolation are the underlying subjects of most of his work. His characters are frequently detached, unable to express their emotions or connect with other people. Like Bowles, they are passive, their actions determined by fate.

By the time he was nine years old Bowles had written a number of small piano pieces. He had his own column in the school magazine, the Oracle, and between 1926 and 1928 he published more than 40 pieces there, including several translations from French. He was very attracted to Modernism and Surrealism and practised automatic writing. He sent the results to Transition, which published several of his poems. He was just 17 years old and already sharing pages with James Joyce, Stein and André Breton.

In 1929, Aaron Copland became his music teacher. Copland was notorious for seducing his young male students. They became lovers and Bowles travelled with him to Berlin where Christopher Isherwood used his name for Sally Bowles in Goodbye to Berlin, which later became Cabaret. They visited Stein who said that he and Copland should go to Tangier, which they did.

Bowles married the writer Jane Auer in 1938 and they travelled in Central America and France. Friends were puzzled by the match because although Paul had taken both male and female lovers, Jane had been exclusively lesbian all her life. Paul and Jane were great friends, always joking and chattering together. However, they usually chose sexual partners with whom little communication was possible: Jane’s longest relationship was with Cherifa, a woman from the market in Tangier who spoke only Moghrebi, and Paul’s post-war lovers were illiterate Arab boys.

After travels in Central America, Bowles translated Sartre’s No Exit, the first of a long series of translations from French, Spanish and Moghrebi, which continued for the rest of his life. He became the music critic for the New York Herald Tribune and began publishing short stories.

Paul was diffident and removed in the extreme, often appearing callous towards his wife. Jane, a spoiled rich girl who never had to work, was forever causing scenes and having tantrums, and fretting over her work, which came very slowly. Her novel Two Serious Ladies, published in 1943, inspired Bowles to also write a novel.

The memory of Tangier haunted him. In 1947, with an advance for a novel, “I got on a Fifth Avenue bus one day to go uptown. By the time we had arrived at Madison Square I knew what would be in the novel and what I would call it… It would take place in the Sahara, where there was only the sky, and so it would be The Sheltering Sky.” By the time he reached midtown, he had made all the important decisions about this, his most celebrated book. Bernardo Bertolucci’s Bafta award-winning film of The Sheltering Sky was released in 1989, and featured Bowles himself as the narrator.

He left for Morocco, travelling with his boyfriend. Jane followed seven months later with her girlfriend. In Tangier they had separate apartments in the same building. Paul liked majoun, a form of hashish candy, and kif, and stayed up late, stoned, smoking with friends. Jane could not stand any form of cannabis, but was a heavy drinker; the probable cause of her stroke in 1957. When faced with the tricky prospect of describing the death of his protagonist, as a confirmed Surrealist, Bowles handed the problem over to his subconscious and took a large amount of majoun: “The majoun provided a solution totally unlike whatever I should have found without it.”

Bowles’s dedication to his third book, The Delicate Prey, read: “For my mother, who first read me the stories of Poe.” There is a sense of dread in his writing, that something terrible is about to happen, there is no safety anywhere, no security, each of us is essentially alone. Tennessee Williams, visiting Tangier at a time of political unrest, said: “It wasn’t the Arabs I was afraid of while I was in Tangier, it was Paul Bowles, whose chilling stories filled me with horror.”

Most of his characters were thinly veiled portraits. The Arab boy in The Spider’s House is based on Ahmed Yacoubi, Bowles's lover for a decade. Bowles: “As much as I was capable of loving anyone, I loved Yacoubi with an intense passion heretofore unknown to me. With Yacoubi, it was never ‘just sex’.” What constituted “just sex” for Bowles he never made clear, but he did speak of his love of being beaten. At school he goaded his fellow pupils into fighting with him. He always took punishment “stoically and ecstatically”. This became a feature of his adult relationships: “Being beaten,” he wrote to a friend, “[is] a vice. But how enjoyable. How exquisite. Biding myself with the pain, all the more enjoyable than misbehaving with some girl or man.”

Based largely on the publication of A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard and M’Hashish, Bowles found that his writing on the use of kif and majoun had made him a cult figure in the Sixties counter-culture. Hippies turned up at his door.

On May 4 1973, Jane Bowles died after years of ill health and rumours spread around Tangier that her lover Cherifa had poisoned her. Bowles himself was criticised for not getting better medical advice. He had been very passive, simply doing what the doctor advised without getting other medical opinions.

His fame grew. The Rolling Stones visited and he became an essential stop on the tour of north Africa. Film crews arrived from Sweden and France, Germany and Holland – as well as from the United States and Britain. Then in 1997 his health began to fail. He died following a heart attack on November 18 1999.

Barry Miles’s London Calling: a Countercultural History of London Since 1945 is published by Atlantic at £25

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