Paul Bowles - The Stories of Paul Bowles

PAUL BOWLESS ruthless unsentimentality and cruel wit are not for everyone. Some readers enjoy a liberated voice in his work. One acquaintance of mine says he has a piece missing. Ordinary human sympathy is the piece I think she means. Bowless enthusiasts are glad to trade sympathy for the absence of ordinariness. Nobody denies he could cast a spell.

At his best, said Time magazine, Bowles has no peer. Gore Vidal wrote that Bowles has had few equals in the second half of the twentieth century. These claims seem a bit defiant, almost inviting argument.

The spirit of literary fashion, which goeth where it listeth, is presently more or less by Bowless side. He was colorful and exotic, toughminded to the point of being mean, hip, apparently gay, and leftist in politics. A contemporary and associate of the Beat writers, Bowles shared their vitalist spirit and libertine ways.

It is difficult to remember or imagine now how much ridicule and derision the Bohemian poets and writers of the 1950s had to endure. World War IIvintage feature writers liked to invent anecdotes in which celebrities such as Hemingway and Dame Edith Sitwell amusingly insulted Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and other ragged, supposedly unwashed Americans. Bowles, expatriate and cosmopolitan, could afford to leave the fifties Media Goon Squad an ocean away, while offering exotic bouts of refuge to persecuted colleagues. Incidentally, aspiring Bohemians might study in the career of Paul Bowles how having a lot of money equips a young person for life in the counterculture.

As an American in Tangier, Bowles gave the red-baiters of the McCarthy period a miss as well. He actually joined the Communist Party for a while in the thirties, not the only fastidious socialite and misanthrope to embrace the party of the toileers in those days. In his autobiography, Without Stopping, Bowles tells us a little about the partys shortcomings.

The Communist Party USA, it seemed to me, could serve only as a harassing instrument; all attempts to give it the air of an American institution were doomed to failure. It was legal and thus absurd; for it to have meaning it would have to be driven underground. I had no faith in any political procedure save conspiracy.

Covertness might also spare a man of Bowless sensitivity and reserve long hours of odious camaraderie.

Bowless greatest stories are contained in this volume, which represents the work of forty years. There is juvenilia, some of it patently novice work, along with experimentation that occasionally misfires and some late epistolary stories describing the dreary postcolonial Tangier in which he was a long-lingering Euro-American. These later pieces cast an interesting light on Bowless fascination for dramatic and bizarre misfortune. Tangier in the sixties was a dangerous place for the remittance ladies and gentlemen who vainly hoped to retain a privileged pukkasahib status. The nominally socialized Islamic monarchy had no inclination to extend them one.

Bowles was a contradictory and eccentric figure, possessed nonetheless of an old-fashioned reticence and discretion. His autobiography is a fine chronicle of the postwar musical and literary world. In it and other autobiographical writings, he includes characters ranging from his good friend Gertrude Stein to Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones (utterly unheard of by him, he tells us, on introduction). But although he is quite commonly associated with a gay milieu and although many of his stories present an intense and undeniable sexual charge, he never chose to publicly review his love life or encourage speculation about it. (He did once ask an editor, appearing genuinely puzzled, why so many people seemed to assume he was gay.) In addressing the stories in this collection it seems appropriate simply to follow Paul Bowless preferences and consider his fiction as he himself presented it.

The Delicate Prey, his great Moroccan story of the 1940s, is included here and represents all the elements upon which Bowless reputation rests. It is also one of the most traditionally structured of his short prose works. Perfect in sound and detail, The Delicate Prey seems to gather itself out of dark magic, half-recognized music echoing over the reaches of a space both fearful and lyrical. Its lovely sinister light winks from a quarter where no light belongs.

Only when the story is well under way does the reader recognize the melody or identify the light. Like the terrifying magician in Eliots The Waste Land, Bowless narrative is about to show us fear in a handful of dust. Fear is the glimmering quality we have been glimpsing from the start. The light marks the edge of reasonable expectation, the borders of dread. They have been there, at hand, all along. And they have been much closer than we had allowed ourselves to suspect.

Three Filali merchants, trading in the Sahara, determine that the time has come for their setting out across dangerous territory frequented by bandits.

Two of the merchants are brothers with a taste for religious speculation; they pass their free time at the market discussing the sura and the compass of the law. The youngest merchant is their nephew. His speculative interest follows his romantic chances with the dark-skinned girls of the quartier. Hes a handsome youth and popular there. Hence hes not pleased to hear hell be exchanging the carpeted tents of the women for weeks of desert encampments.

Setting out across the desert, the three are accosted by a man of the Moungari tribe. The Moungari asks to travel in their company. The Filali merchants agree.

By a ruse, the Moungari lures the brothers to their death in an ambush. Their nephew becomes his prisoner. At just this point in the story, the margins of safety, reason, and reasonableness are passed. The unfortunate prisoner knows to expect anything under the terrible sky of this wilderness to which he has been carried by treachery. Bowless reader comes to the same realization and, insofar as such a thing is possible, shares the characters fate. To thrust the fortunes of a fictive creation upon the reader in the most intense manner possible is, of course, the fundamental goal of fiction. In this matchless, classic story, with its lovely structure and delectable sound, Bowles does it as well as it has ever been done. Similarly, in the story A Distant Episode, the reader is compelled to share both the foolishness and insight of the singularly luckless European professor.

Whatever part Paul Bowles may have given away to the competition, it was not psychological acuity. And perhaps because of his sure head for interior conditions, no other writer I can think of writes so well about the effects of narcosis. In no others work may we experience so acutely the burrowing of paranoias worm, the comic yet distantly disturbing non sequitur, the hopelessly complexifying suspicion.

Many American writers have attempted to render the high state on the page. Few did it well and Jack Kerouac was not one of them. William Burroughs could turn the pharmacopoeia into fiendish comedy, broad burlesque. But in stories like He of the Assembly, we can follow the adept into the resinous groves in a manner unmatched. Or, as they might say at the Cafe of the Two Bridges, we may savor the delights.

Bowles died in 1999 and the wonderful, dangerous world to which he attached himself is gone. He was an artist of two disciplines, a cosmopolite who bridged the worlds of Gertrude Stein and Allen Ginsberg while being a friend of both. A wide range of sensibilities are dealt with in these stories, an entire half century of conflicting assumptions variously challenged.

As the new century casts up its artistic idioms and heroic modes, deeply original and adventurous work like Bowless will help us find our way back toward the deserts over which we have passed and lead us back again. We shall use his stories to connect milieus of time and place and also enthusiasmsartistic, political, eroticthat are already beginning to lose a common language.