3/30/2020 Paul Bowles Trusted the Sheltering Sky, Even When It Scorched - The New York Times

BOOKS

Trusting in the Sheltering Sky, Even

When It Scorched
By Dwight Garner

Aug. 30, 2009

See how this article appeared when it was originally published on

NYTimes.com.

Paul Bowles’s first and best novel, “The Sheltering Sky,” published 60 years ago this fall,
was a book few saw coming. Its author was better known as a composer. Doubleday, the
publisher that had paid Bowles an advance, rejected the manuscript, telling him it was
not a novel. “If it isn’t a novel,” Bowles said angrily, “I don’t know what it is.”

When the book appeared, in fall 1949 (it was finally issued by New Directions), no one
else knew quite what to make of it either. But they knew this bleak, spare story about a
young couple from New York who drift from city to city in the North African desert
marked the arrival of a different kind of American voice.

Tennessee Williams reviewed “The Sheltering Sky” in The New York Times Book Review
and wrote that “it brings the reader into sudden, startling communion with a talent of
true maturity and sophistication of a sort that I had begun to fear was to be found
nowadays only among the insurgent novelists of France, such as Jean Genet and Albert
Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre.”

Norman Mailer caught the sinister undertones in Bowles’s work, writing in

“Advertisements for Myself”: “Paul Bowles opened the world of Hip. He let in the
murder, the drugs, the incest, the death of the Square ... the call of the orgy, the end of
civilization.” This fall will mark a double anniversary of sorts for Bowles, not just the 60th
anniversary of “The Sheltering Sky” but the 10th anniversary of his death, at 88, in 1999.

You can’t help wishing he’d lived longer, if only so we’d have known what Bowles a
longtime resident of the northern Moroccan city of Tangier and the writer who did
perhaps more than any other in the last century to introduce the Arab world to
Americans would have made of the events of Sept. 11.

Bowles was an elusive figure throughout his long life, and he remains nearly as elusive
now. But his influence continues to be felt deeply. A decade after his death his
achievements as a writer, as well as the flaws that plague even his best work, are worth

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re-examining.

Bowles was born in Queens in 1910 and graduated from Jamaica High School. His father,
a stern disciplinarian, was a dentist. Bowles began composing music before he was 10.
When he was 16 he began publishing poetry in transition, the English-language literary
and art magazine from Paris.

In 1928 Bowles enrolled at the University of Virginia, but he wasn’t happy there. The urge
to travel had already infected him. According to his biographer, Virginia Spencer Carr,
whose 2004 “Paul Bowles: A Life” was reissued in paperback early this year by
Northwestern University Press, he sat in his room one day as a freshman in
Charlottesville and flipped a coin. Heads, he would leave for Europe as soon as possible.
Tails, he would take an overdose of pills and leave no note. The coin came up heads.

Bowles was charming and attractive, and he quickly seemed to meet, either at home or
abroad, everyone who mattered, including Gertrude Stein and Christopher Isherwood.
The composer Aaron Copland took him under his wing and helped his music career.
Bowles was bisexual, and the two also had a sexual involvement.

In 1938 Bowles married the mercurial Jane Auer, who as Jane Bowles published her only
novel, “Two Serious Ladies,” five years later. He was envious of her freedom: she needed
only a typewriter to work during their travels; he required a piano. He too soon began to
write, publishing the short stories that led to his contract for “The Sheltering Sky.”

Paul Bowles near his home in Tangier in 1987.

Ulf Andersen/Getty Images

The glamorous couple lived like exotic cats, together but separate. Jane Bowles was also
bisexual, and took female lovers. “We knew that we loved each other no matter who else
might be in our lives,” Paul Bowles said. Among her nicknames for him were Bupple and
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Gloompot.

Gloompot is not a bad description of the author of “The Sheltering Sky.” Though
personable, Bowles was also famously aloof, and his qualities spilled over into those of
the novel’s protagonist, Port Moresby. Moresby was not the kind of person to feel
excitement. He was the kind of person, Bowles writes, who “was perturbed to witness his
own interior excitement.”

Bowles’s demeanor did not always win him admirers. Gertrude Stein reportedly called
him the “most spoiled, insensitive and self-indulgent young man” she’d ever met. Bowles
never seemed to mind criticism, personal or professional. “No one can ever heap enough
insults on me to suit my taste,” he once said. “I think we all really thrive on hostility,
because it’s the most intense kind of massage the ego can undergo. Other people’s
indifference is the only horror.”

Rereading “The Sheltering Sky” today is to be reminded of its dark, largely sublimated
power; from its first pages the novel is like a pile of kindling to which a match is about to
be applied. Bowles’s sun-baked prose, while never showy, is consistently and ruthlessly
evocative. North African vegetation is described as “a tortured scrub of hard shells and
stiff hairy spines that covered the earth like an excrescence of hatred.”

His characters may be, to some degree, indistinct, but they are tough and savvy and true
to themselves. It was audacious of Bowles to kill off Moresby long before the story’s end.

The book’s drawbacks are readily apparent. He turns the characters he doesn’t admire
into grotesque caricatures, and the world he creates can be both pretentious and
portentous, devoid of humor. “The Sheltering Sky” is as alive today, however, as it was in
1949.

Many intellectuals had no time for Bowles, who claimed to write largely from his
subconscious. “I’ve never been a thinking person,” he told a Paris Review interviewer.
“One part of my mind was doing the writing, and God knows what the other part was
doing. I suppose it was bulldozing the subconscious, dredging up ooze.”

When he was stuck on an important scene in “The Sheltering Sky,” Bowles turned to
hashish, which helped him keep writing. Bowles would come to be known for his
cannabis use, which was one of the things that led Beat writers like Allen Ginsberg and
William Burroughs to Tangier in the 1950s and ’60s.

Bowles had his issues with the Beats. “Every day one sees more beards and filthy blue
jeans, and the girls look like escapees from lunatic asylums,” he wrote in 1961.

Bowles’s career had many tentacles. He not only composed music but also, as a
translator, gave the title “No Exit” to Sartre’s play “Huis Clos.” In the late 1950s he spent
months recording Morocco’s indigenous music.

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Jane Bowles died in 1973, at 56. Bowles himself lived another quarter-century, mostly in
Morocco, and he ultimately published dozens of books, including novels, poems, books of
stories and translations. He remained distant, just out of sight. He mostly turned down
his editors’ requests to do book tours or appear on television.

Bowles’s best work remained dark. “If I stress the various facets of unhappiness, it is
because I believe unhappiness should be studied very carefully,” he told an interviewer.
“This certainly is no time for anyone to pretend to be happy, or to put his unhappiness
away in the dark. You must watch your universe as it cracks above your head.”

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