NARRATIVEMAGAZINE.

COM

Reconsidering
Paul Bowles
A N E S S AY

BY TOBIAS WOLFF

published a novel
I N 19 49 PAU L B OW L E S

called The Sheltering Sky. It was one of the

most original, even visionary, works of
MARION ETTLINGER

fiction to appear in the twentieth century.

The main actors, Port Moresby and his wife, Kit, are
refugees of a sort peculiar to our age: affluent drifters
Tobias Wolff is the
dispossessed spiritually rather than materially, severed
author of two celebrated
memoirs, This Boy’s Life from the possibility of believing that they can be safe
and In Pharaoh’s Army. anywhere or, consequently, be anywhere at home. In the
His novella The Barracks
course of their wanderings they visit North Africa, and
Thief received the PEN/
Faulkner Award for this proves a mistake. In the silent emptiness of desert
Fiction in 1985. Wolff and sky, the knowledge of their absolute isolation from
has written two novels
other people comes upon them so violently that it sub-
and several collections
of stories considered verts their belief in their own reality and in the reality of
contemporary classics, their connection to each other.
including Our Story
Doubting this connection is, of course, prelude to
Begins: New and Selected
Stories. He teaches at betraying it. And betray it they do, in every way, until be-
Stanford University. trayal grows instinctual. Kit abandons Port in his dying
hour and puts herself in the hands of another man. “What
delight,” she thinks, “not to be responsible . . . !” Later she
becomes the concubine of an Arab named Belgassim,
and in her complete subjugation Kit finds “mindless

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contentment, a state which she quickly grew to take for granted, and then, like a
drug, to find indispensable.”
When Belgassim loses interest in her, Kit leaves his house in search of someone
like him, realizing that “any creature even remotely resembling Belgassim would
please her quite as much as Belgassim himself.” The identity of others has ceased
to have any meaning for Kit except in their ability to dominate her, because she can
define her own identity only in the experience of being dominated. When the French
colonial authorities eventually find her, she carries no identification and does not
answer to her name.
The Sheltering Sky has been called nightmarish; that description lets us off the
hook too easily because it implies a fear of the unreal. The power of this novel lies
precisely in the reality of what it makes us fear—the sweetness of that voice in each
of us that sings the delight of not being responsible, of refusing the labor of choice
by which we create ourselves. This appetite for the “mindless contentment” of
self-surrender is nothing new in our makeup, but we modern folk have devised
for ourselves a singularly rich offering of oppressions to satisfy it. We all know the
menu: totalitarian ideologies, totalitarian theologies, drugs, guru worship, mass-
market advertising, television addiction, pornography, and, just so we won’t feel too
bad about any of this, determinist psychologies and sociologies that speak of us as
products with only a culturally induced illusion of free will.
Our failing resistance to these attacks on our sense of worth as individuals is the
central drama of our time. The Sheltering Sky records the struggle with complete
fidelity, impassively noting every step in the process of surrender. Like The Sun Also
Rises and Under the Volcano, Bowles’s novel enacts a crucial historical moment with
such clarity that it has become part of our picture of that moment.

B O W L E S F O L L O W E D The Sheltering Sky with a collection of stories. The Delicate

Prey, published in 1950, extends the perceptions of the novel into even more exotic
and disturbing terrain. Here the characters no longer simply acquiesce in their own
destruction; they seem to be in search of it. In “A Distant Episode,” a professor of
linguistics, presumably an American, travels to a remote Saharan town where he
has no connection to anyone—only a vague memory of a café owner with whom he’d
become acquainted when he passed through some ten years earlier. He has no real
reason for going there; he simply “decides” to. Like the Moresbys’ decision to visit
the same area, it works out very much to his disadvantage.

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The café owner is dead. The Professor strikes up a conversation with the waiter
who gives him the news, though the man is openly contemptuous of him. Unwilling
to lose the waiter’s company, the Professor hires him to broker the purchase from a
hostile nomadic tribe of some boxes made from camel udders. This involves accom-
panying the waiter on a perilous trek by moonlight to the lip of a cliff. They pass a
corpse and are attacked by a wild dog, but the Professor keeps going. He doesn’t trust
the waiter, he knows that the tribe is dangerous; but in spite of his suspicion and
fear, he finds himself powerless to turn back. The waiter abandons him at the cliff’s
edge, and still the Professor goes on, descending the cliff alone to the desert floor,
where the tribesmen seize him and cut out his tongue and dress him in a tinkling
suit of flattened tin cans, in which costume he is taught to entertain them by jump-
ing up and down and waving his arms. The curiosity seeker has himself become a
curiosity, comically and ineffectually armored in the detritus of his own culture.
The story is a tour de force, an ominous parable of the weakening of the indi-
vidual will to survive. The other stories in the book, mostly set in Morocco and Latin
America, are equally unsettling. The Delicate Prey is in fact one of the most pro-
found, beautifully wrought, and haunting collections in our literature. It was—like
The Sheltering Sky—celebrated as a masterwork at the time of its appearance.
In the thirty-five years between The Delicate Prey and his death in 1999, Bowles
published some twenty books—books of stories, books of poems, travel books, trans-
lations, novels, and autobiographies. He also did duty as a modern scribe, writing
down the life stories of interesting but unlettered men and publishing them under
their names as well as his, a practice that, if generally observed, would leave many
novelists with nothing whatever to call their own.
And what books they are! The novels and stories come to you from every direc-
tion, told from the points of view of men, women, Europeans, Arabs, priests, lunatics,
murderers, merchants, beggars, animals, and spirits—occasionally several of these
presented in the same story, a virtuoso mingling of perspectives that has become a
characteristic flourish in the Bowles signature. His talents are at once austere, witty,
violent, and sensuous. They move with the inevitability of myth. His language has a
purity of line, a poise and authority entirely its own, capable of instantly modulating
from farce to horror without a ruffle and without giving any signal of delight in itself.
It never goes on parade.
In short, Bowles proved himself, on the evidence of an extraordinary body of
writing, to be one of our most serious and authentic literary artists. But until the

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1970s, when Black Sparrow and Ecco Press began to reissue his works, many of his
finest books—including the two acknowledged classics I have discussed here—were
out of print altogether.
In 1982 Bowles published Points in Time, a nervy, surprising, completely original
performance, so original that it can’t be referred to any previous category of fiction
or nonfiction. Divided into eleven sections, or movements, the book presents a series
of legends, snatches of popular song, incidents from history, writings from ancient
explorers, all woven together with invented stories and interludes of pure descrip-
tion. Through these changing forms, each with its own angle of vision, Bowles
creates an impression of the actions of man and nature upon the land that is now
Morocco. The unpredictable structure of the book gives you no chance for a drowsy,
complacent read. Instead, you are kept in a state of uncertainty that leaves you
acutely vulnerable to the book’s vivid sensory suggestions and shifting moods. Print
and page vanish; it plays on you with the directness of music, and it brands indelible
images on the memory.
Points in Time is a brilliant achievement, innovative in form, composed in a lan-
guage whose every word, every pause, feels purposeful and right. In England Points
in Time received enthusiastic notices. But in America not a single review appeared
anywhere. Not one.
In 1990, late in Bowles’s life, The Sheltering Sky was adapted into a film starring
John Malkovich, and for a time Bowles and his work gained popularity, gradually
falling again into the background. But Bowles’s writing has a life of its own; once
read, it can’t be forgotten.
And I have a feeling that Paul Bowles was not much disturbed by the ebb and
flow of reputation. I didn’t know him, but I know his work, and there’s a telling
calmness in its attention to flapping arms and strident voices. Better to take the long
view, like the old Arab whom Bowles saw lose a fingertip in a truck door: “He looked
at it an instant, then quietly scooped a handful of that ubiquitous dust, put the two
parts of the finger together and poured the dust over it, saying softly, ‘Thanks be
to Allah.’ ” ■N