Paul Bowles
Paul Bowles was an influential American writer and composer, born in 1910, who garnered recognition for his unique blend of fiction and music. He began writing seriously in his teenage years and published surrealist poetry in Paris in 1928. After a brief stint at the University of Virginia, Bowles moved to Paris in 1929, where he studied composition and was encouraged by notable figures like Gertrude Stein. Eventually settling in Tangier, Morocco, Bowles became immersed in the cultural intersections of Arab and Western societies, which deeply influenced his literary themes, often exploring nihilism and the search for meaning. His seminal novel, "The Sheltering Sky," depicts the journey of New Yorkers in the Sahara, reflecting their existential struggles against an indifferent universe. Bowles also wrote several other notable works, including "Let It Come Down" and "The Spider's House," while translating Moroccan literature into English to preserve the native culture. Over time, despite a gradual rise to prominence, Bowles became recognized as a significant figure in twentieth-century literature before his death in 1999.
Subject Terms
Paul Bowles
Composer
- Born: December 30, 1910
- Birthplace: New York, New York
- Died: November 18, 1999
- Place of death: Tangier, Morocco
American short-story writer, novelist, and poet
Biography
Even as a child, Paul Bowles (bohlz), the son of a dentist father and schoolteacher mother, demonstrated talent in many areas. He had begun writing seriously by the age of seventeen, and in 1928 his surrealist poetry was published in the Paris literary magazine Transition. Seventeen years were to elapse, however, before he published the first of the fiction for which he became known.
After finishing high school and attending one semester at the University of Virginia, Bowles left for Paris in 1929 on a six-month adventure. He returned to New York to study composition with Aaron Copland, who recognized and nurtured Bowles’s musical ability. In 1931, Bowles met Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in Paris. Both encouraged him in his writing, and Stein recommended that Bowles, who preferred a mild climate, try living in Morocco. Bowles and Copland spent part of the summer with Stein and Toklas in the south of France, after which they settled into life in Tangier. Bowles at first continued to devote himself to music, composing theater scores and chamber music, but after his story “A Distant Episode” was published in Partisan Review, he was encouraged to pursue his writing. Bowles married writer Jane Auer in 1938. In Tangier, he found that the juxtaposition of Arab and Western cultures provided him with a context for expressing his ingrained nihilism, which was substantially heightened by his exposure to writers such as Albert Camus, André Gide, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Bowles’s 1958 translation of Sartre’s play Huis-clos (pr. 1944; No Exit, 1946) is the standard English version of the play. Bowles’s childhood exposure to the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe also influenced his writing.
Bowles’s first novel, The Sheltering Sky, is the engrossing tale of the New Yorkers Kit and Port Moresby who, with their friend Tunner, venture into the Sahara; the region’s barrenness mirrors the barrenness of their lives. They are, according to Bowles, not merely tourists but travelers, who have traveled for the twelve years of their peripatetic marriage. The thesis of this metaphoric, nihilistic novel is that nothing exists beyond the sheltering sky. The here exists, the now exists, but although neither is meaningful, it is all that people have; beyond there lies an abyss.
In his later novels, Bowles is directly concerned with how and whether the two worlds he knows best can ever understand each other, if one can ever have meaning for the other. The answer his characters suggest is that there is little meaning even in their own worlds; to look for meaning in alien worlds is unrealistic. Let It Come Down focuses on Nelson Dyar, a bank clerk from New York who has come to Tangier seeking adventure. He kills an Arab by accident and is exposed to the whole treachery of Tangier’s exotic society. The novel is reminiscent of Camus’s L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, 1946) and emphasizes, as do most of Bowles’s short stories and his novels, the question of bridging opposing cultures. The Spider’s House, which some consider Bowles’s most finely crafted novel, explores the crumbling traditional Muslim culture of a Fez boy, Amar, during the Moroccan fight for independence. Bowles’s last novel, Up Above the World, is a partly surrealist crime novel set in South America.
In 1960, Bowles began collecting and translating Moghrebi literature, both oral and written, into English, in the attempt to preserve the native literature of his adopted home. Because of his self-banishment from the United States and from mainstream literary circles, Bowles’s reputation grew slowly, but he developed a persistent following of sophisticated readers and was recognized as one of the most profound writers of twentieth century literature. He died in 1999 just short of his eighty-ninth birthday.
Bibliography
Caponi, Gina Dagel. Paul Bowles. New York: Twayne, 1998. Provides an excellent introduction to Bowles and his writings. After a brief chronology and biography, Caponi explores the breadth of Bowles’s canon through various critical lenses: existentialism, postcolonial literature, detective fiction, surrealism, extraordinary consciousness, travel writing, and historical fiction.
Caponi, Gina Dagel. Paul Bowles: Romantic Savage. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994. Biographical and critical study of Bowles’s life and art examines the sources of his fiction, his major themes and techniques, and his methods of story composition.
Caponi, Gina Dagel, ed. Conversations with Paul Bowles. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993. Collection of reprinted and previously unpublished interviews reveals Bowles’s own opinions about his life and art. Bowles often tended to give perverse responses to interview questions, but he still communicated a great deal about the relationship between himself and his work. He claimed that the man who wrote his books did not exist except in the books.
Dillon, Millicent. You Are Not I: A Portrait of Paul Bowles. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Biography traces the relationship between the author and his wife Jane Auer Bowles. Dillon reevaluates the views she expresses in her biography of Jane Bowles and provides her own speculations on Paul Bowles’s life and work.
Green, Michelle. The Dream at the End of the World: Paul Bowles and the Literary Renegades in Tangier. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. Presents a lively account of the artistic and socialite sets that congregated in Tangier in the 1940’s and 1950’s. Investigates the life of Bowles and those who came to stay with him in Morocco, providing some interesting background details for readers of Bowles’s fiction. Includes photographs and index.
Hibbard, Allen. Paul Bowles: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1993. This introduction to Bowles’s short fiction discusses his debt to Edgar Allan Poe’s theories of formal unity and analyzes his short-story collections as carefully organized wholes. Also includes material from Bowles’s notebooks and previously published critical essays by other critics.
Lacey, R. Kevin, and Francis Poole, eds. Mirrors on the Maghrib: Critical Reflections on Paul and Jane Bowles and Other American Writers in Morocco. Delmar, N.Y.: Caravan Books, 1996. Collection of critical essays on the Bowleses and the Beats explores the relationship between the concept of otherness and Morocco. Includes a number of essays by Moroccan critics, who provide a North African viewpoint on the strengths and weaknesses of Bowles’s depiction of their homeland.
Patterson, Richard. A World Outside: The Fiction of Paul Bowles. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987. Comprehensive, scholarly examination of Bowles’s work provides extensive discussion of The Sheltering Sky. Includes informative endnotes and index.
Pounds, Wayne. Paul Bowles: The Inner Geography. New York: Peter Lang, 1985. Serves as a good introduction to Bowles and his use of landscape. Demonstrates the connection between setting and the spiritual states of Bowles’s characters.
Sawyer-Laucanno, Christopher. An Invisible Spectator: A Biography of Paul Bowles. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989. Very readable account of the writer’s life offers some intriguing speculation on the connections between events in Bowles’s life and the plots of his stories. Includes notes, a select bibliography that lists Bowles’s major works in literature and music, and an index.