Staying On: Paul Bowles’ Later Years in Tangier

By 1973, Paul Bowles’ readers may have thought that his career was over. And he may well have felt the same way himself. His beloved wife (and fellow writer) Jane Bowles had died on May 4 after an agonizing series of illnesses, and he had found little time or energy for new work. He was 62, and his reputation as an avant-garde existentialist was fading.

However, the next quarter century saw a surprising outpouring of stories and poems and unclassifiable works. They were as good (and usually as dark) as any Bowles had written as a younger man, but their darkness was relieved by prose as limpid as spring water. Bowles also published a steady stream of translations, while editors compiled omnibus collections of his fiction, poetry, letters and even photographs. He was also a composer of note, and concerts of his music were held in Paris and Nice and (at Lincoln Center!) in New York City. Bernardo Bertolucci filmed Bowles’ famous novel The Sheltering Sky, and even gave the writer a cameo role. It was a busy time for Bowles as well as for his readers, listeners, viewers, and critics, not to mention bibliographers.

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Bowles once explained that he preferred working with small presses because he disliked getting rejections. It was an understandable attitude, and one that would shape the later years of his literary career, as a glance at the period illustrates.

The highlight of the booklet Three Tales, published by Frank Hallman of New York in 1975, is “Mejdoub,” which deals with one of Bowles’ favorite themes, the instability of identity. Here a Moroccan pretending to be an insane beggar is taken at his word by the police and locked up. “The months moved by. Through nights and days and nights he lived with the other madmen, and the time came when it scarcely mattered to him any more, getting to the officials to tell them who he was. Finally he ceased thinking about it.”

The title of Bowles’ 1977 collection Things Gone and Things Still Here, from distinguished California publisher Black Sparrow, suggests a kind of stock-taking, with the title piece considering several Moroccan folk beliefs. One concerns the Haddaoua, a sect whose members are said to be able to exercise their will over animals: “A Haddaoui could go out alone into the countryside and return in a few days with hundreds of goats following him in single-file formation.” Bowles describes watching a Haddaoui “become” a goat. “There in front of me was a man’s body with a goat inside it, as if the goat had been able to assume the visible form of a man, while at the same time it remained unmistakably a goat.” Another belief involves Moroccan djenoun (djinns or genies), beings whose habitat “is only a few feet below ours.” The collection also reprints “Mejdoub” and includes another, more chilling story about transference of personality, “Allal,” in which a young Moroccan man switches identities—literally—with a poisonous serpent.

Black Sparrow published another, more substantial collection by Bowles, Midnight Mass, in 1981. Most of its stories are set in Morocco, and one of them, “The Eye,” begins with this starkly arresting sentence: “Ten or twelve years ago there came to live in Tangier a man who would have done better to stay away.” The story was selected by Joyce Carol Oates for inclusion in Best American Short Stories of 1979. A gentler story, “Here to Learn,” follows a naïve young Moroccan woman who travels halfway round the world on the strength of her beauty, only to discover that she can’t go home again.

These three collections are a reminder of the attraction that Morocco had long held for Bowles. He had visited the country for the first time in 1931 at the suggestion of Gertrude Stein, and eventually settled in the city of Tangier in 1947, although he continued to travel periodically. As he explained in his 1972 autobiography Without Stopping, he had always been “vaguely certain” that at some point he would “come into a magic place which, in revealing its secrets, would give [him] wisdom and ecstasy—perhaps even death.” Living in Tangier, he relished “the idea that in the night,… sorcery [was] burrowing its invisible tunnels in every direction, from thousands of senders to thousands of unsuspecting recipients.” But by the time Bowles wrote “Things Gone and Things Still Here,” the djenoun had begun to disappear from the magic place, vanquished by the “proximity of iron and steel.”

In 1982, Los Angeles publisher Sylvester & Orphanos published a sumptuous edition—limited and numbered and signed—of “In the Red Room,” arguably Bowles’ best story. Set in Sri Lanka (Ceylon), where Bowles lived on several occasions in the early 1950s, the story describes an encounter involving an unnamed narrator and his parents with a young man, “Sonny,” who urges them to visit his house. Once inside, Sonny seats them in a small bedroom whose walls and ceiling have been painted a “glistening” crimson and whose bed is topped with a “slightly darker red” coverlet. Three portraits—of a young woman, Sonny and another young man—hang on the wall. Sonny sits “stiffly, looking straight ahead, like someone at the theatre.” Afterward, the narrator remarks that the brief visit “was like watching television without the sound. You saw everything, but you didn’t get what was going on.”

A few days later, the narrator encounters an acquaintance who clears up the mystery. It seems that the day after Sonny’s wedding, he had found his bride in bed with his best man and proceeded to shoot them both and chop their bodies into pieces. After a few weeks in a mental hospital, he’d been discharged.

The story ends with an ironic exchange between the narrator (who wisely chooses not to tell his parents what he’s learned) and his mother, who has been puzzling over the incident. “That room had a particular meaning for him,” she remarks. “It was like a sort of shrine.” The narrator realizes that “she had got to the core without needing the details,” and replies, “I felt that, too,… Of course, there’s no way of knowing.” In turn, his mother comments, “Well, what you don’t know won’t hurt you.” The narrator explains that he “had heard her use the expression a hundred times without ever being able to understand what she meant by it, because it seemed so patently untrue. But for once it was apt.” He nods his head and replies, “That’s right.”

Subsequently, Black Sparrow added “In the Red Room” to a second edition of Midnight Mass and it was reprinted in The Best American Short Stories, 1984 and The Best American Short Stories of the Eighties.

The year 1982 also saw the publication of Bowles’ most original work, Points in Time, by London publisher Peter Owen. The short book consists of eleven sections, one of them all of sixty words long and a few the length (and shape) of short stories, arranged chronologically from Morocco’s earliest days through decades of foreign occupation to what was then the present. The collection opens with a glimpse of the country’s Atlantic coastline as it must have looked to Hanno, the Carthaginian mariner who sailed down the West African coast about 500 B.C.E. Many of the subsequent episodes explore the relationship between Moslems, Jews, and “Nazarenes,” or Christians.

One of the best pieces, which is apparently based on a true incident, concerns one Andrew Layton, an English exporter living in the windy seaside town of Essaouira (Mogador) two centuries ago. Layton becomes involved in a fracas with some farmers and in anger strikes a woman in the face with his whip, dislodging two of her teeth. All parties are called before the Sultan in Marrakech, where Layton straightforwardly admits the crime and the farmers successfully press their demand for “precise retaliation.” What follows is pure Bowles:

Layton “had the presence of mind to ask that the teeth to be pulled be two molars which recently had been giving him trouble. The complainants agreed to the suggestion. Back teeth being larger and heavier than front teeth, they felt that they were getting the better of the bargain.

The operation went ahead under the intent scrutiny of the villagers. They were waiting to hear the infidel’s cries of pain. Layton, however, preserved a stoical silence throughout the ordeal. The molars were washed then presented to the claimants, who went away entirely satisfied.

Impressed with Layton’s composure, the Sultan befriends him, hoping that eventually Layton might become British Consul in Marrakech. But no, he will stay in Essaouira. “He had got used to the wind, he said.”

Disputes among people of differing religions and nationalities, among the colonizers and the colonized, are usually settled less satisfactorily. “At night in the courtyards of the Rif, grandfathers fashion grenades. Each rock in the ravine shields a man. The Spaniard in the garrison starts from sleep, to find his throat already slashed.”

Peter Owen promoted Points in Time as “tales from Morocco,” while Bowles himself suggested that it was “perhaps lyrical history.” Critic Tobias Wolff called it “a nervy, surprising, completely original performance, so original that it can’t be referred to any previous category of fiction or non-fiction.” I think of it as a suite, but one composed of words rather than notes.

The short 1988 collection Unwelcome Words, from Tombouctou Books of Bolinas, California, continues Bowles’ string of experiments, and suggests as well that the wind that once blew through Essaouira in Points in Time had turned icy. Three of its stories—“New York 1965,” “Massachusetts 1932,” and “Tangier 1975”—are punctuation-free and unparagraphed monologues dramatizing misunderstanding and madness in locations that, not coincidentally, had personal significance for Bowles. The title story itself consists of six undated letters written to an unidentified recipient. The latter is apparently physically incapacitated and has, according to the former, entered the “final period” of his life. “But as you sink into your self-imposed non-being,” we read in the last letter, “I hope you’ll remember (you won’t) that I made this small and futile attempt to help you remain human.”

But those unwelcome words weren’t Bowles’ final ones. Ecco Press founder Daniel Halpern published a new novella by Bowles, Too Far from Home, in a 697-page compilation of “selected writings” under the same title in 1993. Set in Mali, the novella describes the experiences of an American woman who has fled a disastrous marriage to take refuge with her artist brother in a disconcertingly unfurnished house with no electricity and no running water. Finding herself a “shadow” in a land in which black people are the “real” people (she is, after all, too far from home), the woman unwittingly calls down a fatal curse on two other travelers. Bowles’ British publisher, Peter Owen, reprinted the novella the following year, adding sketches by Bowles’ friend and longtime Tangier resident Marguerite McBey.