Source of book: I own this
“He did not look up because he knew how senseless the landscape would appear. It takes energy to invest life with meaning, and at present this energy was lacking. He knew how things could stand bare, their essence having retreated on all sides to beyond the horizon, as if impelled by a sinister centrifugal force. He did not want to face the intense sky, too blue to be real, above his head, the ribbed pink canyon walls that lay on all sides in the distance, the pyramidal town itself on the rocks, or the dark spots of oasis below.”
This is definitely the strangest book I have read so far this year. I can’t say I have read anything quite like it, although I can see some influence from Camus - the setting in French Algeria, the existentialism, the psychodrama. But it also goes in a very different direction, with a final third of the book that is so unexpected that I hesitate to spoil it.
But first, who was Paul Bowles? His was not a name I was all that familiar with until recently. Blame my lack of education and experience in writers of the mid-20th Century, I suppose. I encountered his name in connection with the circle of literary friends he ran in: Tennessee Williams, the Beats, Gertrude Stein, Christopher Isherwood among others.
But Bowles wasn’t initially known for his writing, but his music. After falling in love with modern Classical as the result of hearing Stravinsky performed, he left college to study composition with Aaron Copland and then Virgil Thompson. During the 1930s and 40s, he composed a number of works, from solo piano works to movie music. While he never did become a top tier artist, he was well respected as a composer.
But then, he took a radical turn in his life. He had never stopped writing, but took a new interest in it after editing his wife Jane’s novel, Two Serious Ladies. He gave up his composing, and switched to writing instead.
Oh, and he also decided to pack up and move to Tangier, where he would live for the rest of his life.
He didn’t entirely end his involvement with music, though. He made field recordings of traditional Moroccan music, about 60 hours of which are in the Library of Congress. In addition to his writing and recording, he also translated works from Spanish, Portuguese, and French, and collected folk tales.
It is also worth mentioning his personal life. Bowles was bisexual, and had a number of affairs with both men and women before his marriage to Jane Auer. She was probably lesbian, or at least female-oriented, as Paul was the only man she is known to have slept with, and their sexual relationship lasted all of a year.
They were fast friends and soulmates, however, and remained married and close to each other until her death. For the rest of the marriage, she openly had affairs with women, and he openly carried on with both men and women, although his longest relationships were with men.
One might have called the marriage a marriage of convenience, except that Paul and Jane had a strong emotional connection to each other that went beyond a desire for respectability.
Despite the connection, I would not say that the marriage was exactly happy. Jane struggled with alcoholism and mental illness, and spent years in an abusive relationship with a Moroccan woman. Paul, for his part, could be erratic, alternately loving and verbally cruel.
Both in this book and in Jane’s novel, the two of them portrayed each other in unflattering lights, although, to be fair, Paul’s portrayal of himself is pretty harsh in this book too. Here is how Jane (as Kit) is described:
Small, with blonde hair and an olive complexion, she was saved from prettiness by the intensity of her gaze. Once one had seen her eyes, the rest of the face grew vague, and when one tried to recall her image afterwards, only the piercing, questioning violence of the wide eyes remained.
When Jane suffered a series of strokes, Paul remained her primary caretaker until her death.
So, about the book itself. Bowles once noted that the book is autobiographical but not in the factual, but the emotional and poetic sense. Nothing in the book actually happened, but there are correspondences in the characters between Paul and Jane.
A married couple, Port and Kit Moresby, travel to Morocco, intending to explore the Sahara Desert and, if possible, rekindle the flame in their marriage. Accompanying them at first is a friend, George Tunner.
Things go very badly indeed, as the result of their naivete as to the dangers of a foreign third-world country, and the desert itself. To use Bowles’ metaphor, the sky that was supposed to shelter them instead became a portal for all that afflicted them.
In addition to the sky, Bowles also uses flies throughout the book, both in the literal annoyance the characters endure, but also as a metaphor for the various persons trying to sponge off of Kit and Port, from Eric on down
Things start off ominously. Port, rebuffed by Kit, wanders out into the city, and ends up sleeping with a prostitute who tries to rob him. Kit gets drunk on the train, and ends up sleeping with Tunner. A particularly horrid mother and son pair from England, Eric and Mrs. Lyle, glom on to them, with Eric trying to borrow money all the time, and eventually stealing Port’s passport.
And that is just the start. Their existential crisis spirals, and they start making increasingly irrational decisions. By the end, death and insanity, disease and sexual slavery, and the desert heat and chill have overtaken the couple.
The story is crazy, terrifying, and haunting. But the writing is beautiful and evocative. If you can imagine a nightmare that is stunningly gorgeous, that is about where this book lands. The lead quote of this post encapsulates so much of the emotional landscape of the book.
The opening lines of the book set the tone so well.
He awoke, opened his eyes. The room meant very little to him; he was too deeply immersed in the non-being from which he had just come. If he had not the energy to ascertain his position in time and space, he also lacked the desire. He was somewhere, he had come back through vast regions from nowhere; there was the certitude of an infinite sadness at the core of his consciousness, but the sadness was reassuring, because it alone was familiar.
The descriptions in the book are fascinating and often unexpected. Here is Port’s impression of Eric:
Port watched, fascinated as always by the sight of a human being being brought down to the importance of an automaton or a caricature. By whatever circumstances and in whatever manner reduced, whether ludicrous or horrible, such persons delighted him.
Tunner is the only actually likeable character in the book, which may be why Port is both drawn to him (possibly sexually) yet repulsed by him.
Tunner was the sort of person to whom it would occur only with difficulty that he might be being used. Because he was accustomed to imposing his will without meeting opposition, he had a highly developed and very male vanity which endeared him, strangely enough, to almost everyone.
I noted a particular exchange between Port and Kit that I wondered if it were a conversation that Paul and Jane had. It occurs after an awkward tea with one of the locals.
“Oh, point! I don’t suppose there was any particular point. I thought it would be fun. And I still think it was; I’m glad we went.”
“So am I, in a way. It gave me a first-hand opportunity of seeing what the conversations are going to be like here - just how unbelievably superficial they can be.”
He let go of her waist. “I disagree. You don’t say a frieze is superficial just because it has only two dimensions.”
“You do if you’re accustomed to having conversation that’s something more than a decoration. I don’t think of conversation as a frieze, myself.”
Another telling exchange comes after Port discovers his passport is missing, and accuses the hotel proprietor of the theft. The local French administrator knows better, and questions why Port is so sure.
“I accuse him because logic indicates him as the only possible thief. He’s absolutely the only native who had access to the passport, the only one for whom it would have been physically possible.”
Lieutenant d’Amrmagnac raised himself a little higher in bed. “And why precisely do you demand it be a native?”
Port smiled faintly. “Isn’t it reasonable to suppose it was a native? Apart from the fact that no one else had the opportunity to take it, isn’t it the sort of thing that would naturally turn out to have been done by a native - charming as they may be?”
“No, monsieur. To me it seems just the sort of thing that would not have been done by a native.”
The lieutenant is right, of course. As he points out, a native would steal something he wants to have, but would be unlikely to have the connections to make use of a foreign passport. The passport is indeed located later exactly where the lieutenant predicted, and it eventually becomes clear that Eric was the thief.
I mentioned the descriptions of the desert. There are so many, but two are particularly worth quoting.
The new moon had slipped behind the earth’s sharp edge. Here in the desert, even more than at sea, she had the impression that she was on the top of a great table, that the horizon was the brink of space. She imagined a cube-shaped planet somewhere above the earth, between it and the moon, to which somehow they had been transported. The light would be hard and unreal as it was here, the air would be of the same taut dryness, the contours of the landscape would lack the comforting terrestrial curves, just as they did all through this vast region.
And this one:
The desert landscape is always at its best in the half-light of dawn or dusk. The sense of distance lacks: a ridge nearby can be a far-off mountain range, each small detail can take on the importance of a major variant on the countryside’s repetitious theme. The coming of day promises a change; it is only when the day has fully arrived that the watcher suspects it is the same day returned once again - the same day he has been living for a long time, over and over, still blindingly bright and untarnished by time.
I have a certain love for the desert here in the American west, and these descriptions hold true for our deserts as well. (Star Wars fans will know that both northern Africa and Death Valley were used for filming. Very similar terrain.)
The desert, however beautiful, is also cruel and unwelcoming; and ultimately, as pointless as human existence seems from Bowles’ existentialist viewpoint. Whether you agree with that idea or not, the story itself is inseparable from the philosophy.
I did love a pair of quotes about the ephemeral nature of human life, and the uneasy truth that all things end.
And it occurred to him that a walk through the countryside was a sort of epitome of the passage through life itself. One never took the time to savor the details; one said: another day, but always with the hidden knowledge that each day was unique and final, that there never would be a return, another time.
Later, Kit recalls something Port had said earlier.
“Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don’t know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It’s that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don’t know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”
I am feeling this more and more as my kids grow up. I have already experienced a lot of “lasts.” Last time I saw a child take their first step, say their first word, learn to ride a bike, and other things. All too soon, the last one will move out. It seems limitless, but it is really so finite and small.
I won’t claim to understand everything that Bowles is trying to do in this book, but it is truly haunting and weird and surreal. And well written. It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea (in the desert), but for those who find existentialism or the desert to be thought provoking, it may resonate.
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I haven’t seen it, but there was a movie made of the book which appears to be faithful to the plot. It was a bit of a commercial flop, and Bowles essentially disowned it. But I wonder how one even films this book. It might be interesting to seek out.
***
Here is a bit of Bowles' music:
And, some King Crimson inspired by the book:
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