The Idler

Conversations: Paul Bowles

Paul Bowles: not beat yet
by Marcel Theroux
Taken from Idler issue 3, 1993

Friend of the beatniks, poet, composer, author of The Sheltering Sky: the octogenarian Paul Bowles was still working and still dressing like a gentleman when Marcel Theroux visited him in the Tangier block of flats where he had lived for 35 years.

I shuffled from foot to foot in the gloomy hallway, three storeys above the wet street where a group of children were frolicking and shouting in Arabic. telling myself it was too late to let embarrassment get in the way of effrontery, I gave another blast on the doorbell. I felt like a literary groupie of the worst kind: persistent unannounced, and worse still, I’d never bought any of his books. There was silence behind the door marked with a brass plate that read “Mr Paul Bowles” in capitals. But I knew Bowles was inside, and I was determined to brazen it out. Finally the door was opened by Bowles’s masseur and I went into the sitting room. Through it in a stuffy little bedroom, lay Mr Bowles himself.

Paul Bowles, poet, writer, composer, exile, has been living in the same block of flats in Tangier since 1957. From his modest apartment he has watched the Beat generation come and go, the city slip out of international control and the sexual adventurers of the Fifties and Sixties give way to day trippers from Algericas in shell-suits. Tangier has gone straight, trading the illicit glamour of its past for a steadier income as a tourist destination. The literary outlaws have gone too. only Bowles, whom they claimed as a patron but who always stood apart from them remains. Now, by association, he is among the city’s patrons.

“A Frenchman told me, ‘never allow yourself to become a monument, people piss on them’,” said Bowles. He was sitting up in bed in a dressing gown. It was early afternoon but he was laid up after surgery for a blocked artery in his leg.

“People visit almost every day. Some- mostly the French - have the chutzpah to say: ‘I didn’t want to leave Tangier without seeing what you looked like’!”

I disguised my wince as a sympathetic nod. I had got his address from the doorman of a five-star hotel in the old part of the city. He had known not only where Bowles lived, but also that he was ill and best visited in the afternoon.

The bedroom window was blacked out. A portable gas heater directed a naked jet of flame at the single bed. Bowles had been correcting some of his music compositions for publication. The scores lay scattered about the counterpane. The room was hot and stuffy, and smelled strongly of eucalyptus oil.

At 82, Bowles still has a delicate, almost pretty face, and plenty of white hair. He is frail and elegant, like someone’s great aunt. His face was rosy, as though he had just had a hot bath.

Throughout our conversation I was struck by his lucid and courtly manner. He chatted aimiably in his soft East coast accent, seemingly unfazed by my intrusion.

“I was here before the Beats ever thought of coming to Tangier,” he said. “I came here for the first time with Aaron Copeland. We didn’t stay long that time. He heard the drumming at night - there’s still drumming - and he heard the women wailing, and he said: “the natives are on the warpath!”

“The Beats came twice, in 1957 and 1961. Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Alan Anson, Bill Burroughs, Gregory Corso. The first time they were all working awful hard on the book Naked Lunch. the second time they were just ‘goofing off’, as they put it.

“That first time Burroughs didn’t know where he was. He’d finish a sheet of foolscap and drop it on the floor, then he’d walk on it, drop bits of sandwich on it. Ginsberg picked it up and put it in order. Allen lived for the book.”

Bowles is probably well used to recounting Beat generation anecdotes about the gestation of Naked Lunch. The Beats subsequently became literature’s pin-up idols, but their interest in the Morocco outside Tangier was minimal. For most visitors the city meant expatriate decadence, or cheap kif, or boys.Bowles, on the other hand, studied the country, learned Maghrebi Arabic, befriended its writers and translated its literature. He even schlepped around the country with a big tape recorder to record folk musicians performing their traditional music.

Bowles’s writing shares that fascination with North Africa, and it is often a fascination with the possibilities of the continent that unhinges his characters. in his fiction, those most receptive to Africa’s mysteries are usually those most completely destroyed by them. At their most disturbing, Bowles’s stories are as exquisite and cruel as the poisoned champagne in Julian Vreden. With terrible clarity, he writes of travellers fatally out of their depth in unfamiliar surroundings. A linguist has his tongue cut out by the Berber tribesmen he has come to study in A Distant Episode. In The Sheltering Sky one visitor to North Africa gets sick and dies, while his wife goes mad and is raped and enslaved.

Bowles said he didn’t enjoy the Bertolucci version of The Sheltering Sky, despite a cameo appearance. He felt it shied away from the bleakness of the original, while tampering with the script to inject a more marketable quantity of sex. Like everyone who saw it, he admired the cinematography. And the film wasn’t the only frustration of his trip to the premi?�re in Paris: he had to get there by plane.

“I hate air travel. Not because I’m afraid of flying. But there are no porters. I used to travel with 20 suitcases. You need books, and I always brought clothes for hot weather and cold weather. What can you bring now? A little canvas thing.”

Bowles was always dandyish. In the thirties, Gertrude Stein observed that he travelled with enough clothes for six young men. But then perhaps they weren’t all his. Even now he was wearing a cravat with his dressing gown. He opened up a silver case and offered me a hand-rolled cigarette. I said I didn’t smoke. Bowles put his in a holder.

“I always have tea around four and now it’s five fifteen,” he said, lighting up. It was a while before I realised he was talking about the cigarettes. The word “tea” sounded quaint, like talk of “wild bop” and “cut ups”. Soon the privetty smell of his joint was combining with the eucalyptus and the stuffiness of the room to give me a headache.

“I smoke it for the health effect,” he said mischievously. If I had not visited, he would have been tinkering away with his manuscripts until he fell asleep. Sometimes he watches Spanish TV on the big Sony in the corner of the room.

“I should get a parabolic antenna,” he mused. “They have a pornographic channel - channel six. They show everything - fucking scenes.”

Apart from correcting his scores, Bowles stays busy writing and translating. At the moment he is working on a translation of the Guatemalan writer Rodrigo Rey Rosa.

“So you’re not an idler?”

“Oh, good heavens no. Whoever said I was?”

By now it was dark outside, though the bedroom remained exactly the same as when I’d arrived. The blacked-out window gave no hint that an unusually damp and foggy Moroccan night was falling. I told Bowles I had better be going and promised to bring him some chocolates on my next visit.

“Everyone’s always leaving tomorrow,” he said. As I left, another pair of pilgrims arrived. Two French journalists had come to do an interview. I said goodbye and got his permission to snap a photo.

Mulling over our conversation in a bar later, it all seemed puzzling and inconclusive. Could that courtly old gentleman have written those cruel tales? I drew some comfort from Bowles’s biographer who confesses to find the man deeply enigmatic.

At the bar I was introduced to a friend and former prot?�g?� of Bowles, the Moroccan writer Mohammed Choukri. Choukri I guessed, was in his late forties. He was a thin man with a rather stylish pencil moustache and wiry grey hair. He was lively and talkative, drinking whisky and scoffing at Bowles for being a nihilist.

“He’s a miser!” said Choukri. “In all the time I’ve known him he’s never even bought me a cup of coffee.”

I thought of Bowles in his dark and overheated little room, his interviewers gone, maybe smoking a cigarette, maybe pouring over the proofs of his music.

“Do you think he’s happy?” I asked.

“Happy?” said Choukri. “You should have asked that question 20 years ago.”