Paul Bowles: A Life
by Virginia Spencer Carr
Scribner. 409 pages, $35.
AMONG THE WRITERS whose names are associated with the Beat Generation—Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and the rest—perhaps only Paul Bowles is destined to transcend that association and secure his own place as an artist of the late 20th century. It’s appropriate to designate him as an “artist,” for Bowles was not only a critically acclaimed novelist, poet, memoirist, and translator; he also achieved fame as a composer of both classical and theatre music, and he was a photographer and illustrator, as well.
Bowles died in Tangier in 1999, but even before his death, his work had received a fair amount of critical attention and was well on its way to making a mark on American popular culture. The Sheltering Sky (1949), his best-known novel, is still in print and was made into a film by Bernardo Bertolucci in 1990. Bowles and his Tangier circle are also featured as prominent characters in David Cronenberg’s 1991 film Naked Lunch, based on the Burroughs novel of the same name. In 2003 the Library of America published a handsome two-volume edition of Bowles’ novels and short stories—an event that seems to have solidified Bowles’s work in the American canon. Of course, for Bowles the label “American” is somewhat problematic. Like that rarefied group that includes Henry James, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway, among others, Bowles was an American writer who reached his creative peak only after he left his native country and adopted a new life ove In writing Paul Bowles: A Life, biographer Virginia Spencer Carr was faced with what can fairly be called a Herculean task. Bowles’s circle of friends was as vast and varied as his creative output; what’s more, he was a psychologically complex man, sexually ambiguous, involved in a marriage to a woman, Jane Bowles, that was unconventional, to say the least. Carr is Bowles’s authorized biographer, for all intents and purposes (but for reasons she explains in her introduction, she is not officially recognized as such). She had a close relationship with Bowles during his last years and received his blessings for her project, so she was able to conduct numerous lengthy interviews as well as obtain access to all of his personal papers and letters. Always one is struck by the scope of Bowles’s creative achievement—at sixteen, he was already a poet published in international journals. But he also had romances and intimate friendships with some of the most important literary and artistic figures of the 20th century: Aaron Copland, Gertrude Stein, W. H. Auden, Tennessee Williams, and countless others. Carr incorporates all of their perspectives in rounding out her portrait of the artist. If Bowles had restricted himself to musical composition, his life would still be worthy of a biography. His work as a translator also stands alone as a singular achievement: he not only was the first to translate Sartre’s No Exit and other important French works into English, he also brought a whole generation of Moroccan writers to an American audience that would otherwise never had heard of them. Carr has produced a biography that successfully captures the life that shaped Bowles’s work—his music as well as his writing. Much has been said about his Tangier years (such as Michelle Green’s somewhat chatty but very readable 1991 work, The Dream At the End of the World, a book Bowles admired). Carr does an excellent job of filling in the background, particularly with respect to Bowles’s complicated relationship with his mother and father. Quoting from interviews, letters, and from his 1972 autobiography, Without Stopping, Carr paints a portrait of his early psychological development that is honest and humane. This she manages even though Bowles was, by his own admission, not much given to self-analysis. Jim Nawrocki, a frequent contributor to this journal, has appeared in The Bay Area Reporter, New Art Examiner, and Mavin.
rseas. Bowles, whose early life was peripatetic, to say the least, eventually found his home in Tangier. Although many of the luminaries of his generation gravitated to Paris (and Bowles did too, for a short time), he not only made Tangier his new home but welcomed scores of other writers and artists there, establishing an expatriate community of his own.
