by Paul Bowles
Travels
COLLECTED WRITINGS, 1950–1993
PAUL BOWLES
Introduction by Paul Theroux
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Editor’s Note
Introduction by Paul Theroux
17 Quai Voltaire: Unpublished Journal
Paris! City of the Arts: Holiday, April 1953
Fez: Holiday, July 1950
Fish Traps and Private Business: Journal, 1950
No More Djinns: The American Mercury, June 1951
Baptism of Solitude: Holiday, January 1953
Letter from Tangier: London Magazine, July 1954
Windows on the Past: Holiday, January 1955
A Man Must Not Be Very Moslem: Holiday, May 1955
Yallah: Introduction to Peter W. Haeberlin’s Yallah, 1956
View from Tangier: The Nation, 30 June 1956
All Parrots Speak: Holiday, November 1956
How to Live on a Part-Time Island: Holiday, March 1957
Letter from Ceylon: The Nation, 13 April, 1957
Letter from Kenya: The Nation, May 25, 1957
Tangier Diary: A Post-Colonial Interlude: Africa South, Capetown, 1957
Notes Mailed at Nagercoil: Harper’s, July 1957
The Passport: Journal; Cherie Nutting’s Yesterday’s Perfume
Worlds of Tangier: Holiday, March 1958
The Challenge to Identity: The Nation, April 26, 1958
Sad for U.S., Sad for Algeria: The Nation, May 24, 1958
Africa Minor: Holiday, April 1959
The Rif, to Music: Kulchur, Spring 1960
Madeira: Holiday, September 1960
The Ball at Sidi Hosni: Kulchur #2, 1961
The Route to Tassemsit: Holiday, February 1963
Tangier: Gentlemen’s Quarterly, October 1963
Zany Costa del Sol: Holiday, April 1965
Casablanca: Holiday, September 1966
Kif – Prologue and Compendium of Terms: The Book of Grass, 1967
Café in Morocco: Holiday, August, 1968
What’s So Different About Marrakesh?: Travel & Leisure, June/July 1971
From Notes Taken in Thailand: Prose, Spring 1972
Fez: Behind the Walls: 1984; Barry Brukoff’s Morocco, 1991
An Island of My Own: San Francisco Chronicle, 1985
Tangier: Independent on Sunday, 1990
Views of Tangier: Jellel Gastelli’s Vues Choisies, 1991
The Hakima: William Betsch’s The Hakima: A Tragedy in Fez, 1991
The Sky: Vittorio Santo’s Portraits Nudes Clouds, 1993
Paul Bowles, His Life: Unpublished journal, 1986
Glossary: Their Heads are Green, 1963
A Bowles Chronology
Chronology
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Books by Paul Bowles
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Editor’s Note
The articles in this collection are arranged by date of publication – with a few exceptions. The first two pieces, “17 Quai Voltaire” and “Paris! City of the Arts”, cover Paul Bowles’ first travels as a teenage student, and although written some years later, they seem best placed opening this book. Similarly, “Passport”, a short journal piece that was published at the end of Bowles’ life, appears in its ‘natural’ sequence, after a longer article about travelling in south India. And the remarkable prose poem – ‘Paul Bowles, His Life’ – seems to have no other place than at the close of this collection.
Bowles enthusiasts will note that eight of the forty pieces appeared in his own selection of travel writing, Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue (published in 1963), in which he revised a number of articles originally published in magazines. These appear in order of their original magazine publication, but the revised texts have been adopted. The original glossary from Their Heads are Green appears at the end of the book, and is followed by a Chronology of Paul Bowles by Daniel Halpern.
I have taken the term ‘travel writing’ loosely, in order to encompass travel-oriented journals, introductions to photographic books (Bowles was a generous contributor), even an enthusiastic glossary of kif terms for a 1960s book on cannabis. All of them showcase the unfailing quality of Bowles’ prose – as well as how central a role travel played in his life and work.
Mark Ellingham, London, 2010
Paul Bowles in front of his cases, Tangier 1952
Introduction by Paul Theroux
Paul Bowles of the stereotype is the golden man, the enigmatic exile, elegantly dressed, a cigarette holder between his fingers, luxuriating in the Moroccan sunshine, on remittances, occasionally offering his alarming and highly polished fictions to the wider world. This portrait has a grain of truth, but there is much more to know. Certainly, Bowles had style, and a success with one book. But a single book, even a popular one, seldom guarantees a regular income. And, quite apart from money, Bowles’ life was complicated emotionally, sexually, geographically, and without a doubt creatively.
A resourceful man – as the exile or expatriate tends to be -Bowles had many outlets for his imagination. He made a name for himself as a composer, writing the music for a number of films and stage-plays. He was a music ethnologist, an early recorder of traditional songs and melodies in remote villages in Morocco and Mexico. He wrote novels and short-stories. He wrote poems. He translated novels and poems from Spanish, French and Arabic, and created more than a dozen books with the Moroccan storyteller Mohammed Mrabet. So the louche languid soul of the stereotype turns out to have been a very busy man, highly productive, verging on a drudge.
He wrote travel essays, too, a whole book of them, which appeared as Their Heads are Green and Their Hands are Blue (1963). And as this new and valuable collection shows, he wrote vastly more travel pieces than are represented there, more than 30 of them that have never been collected before or reprinted. These range from journal entries and near prose-poems, a long autobiographical poem (“Paul Bowles, His Life”), polemical essays, political commentaries, and magazine pieces for glossy travel magazines, as well as magisterial introductions to books, such as I am attempting to do now.
He was handsome and hard to impress, watchful, solitary, and knew his own mind, his mood of acceptance, even of fatalism, made him an ideal traveler. He was not much of a gastronome -as his fiction shows, the disgusting meal (fur in the rabbit stew) interested him much more than haute cuisine. He was passionate about landscape and its effects on the traveler, as “The Baptism of Solitude” demonstrated, he was fascinated by the moods of the sky; and he was animated by the grotesque, wherever its misshapen form can be found. (He would have loved this observation by Augustus Hare in The Story of My Life: “It used to be said that the reason why Mrs. Barbara had only one arm and part of another was that Aunt Caroline had eaten the rest”) Contemptuous of what passes for progress or technology, he speaks in one of these pieces about Colombo being afflicted with “the Twentieth Century’s gangrene,” by which he means modernity.
As these newly disinterred pieces show over and over, Bowles was far from the dandy-dilettante that he is sometimes perceived to be. In the 62 years they represent, from 1931 to 1993, Bowles was a serious and extremely hard-working writer, trying to make a living; for, after the success of The Sheltering Sky (1948), his books were not brisk sellers. This is a salutary as well as an enlightening collection, demonstrating that the prudent writer, if he or she wishes to be spared the indignities of a real job, and the oppressions of a tetchy boss, has to keep writing. Bowles was fortunate in writing at a time (not long ago, but now gone) when
travel magazines still welcomed long thoughtful essays. He wrote for the American Holiday magazine. The frivolous name masked a serious literary mission. The English fiction writers, V S Pritchett and Lawrence Durrell also traveled for this magazine; so did John Steinbeck after he won the Nobel Prize for literature, when he crisscrossed the United States with his dog. Bowles wrote for The Nation and Harpers too, and contributed to essay collections. As we see here, Bowles wrote a piece for Holiday about hashish, another of his enthusiasms, since he was a life-long stoner.
He knew what he enjoyed in travel, and what bored him: “If I am faced with the decision of choosing between visiting a circus and a cathedral, a café and a public monument, or a fiesta and a museum, I am afraid I shall normally take the circus, the café, and the fiesta”
No matter who he is writing for – travel magazine or pompous quarterly – he is never less than felicitous, and often funny. Of the Algerian hinterland: “When you come upon a town in such regions, lying like the remains of a picnic lunch in the middle of an endless parking lot, you know it was the French who put it there” Or in the desert, drinking “piping hot Pepsi Cola”, or seeing “locust ravaged date palms whose branches look like the ribs of a broken umbrella,” or the unforgettable Monsieur Omar, “lying in his bed smoking, clad in only his shorts, a delighted and indestructible Humpty Dumpty”
One of the oddities not to say weird anachronisms in some of these pieces is his casual mention of slaves or slavery: “If there is no slave or servant handy...” he writes in Holiday in 1950. In a piece the same year, about Fez, he writes, “Sidi Abdallah has a slave girl by whom he had a child. The slave market has been abolished by the French but the institution still persists” – stating it flatly, without details. Nine years later, another off-hand remark, in a piece about hospitality in “Africa Minor” – “only the guard, an old Sudanese slave, had the keys” Where the reader might expect outrage, Bowles simply deadpans.
He wrote about Paris at a time when he was footloose and a Francophile; the Costa del Sol while the coast was still stylish and unspoiled; Ceylon (where he owned an entire offshore island); Thailand (he hated Bangkok but recorded the traditional music in rural Chiang Mai), Istanbul (“disorder is the visual keynote”), Kenya in the Mau-Mau period (where he was strongly, unfashion-ably anti-colonial), Madeira, India, and other places to which he was sent or happened to be journeying.
Morocco was his preferred place, its cities, its hinterland, and in particular Tangier. But it is Bowles’ peculiar Tangier, not the tourist’s, or the hippie’s; nor even the city of William Burroughs or Barbara Hutton or Truman Capote, though he knew all three and wrote well about them. Tangier for Bowles is not as decadent as it is usually depicted; it is friendly and unrestrained; cheap, not beautiful, a farrago of architectural styles; off the beaten track, with no center, blighted with “a dearth of cultural life” Bowles says he feels infantilized by it, and he affectionately disparages it, “Tangier is a city where everyone lives in a greater or lesser degree of discomfort”
But Tangier had its eccentrics. They interested Bowles much more than the millionaires or the Beats. Mr Black, and his unusual drink, is like a Bowles fiction: “There was the somewhat sinister Mr Black, whom I never met, but who, I am told, kept an outsize electric refrigerator in his sitting room, in which there was a collection of half-pint glass jars. Occasionally he would open the refrigerator door, inspect the labels on the bottles and select one. Then in front of his guests he would pour its contents into a glass and drink. A lady I know, who was present one day when he did this, innocently inquired if what he had in the glass were a combination of beet and tomato juice. ‘This is blood,’ he said. ‘Will you have some? It’s delicious chilled, you know’ The lady, who had lived in Tangier for many years and was thus determined to show no astonishment at anything, replied, ‘I don’t think I will right now, thank you. But may I see the jar?’ Mr Black handed it to her. The label read Mohammed. ‘He’s a Riffian boy,’ explained Mr Black. ‘I see,’ she said, ‘and the other jars?’ ‘Each one is from a different boy,’ her host explained. ‘I never take more than a half pint at a time from any one of them. That wouldn’t do. Too debilitating for them’”
In a number of pieces in this collection, Bowles unambiguously approves of Tangier’s drug culture, the smoking of the narcotic kif, the eating of majoun, cannabis jam. “Cannabis, the only serious world-wide rival to alcohol, reckoned in millions of users, is always described in alcoholic countries as a social menace” [from “Kif,” an essay that he wrote for The Book of Grass]. He is not a drinker at all, and anything but a hellraiser, but he has his pleasures.
Though some of the pieces are purely political, and others as elegant as any he wrote, his general outlook is much more relaxed here than in his fiction, or even of those essays Bowles selected for Their Heads are Green, many of them with the tone of Letters Home (another paradox, because for most of his life he did not really have a home outside of Tangier), informative, direct, familiar in tone, casual, sometimes abrupt, “So I’m off tomorrow; I can’t stand this rain any longer” He is associated with one city, but he casually lets drop the fact that in six months of 1959 he traveled 25,000 miles – and what makes this extraordinary is that Bowles, who had a fear of flying, was traveling by ship and bus and train.
His rich experience of the world equipped him to write about travel, and one of the best essays here (“The Challenge to Identity”) analyzes travel literature: “What is a travel book? For me it is the story of what happened to one person in a particular place, and nothing more than that; it does not contain hotel and highway information, lists of useful phrases, statistics, or hints as to what kind of clothing is to be needed by the intending visitor. It may be that such books form a category which is doomed to extinction. I hope not, because there is nothing I enjoy more than reading an accurate account by an intelligent writer of what happened to him away from home”
Bowles’ long and full life is captured in these pieces, which also shed light on his brilliant fictions. It was a life of his choice. He never compromised, and thoroughly admirable in going his own way, writing what he wished, he never did anything he did not want to do; he kept at it until he died.
The melancholy lines in his autobiographical poem tell something about his last two decades. After his wife Jane died in 1973, he lived another 26 years. Jane had had a number of passionate affairs with women, and was deeply monogamously attached to a Moroccan woman called Cherifa, whom Bowles suspected to be a witch and a poisoner. Bowles too had his male attachments. Yet the death of this seemingly semi-detached wife, a dedicated lesbian, devastated him and put him in limbo:
After that it seemed to him that nothing more happened
He went on living in Tangier,
translating from Arabic, French and Spanish.
He wrote many short stories, but no novels.
There continued to be more and more people in the world.
And there was nothing anyone could do about anything.
17 Quai Voltaire
Journal; Memoir of Paris, 1931-321
IF I REMEMBER CORRECTLY, the apartment, at 17 Quai Voltaire, consisted of a very high-ceilinged studio with a balcony along one side. I slept up there. Harry Dunham, just out of Princeton, had rented the studio. He had the small bedroom downstairs. It was January, and the mornings were very cold. I could look out of the bathroom window on the balcony at the tracery of branches against the sky, and at the touts going up and down the river at my feet. This was the winter of 19311932; there were not many cars passing in the street below. I assume there are more now.
In Marrakesh Harry had thought it a good idea to import Abdelkader, a fifteen-year-old Moroccan who worked in the hotel there, and who could, thought Harry, be trained to act as his valet and as a general factotum. This proved to be not a successful venture.
There must have been some sort of heating apparatus in the place, or it would have seen untenable, and as a matter of fa
ct I recall Abdelkader’s journeys down the narrow back stairway to the basement in order to fetch fuel. Whether this was wood or coal I have no idea. I know that it was on this staircase where one day he met someone he enthusiastically described as “comme ma mère, je te jure”, and to whom he subsequently presented me (also on these back stairs). The voluble lady’s name was Lucie Delarue-Mardrus. She invited me in to her apartment for a cup of coffee, and introduced me to Dr. Mardrus, who had much less to say than she. I was almost mute, not having read, or even known of the existence of his translation of The Thousand and One Nights. It was here that I first heard of Isabella Eberhardt, whom Mme. Mardrus described with great relish. They had met in Algeria.
Paul Bowles took this photo-booth picture in Paris in 1930 and sent it to his friend, Bruce Morrissette; the phrase he has inked in the background reads “et qui voit le mystère” (“and who sees the mystery”)
The previous month I had been staying at an Italian skiresort. I was not in the best of health, and I wrote this to Gertrude Stein, who insisted that I return to Paris. But in the meantime someone (there were so many gossip spreaders on the Left Bank in those days) went to her and told her that I was with a French girl there in the Alps. The girl and I were merely friends, but Gertrude Stein drew her own conclusions.
