Travels: Collected Writings, 1950-1993

by Paul Bowles

  THE TREND OF THIS CENTURY is being set by America for the entire world. (Even Lenin on his deathbed is reported to have said, “Americanize yourselves.”) Whether or not we are as yet truly fitted for the task, we Americans are now fairly used to considering ourselves the leaders. We manage pretty well in undertakings which demand organization, perseverance, industriousness and, of course, technique. In cultural matters, however, we often find ourselves still looking across the Atlantic for guidance. To attribute this backward-glancing to mere aesthetic snobbery is to explain away some of it, I admit, but not all of it. There are deeper reasons why Europe still holds something important for us.

  I think it is the business of technique that stands in the way of our own culture’s complete and unimpeded flowering. In the rush to learn how we have forgotten that first we must know what. And we are becoming increasingly aware that an overemphasis on technique produces an unsatisfying artistic result. Unconsciously or otherwise we demand something better, we are uneasy, we suspect that we have missed some element vital to the fashioning of a culture. Why otherwise are we so consistently fascinated by Europe – slightly contemptuous of her oldness, of course, but drawn back to explore her, year after year, decade after decade, in ever increasing numbers – unless it be that our intuition tells us we shall find what we need there, among the visible vestiges of our immediate tribal past?

  For some the search leads to specific museums, cathedrals, festivals – the neatly packaged evidences of Europe’s culture. Not long ago I went to see Tosca at the Terme di Caracalla in Rome; the moon shone down from overhead, there was an audience of ten thousand people, the production and performance were superb, and no microphones were used. At the same time another annual opera season was in progress, at the vast Roman Arena of Verona, and just as that would draw to a close, the XIVth International Film Festival was scheduled to open in Venice. The visitor to Italy, or to practically any part of Europe, can be sure of finding plenty of organized culture. By timing his travels to gratify his tastes, he can catch the Shakespeare Festival at Stratford-on-Avon, or the Royal Danish Ballet Festival at Copenhagen, or the miracle play Petrus de Dacia on Gotland Island off the coast of Sweden, and any of innumerable music festivals, of which some celebrate the work of a single composer (Sibelius at Helsinki, Wagner at Bayreuth), others offer more general fare (Salzburg, Strasbourg, Granada), and still others specialize severely (the Dolmetsch Festival of Early English Music at Halsmere, Surrey, or the Carillon Concerts at Bruges in Belgium). Particularly in summer, Europe teems with such activities.

  That is excellent. But I believe that what we Americans are searching for, and thus the most important thing we can bring back with us, is something more all-embracing. I should call it a childhood – a personal childhood that has some relationship to the childhood of our culture. The overwhelming majority of us are transplanted Europeans of one sort or another. Culturally speaking, the short time we have been in America is nothing compared to the infinitely longer time we have spent in Europe, and we seem to have forgotten this true past, lost contact with the psychic soil of tradition in which the roots of culture must be anchored.

  Our gadget civilization has no visible connection with the past; it is not the continuation or outgrowth of any deep-seated myth, and however much the rational section of the mind may approve of it, the other part of the mind, the part that actually determines preferences rather than explaining them, is dissatisfied with it. What we want is to experience that glow which comes to an individual when he feels beyond a doubt that he is an integral, if infinitesimal, part of historical continuity. And Europe, if we approach it without preconceived ideas as to what constitutes its “culture” – simply with a little humility and a little imagination – provides us with that lost childhood, the childhood which never happened, but whose evocation can be so instrumental in helping us to locate ourselves in time and space. It is the first step, the indispensable one, in the direction of knowing what we are to ourselves and what we are in the world.

  CULTURE IS ESSENTIALLY a matter of using the past to give meaning to the present. A man’s culture is the sum of his memories. It will not consist of a wealth of facts, names and dates which he has at his finger tips, but will be rather the sum of everything that he has thought and felt – that is, known.

  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’m afraid I shall normally take the circus, the café and the fiesta, trusting to luck that I shall manage to see the others later. I suppose I’m simply not what today is called culture-minded. Perhaps that is because to me the culture of a land at any given moment is the people who live in it and the lives they lead in it, not the possessions they have inherited from those who came before. They may or may not profit by their legacy. If they do, so much the better for them; but whether they do or do not, their culture is represented by them and not by their history.

  I moved around Europe a good deal during my teens and twenties, and by moving around I mean constant displacement, often every day, all year round, an occupation which I pursued with an intensity I find difficult to understand now. With the usual omnivorousness of the footloose American in Europe, I wandered into hundreds of museums, chapels, galleries, cathedrals, parks, ruins and cemeteries, all the places where tangible evidence of what it pleases us to call culture could still be found. But probably because I was a young man of abysmal ignorance in such matters, the objects of culture themselves seldom impressed me as much as the general atmosphere enveloping each particular place. Always, as I stepped into one of these cultural sanctuaries, I felt that at the same time I was stepping almost entirely out of life, out of the world of reality.

  With such an attitude, it is not surprising that I remember very little of what I saw in these dim places, and that in my memory they have become collectively merely an atmospheric part of the whole, whose brighter points are inevitably streets, cafés, railway stations, theaters, village squares, markets and rural landscapes.

  Yet, understood and appreciated or not, the dim places remain in my mind; they are the dark, mysterious core of my European memories, and it is this core which in some unexplained fashion – perhaps precisely because of its element of mystery – now gives meaning and direction to the memories I carry.

  The mind has a strange way of selecting a few details from among millions, and presenting them to us as tokens of experience. It is as if it said to us: “These are the only keepsakes you are to have, these irrelevant memories. The rest I am sweeping out.” And then, doubtless just because there are so few of them, these flashes of past reality grow in intensity, the light that illumines them is no longer simple sunlight or moonlight, but of our own making, and the illogical little vignettes become symbols in themselves, etched indelibly on our memory.

  Thus a week spent in Munich for a music festival may eventually yield only the milkiness of the River lsar, the ever-present choking smell of burning coke in the air, and the Deutsches Museum, which fascinated me to such an extent that I preferred to eat a ghastly lunch there in its basement rather than go out for a good one and return. (I might add that the museum was full of automata which could be set in motion by pushing buttons.) Or the Alps in winter can be reduced to the mingled smell of melting snow and barnyards; the Alps in spring to hyacinths and ice along the road, and going to sleep nights in country inns to the sound of waterfalls; the Alps in summer to funiculars, bunches of lavender picked on the hillsides, and the cold breath of glaciers that creak in the still, hot sunlight. Of Heidelberg I can recall only crawling around the Schloss alone at night, being brushed against by startled bats and nearly breaking my neck – that and an Ascension Day morning spent sitting on a hill watching a battle between two varieties of ants, while the church bells rang. Of Salzburg, the castle on the hill slowly shedding its morning coat of mist. Of Venice the fact that living there is slightly disquieting; one feels like a personage in a p
ainting – so much so that the paintings there seem less exciting than they should. Of Berlin, the shortness of the summer nights; in June you could go to Götterdämmerung at the old Kroll Oper, and when you came out there would still be daylight in the west. Then you would sit an hour in a café, and before you got home dawn would be breaking, the sparrows twittering. And of Mont Saint Michel, besides the omelettes of Mère Poulard, the plight of some unfortunate medieval gentleman, described by the guide as he dragged his flock through a particularly dark dungeon: “On l’a jeté ici, où il a été r-r-rongé par les r-r-rats!”

  The entire French populace is often credited with having unerring taste and understanding in matters of art: this is unfortunately a gross exaggeration. One winter in Paris I lived in a large studio on the Quai Voltaire. On the walls I had placed, with care and a certain pride, three huge “constructions” by Miró, made of wood, plaster and rope. They were the only objects of art in the place, and it was a shock to return one evening to the studio and find them gone. I rushed downstairs to the concierge, who with her sister had charge of cleaning the apartment, and announced the disappearance of the Mirós, and at the same time I asked her for the address of the nearest police station. She looked mystified. “But monsieur has never had any pictures in his studio,” she said. I described them. “Oh!” she laughed. “Those old pieces of wood you had tacked against the wall. I threw them in the cellar with the firewood. I thought monsieur would be pleased to get rid of them. They took up so much room.” The three constructions had to be sent back to the Gallery for repairs, which I was told could be done only by the maître when he returned from Barcelona.

  THERE WAS A MUSIKFEST in a spa of Westphalia one spring. I remember it, probably, because it required a concentrated participation which I was unable to give it; it is normal not to forget an incident which impresses one with a sense of one’s inadequacy. The cherry trees were in bloom, the grass was lush, one crunched along the gravel sidewalks of the resort always in the shade of the carefully manicured lindens. The air was incredibly sweet, and there was an atmosphere of unsmirchable cleanliness about the town and the neighboring countryside.

  The first night I got off on the wrong foot by having an argument with the hotelkeeper. On the register, under Nationality, I had written Amerikaner, and under Profession, I had put Komponist. A half hour later, passing by the desk, I happened to glance at the register again, and discovered that my host had supplied the gratuitous word Jazz before Komponist. Being at an age when such a thing constitutes a grave affront to one’s honor, I promptly crossed out Jazz but unfortunately the proprietor saw me and hurried out to inform me that it was forbidden to change anything on the register once the authorities had been given the information contained therein. “Polizeilich verboten!”, he barked. This led to a discussion about the nature of my work, a subject which he loudly insisted was of no interest whatever to him. An American composer was a jazz composer (he pronounced it “yatz,” of course) and that was that. This put me in a fury, and as one is wont to do in such cases, I transferred most of my annoyance with him to the festival in general.

  The next morning I determined to change dwelling places, and I chose a pension with a pretty garden. This place was full of musicians. From the moment I moved in until three days later when I left for Hanover the only lapses in the stream of purely musical conversation were those engendered by linguistic difficulties. Otherwise it was all Schnabel, Hindenith Gieseking, Szigeti, Bartók, Furtwängler, cadenze, tutti, rubati, and that strange, highly inflected but utterly unmellifluous tongue that is comprehensible only to the musicians, in which they quote themes to each other: “Paw paw paw paw, dzing dzing dzing-a-dzing poom, paw paw paw paw, bom!”

  Early in the game it was decided that I was a very peculiar fish. What was I, an American jüngling, doing all alone out here on this sacred pilgrimage? Where were my parents, and why was I not studying? The men were a little more indulgent, but the women were fierce about it.

  Afternoons we would sit at cafés in the deep shade along the Hauptstrasse, drinking beer or eating ice cream topped with Schlagsahne. Evenings were spent, of course, at the concert hall, with everyone who had access to scores or manuscripts following them studiously. Then the real fun began, when the listeners joined the participants and composers back at the cafés afterward and let fly with their endlessly ramified opinions. But when finally everyone went to bed there was the deep silence of the country night, and in the early morning the smell of wood smoke filled the air.

  Because I had been put on the defensive by these people, I felt more or less duty-bound to stick it out: the long concerts of modern music that was largely dull, the conferences afterward, and the eternal conversations at mealtimes. However, when Sunday morning dawned bright and beautiful, I had to choose between a special ten-o’clock symposium on the contemporary Czech art song and a stroll, preferably through the orchards up the hill overlooking the town and its valley. I could foresee just what sort of mournful and dissonant sounds would be filling the dark auditorium, and I took the walk. Even so, I was not without music; the birds and the village church bells provided me with a concert far more in keeping with the day and the spot.

  I came late to luncheon, and was greeted with reproachful glances. I was accused of not being a serious person. Then someone had the novel idea of attributing my obviously frivolous nature to my nationality, and everyone hastened to agree. If a man were not able to be serious, this constitutional inferiority made him a pitiable rather than a censurable character. This reflection brought cheer to them all, and I found myself back in their good graces, where I stayed until I sneaked away to the station the next morning and caught the early train out. And that was the end of the one music festival whose events I can recall.

  MY FIRST VISIT to the Prado took place twenty-two years ago on a cold rainy afternoon in November. I was passing through Madrid on my way from Marrakesh to Paris, and with me I had Abdelkader, a savage little fifteen-year-old Moroccan who was being exported to the Quai Voltaire to be broken in to domestic service in the house of a friend. In his short life Abdelkader had not had much opportunity to learn about Europeans and their culture; he had never seen or heard of such a thing as a painting.

  Our first confrontation was a very large Greco. “It’s broken,” remarked Abdelkader, after a moment.

  “What do you mean, broken?” I asked him.

  “It’s stuck. It’s not moving.”

  I explained carefully that this was not a cinema, and we went into a room full of pictures by Bosch, or El Bosco, as the Spanish like to call him. Here were most of the famous examples of the Flemish master’s intimate visions of punishment, doom and destruction. We paused in front of the Temptation of Saint Anthony, complete with a case of the most malevolent little demons ever depicted in paint. Abdelkader needed no previous knowledge of Christian dogma to understand the nature of the monsters that swarmed across these tortured canvases. Now he exhibited distinct signs of panic.

  “It’s not a cinema?” he whispered, and I assured him again that it was not.

  “Then,” he went on, his voice rising in volume and pitch, “that is real fire and blood, and those are real devils. Come on!”

  We went hurriedly into another sala, hung with peaceful Flemish interiors and landscapes. He signed with relief. “Ah, no, my friend. I’m not going to stay in there with those things. They’re very bad. The Spanish are crazy to leave such things around in the open.”

  As the afternoon wore on, his courage returned somewhat, and I think he began to feel pangs of shame for his earlier reactions. At one point he approached a particularly vivid crucifixion and tentatively touched a portion of it with his forefinger, calling my attention to his exploit. “Look! The blood doesn’t come off! It’s dried on.” This preliminary experiment encouraged him to further daring, and he began to dart from picture to picture, rubbing flesh, tree trunks, bones, clouds and water, until a guard caught sight of him and reprimanded him se
verely.

  “Prohibido. Está prohibido,” the guard insisted, wagging his index finger back and forth in front of the offender’s face.

  “What’s he saying?” asked Abdelkader. I told him, and explained that the picture might be damaged by being touched.

  “But all the people are dead and dried up,” he said scornfully. “How could it hurt them? The Spanish are crazy.”

  A somewhat similar thing happened recently when my Moorish chauffeur, on his first visit away from his native Morocco, drove me to the Cathedral in Córdoba. “Hm,” he said with satisfaction as we approached the great, unmistakably Eastern edifice, “this is ours.” My mistake was in saying “Yes,” for he took my agreement to mean that the building was still a mosque. This illusion was not dispelled, either by the vast outer courtyard or by the interior. When he got inside, like any good Moslem, he went in search of water. Before I knew what was happening, he had installed himself before a fount of holy water, rolled up his sleeves, immersed his face and was gargling, spitting, splashing and scrubbing quite as his forebears had done in the same place of worship a thousand years ago. Happily this part of the Cathedral is fairly dark, and was deserted at that moment of the afternoon, so that I got to him before anyone heard or saw him, otherwise we might both have ended the day at the Comisaria de Policía. Few citizens of Córdoba would have taken a light-hearted view of his innocent sacrilege.