Let It Come Down
Page 34
But above and beyond these dark themes, it is also possible to see in Let It Come Down a love letter addressed to Tangier. Bowles writes about the streets, houses, cafés, bars and harbour of the old city with a documentary accuracy born from gratitude and affection. Indeed the city is arguably the only character in the entire book for which one is allowed to feel some affection. Tangier is depicted by Bowles in the last year of her extraordinary period as an International City, which lasted just a generation, from the 1920s to the 1950s. She was an intact city-state with her own hinterland, ruled by a council of foreign consuls and local representatives. She also remained part of the spiritual Kingdom of Morocco, yet was part of the wider world, with different systems of justice for those of different faiths, and an entirely free market for the exchange of goods, money and ideas. As such, she attracted, like Shanghai in the 20s and 30s, a motley and exotic collection of inhabitants, attracted by the liberal attitudes to commerce and morality. There have been dozens and dozens of memoirs and novels written about International Tangier by ex-residents but none of them manages to achieve anything of the accuracy, range, empathy and sensibility of Let It Come Down. This is lucky, for within a year of the novel’s completion, the struggle for Moroccan independence had started, and with it began the slow transformation of Tangier from independent city to provincial backwater.
Morocco, whether he was visiting as a feckless travelling youth or living there as an honoured and respected elderly writer, was always a place of transformation for Bowles, ultimately the only place where he could both feel stimulated and yet work. It was a place where he could fall in love—or as he would have it, fall into an obsession. His friendship with the Moroccan painter, Ahmed Yacoubi, was one of the great adventures of his life. Yacoubi was born into a family of Muslim faith-healers who lived in one of the old quarters of the walled medieval city of Fez. As well as a self-taught genius for painting (a habit which he had to hide during his youth as it was considered impious), he had a curiosity and delight in travelling that was fully equal to Bowles’s own insistent wanderlust. Whilst Bowles wrote Let It Come Down he was infatuated with Yacoubi, with his vast storehouse of stories and traditional practices, as well as his youthful exuberance, enthusiasm and honesty. Yacoubi allowed Bowles unique access to the most intimate beliefs, thoughts, attitudes and habits of a Moroccan man. Some of this experience, particularly their trip into the Rif mountains and into the Rif town of Chechaouen, where Bowles witnessed the bloody spirit dances of a Sufi brotherhood, were poured straight into the penultimate chapters of Let It Come Down. If there is such a thing as the Yacoubi novel however, it is not Let it Come Down so much as its successor, The Spider’s House, which is set in Yacoubi’s Fez and centres around the adventures of a traditionally educated young man drawn towards the two destructive sirens of nationalism and western modernity.
But let us take leave of Paul Bowles with what Tangier meant to him. After his very first visit, in the autumn of 1931, he wrote, “If I said Tangier struck me as a dream city, I should mean it in the strict sense. Its topography was rich in prototypal dream scenes; covered streets like corridors with doors opening into rooms on each side, hidden terraces high above the sea, streets consisting only of steps, dark impasses, small squares built on sloping terrain so that they looked like ballet sets designed in false perspective, with alleys leading off in several directions; as well as the classical dream equipment of tunnels, ramparts, ruins, dungeons and cliffs …” Forty years later, as an older man writing his autobiographical memoir, Without Stopping, he would add: “I relish the idea that in the night, all around me in my sleep, sorcery is burrowing its invisible tunnels in every direction, from thousands of senders to thousands of unsuspecting recipients. Spells are being cast, poison is running its course; souls are being dispossessed of the parasitic pseudo-consciousness that lurks in the unguarded recesses of the mind. There is drumming out there most nights. It never awakens me; I hear the drums and incorporate them into my dream, like the mighty call of the muezzins. Even if in the dream I am in New York, the first cry of Allah Akhbar effaces the backdrop and carries whatever comes next to North Afrca, and the dream goes on.”
Barnaby Rogerson, 2009
THE BEGINNING
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First published in Great Britain by John Lehmann 1952
Published in Penguin Classics 2000
Copyright © Paul Bowles, 1952
Introduction copyright © Paul Bowles, 1980, reproduced by kind permission of Black Sparrow Press
Afterword copyright © Barnaby Rogerson, 2009
The moral right of the author and the author of the Afterword has been asserted
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-0-141-91184-7