Paul Frederic Bowles (December 30, 1910 – November 18, 1999) was an American composer, author, translator, and expatriate.

Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making various trips to Paris in the 1930s. He studied music with Aaron Copland and in New York wrote music for various theatrical productions, as well as other compositions. He achieved critical and popular success with the publication in 1949 of his first novel The Sheltering Sky, set in what was known as French North Africa, which he had visited in 1931.

In 1947 Bowles settled in Tangier, Morocco, and his wife, Jane Bowles followed in 1948. Except for winters spent in Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) during the early 1950s, Tangier was his home for the remainder of his life.

Paul Bowles died in 1999 at the age of 88 and is buried in upstate New York.

Life

1910-1930: Family and education

Paul Bowles was born in Jamaica, Queens, New York City the only child of Rena (née Rennewisser) and Claude Dietz Bowles, a dentist. His childhood was materially comfortable, but Bowles senior was a cold and domineering parent, opposed to any form of play or entertainment, feared by both his son and wife. According to family legend, he had tried to kill his newborn son by leaving him exposed on a window-ledge during a snowstorm; the story may not be true, but Bowles believed it was, and it encapsulates his relationship with his father. Such warmth as there was in his life as a child came from his mother, who read Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe to him - it was to the latter that he later attributed his own desire to write stories like "The Delicate Prey," "A Distant Episode," and "Pages from Cold Point"^[1]

Bowles could read by the time he was 3 and within the year was writing stories. Soon, he wrote surrealistic poetry and music.^[2] In 1922, at age 11, he bought his first book of poetry, Arthur Waley's A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems, and at age seventeen one of his poems, "Spire Song," was accepted for publication in the twelfth volume of "Transition", a literary journal based in Paris that served as a forum for some of the greatest proponents of modernism — Djuna Barnes, James Joyce, Paul Éluard, Gertrude Stein and others.^[3] His interest in music also dated from his childhood, when his father bought a phonograph and classic records (Bowles was interested in jazz but such records were forbidden in the house). His family bought a piano and the young Bowles studied musical theory, singing, and piano. When he was 15 a performance of Stravinsky's The Firebird at Carnegie Hall made a profound impression: "Hearing The Firebird made me determined to continue improvising on the piano when my father was out of the house, and to notate my own music with an increasing degree of knowing that I had happened upon a new and exciting mode of expression."^[4]

Bowles entered the University of Virginia in 1928, where his interests included T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Prokofiev, Duke Ellington, Gregorian chants, and the blues. He also heard music by George Antheil and Henry Cowell. In April 1929 he dropped out without informing his parents and sailed with a one-way ticket for Paris and no intention of ever returning - not, he said later, running away, but "running toward something, although I didn't know what at the time." ^[5] Nevertheless, by July he returned to New York and took a job at Duttons Bookshop in Manhattan, where he began work on an unfinished book of fiction, Without Stopping (not to be confused with his later autobiography of the same title). At the insistence of his parents he returned to the University of Virginia, but left after one semester to go back to Paris with Aaron Copland, with whom he had been studying composition in New York.^[6] It was during the autumn of 1930 in Paris that Bowles began work on his own first musical composition, the "Sonata for Oboe and Clarinet", which he finished the following year and which premiered in New York at the Aeolian Hall on Wigmore St, 16th December 1931, the whole concert (which also included work by Copland and Virgil Thomson) was "panned" by New York critics. ^[7] although his first known completed compositional work was to translate some vocal pieces of Kurt Schwitters to piano music, in Berlin. ^[8]

1931-1946: France and New York

In France, Bowles became a part of Gertrude Stein's literary and artistic circle. On her advice he made his first visit to Tangier with Copland in the summer of 1931 ^[9]. They took a house on the Mountain above Tangier Bay. Morocco was later to become the home of Paul Bowles, and the sparse landscape would inspire him to transform himself from being predominantly a composer into being predominantly a novelist ^[10]. From there he traveled back to Berlin, where he met Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood, before returning to North Africa the next year to travel throughout other parts of Morocco, the Sahara, Algeria and Tunisia.

In 1937 he returned to New York, and over the next decade established a solid reputation as a composer, collaborating with Orson Welles, Tennessee Williams and others on music for stage productions as well as orchestral pieces. In 1938 he married the author and playwright Jane Auer. It was an unconventional marriage: their intimate relationships were with people of their own sex, but they maintained close ties to each other,^[11] and despite being frequently anthologised as a gay writer Bowles always regarded such typecasting as both absurd and irrelevant.^[12] After a brief sojourn in France they were prominent among the literary figures of New York throughout the 1940s, with Paul working under Virgil Thomson as a music critic at the New York Herald Tribune. His light opera The Wind Remains, based on a poem by García Lorca, was performed in 1943 with choreography by Merce Cunningham and conducted by Leonard Bernstein.

In 1945 he began writing prose again, beginning with a few short stories including A Distant Episode. His wife Jane, he said, was the main influence upon his taking up fiction as an adult, and he did not begin writing the tales for which he was later known until after Jane had published her first novel, Two Serious Ladies (1943).^[13] His translation of Sartre's play No Exit (Huis-clos), directed by John Huston, won a Drama Critic's Award. The subsequent year, he received an advance for a novel, and began writing The Sheltering Sky in New York. Bowles commented that he got the idea for the title of his book while riding on a bus on Fifth Avenue from a song that he had known from the age of four, "Down Among the Sheltering Palms" and he had heard it every summer on a recording that was kept at the Boat House (the family home in Glenora). ^[14]

1947-1973: Early years in Tangier

In 1947 Bowles moved permanently to Tangier, where Jane joined him in 1948. His first novel, The Sheltering Sky, was first published in London, England in September 1949 (the original American publisher having cancelled their contract)^[15] with the American edition appearing the following month. The book had three printings in two months ^[16] and quickly rose to the New York Times best-seller list. The plot follows three Americans as the journey through the desert of an unnamed North African country, culminating in the death of one and the descent into madness of another. Critical reception was warm, but not overwhelmingly so, the reviewer for TIME magazine commenting that the ends visited upon the two main characters "seem appropriate but by no means tragic". Nevertheless, reviewer concluded that "Bowles scores cleanly with his minor characters: Arab pimps and prostitutes, French officers in garrison towns, a stupidly tiresome pair of tourists—mother & son [and the book] is drenched with a fine sense of place, ...sketch[ing] Arab towns and the Sahara itself with sharp sureness. Bowles may have missed the center of the target with his central characters, but he has given them a supporting cast and an exciting setting that a good many more practiced novelists can honestly envy."^[17]

Bowles's short stories had already appeared in literary magazines, and his first collection appeared in 1950. Titled A Little Stone in its UK edition, it appeared in the US as The Delicate Prey and Other Stories; two of Bowles's most famous short stories, "A Delicate Prey" and "A Distant Episode", were kept out of the British edition by the publisher on the advise of Somerset Maugham, who felt they were too violent. A second novel, Let It Come Down, appeared in 1952, and a third, The Spider's House, in 1955. Reviewers noted that The Spider's House marked a departure in that it introduced a contemporary political theme to Bowles's writing, the conflict between Moroccan nationalism and French colonialism.

While Bowles was now concentrating on his career as a writer, he composed incidental music for nine plays presented by the American School of Tangier. The Bowleses became fixtures of the American and European expatriate scene in Tangier. Visitors included Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal. The Beat writers Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Gregory Corso followed in the mid-1950s and early 1960s. In 1951, Bowles was introduced to the Master Musicians of Jajouka, having first heard the musicians when he and Brion Gysin attended a festival or moussem at Sidi Kacem. Bowles' continued association with the Master Musicians of Jajouka and their hereditary leader Bachir Attar is described in Paul Bowles' book, a diary entitled Days: A Tangier Journal. In 1952, Bowles bought the tiny island of Taprobane, off the coast of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where he wrote much of his novel The Spider's House, returning to Tangier in the warmer months.

In 1961, Bowles began tape-recording and translating Moroccan authors and story-tellers including stories by Mohamed Choukri, Ahmed Yacoubi, Larbi Layachi (under the pseudonym Driss ben Hamed Charhadi), and Mohammed Mrabet. In 1968, Bowles spent one semester at the English Department of the San Fernando Valley State College, (now California State University, Northridge), lecturing on existentialism and the structure of the novel. Most of the time however, he remained in Tangier with brief interludes overseas, mainly to visit his sick wife, Jane, who had by then recently been hospitalized in Malaga.

In 1970 Bowles and Daniel Halpern started the Tangier literary magazine "Antaeus" which was to feature many new authors, such as Lee Prosser, as well as more established authors such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti and his own work, such as "Afternoon with Antaeus", some fragments of an unfinished novel by his wife Jane Bowles along with excerpts from "The Summer House", and works by Daniel Halpern and others. "Antaeus" magazine continued to publish until 1994

Paul Bowles also was a music ethnologist. He was fascinated by Moroccan traditional music, including the jilala, gnaoua, aissaoua, hamadcha, and others.

1974-1999: Later years

After the death of Jane Bowles in 1973 in Málaga, Spain, Bowles continued to live in Tangier, writing and receiving visitors to his modest apartment. In 1985 he published his translated version of one short story "The Circular Ruins" of Jorge Luis Borges which was published in a book of sixteen story translations (all by Bowles) called "She Woke Me Up So I Killed Her". This Borges story had already been translated and published by the three main Borges translators: Anthony Kerrigan, Anthony Bonner and James E. Irby and it is interesting to note the difference of styles amongst these four different translations. Bowles's version is in typical Bowles prose style form and is very identifiable from the other three, which all tend to stick to a more conservative idiomatic form of translation.

In the summers of 1980 and 1982 Paul Bowles conducted Writing Workshops in Morocco, (under the auspices of the School of Visual Arts in New York) at the American School of Tangier which were both very successful, so much so that several of his former students including Rodrigo Rey Rosa ^[18] who was the 2004 Winner of the Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize in Literature and who is also the Literary Heir of the Estate of Paul Bowles ^[19]and Mark Terrill ^[20] went on to become successful authors.

Bowles made a cameo appearance at the beginning and end of the movie in the Bernardo Bertolucci film adaptation of his novel The Sheltering Sky (1949) in 1990. Bowles music was mostly forgotten until the 1990's when a new generation of American musicians and singers became interested in it again. These charming, witty pieces are a treasure to be savored by art song enthusiasts. ^[21]

In 1995 Paul Bowles made a rare and final return to New York for a special Paul Bowles Festival celebrating his music at the Lincoln Center under the conductorship of Jonathan Sheffer with the Eos Orchestra ^[22] and later a symposium and interview held at the New School for Social Research.

Bowles was interviewed by Paul Theroux in 1994, documented in the last chapter of Theroux's travel book, The Pillars of Hercules. The last interview with Paul Bowles took place in Tangier on 6th June 1999; was conducted by Irene Herrmann, the executrix of the Paul Bowles Music Estate and was published in September 2003. ^[23]

Bowles died of heart failure at the Italian Hospital in Tangier on November 18, 1999 at the age of 88. He had been ill for some time with respiratory problems. Although he had lived in Morocco for 52 years, he was buried in Lakemont, New York, next to the graves of his parents and grandparents.

Achievement and Legacy

Paul Bowles was one of the last surviving representatives of a generation of artists whose work has shaped 20th century literature and music.^[24]In the Introduction to Bowles's "Collected Stories" (1979) Gore Vidal ranked his short stories "among the best ever written by an American," writing: the floor to this ramshackle civilization that we have built cannot bear much longer our weight. It was Bowles's genius to suggest the horrors which lie beneath that floor, as fragile, in its way, as the sky that shelters us from a devouring vastness".^[25]

His music, in contrast, is "as full of light as the fiction [is] of dark...almost as if the composer were a totally different person from the writer."^[26] During the early 1930s he studied composition (intermittently) with Aaron Copland; his music from this period "is reminiscent of Satie and Poulenc." Returning to New York in the mid-30s, he became one of the preeminent composers of American theater music, producing works for William Saroyan, Tennessee Williams, and others,^[27] "show[ing] exceptional skill and imagination in capturing the mood, emotion, and ambience of each play to which he was assigned." In his own words, incidental music allowed Bowles to present "climaxless music, hypnotic music in one of the exact senses of the word, in that it makes its effect without the spectator being made aware of it.” At the same time he continued to write concert music, his style assimilating some of the melodic, rhythmic, and other stylistic elements of African, Mexican, and Central American music.^[28]

In 1991 Paul Bowles was awarded the Rea Award for the Short Story, an award that is made annually "to a writer who has made a significant contribution to the short story as an art form". The jury gave the following citation: “Paul Bowles is a storyteller of the utmost purity and integrity. He writes of a world before God became man; a world in which men and women in extremis are seen as components in a larger, more elemental drama. His prose is crystalline and his voice unique. Among living American masters of the short story, Paul Bowles is sui generis.”^[29] His works were added to the Library of America (aimed at preparing scholarly editions of American literary classics and keeping them permanently in print) in 2002.

Notes

Notable works

In addition to his chamber and stage compositions Bowles published fourteen short story collections, three volumes of poetry, numerous translations, numerous travel articles, and an autobiography.

Music

Fiction

Translations

Among his life's accomplishments were translations of stories from the oral tradition of native Moroccan storytellers including Mohammed Mrabet, Driss Ben Hamed Charhadi (Larbi Layachi), Mohamed Choukri, Abdeslam Boulaich, and Ahmed Yacoubi. He also translated Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Jorges Luis Borges, Jean-Paul Sartre, Isabelle Eberhardt, Guy Frison-Roche, André Pieyre de Mandiargues, Ramon Gomez de la Serna, Giorgio de Chirico, Si Lakhdar, E. Laoust, Ramon Beteta, Gabino Chan, Bertrand Flornoy, Jean Ferry, Denise Moran, Paul Colinet, Paul Magritte, Popul Buj, Francis Ponge, Bluet d'Acheres and Ramon Sender .

Travel, Autobiography and Letters

Editions

Film Appearances and Interviews

• Paul Bowles in Morocco (1970), produced and directed by Gary Conklin 57 minutes
• Paul Bowles: The South Bank Show" London Studios (1988), produced by ITV, directed by Melvyn Bragg, 54 minutes
• In 1990 Bernardo Bertolucci adapted The Sheltering Sky into a film in which Bowles has a cameo role and provides partial narration. 132 minutes
• "Paul Bowles The Complete Outsider" 1993, by Catherine Hiller Marnow and Regina Weinreich 57 minutes.
• "Halfmoon" 1995, four stories by Paul Bowles, Frieder Schlaich and Irenve von Alberti. First Run Features, 91 minutes
• "Halbmond" 1995, German version of "Halfmoon", Frieder Schlaich and Irenve von Alberti. First Run Features, 90 minutes
• "Let It Come Down" 1998, Requisite Productions, Zeitgeist Films, pub. 72 minutes, not rated. - this film is likely the definitive portrait of the author late in life. Directed by Jennifer Baichwal, includes footage of the final meeting between Bowles, William Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg which took place in 1995 in New York. 72 minutes
• "Night Waltz" 2002, Owsley Brown Film of the music of Paul Bowles, with Phillip Ramey and an Interview with Jonathan Sheffer, conductor of the Eos Orchestra. 77 minutes

References/Further Reading

Biographies

• Paul Bowles: 2117 Tanger Socco, Robert Briatte (1989), ISBN-2-259-02007-0The first authorized biography of Paul Bowles (in French)
• An Invisible Spectator: A Biography of Paul Bowles, Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno (1989)
• The Dream at the End of the World, Michelle Green (1991)
• You Are Not I: A Portrait of Paul Bowles, Millicent Dillon (1998)
• Paul Bowles: A Life, Virginia Spencer Carr (2004), ISBN-10: 0684196573

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

Paul Bowles

Official website and fansites

• paulbowles.org: The official Paul and Jane Bowles website
• paulbowles.com: The International Paul Bowles Society, a fan site promoting Paul Bowles in the written, musical and theatre forms

Writing and music

• Works by or about Paul Bowles in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Paul Bowles Collection at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin
• Paul Bowles Online Exhibit, University of Delaware
• Paul Bowles audio and music web published on the Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine project archive at Ubuweb

Interviews with Paul Bowles

More interviews on the official Paul Bowles website

• Clips of interviews with Bowles from the documentary Paul Bowles in Morocco
• "Paul Bowles, A Conversation with Bruce Duffie" (Bruce Duffie, May 1992)
• "Stranger on a Strange Shore" (Gaither Stewart, Critique magazine, October 2000).

Assessments, reviews and obituaries

• Review of "The Sheltering Sky", TIME magazine, 5 December, 1945
• Review of "Let It Come Down", "Critique" magazine.
• Review of "The Spider's House", New York Times, 1955
• New York Times obituary, 19 November 1999
• BBC World obituary, 19 November 1999
• Manchester Guardian obituary, 19 November 1999