Paul Bowles’s Enduring Mystery

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The New York Sun

Paul Bowles is a mystery to biographers. Perhaps that is why they keep writing about him. In “You Are Not I: A Portrait of Paul Bowles” (1998), Millicent Dillon puts it best:



In the past decade, since Paul Bowles has become an international legend, he has been the subject of many interviews and articles as well as several full-scale biographies. Yet, for all this reportage, he remains elusive. The complex being who is Paul Bowles deflects direct inquiry.


Ms. Dillon, the author of “A Little Original Sin: The Life and Work of Jane Bowles,” enjoyed his cooperation when she set out to write about his wife, and he also cooperated with her biography of him. Yet Ms. Dillon felt frustrated:


“Gazed at directly, for all that he had expressed eagerness about doing this project, he became a master of opacity.” She expected her interviews with him to trace “an arc of knowing,” an accumulation of knowledge. Instead she experienced “starts and stops … reversals and sudden leaps and reversals again.”


Bowles, I believe, was evincing his passive/aggressive personality, the temperament of the artist who wishes to engage with the world and yet reacts with hostility or evasiveness under its express scrutiny. Thus Ms. Dillon decided to write one of those books in which the biographer in quest of her subject engages in a “meditation on the nature of biography.”


In “Paul Bowles: A Life” (Scribner, 409 pages, $35), Virginia Spencer Carr seems content to present Bowles in all of his magnificent elusiveness. She hardly wishes even to acknowledge the mystery, taking Bowles at his word and rarely choosing to dissect his motivations. Perhaps that is why he gave her “carte blanche to present his life as I saw it.”


There is no reason to suppose, though, that Bowles gave his heart away. On the jacket flap of her book there is a photograph (taken on August 10, 1997) of her aged subject in a reclining posture, smiling while he holds up a magnifying glass to the smiling Ms. Carr. “Paul Bowles scrutinizing his biographer,” the caption reads. Did she want to include the photograph to ratify her authority and to signify her subject’s approval? Save for that magnifying glass, the photograph might bolster the biographer. I seem to remember a line from Shakespeare about smiling and smiling and proving a villain.


Ms. Carr is no villain, except insofar as every biographer is. But I cannot help but think that the cagey Bowles employed Ms. Carr to command the field against other encroaching biographers. One of the first, Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno, provoked an angry Bowles to say in a letter that he should have arranged for the biographer’s murder when he came to investigate his subject’s life in Tangier.


Bowles had his violent side, once throwing a knife at his father and later breaking a man’s nose in Morocco. Ms. Carr reports these incidents but chooses not to go beyond Bowles’s own accounts of them. Like Bowles, she favors laconic declarative sentences. And so her biography begins: “Paul Bowles hated his father.”


And why not? His father seemed to hate the very fact of his son’s existence. Or so it seems in Ms. Carr’s first pages. Yet later the father refuses to retire from the battlefield, and Bowles’s mother, another seemingly unsympathetic character, actually joins her son in Europe after Ms. Carr’s account makes it seem that her subject had left his family behind for good. What happened? I don’t think Ms. Carr can say, because to do so would violate that mystery Bowles wanted to preserve and that the rude Mr. Sawyer-Laucanno had the audacity to probe in “The Invisible Spectator: A Life of Paul Bowles” (1989). He presents a family drama that Ms. Carr, like her subject, chooses to evade.


In Mr. Sawyer-Laucanno’s version, Paul Bowles grew up in the Jamaica section of Queens in comfortable though by no means lush surroundings. His father, Claude, was a dentist who at one time had had artistic aspirations, but Claude’s father forced him to find a more practical career. When his son Paul showed a similar inclination toward the arts (by the age of eight, Paul was writing stories and diaries as well as exhibiting a precocious talent at the piano and in musical composition), Claude tried to stifle this manifestation of genius.


Claude seemed to suspect his son’s motivations at every turn and made his son’s home life miserable. He barely tolerated Paul’s piano lessons and his wife Rena’s more sympathetic attitude to the arts. It was Rena who read to Paul from the tales of Edgar Allen Poe and soothed his hurt feelings when his father attacked him. But she did not dare stand up to her husband or defend her boy, and Paul always had to wrest his art from hostile circumstances at home.


Without Mr. Sawyer-Laucanno’s more expansive account, I don’t see how one can understand the artist’s later life. Both biographers agree Bowles did not easily share himself with others. Even when he began to be recognized by such artists as Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, and Gertrude Stein, he remained an introverted figure. As Mr. Sawyer-Laucanno puts it: “For Bowles the notion of the outer and the inner selves still held sway. And as in childhood, the idea of revealing one’s true self was completely repugnant to him. Bowles was in many ways still a product of his father’s manufacturing.”


By the time Bowles reached Paris in 1930, he had already tried a year at the University of Virginia – mostly to please his parents – and had found the school a cultural backwater. He had already taken lessons with Aaron Copland, who was quickly establishing himself as the greatest American composer of his generation. Yet a curious passivity gripped Bowles. He was content to live off the generosity of others and even returned to the University of Virginia after a period of ill-health and penury in New York City.


Until the 1940s, Bowles concentrated on his musical career, writing serious classical compositions as well as much work for films and for the stage. His reputation rose, and his work received much favorable critical attention, especially from Virgil Thomson, who was not only a distinguished composer but also a first-rate critic who saw to it that Bowles received important commissions. Yet Bowles never quite fulfilled his promise as a composer and was slow to learn instrumentation. He would interrupt his lessons frequently to travel abroad.


In fact, when Bowles did not have a specific assignment to write music, he usually traveled, trying to blend into his new surroundings. As he once put it, “I wanted to see whatever was happening continue exactly as if I were not there. … I believed we should strive for invisibility.” Much of Bowles’s music and writing has striven for a similar invisibility, suppressing his own personality in favor of environment or of other personalities. It is no accident that he eventually turned toward translations during those periods when he was not writing his own stories and novels.


When Bowles married Jane Auer (an avowed lesbian), he seemed to have done so not only because they enjoyed each other’s company but also because it would be convenient to do so. There would be fewer questions about his sexual preferences, and indeed, questions have been raised about whether he and Jane ever had a sexual relationship, questions which Mr. Sawyer-Laucanno cannot definitively answer, but which Ms. Carr can – if Bowles’s own letters to her can be believed. He told Ms. Carr that in its early stages the marriage was sexually satisfying to both partners.


By the 1940s, Paul Bowles was gradually shifting from music to literature, although he would never quite give up his career as a composer. Much of his music had been for the theater, and he seemed tired of being at the service of other people’s ideas. Virgil Thomson felt that Bowles merely discovered there was more income in writing. Ned Rorem believed that Bowles turned to writing full time when he saw it brought him much more attention and appreciation than music ever had. Certainly Bowles’s first novel, “The Sheltering Sky” (1949), was an enormous success, becoming an international best seller now recognized as a classic.


In the end, it seems to me that Ms. Carr was able to get Bowles to open up, if not to surrender, to his biographer. But the mystery endures.


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