Paul Frederic Bowles (; December 30, 1910November 18, 1999) was an American composer, author, and translator. He became associated with the Moroccan city of Tangier, where he settled in 1947 and lived for 52 years to the end of his life.
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 several trips to Paris in the 1930s. He studied music with Aaron Copland, and in New York wrote music for theatrical productions, as well as other compositions. He achieved critical and popular success with his first novel The Sheltering Sky (1949), set in French North Africa, which he had visited in 1931.
In 1947, Bowles settled in Tangier, at that time in the Tangier International Zone, and his wife Jane Bowles followed in 1948. Except for winters spent in Ceylon during the early 1950s, Tangier was Bowles's home for the remainder of his life. He came to symbolize American immigrants in the city.
Life
1910–1930: family and education Paul Bowles was born in Jamaica, Queens, New York City, as the only child of Rena (née Winnewisser) and Claude Dietz Bowles, a dentist. His childhood was materially comfortable, but his father was a cold and domineering parent, opposed to any form of play or entertainment, and feared by both his son and wife. According to family legend, Claude 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 that it encapsulated his relationship with his father. Warmth in his childhood was provided by 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, such as "The Delicate Prey", "A Distant Episode", and "Pages from Cold Point".
Bowles could read at age 3 and was writing stories by age 4. Soon, he wrote surrealistic poetry and music. In 1922, at age 11, he bought his first book of poetry, Arthur Waley's A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems. At age 17, he had a poem, "Spire Song", accepted for publication in the literary journal transition. This Paris-based publication served as a forum for leading proponents of modernism – Djuna Barnes, James Joyce, Paul Éluard, Gertrude Stein and others. Bowles's interest in music also dated from his childhood, when his father bought a phonograph and classical records. (Bowles was interested in jazz, but such records were forbidden by his father.) His family bought a piano, and the young Bowles studied musical theory, singing, and piano. When he was 15, he attended a performance of Stravinsky's The Firebird at Carnegie Hall, which 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." Bowles attended Jamaica High School in Queens, NY.
Bowles entered the University of Virginia in 1928, where his interests included T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Prokofiev, Duke Ellington, Gregorian chant, and 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 returning – not, he said later, running away, but "running toward something, although I didn't know what at the time." Bowles spent the next months working for the Paris Herald Tribune and developing a friendship with the Romanian poet Tristan Tzara. By July, he returned to New York and worked 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, Bowles returned to studies at the University of Virginia but left after one semester to return to Paris with Aaron Copland, with whom he had been studying composition in New York. Copland was a loverCarr, Virginia Spencer "Paul Bowles, A Life", Scribner, New York 2004, p358, n29 as well as mentor to Bowles, who would later state that he was "other than Jane the most important person in my life":Carr, Virginia Spencer "Paul Bowles, A Life", Scribner, New York 2004, p171 when their affair concluded, they remained friends for life.
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. It premiered in New York at the Aeolian Hall on Wigmore Street, December 16, 1931. The entire concert (which also included work by Copland and Virgil Thomson) was panned by New York critics. (Bowles's first-known composition was completed earlier in Berlin: an adaptation as piano music of some vocal pieces by Kurt Schwitters.)"Bowles letter of 9 June 1931 to Edouard Roditi, Berlin," In Touch: The Letters of Paul Bowles
1931–1946: France and New York In Paris, Bowles became a part of Gertrude Stein's literary and artistic circle. On her advice, he made his first visit to Tangier with Aaron Copland in the summer of 1931. They took a house on the mountain above Tangier Bay. Bowles later made Morocco his full-time home, and it inspired many of his short stories. From Tangier he returned to Berlin, where he met British writers Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood. (Isherwood was reportedly so taken with him that he named Sally Bowles, a character in a novel, after him.) The next year, Bowles returned to North Africa, traveling through other parts of Morocco, the Sahara, Algeria, and Tunisia.Paul Bowles, Without Stopping: an autobiography, New York, Echo Press, 1972, chs 7, 8
In 1937, Bowles returned to New York. Over the next decade, he 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.Paul Bowles, Without Stopping: an autobiography, New York, Echo Press 1972, chapters 10, 12
In 1938, he married Jane Auer, an author and playwright. It was an unconventional marriage; their intimate relationships were reportedly with people of their own sex, but the couple maintained close personal ties with each other. During this time the couple joined the Communist Party of USA but soon left the organization after Bowles was ejected from the party.
Bowles has frequently been featured in anthologies as a gay writer, although he regarded such categories as both absurd and irrelevant. After a brief sojourn in France, the couple were prominent among the literary figures of New York throughout the 1940s. They briefly lived in February House in late 1939, using burlesque dancer Gypsy Rose Lee's room while she was performing in Chicago, but clashed with Benjamin Britten over use of the piano for composing, and other housemates over their noisy bedroom fantasies. Bowles also worked under Virgil Thomson as a music critic at the New York Herald Tribune. His zarzuela, The Wind Remains, based on a poem by Federico García Lorca, was performed in 1943 with choreography by Merce Cunningham and conducted by Leonard Bernstein. His translation of Jean-Paul Sartre's play Huis Clos (No Exit), directed by John Huston, won a Drama Critic's Award in 1943.
In 1945, Bowles 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, when she published her first novel Two Serious Ladies (1943).
1947–1956: early years in Tangier In 1947, Bowles received a contract for a novel from Doubleday; with the advance, he moved permanently to Tangier. Jane joined him there the following year. Bowles commented:
Bowles traveled alone into the Algerian Sahara to work on the novel. He later said, "I wrote in bed in hotels in the desert." He drew inspiration from personal experience, noting years later that, "Whatever one writes is in a sense autobiographical, of course. Not factually so, but poetically so." He titled the novel The Sheltering Sky, from a song, "Down Among the Sheltering Palms", which he had heard every summer as a child.. It was first published by John Lehmann Limited in England, in September 1949, after Doubleday rejected the manuscript.
Bowles recalled:
A first American edition, by New Directions Publishing, appeared the following month. The plot follows three Americans: Port, his wife Kit, and their friend, Tunner, as they journey through the Algerian desert. The reviewer for TIME magazine commented that the ends visited upon the two main characters "seem appropriate but by no means tragic", but that "Bowles scores cleanly with his minor characters: Arab pimps and prostitutes, French officers in garrison towns, [and] a stupidly tiresome pair of tourists—mother & son." In The New York Times, playwright and critic Tennessee Williams commented that the book was like a summer thunderstorm, "pulsing with interior flashes of fire". The book quickly rose to the New York Times best-seller list, going through three printings in two months.
In 1950, Bowles published his first collection of short stories. Titled A Little Stone (John Lehmann, London, August 1950), it omitted two of Bowles's most famous short stories, "Pages From Cold Point" and "The Delicate Prey". British critic Cyril Connolly and writer Somerset Maugham had advised him that if they were included in the collection, distribution and/or censorship difficulties might ensue. The American edition by Random House, The Delicate Prey and Other Stories (November 1950), did include these two stories.
In an interview 30 years later, Bowles responded to an observation that almost all of the characters in "The Delicate Prey" were victimized by either physical or psychological violence. He said:
He set his second novel, Let It Come Down (John Lehmann, London, February 1952), in North Africa, specifically Tangier. It explored the disintegration of an American (Nelson Dyar) who was unprepared for the encounter with an alien culture. The first American edition by Random House was published later that same month.
Bowles set his third novel, The Spider's House (Random House, New York, November 1955), in Fez, immediately prior to Morocco's gaining independence and sovereignty in 1956. In it, he charted the relationships among three immigrants and a young Moroccan: John Stenham, Alain Moss, Lee Veyron, and Amar. Reviewers noted that the novel marked a departure from Bowles's earlier fiction in that it introduced a contemporary political theme, the conflict between Moroccan nationalism and French colonialism. The UK edition (Macdonald) was published in January 1957.
While Bowles was concentrating on his career as a writer, he composed incidental music for nine plays presented by the American School of Tangier. The Bowles couple became fixtures of the American and European immigrant scene in Tangier. Visitors included Truman Capote, Joseph Glasco, Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal. William S. Burroughs, and the Beat writers Allen Ginsberg 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 described his continued association with the Master Musicians of Jajouka and their hereditary leader Bachir Attar in his book, Days: A Tangier Diary.
In 1952, Bowles bought the tiny island of Taprobane, off the coast of Ceylon. There, he wrote much of his novel The Spider's House and returned to Tangier in the warmer months. He stayed in Sri Lanka most winters.
1957–1973: Moroccan music and translation