Collected stories, p.1
Collected Stories, page 1
Paul Bowles
* * *
COLLECTED STORIES
With an introduction by James Lasdun
Contents
Introduction by James Lasdun
By the Water
The Echo
A Distant Episode
Call at Corazón
The Scorpion
Under the Sky
At Paso Rojo
You Are Not I
Pages from Cold Point
Pastor Dowe at Tacaté
Tea on the Mountain
How Many Midnights
The Circular Valley
The Delicate Prey
Señor Ong and Señor Ha
The Fourth Day Out from Santa Cruz
Doña Faustina
The Successor
If I Should Open My Mouth
The Hours After Noon
The Frozen Fields
Tapiama
A Thousand Days for Mokhtar
The Story of Lahcen and Idir
He of the Assembly
A Friend of the World
The Hyena
The Wind at Beni Midar
The Garden
The Time of Friendship
Afternoon with Antaeus
Mejdoub
The Fqih
Reminders of Bouselham
Istikhara, Anaya, Medagan and the Medaganat
Things Gone and Things Still Here
Midnight Mass
Here to Learn
The Eye
The Waters of Izli
You Have Left Your Lotus Pods on the Bus
Allal
The Dismissal
Madame and Ahmed
Kitty
The Husband
At the Krungthep Plaza
Bouayad and the Money
The Little House
The Empty Amulet
Rumor and a Ladder
In the Red Room
Massachusetts 1932
Tangier 1975
Julian Vreden
Hugh Harper
Unwelcome Words
New York 1965
An Inopportune Visit
In Absentia
Dinner at Sir Nigel’s
Too Far from Home
About the Authors
Paul Bowles was born in Jamaica, New York, in 1910. He began composing music and writing stories at a very early age and at seventeen some of his poetry was published in the French literary magazine transition. At the age of eighteen he began his travels to Europe, North Africa, Mexico and Central America. A student of Aaron Copland, Bowles established his reputation early as a gifted composer. In 1945 he returned to writing short stories, and by 1947, when he went to live in Tangier, fiction had become his major focus. He wrote four novels, The Sheltering Sky, Let it Come Down, The Spider’s House and Up Above the World; one hundred short stories; a book of poetry; and many travel essays. He lived in Tangier until his death in 1999.
James Lasdun is a British writer now living in the United States. He has published two collections of short stories, The Silver Age and Three Evenings, and three books of poetry, A Jump Start, The Revenant, and Landscape With Chainsaw, which was shortlisted for the 2001 Forward Prize. With Michael Hofmann he co-edited the anthology After Ovid. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books. His awards include the Dylan Thomas Award for short fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry and first prize in the 1999 TLS/Blackwells Poetry Competition. He has taught Creative Writing at Columbia, Princeton and New York Universities. He co-wrote the screenplay for Sunday, starring David Suchet and Lisa Harrow, which won both the Best Screenplay and the Grand Jury Prize for Best Feature at the Sundance Film Festival of 1997. His story ‘The Siege’ was adapted by Bernardo Bertolucci into the film Besieged. His first novel, The Horned Man, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2002 to superb reviews. His second novel, Seven Lies, was published in January 2006 and was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction. In May 2006 his short story ‘An Anxious Man’ won the inaugural National Short Story Prize, sponsored by Prospect magazine in association with NESTA and the BBC. A new collection of stories, It’s Beginning to Hurt, was published in April 2009. Several of the stories were read on Radio 4’s ‘Book at Bedtime’.
Introduction
Who is Paul Bowles? The bare facts of his life suggest not so much a personality as a node of cultural celebrity; a point of intersection where an improbably large number of the century’s major artistic trends converged.
A precociously literary only child, he wrote a crime series when he was five, and by the age of seventeen had had his first poem accepted by Eugene Jolas’s international surrealist magazine, Transition. At nineteen, deciding to become a composer as well as a writer, he studied with Aaron Copland, who quickly adopted him as his protégé. Two years later, in 1931, he set off for Paris, where, exerting the same apparently irresistible magnetism, he was taken up by Gertrude Stein, met Pound, Cocteau and Gide, then moved on to Berlin where he spent his afternoons in the Café des Westens with Christopher Isherwood and Stephen Spender. After visiting Morocco at Stein’s suggestion, he returned to a musical career in the States. Backed by Copland and Virgil Thomson, he received commissions to write a ballet for Lincoln Kirstein, an opera for Leonard Bernstein and incidental stage music for Orson Welles, William Saroyan and Tennessee Williams. In 1938 he married the novelist Jane Auer (subsequently Jane Bowles). The couple travelled in Central America, then moved into W. H. Auden’s ménage in Brooklyn, along with Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears. After the war Bowles decided to shift his energies from music to literature, and returned to Tangier. Far from cutting him off, his geographical remoteness seems to have merely enhanced his drawing power. Truman Capote and Gore Vidal followed him to Morocco. William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Bernardo Bertolucci, have all paid their respects. And so on …
The paradox of such a litany is that the characteristic attitude of the writer it attaches to is one of aloofness, while the preferred state of most of his characters is that of solitude. “You don’t take a honeymoon alone”, says they writer-protagonist of “Call at Corazón”; “You might”, retorts his Jane Bowles-like wife. Bowles may be one of the great outsiders of our time, but his isolation is voluntary, and his acquaintance with the culture he left behind is clearly that of the consummate insider. Early on he appears to have fascinated people not so much for anything he wrote (he’d published no fiction when Gertrude Stein met him, and she disliked his poetry), as for certain innate qualities—a particular manner of inhabiting the world “He is as ‘free’ a man as I have ever known”, wrote Virgil Thomson. Stein’s take, as recalled cheerfully by Bowles himself in his autobiography Without Stopping, is perhaps more revealing, if less romantic:
I provided her initial encounter with a species then rare, now the commonest of contemporary phenomena, the American suburban child with its unrelenting spleen … I was the most spoiled, insensitive, and self-indulgent young man she had ever seen and my colossal complacency in rejecting all values appalled her. But she said it beaming with pleasure … “If you were typical, it would be the end of our civilization,” she told me. “You’re a manufactured savage”.
Without trying, he seems to have projected one of the qualities most highly prized among artists of the twentieth century: the combination of refinement and delinquency. When he turned to literature, it showed itself as an uncannily sure instinct for the downward or catabolic cycle of the social organism. In this respect, he seems poised somewhere between two of the other great writer-travellers of our century: D. H. Lawrence and William Burroughs (whose itineraries, barring the antipodes, he more or less combined in his own). Like the Lawrence of “St Mawr” or “The Woman Who Rode Away”, he writes often of spiritually weary Europeans or Americans plunging themselves recklessly into alien, “primitive” cultures. But whereas Lawrence tended to regard this as a step towards reinvigoration, Bowles dramatizes it largely in terms of unavoidable catastrophe, and his interest is more in the minutiae of destruction than in any redemption that might follow. His ur-tale in this regard is “A Distant Episode”, where a Professor in search of new dialects allows himself to be led into the desert night. This characteristic gesture of acquiescence (“a monstrous letting go” Bowles calls it in another story), swiftly exposes him to violence of an annihilating cruelty. His tongue is cut out, he is enslaved, forced to sing and dance for his captors in a strange coat of tin cans. The final image of the unhinged professor howling and rattling off towards his death, might have been created expressly to illustrate Gertrude Stein’s idea of the “manufactured savage”. It certainly takes its place as one of our civilization’s more disturbing premonitions of its own breakdown.
On the other hand, while Bowles shares with Burroughs a connoisseur’s relish for the processes of social and psychic disintegration (random violence, drugs, fevers, sexual taboo-breaking of every kind, all find their way into the stories), he seldom allows the spirit of mayhem to penetrate into the storytelling itself. No cut-ups or collages; aside from his professed use of kif as an inspirational aid, very little in the way of formal experimentation. For the most part, his narratives remain elegantly coherent, even conventional.
This tension—between the extreme nature of the actions they contain, and the calm logic with which they unfold—is partly what gives the tales their peculiar enchantment. One doesn’t so much read them as su
Partly this is a matter of technique. Though Bowles has often professed to rely on surrealist techniques of mind-emptying and spontaneous composition (“I write unconsciously, without knowing what I am writing”), his stories are highly sophisticated artefacts, with calibrated effects and skilfully organized constructions. In someone who has constantly split himself in two (two careers, two continents, apparently two sexual orientations), it perhaps isn’t surprising to find that mirrorings, reduplications and magical exchanges are not only the subjects of many of the stories, but also their predominant structural device. “Señor Ong and Señor Ha” is built on a series of reciprocities featuring silver coins, silvery sand, the white powder of Señor Ong’s cocaine, and the white hair of the albino child, Luz. The repetition of an aggressive act involving water triggers the explosive violence of the girl in “The Echo”, whose scream of rage is itself promptly echoed by the ravine below her mother’s house. (The almost obtrusive formal neatness of this perhaps owes something to Bowles’s past as a composer of music, where form is practically everything.) And in “You Are Not I”, an exercise in first-person-psychotic that prefigures some of Ian McEwan’s stories, the final exchange of identities is beautifully prepared for by the moment where the delusionary Ethel first re-enters her sister’s home and “remembers” things back to front: “Right away I saw she had had the whole thing rebuilt, only backward.”
Stylistically, Bowles favours a kind of neutral transparency over the more personally expressive or richly textured idioms of many of his contemporaries. The effect is oddly heightening, giving the stories an almost physical, incontrovertible, object-like reality, with the words merely acting as a window onto the events they contain. At times they read almost like translations—ideal translations of ideally vivid texts. Flourishes of metaphor or overtly ingenious description are rare, though when they occur, prove to contain marvellous—if discreet—compressions of meaning or sensory data. Consider the synaesthesia of “blunt little berries of sound” as an evocation of machine-gun practice heard by two children out in the countryside; or the subdued humour and menace of the “lively young alligator” in the girl’s arms in “Pastor Dowe at Tacaté”. Likewise, the details used to evoke a given setting tend to be spare, but exquisitely chosen: the trees along the too-narrow waterway obstructing the boat with its ill-fated honeymooners in “Call at Corazón”; the back yard of the professor’s hotel in “A Distant Episode”, “full of refuse and barrels, where two gazelles wandered about”.
We don’t, of course, read Bowles or anyone else for their technical adroitness. Technique can make a story “work” in the most mechanical sense (and some of Bowles’s lesser pieces, not included here, do little more than that), but what keeps one’s interest are the singularities of a writer’s perception, intuition, understanding and imaginative daring—their sensibility. The uniquely unsettling atmosphere of Bowles’s work—the pervasive disquiet, the frequent non-human perspective on human affairs, the sense of impending disaster (even when it doesn’t occur) are what we go to him for. He has spoken of his writing as “therapeutic”, and the obsessive reiteration of themes does suggest a need to confront certain elementally disturbing experiences. If this is so, then judging from the autobiography, Bowles’s relationship with his father is likely to have been the origin. The exchanges Bowles recalls between himself and his father (and which he returns to in the semi-autobiographical story “The Frozen Fields”), were antagonistic, to say the least. “Your father wanted to kill you”, Bowles remembers his grandmother telling him as a small boy. “I vowed to devote my life to his destruction”, he records from a later occasion when his father beat him and confiscated his notebooks (Bowles senior appears to have suspected his son of masturbating in the bathroom). At nineteen he threw a meat knife at his father.
In reaction to this apparently unfathomable enmity, Bowles early on began cultivating a state of icy detachment, which he describes variously as a form of indifference—“I reminded myself that since nothing was real, it did not matter too much”—and as a kind of suspension of will, in which, like so many of his subsequent creations, he was capable of performing the most irrational acts in the belief that he had no choice. His first, spur-of-the-moment departure for Europe was the result, so he tells us, of one such “compulsive experience”:
I got back to my room one afternoon at dusk and, upon opening the door, knew at once, although I had no idea what it was going to be, that I was about to do something explosive and irrevocable … I took out a coin and tossed it … Heads … Tails would have meant that I would have had to take a bottle of Allonal that night and leave no note. But heads meant that I would leave for Europe as soon as possible.
In itself none of this is too far from the histrionics of any anguished adolescent, especially one of a literary bent (Bowles at this time was much taken with Gide’s notion of the acte gratuit). What makes it interesting is that, rather than the kind of solipsistic exhibitionism another writer with his odd and painful upbringing might have settled for, Bowles instead used it as a means of entry into the wider universe. One feels its pressure, not only in his explanation for his insatiable curiosity about cultures other than his own—“I has a placid belief that it was good for me to live in the midst of people whose motives I did not understand”—but also in what he discovered there. “In the Sahara”, he writes in one story, “where the air, the light, even the sky suggest some as yet unvisited planet, it is not surprising to find certain patterns of human comportment equally unfamiliar … If circumstances offer the opportunity for attack and pillage, the action is expected; indeed custom demands it.” A pitiless world—but not after all so far removed from the one he left behind: “the New England mentality, according to which reparations must accompany transgression”.
Just as Kafka contrived to turn his implacable father into the fortresses, barred gateways and insuperable human obstacles of the novels and stories, so Bowles has recapitulated his personal circumstances in terms of a physical and moral landscape that is both terrifyingly strange and strangely familiar. This is the gesture of a major artist.
James Lasdun
By the Water
THE MELTING SNOW DRIPPED from the balconies. People hurried through the little street that always smelled of frying fish. Now and then a stork swooped low, dragging his sticklike legs below him. The small gramophones scraped day and night behind the walls of the shop where young Amar worked and lived. There were few spots in the city where the snow was ever cleared away, and this was not one of them. So it gathered all through the winter months, piling up in front of the shop doors.
But now it was late winter; the sun was warmer. Spring was on the way, to confuse the heart and melt the snow. Amar, being alone in the world, decided it was time to visit a neighboring city where his father had once told him some cousins lived.
Early in the morning he went to the bus station. It was still dark, and the empty bus came in while he was drinking hot coffee. The road wound through the mountains all the way.
When he arrived in the other city it was already dark. Here the snow was even deeper in the streets, and it was colder. Because he had not wanted to, Amar had not foreseen this, and it annoyed him to be forced to wrap his burnous closely about him as he left the bus station. It was an unfriendly town; he could tell that immediately. Men walked with their heads bent forward, and if they brushed against a passer-by they did not so much as look up. Excepting the principal street, which had an arc-light every few meters, there seemed to be no other illumination, and the alleys that led off on either side lay in utter blackness; the white-clad figures that turned into them disappeared straightway.
