The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles (1949)

My Posts on Paul Bowles

Paul Bowles (1910- born in New York City, died 1999 in Tangiers) was a highly talented composer, a great writer and is probably most now remembered as Counter-Culture icon of the 1960s.  (There is some background information on Bowles in my posts on those of his  short stories I have read.)  Bowles spent many years of his life living in Tangiers.  He was deeply into the culture of the region.  

Bowles' most read literary work is his novel, set in Algeria, The Sheltering Sky.  It a book people fall in love with.  It is the story of three Americans on a journey of no real purpose across North Africa.  It helps us see into the impact of colonialism, Algeria being at the time a French colony, on the colonized and the colonizer.  Taliking place in a setting of savage beauty, the Americans look upon the inhabitants as little more than tourist couriousties, the good ones are servile and obsequious, the bad ones are sinister, nearly beyond the bounds of reason.  They are always concerned with being robbed, with whether or not they can find any edible food.  The descriptions of the desert landscape are very evocative and powerful.  The central characters in the novel are perfectly realized. 

The Sheltering Sky  is a very deep book. In my opinion going further into the roots of racism and the colonial mentality than The Heart of Darkness.  In the very powerful closing sections of the book we see how colonialism is tied into visions of masculinity, of the white traveler in a place where he thinks he can do whatever he wants. It is also about the nature of travel, being a stranger in a strange land.  It is a very painterly book.

Scene from the movie based on the book

I hope to reread this book in 2015.  I have a collection of sixty five of his stories and will be working my way through them.   This is truly a great work of art.

Please share your experience with Bowles with us.

Mel u

"Midnight Mass" by Paul Bowles (1962)

Paul Bowles (1910 to 1999), pictured above with his wife Jane Bowles, might be a writer of a forgotten era to most people, writing about  hash loving expats and exotic natives  living in Tangiers from some mysterious source of money while entertaining the elite of the stoned literary world.  I have read several of his stories and liked them all.  A while ago I got for only $1.95 an e book of his collected stories (sixty five of them) and I am slowly reading through them.   Imagine the film Casablanca, then think not of the semi respectable Rick's Cafe American but of the more noir  Blue Parrot and you can picture the world of a Bowles story.  If hanging out in the Blue Parrot leaves you cold, then probably you are not meant to be a Bowles reader.  

"Midnight Mass" centers on a well of European man who has returned to Tangiers after a seven year hiatus.  He long ago inherited his mother's house.  He left it for many years in the care of servants.  He decided to come back alone to see if he and his wife could spend Christmas there. The house is a wreck, totally neglected.  The servants have their excuses and in the Tangiers of Bowles' this is normal way of doing things.  He decides he does not want to be alone for Christmas Eve so he invites a lady that was a friend of his mother's to bring over some guests.  She promises to bring some "interesting" people.  She does.  One of the guests is a young Morocannan painter who induces the man to let him use one of the many rooms in the huge house for a painting studio.  He sends his wife a cable saying he is going to have the placed fixed up so they can celebrate Easter there. Events take an unfortuitious turn as the story closes.

All in all a decent story.  

"He of the Assembly" by Paul Bowles (1960).

 

You don't have to be into hashish to appreciate "He of the Assembly" by Paul Bowles (1910 to 1999) but as you work your way through it at some point you will wish you were.  It should be must reading for anyone at one of the new marijuana resorts opening in Colorado, which recently legalized marijuana.  Robert Stone in his introduction to The Collected Short Stories of Paul Bowles says the story is among the very best literary representations of consciousness under the influence of opiates.   It makes large use of transliterated Arabic terms for various types of opiates and drug paraphanila which I did find a bit interesting but if i did not have Google to instantly explain them I might have been annoyed.  It really is an amazing story which also deals with the paranoia of thinking you are under police scrutiny while stoned.   The hashing cafes of old Tangiers were probably enough to scare most non-locals anyway and high I am sure they were near psychosis inducing.  This is a kind of "go with the flow story".  You get what you get from it.  I greatly enjoyed reading it.  It is quite beautiful.  

There is a superb web page on Bowles here http://www.paulbowles.org/enter.html

Mel u

"A Distant Episode" by Paul Bowles (1947, 12 pages)

I subscribe to several e mail services that notify me of bargain E Books.  About six months ago The Collected Short Stories of Paul Bowles (680 pages with over sixty stories) was on sale for 24 hours only for $1.95 and I could not resist.  (I have gotten the full Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty collections for the same prize.). There is an excellent introduction and the stories are arranged in order of publication, from 1946 to 1993.  Bowles was born in New York City in 1910 and died in Tangiers in 1999.  I think his most famous book of his many is The Sheltering Sky.  He was a figure of the "counter culture" of the 1960s because many of his writings did deal with drug usage.  I think hashish was his drug of choice.  He had many famous friends from Gertrude Stein, William Burroughs to Alan Ginsburg and was married to the superb writer, Jane Bowles.  I have previously posted on Bowles intriguing story from 1946, "By the Water'.  He kind of epitomizes the American expat from a now lost era.

"A Distant Episode" (1947, first published in The Parisian Review) centers on the terrible misfortunes of a European professor of linguistics living in probably Tangiers.  The professor decides he will take a bit if a trip to see if he can learn more about the dialects of nomadic North African tribes.  The professor stops in at a cafe ran by an old friend.  It turns out the friend is dead.  The professor has a bit of a superior bearing and he offends the new cafe manager.  Then he tells him he collects camel udder boxes and offers the man money to help him buy some.  The professor is taken to a sinister seeming place where camel udder boxes can be bought.  The professor begins to fear he has been led  into sinister trap and he is terribly right.  I hope you can one day read this story so I will say only that the professor was sold into slavery which last over a year to a nomadic tribe.  

"A Distant Episode" was a lot of fun to read.  It is perfectly constructed and could if you wanted to be read as a story about colonialism.  The atmosphere is perfect.

 

Mel u

"By the Water" by Paul Bowles (1946)

Paul Bowles (1910 to 1999 was a very prolific writer, translator and collector of Moroccan stories, and music composer.   Just to give a small illustration of his output, he published fourteen volumes of just his short stories.  I think he may not be as much read now as he once was and this seems our loss.  Here is what Gore Vidal said about Bowles' short stories:  "among the best ever written by an American. 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".   (There is a very detailed article about his life and career here.)  His career and life are really quite fascinating.

Bowles was born and buried in New York State but he lived for many years in Morocco.   He was the friend to the famous and infamous of the literary world.  He was married to the writer Jane Bowles (my post on her is here.)   He lived 52 years in Tangiers where he received a long list of guests.  In his personal life he was, it strongly appears, involved in same sex relationships with several Gay icons.   In the 1950s  and 1960s Tangiers was considered a place of exotic decadance and Bowles did his share to give it this reputation.    

"By the Water" is the lead story in The Stories of Paul Bowles.  It is set in Tangiers and it is everything I hoped it would be.   There are sinister gangsters, visits to dangerous native quarters (think  about the movie Casablanca to get a feel for the world of this story) and elements of magic realism and things that just flat out make no sense.  (You can read this story if you wish by having Amazon send you a sample of the book, the full story and another one are included in the sample as well as a very informative introduction.)  I am getting further and further behind in my postings so I will keep the rest of this short.  The story is told in the first person.  The narrator has somehow offended or taken advantage of a notorious underworld figure though I am not sure there are too many overworld charaters in the world of these stories!   The story is very atmospheric.  We wish we were there, sitting in a cafe,watching the world go by waiting for checks to come in, from some mysterious trust, while, smoking hash and wondering if we will do anything or anyone today.   When the narrator does meet the gangster he is barely human, with no arms or legs just flipper like appendages.   I really enjoyed this story and have tried to convey the feel of it without giving away much of the plot.  I well might read through this collection.   I do not think we will see its like again anytime soon.


Please share your experiences with Paul Bowles with us.


Mel u