by Paul Bowles
1928 Graduates from Jamaica High School in January. The Hoagland sisters help him sell his paintings; when father refuses to support his artistic aspirations, mother pays for classes at School of Design and Liberal Arts in New York. Bowles publishes poem “Spire Song” and prose poem “Entity” in transition. Spends summer working in the transit department of the Bank of Manhattan. Enters the University of Virginia in the fall. Reads The Waste Land; discovers Prokofiev, Gregorian chant, Duke Ellington, and the blues. Experiments with inhaling ether. While home on winter break, attends one of the Aaron Copland-Roger Sessions Concerts of Contemporary Music, featuring music by Henry Cowell and George Antheil.
1929 Returns to University of Virginia in January and is hospitalized with conjunctivitis. Decides to move to Paris and obtains passport with the help of Sue Hoagland and Mary Oliver; tells virtually no one of his plans. Arrives in Paris in April and works as a switchboard operator at the Herald Tribune. Mother refuses request to send money to Bowles made by a friend of Oliver’s. Bowles receives 2,500 francs from Oliver and quits job; takes a short trip to Switzerland and Nice. Publishes poems in English and French in the Paris-based magazines Tambour, This Quarter, and Anthologie du Groupe Moderne d’Art. Visits northeastern France and Germany....Accompanies Hubert to St.-Moritz and St.-Malo. Decides to return home and sails for New York on July 24. Works at Dutton’s Bookshop and rents a room at 122 Bank Street. Begins writing “Without Stopping,” fictional account of his travels in Europe.
1931 Sails for Europe on March 25. Shortly after arriving in Paris, looks up Gertrude Stein, with whom a friendship develops. Meets Jean Cocteau, Virgil Thomson, Ezra Pound, and Pavel Tchelitchew. Goes to Berlin with Copland at the end of April. Meets Jean Rhys, Stephen Spender, and Christoper Isherwood, who will give Bowles’s surname to the heroine of his Goodbye to Berlin. Continues composition studies with Copland but dislikes Germany. Visits Kurt Schwitters in Hannover and is impressed with his studio; Bowles will soon incorporate one of Schwitters’ abstract poems into his Sonata for Oboe and Clarinet. Writes to friend Daniel Burns that he feels his poems are worth “a large zero” and stops writing poetry for more than two years. Spends part of July with Stein and Alice B. Toklas in Bilignan, France, where they are joined by Copland; at Stein’s suggestion, the two men visit Morocco, which enchants Bowles and frustrates Copland. They live in Tangier until early October. Bowles meets Claude McKay and the surrealist painter Kristians Tonny. After visiting Fez, Bowles writes to Morrissette, “Fez I shall make my home some day!” Bowles travels in Morocco with Harry Dunham after Copland leaves; returns to Paris via Spain. Attends final Copland-Sessions concert on December 16 in London, where his Sonata for Oboe and Clarinet is performed.
1933 Arrives in Ghardaïa and settles in nearby Laghouat, where he uses the harmonium to compose a cantata, using his own French text. Travels around the Sahara and North Africa with George Turner, an American. Goes to Tangier, where he shares a house with Charles Henri Ford, surrealist poet and editor of View with whom he has been friendly since 1930, and Djuna Barnes. Returns to United States after a three-week visit to Puerto Rico en route to New York City.
1936 With the help of Virgil Thomson, receives commission to write music for Horse Eats Hat, Edwin Denby’s adaptation of a Eugène Labiche farce directed by John Houseman and Orson Welles and supported by the Federal Theater Project. Helps to found the anti-Franco Committee on Republican Spain. Article by Copland commends Bowles’s music in Modern Music as “full of charm and melodic invention, surprisingly well-made in an instinctive and nonacademic fashion.” Bowles learns orchestration and works on score for production of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus directed by Welles.
“After visiting Fez, Bowles writes to Morrissette, ‘Fez I shall make my home some day!’”
1937 Doctor Faustus opens in January; Thomson praises the score in Modern Music as “Mr. Bowles’s definite entry into musical big-time.” In February, Bowles is introduced to Jane Auer (b. February 22, 1917) by John Latouche. Sees Auer the following week at E. E. Cummings’s apartment; when Bowles and Kristians Tonny propose a trip to Mexico, Auer asks to join them, and Bowles goes to meet her parents the same evening. Orders 15,000 anti-Trotsky stickers to distribute in Mexico. Travels to Mexico by bus with Auer, Tonny, and Tonny’s wife, Marie-Claire Ivanoff. Auer falls ill with dysentery a week after arriving in Mexico and returns home without telling her companions.
1938 Bowles marries Auer on February 21. The couple honeymoon in Central America, then travel to Paris. Jane Bowles works on novel Two Serious Ladies. The Bowles meet Max Ernst and the painter and writer Brion Gysin, who will become a friend. Marriage is strained as Jane spends much of her time apart from Bowles. Couple separates briefly when Bowles goes to the south of France; Jane joins him after Bowles urges her by wire to do so.
1947 Partisan Review publishes “A Distant Episode.” At a meeting with Dial Press about a possible collection of stories, Bowles is introduced to Helen Strauss, who agrees to be his agent. Hears from Strauss that Doubleday has offered an advance for a novel; Bowles signs contract and leaves for Morocco soon after. Writes “Pages from Cold Point” while at sea. Works on The Sheltering Sky, spending the fall in Tangier. Although he will travel frequently to Europe, Asia, and the United States, Tangier will be Bowles’s home for the rest of his life. Contacts Oliver Smith in New York and they agree to buy a house in the Casbah of Tangier together, which upsets Jane. Meets Moroccan artist Ahmed Yacoubi, who will become a close companion during the 1950s. Begins taking majoun, a [date] jam made from [Cannabis sativa]; tries kif, which he will begin smoking regularly and in large quantities from the 1950s through the 1980s, when health problems force him to reduce his consumption to one cigarette a day. Goes to Fez in December.
“Bowles is introduced to Jane Auer by John Latouche. Sees her the following week at E. E. Cummings’s apartment.”
1948 Crosses into Algeria and travels around the Sahara. Jane arrives in Tangier with her new lover. Edwin Denby arrives and the four visit Fez. Jane has averse reaction to majoun, hallucinating and experiencing severe paranoia. Bowles finishes The Sheltering Sky in May; travels through Anti-Atlas Mountains with singer Libby Holman. Returns to New York alone in July. Doubleday rejects The Sheltering Sky and demands return of the advance. Several months later, English publisher John Lehmann reads The Sheltering Sky while visiting New York and agrees to publish it; James Laughlin of New Directions promises to bring out the American edition. Writes music for Williams’s Summer and Smoke. Concerto for Two Pianos, Winds, and Percussion premieres in New York. Bowles becomes friends with Gore Vidal and Truman Capote. Jane develops an intense emotional attachment to a Moroccan woman named Cherifa that will last for many years. Bowles returns to Morocco, writing “The Delicate Prey” while at sea in December.
“Bowles becomes friends with Gore Vidal and Truman Capote. Jane develops an intense emotional attachment to a Moroccan woman named Cherifa.”
1950 The Sheltering Sky enters the New York Times best-seller list on January 1; reviewing it for the Times, Tennessee Williams praises its “true maturity and sophistication.” Bowles spends several months in Ceylon and southern India, working on Yerma, an opera for singer Libby Holman based on the García Lorca play. Joins Jane in Paris, where she is working on her play In the Summer House; Jane goes to New York, hoping to see the play staged, and Bowles returns to Morocco and receives visit from Brion Gysin. John Lehmann publishes A Little Stone, omitting “The Delicate Prey” and “Pages from Cold Point” because of censorship concerns. American version, The Delicate Prey and Other Stories, includes the two stories and is published by Random House in November.
1954 Returns to Tangier, where he is soon joined by Jane. Falls ill with typhoid and sees Williams and Frank Merlo while convalescing. Receives brief visit from William Burroughs, who will live in Tangier for several years. Bowles begins writing The Spider’s House, inspired by political upheaval in Morocco; moves for the summer with Yacoubi to a rente
d house overlooking the ocean and maintains strict schedule of writing. Transcribes Moghrebi tales told to him by Yacoubi. Moves to Casbah in fall. Bowles and Jane refuse to visit each other because of Bowles’s suspicion of Cherifa and Jane’s distrust of Yacoubi. Hoping to ease tensions by leaving Tangier, Bowles sails for Ceylon with Jane and Yacoubi in December.
1957 English edition of The Spider’s House brought out by Macdonald & Co. Bowles travels to Kenya to cover the Mau Mau uprising for The Nation. Upon return to Morocco in May, discovers that Jane has suffered a stroke; rumors circulate of a violent reaction to majoun or poisoning by Cherifa. Receives visits from poets Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and Alan Ansen, who are drawn to Tangier in part because Bowles and Burroughs live there.
1961 Tape-records and translates tales by Yacoubi, publishing “The Game” in Contact in May and “The Night Before Thinking” in Evergreen Review in September. Ginsberg returns to Tangier and encourages Bowles to write to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, publisher of City Lights Books, with a proposal for a collection of stories about kif-smoking that were written with the aid of kif; Ferlinghetti accepts enthusiastically.
1963 Completes translation of Charhadi’s A Life Full of Holes. Rents beach house at Asilah, a town south of Tangier, and spends several months there with Jane. Begins writing Up Above the World.
1970 Poet Daniel Halpern, whom Bowles had met while teaching in California, starts the magazine Antaeus; Bowles is named founding editor. In May, Jane suffers stroke and her condition deteriorates, causing her to lose her vision.
“[Paul Bowles] receives many visitors and, choosing not to install a telephone at his home, maintains extensive correspondence.”
1971–72 Bowles begins translating the work of Mohamed Choukri, Moroccan writer, working from Choukri’s Arabic texts. Autobiography, Without Stopping,is published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons on March 15, 1972. Bowles discovers the stories of Swiss expatriate writer Isabelle Eberhardt (1877–1904) and begins to translate them.
1973 Jane Bowles dies in Málaga clinic on May 4 with Bowles at her side. In the years following Jane’s death, Bowles will travel outside of Morocco infrequently and will be increasingly confined to the Inmeuble Itesa (in part because of health problems); receives many visitors and, choosing not to install a telephone at his home, maintains extensive correspondence.
1974 Bowles publishes three translations: Choukri’s For Bread Alone and Jean Genet in Tangier, and Mrabet’s Boy Who Set the Fire. Resumes writing his own short stories after a hiatus of several years.
1975 Publishes translations of Mrabet’s Hadidan Aharam and Eberhardt’s Oblivion Seekers in November. Stories “Afternoon with Antaeus,”“The Fqih,” and “Mejdoub” are collected in Three Tales, published by Frank Hallman in the fall.
1981–89 Bowles continues to publish. Midnight Mass, a collection of short stories written after 1976, is published in 1981. Points in Time, a collection of stories spanning twenty-four centuries of Moroccan life, is published in 1982. Unwelcome Words,a collection of short stories, was published in 1988. Too Far From Home, a collection of Bowles’s work, is published in 1992.
1995 A musical retrospective featuring Bowles’s compositions is performed. Entitled The Music of Paul Bowles, it is performed by the Eos Orchestra at Lincoln Center. Bowles returns to New York after a forty-year absence. The gala event was attended by colleagues and friends from Bowles’s life and career including Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Pierre Bergé, and Brice Marden.
1999 Bowles transfers the majority of his literary papers to an archive at the University of Delaware. Owsley Browne’s documentary Night Waltz: The Music of Paul Bowles is released. Bowles is admitted to the Italian Hospital in Tangier for cardiac problems on November 7. Suffers heart attack in hospital and dies on November 18. Bowles’s ashes are interred near those of his parents and grandparents at Lakemont Cemetary in Glenora, New York.
Meet Paul Bowles
PAUL BOWLES was born in 1910 and studied music with Aaron Copland before moving to Tangier, Morocco. A devastatingly imaginative observer of the West’s encounter with the East, he is the author of four highly acclaimed novels: The Sheltering Sky, Let It Come Down, The Spider’s House, and Up Above the World. In addition to being one of the most powerful postwar American novelists, Bowles was an acclaimed composer, a travel writer, a poet, a translator, and a short story writer. He died in Morocco in 1999.
Excerpted Chronology of Paul Bowles’s life is copyright © 2002 by Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., New York, N.Y. All rights reserved. The full Chronology appears in Bowles: The Sheltering Sky, Let It Come Down, The Spider’s House, and in Bowles: Collected Stories & Later Writings, published by the Library of America.
Read on
Have You Read?
More by Paul Bowles
The Spider’s House
The dilemma of the outsider in an alien society, and the gap in understanding between cultures, recurrent themes of Paul Bowles’s writings, are dramatized with brutal honesty in this novel set in Fez, Morocco, during that country’s 1954 nationalist uprising. Completely relevant to today’s political situation in the Middle East and elsewhere, richly descriptive of its setting, and uncompromising in its characterizations, The Spider’s House is perhaps Bowles’s best, most beautifully subtle novel.
“Remarkable....[The Spider’s House] ought to top those lists of novels that speak to our present cultural condition.”
—Francine Prose, Harper’s magazine
The Delicate Prey
“The Delicate Prey is in fact one of the most profound, beautifully wrought, and haunting collections in our literature....Bowles’s tales are at once austere, witty, violent, and sensuous. They move with the inevitability of myth. His language has a purity of line, a poise and authority entirely its own, capable of instantly modulating from farce to horror without a ruffle.”
—Tobias Wolff
Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue
In the introduction to Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue, Edmund White writes: “Bowles, one of the four or five best writers in English in the second half of the twentieth century, embraced the desert as a Christian saint embraces his martyrdom. His self-abnegation and his love of traditional culture made him one of the keenest observers of other civilizations we have ever had in America. Unlike his countrymen he did not brashly set out to improve the rest of the world. For Bowles, Americanization was the problem, not the solution. As these startling, sober travel pieces show, Bowles, because of his powers of negative capability, was able to enter into the inner truth of even the most remote places and peoples.”
Let It Come Down
In the preface of Let It Come Down, Paul Bowles writes: “From the time when I was a boy of eight or nine, I had been fascinated by that brief passage in Macbeth where Banquo comes out of the castle with his son and makes a passing remark to the men outside about the approaching rain, to be answered by a flash of a blade and the admirable four-word sentence, succinct and brutal: ‘Let it come down.’
“The novel to which I gave that title was first published early in 1952, at the very moment of the riots—which presaged the end of the International Zone of Morocco. Thus, even at the time of publication the book already treated of a bygone era, for Tangier was never the same after the 30th of March 1952. The city celebrated in these pages has long ago ceased to exist, and the events recounted in them would now be inconceivable. Like a photograph, the tale is a document relating to a specific place at a given point in time, illumined by the light of that particular moment.”
THE LIBRARY OF AMERICA’S Bowles: The Sheltering Sky, Let It Come Down, The Spider’s House AND Bowles: Collected Stories & Later Writings
This Library of America Bowles set, the first annotated edition, offers the full range of his achievement: the portrait of an outsider who was one of the essential American writers of the last century. In addition to his novels— The Sheltering Sky (1949), Let It Co
me Down (1952), The Spider’s House (1955), Up Above the World (1966)—and his collected stories— including such classics as “A Distant Episode” and “Pages from Cold Point”—they contain his masterpiece of travel writing, Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue (1963). Throughout, Bowles shows himself a master of gothic terror and a diabolically funny observer of manners as well as a prescient guide to everything from the roots of Islamist politics to the world of Moghrebi music. With a hallucinatory clarity as dry and unforgiving as the desert air, Bowles sends his characters toward encounters with unknown and terrifying forces both outside them and within them.
The Web Detective
http://www.paulbowles.org
for the authorized Paul Bowles website—which contains a host of information about Paul and Jane Bowles, including essays, memories, photographs, and catalogues of their work, also includes travel essays by, and interviews with, Paul Bowles
http://www.lib.udel.edu/ud/spec/exhibits/bowles/intro.htm
for a generous overview of the Paul Bowles collection at the University of Delaware, the artist’s many pursuits—poetry, music, novels, short stories, translations, travel writing, and life writing—are finely summarized and accompanied by photographs of both his books and manuscripts
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By Paul Bowles
NOVELS
The Sheltering Sky
Let It Come Down