Travels: Collected Writings, 1950-1993

by Paul Bowles

  The casual outsider, however, can usually get more glimpses of café life than he can of home life. In a bourgeois household, upon the entry of any man or boy not of the immediate family, Moslem or otherwise, all the women and girls are swiftly hidden, and remain hidden until he goes out of the house. In families of lower income, on the other hand, the social strictures have been considerably relaxed, so that I have only to suggest to my maid or chauffeur that a group of my friends would like to visit a Moslem home and meet all the members of the family, and the invitation will be willingly extended. I don’t claim that the activities which we see in a Moslem house are identical with those which would be going on if we were not there. But if we stay long enough, a certain degree of relaxation is usually reached, and the household rhythm at length begins to pulse of its own accord, so that it is possible to get a pretty clear picture of what life is like in the domestic citadel.

  Paul and Jane Bowles greeting the neighbours at their Medina house -’the small and uncomfortable shoebox stood on end’ – in Tangier

  By our standards these people are desperately poor. At present, for instance, the maid who gets our breakfast, cleans the five rooms, and does all the laundering of our clothes, earns the equivalent of $8.33 a month. Also, she gets no food from us. Even in Tangier that is a low wage for 1958. Yet if you visit her house, you find it immaculate; moreover, the manner of life that she and her family lead manages to give an impression of Oriental ease and even abundance. It is a peculiarly Moslem gift, being able to create the illusion of luxury in the midst of poverty, and it never fails to arouse my admiration when I see it displayed. But then, these people are the supreme illusionists; they can give a straightforward action the air of being a conjurer’s trick or make the most tortuously devious behavior seem like naturalness itself.

  I have never decided precisely why the time spent in these humble homes is so satisfying. Perhaps it is merely because both hosts and guests are playing a simple, pleasant game in which the hosts lead the way with regard to the silences to be observed as well as the conversation to be made, and the guests follow comfortably, happy to have all social responsibility taken from them. Certainly it is agreeable now and then to spend an evening reclining peaceably among piles of cushions, in effortless talk with people who are completely natural but infinitely polite. And when the end of the evening comes, and they have fully convinced you that the occasion has been even more enjoyable for them than for you, and you have pronounced the necessary formulas of farewell, it is delightful, too, to step out into the silent moonlit street, and a moment later look from a Casbah gateway down upon the thousands of white cubes which are the houses of the Medina, hearing only the waves as they break on the beach and perhaps the sleepy antiphonal crowing of two roosters on neighboring rooftops. If I ask myself occasionally whether I may not be a trifle out of my mind to have chosen to spend so many years in this crazy city, it is at such moments that I am reassured – easily able to convince myself that if it were 1931 once more, and I possessed the gift of accurately foretelling the future, I should very likely take Miss Stein’s good advice and make my first journey to Tangier all over again.

  The Challenge to Identity

  The Nation, April 26, 1958

  WHETHER IN REVIEWS or publishers’ blurbs, whether here or in england (where the genre flourishes more successfully) there would appear to be a question in the minds of those who write about travel books: who reads them, the stay-at-homes or the venturers-forth? Assuming that these categories define two kinds of temperament, and that many potential voyagers are prevented from achieving their desire to see the world only by force of circumstance, my own guess is that the travel-book public is composed almost exclusively of the venturers-forth – those who have gone and those who hope to go – but nowadays composed, unfortunately, of only a small percentage of them.

  Even as recently as a century ago, travel was a specialized activity. Distant places being out-of-bounds for all but a fortunate and resistant few, it was normal that the desire for contact with the exotic should be satisfied vicariously through reading. Now that in theory anyone can go anywhere, the travel book serves a different purpose; emphasis has shifted from the place to the effect of the place upon the person. The travel book necessarily has become more subjective, more “literary.” But this tends to deprive the travel writer of his natural reader. The ven-turer-forth is inclined to be an extrovert, to despise second-hand experience. If he is going to South America – even if he only dreams of going – he is not eager to know Isherwood’s impressions of it first. He wants a concise volume of data relating to the history, climate, customs and points of interest in each republic. He is even vaguely conscious of having decided to form his own impressions, and to hell with what someone else felt when he came face to face with Aconcagua.

  What is a travel book? For me it is the story of what happened to one person in a particular place, and nothing more than that; it does not contain hotel and highway information, lists of useful phrases, statistics, or hints as to what kind of clothing is needed by the intending visitor. It may be that such books form a category which is doomed to extinction. I hope not, because there is nothing I enjoy more than reading an accurate account by an intelligent writer of what happened to him away from home.

  THE SUBJECT-MATTER of the best travel books is the conflict between writer and place. It is not important which of them carries the day, so long as the struggle is faithfully recorded. It takes a writer with a gift for describing a situation to do this well, which is perhaps the reason why many of the travel books that remain in the memory have been produced by writers expert at the fashioning of novels. One remembers Evelyn Waugh’s indignation in Ethiopia, Graham Greene deadpanning through West Africa, Aldous Huxley letting Mexico get him down, Gide discovering his social conscience in the Congo, long after other equally accurate travel accounts have blurred and vanished. Given the novelistic skill of these particular writers it is perhaps perverse of me to prefer their few travel pieces to their novels, but I do.

  The particularized travel books, those dealing with a definite quest or mission, along with records of exploration and conquest, have their own special charm, but too often the reader is made aware of the fact that they were penned by travelers who also wrote, rather than by writers who also traveled. (Michel Vieuchange’s Smara is a distinguished exception, and for the reason that his quest was ultimately an interior one; he went in search of ecstasy, and finding only physical suffering, he was obliged to use the pages of his journal as an alembic in which to work the transformation.)

  There is a category which in its approach and subject-matter comes closer to autobiography than to travel, but which because it deals with the displaced person in relatively unfamiliar surroundings is conceded to be a part of travel literature. This is the intimate account of a writer’s daily life during his prolonged residence in one particular place abroad. There are several favorites of mine in this group: Flandrau’s Viva Mexico!, Ackerley’s Hindoo Holiday, Dinesen’s Out of Africa, Peter Mayne’s The Alleys of Marrakesh. They are books in which the personality of the author is the decisive element; their charm derives from this unequivocal placing of emphasis upon personal attitudes and reflections.

  I am wondering: in what way, if I were now engaged in writing a travel book, would my behavior be different from what it is at this very moment? I sit here on a bench in a tiny park overlooking the city of Lisbon. Harbor sounds float up from below, to be audible between the sharp cries of small children playing on the grass nearby. The light is very strong, although the sun is covered by a veil of haze, and the smell in the air is a compound of unidentifiable suggestions of spring. Suddenly the little red rubber ball the children have been tossing back and forth bounces through the iron grillwork of the fence and over the parapet into a walled courtyard far below. There is a good deal of shouted recrimination in the wake of this event, after which the young ballplayers disperse – all but one small boy, clearly th
e owner of the lost plaything, who remains behind, clutching the bars of the fence, staring wistfully downward. At this point I have my answer. If I were here to write a travel book, I should call him over and talk with him, offer him the money for another ball. But since I am not, I merely sit still and con- tinue to imagine how, if I were to attempt to write such a book, I should go about it.

  FOR A TRUE travel book, I don’t think a sufficiently accurate job can be done after the fact, if the writer has been living as he pleased during the time he proposes to write about, not taking notes, not conscious of his function as an instrument of reception. The ill-defined memory of his own emotional responses is always stronger than the exact memory of what caused them. Reliance upon recollection is proper to determining the substance of a novel, but not in this case, where it is too likely to alter the writing’s firmness of texture.

  The writer must make the decision to adhere to a scrupulous honesty in reporting. Any conscious distortion is equivalent to cheating at solitaire; the purpose of the game is nullified. The account must be as near the truth as he can get, and it seems to me the easiest way to achieve that is to aim for precision in describing his own reactions. A reader can get an idea of what a place is really like only if he knows what its effects were upon someone of whose character he has some idea, of whose preferences he is aware. Thus is seems essential that the writer place a certain insistence upon the objective presentation of his own personality; it provides an interpretative gauge with which the reader can measure for himself the relative importance of each detail, like the scale of miles in the corner of a map.

  The problem of giving the travel account a linear structure is not primarily a literary one. It is more a matter involving the character and behavior of the writer. He has got to insure that the experiencing which will constitute his material comes into being. He is writing a story which he is obliged first to live out, and if the direction the story is taking appears to demand certain elements in which his life is lacking, he will need to know how to rearrange his existence so that those elements may be provided. His powers of invention must be applied to dealing, not with the question of writing, but with his own relation to the external reality around him.

  It goes without saying that whatever attempts have been undertaken to make a place accessible to the tourist are just so many barricades in the way of the writer, and if he manages to make contact with the place it will be in spite of them rather than thanks to them. The purpose of official aid for the visitor is to make individual research unnecessary; in many countries there is a further, more sinister design in government-sponsored tourist bureaus: a conscious intent to discourage personal relationships between strangers and residents. Writers are particularly suspect, of course, but it is one of their routine tasks to circumvent this sort of thing. “You have no need to talk with anyone,” I was assured by a policeman in an African country. “Our tourist office will supply you with guides at fixed rates and a special booklet in English free of charge that will give you all the information you require.”

  And again: “How do I know you’re a bona fide tourist?” demanded an employee of a South American consulate in London when I applied for a visa. “Why, what would I be?” I said. “I don’t know,” she replied. “It says ‘writer’ in your passport. How do I know what you’re going to do?” “You don’t,” I told her, and went to the Far East instead.

  Sad for U.S., Sad for Algeria

  The Nation, May 24, 1958

  ONE DAY EARLY this year as I was taking the mail out of my box in the post office here in Tangier, I heard my name called softly from the door which opens into the rear part of the building where the mail is sorted. I turned and recognized a young man who works at the registry window.

  “I don’t want to bother you,” he began, “but are you interested in Algeria?”

  “Isn’t everyone?” I said.

  He smiled. “I should like to bring some friends one day to see you. We would stay only a few minutes.”

  “Of course. Whenever you like. My telephone is 14353. Call me any morning at eleven, and we can arrange the time.”

  “Entendu.” He shut the door and a moment later smiled at me from the registry window as I went out.

  A WEEK OR SO LATER he and two other Moslems appeared at my door. I took their raincoats and they went into the sala, where they remained standing until I came back into the room. The postal employee introduced himself as Monsieur Gourit; he then presented me to the other two, the Messieurs Benouar and Youcef. The two Algerians were correctly dressed in dark suits and looked like civil servants, which is what they turned out to be – employees of the Moroccan government. My immediate feeling was that they had come to form a personal impression of me, and this did not change. We sat down. With certain deletions the conversation, in French, ran thus:

  BENOUAR: I see you like Moroccan décor.

  BOWLES: I like everything about Morocco. I first came to live here twenty-seven years ago, you know.

  GOURIT: Before I was born.

  BENOUAR: You have been here for twenty-seven years? BOWLES: No, no. But I’ve been here more than half that time. BENOUAR: You don’t get tired of it?

  BOWLES: No, no at all. On the contrary, I like it more all the time. I travel a good deal, and I love coming back to it.

  YOUCEF: And Algeria? You have been to Algeria?

  BOWLES: Yes, I’ve spent four winters there. Principally in the South. But I’ve traveled all over it, by plane, train, bus and camel. And trucks, too. I like camels the best. You don’t have to ride them. You can get down and walk along beside them.

  BENOUAR: I must confess I’ve never been on a camel.

  YOUCEF: You are American, monsieur. It is for this reason that we came to see you. We have great admiration for the Americans. We thought perhaps you might be able to help us.

  BOWLES: Help you? I’d like very much to help you in any way possible – except financially, which I couldn’t manage – but I don’t quite see what there is that I can do. I have no importance, you know, no influence, no official connections, no powerful friends, nothing.

  YOUCEF: Yes, but you know America.

  BOWLES: No even that any more, I’m afraid.

  YOUCEF (IMPATIENTLY): Tell me, monsieur. Why does America not want to see Algeria independent? Why is she against us?

  BOWLES: In the first place, I don’t agree that the U.S. is against you.

  YOUCEF: Come, monsieur. She finances the war being waged against us, and she has never once expressed herself in our favor. You must admit that.

  BOWLES: She finances it indirectly, yes. And unfortunately France is in Europe and is still an ally of hers. I don’t think she’ll go on financing it much longer, though. I know she just handed France another enormous sum, but that won’t last long. I think eventually she’ll have had enough of France’s nonsense.

  YOUCEF: You’re very optimistic. I wish I could be as much so.

  BOWLES: On the contrary, I’m very pessimistic. I’m afraid by the time America loses her patience it will be too late.

  BENOUAR: Too late? In what sense? You think the French are going to win? I can assure you that will never happen.

  BOWLES: No, I don’t mean that. Of course they can never win. I mean to say, by the time America decides the war has gone on long enough, the Algerians may have committed themselves to the East. Then not only wouldn’t America be able to insist on negotiation, she would even feel obliged to help France continue the war, and this time in an active fashion.

  YOUCEF: It’s unthinkable.

  BENOUAR (SIMULTANEOUSLY WITH YOUCEF): Never.

  GOURIT: I see you are really pessimistic, monsieur.

  YOUCEF: What you are saying there is completely hypothetical, in any case. It is a personal opinion and has no basis in fact. You have been to Algeria. You have seen the poverty and you know the causes for it.

  BOWLES: Yes, of course.

  YOUCEF: You know that the principal purpose of the pre
sent slaughter is to perpetuate the system which creates that poverty. And you know that is why we are fighting.

  BOWLES: Yes, yes. Of course.

  YOUCEF: What we want to know is, how can we bring our case to the attention of the American public? How can we convince them that they are being immoral and short-sighted in supporting France? How can we gain their sympathy?

  BOWLES: I’m sure you already have the sympathy of most of the Americans who are conscious of the fact that there is a war going on in Algeria.

  YOUCEF: Who are conscious of it? What do you mean? How could anyone not be conscious of it?

  BOWLES: Easily. Americans are indifferent, you know, to events that don’t touch them directly. But as I say, practically everyone who knows anything at all about the war sympathizes with you, not with the French. You can be sure of that.

  GOURIT: But then – the American government does not represent the American people.