Signatures
Page 6
PAUL BOWLES
Two Years Beside the Strait
Tangier Journal, 1987–9
1990
SOME PEOPLE HAVE all the luck and Paul Bowles seemed to be one of them. 1910 was a pretty good time for him to be born, and New York City a pretty good place to be born in. There was quite enough money in the family for a private income, the young Bowles was already writing prose and poetry and composing music, and on top of all this he was conspicuously handsome. Here was a natural recruit to the ranks of those in the public eye. His first visit to Tangier was in 1931, and from 1947 onwards he was to live there till the end of his life in 1999, not exactly an expatriate or a dropout, rather a visitor on an extended stay in a place that in his hands might as well have been a suburb of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Just before the war, he married Jane Auer, also an American, seven years younger than him. Both of them gay, they were pioneers of anything-goes, apparently free from inhibitions of any kind, perhaps pioneers in the modern syndrome of being happy to be unhappy. Besides, Jane had had a tubercular knee and was an alcoholic. Their unusual personalities and equally unusual writings have given rise to an extensive and growing literature that praises in academic prose the withdrawal into unreason of this couple. Two Serious Women, Jane Bowles’s one and only novel, is set in Central America, in a hotel that proves to be a chamber of horrors more or less unrelated to reality.
American characters in Paul Bowles’s fiction are too naïve to understand the complexities either of Morocco or of Islamic culture. Clinging single-mindedly to their view of the world and its ways, they become victims of themselves. As for Arabs in his fiction, they have customs and codes which they do not share but still expect strangers to observe, and they will punish disrespect and disobedience. Few writers have ever written with such affinity as Bowles about the sense that easily afflicts Westerners in Muslim countries, that there is a cultural compass somewhere to guide them but they cannot find it. That is how complexes of superiority and inferiority very soon sprout into racism and a vision of supremacy. The Sheltering Sky and Let It Come Down are works of genuine cultural discovery. Less well known, The Spider’s House is an evocation, full of unspoken menace, of the war of national liberation the Moroccans waged to gain independence from France.
I had not been back to Tangier since childhood. Looking at the past with hindsight, I had been one of the lucky people. At the time of the German blitzkrieg in May 1940, my parents were in England, having left me in France in the care of my aunt and uncle, Bubbles and Eduardo Propper. I have described in Fault Lines our flight from the Germans, first to Vichy France and from there to Spain and Morocco. Tangier meant safety, food, blue sky and permanent sunshine. In 1968 I returned with Clarissa and could show her the house I’d lived in; the bench on which I’d sat to watch the British fleet steaming out of Gibraltar in the pale grey dawn; the Marshan where I had played football with Arab boys my age; the casbah and the Petit Socco, the busy heart of Tangier.
The city had since become a sort of open-air nightclub for drugs and sex tourism of every kind. In an old file I had preserved the address of Paul Bowles – Apartment 20, Immeuble Itesa, telephone number 17883. It was an uninhabitable dump of cheap stained cement blocks, without even a minimum concession to domesticity. Here he lived with the solemn, not to say surly, Muhammad Mrabet. Introduced as a writer with whom Bowles went gathering traditional tribal tales that he published under his own name, Mrabet was in fact functionally illiterate. They spent the day smoking kif, the cannabis grown in Morocco. The smell of it impregnated not just the dark and shuttered room but the entire building. Draped around him in various stages of trance was a troop of beachcombers and free-loaders, pimps and prostitutes of both sexes, dreamers, worshippers of the Jane Bowles cult, and somewhere in the mix a published poet or two.
Quite why the brilliant and privileged Paul Bowles had chosen to model himself on the kind of character the deranged William Burroughs or the solipsistic Allen Ginsberg might have invented is a mystery. The Zeitgeist seemed to be working overtime. Impassive, he allowed this life of kif and stupor to wash over him. Toward the end of a boring morning, one of the hangers-on wanted to buy something and Bowles handed his wallet over without comment. The more unconventional his life had grown, the duller he became in himself and in his writing. It was not a case of old age or failing powers but more simply that he had progressively lost all idea of who he really was. He seemed not to realize the lengths to which he had gone in order to prevent himself from becoming the great writer he might have been.
ARNO BREKER
Bildnisse unserer Epoche
NO DATE
THE LIFE AND TIMES of Arno Breker is a warning that bad art has the power to do great damage. Born in 1900 near Schwerin in northern Germany, he had a studio for his sculpture in Paris during the mid-Twenties, and he liked to present himself as the successor to Rodin. His French was fluent. Returning to Germany in 1934, he was a skilled self-promoter, soon accepted in the highest Nazi circles where he was habitually described as “Hitler’s favorite sculptor.” His busts, usually in bronze, highlighted prominent Nazis, including at least two of Hitler. He cast statues a little larger than life, many of them warrior figures in the nude striking heroic poses, for example brandishing a drawn sword regardless that the statue’s prominent penis was a ridiculous contrast, a sort of prop; or muscle-bound males also in the nude raising high in the air a blazing torch or a Laocoön-like serpent. At the entrance of the new Reich Chancellery built for Hitler by Albert Speer were two Breker reliefs representing with labored symbolism The Party and The Army. Hitler himself initiated and led the campaign against what he called “degenerate art,” and Breker played a star role in what was effectively totalitarian control of aesthetics and artists who were potential opponents.Extolling power, conquest and will, Breker praised and promoted the spirit of Nazism through his sculpture in the way that Leni Riefenstahl did in the medium of film or Carl Orff in the music of Carmina Burana.
In the summer of 1940, the French showed themselves unwilling and unable to fight for their country, and it looked as if France could never recover from a comprehensive defeat. An armistice was signed on June 18, 1940, and five days later Hitler made his one and only visit to Paris, a somewhat cursory tour that lasted from dawn to noon. Photographs of the occasion make him out to be lost in his own thoughts, with the Eiffel Tower in the background as though certifying that he is indeed a man of destiny. Breker appears in some of these photographs. Hitler had specially invited him, having him stay in his headquarters and flown with him to Paris in his private aircraft. At one point they were five minutes away from Breker’s Paris studio, but apparently there was not enough time for a detour to it.
A Wehrmacht General was appointed Military Governor of German-occupied France, and this immediately posed the moral question: How was one to behave? Was a Frenchman to buckle under and obey Hitler’s bidding evermore, or on the contrary resist, and if so, by what means? Should a German relax and enjoy superiority over all the French or take care not to offend French sensibilities? Invited to conduct a star-studded Tristan und Isolde at the Opera, Furtwängler refused on the grounds that he would not conduct “on the back of German tanks.” Herbert von Karajan, an honorary Colonel in the SS, felt no such scruple, and immediately took Furtwängler’s place.
Breker similarly exploited the position of supremacy that the Wehrmacht had won. In May 1942, under German auspices, an exhibition of his work was staged in the prestigious Orangerie. Artists and critics who had made Paris the world’s center of pre-war contemporary painting attended the opening. Endlessly talked about and publicized, this was perhaps the peak of collaboration in the four years of occupation. One measure of this general corruption was the compliment that Aristide Maillol, then the most eminent of French sculptors, paid to Breker when he called him “Germany’s Michelangelo.” Breker’s moment of triumph signified that the old moral and political values were no longer applicable a
nd it was in order, unquestionably normal and even respectable, to fall in with the new Nazi masters. France today is still paying the price.
It so happens that in 1955, I had been stationed for a year of national service in Krefeld, a smallish industrial town in the Rhineland. The regiment was quartered in a magnificent no-costs-spared barracks built for the Wehrmacht in the Hitler period. When I arrived there, the rubble of Allied bombing raids was still piled high in the town center. The ruin was worse in Düsseldorf, the nearest big city. Some of us now and again went into the Park Hotel on the Königsallee, a handsome boulevard with what appeared to be shops but were only the front walls of bombed-out buildings.
None of the men in that barracks knew or cared what the local Germans thought of them. Speaking German, I could not help noting that the locals were outwardly polite, not to say deferential, but among themselves they were full of resentment. Trivial incidents such as a waiter accused by one of our corporals of overcharging in some Gasthaus, or a policeman prevented by law from enforcing traffic regulations, could lead to an unpleasant confrontation. At the time, it seemed to me, such people believed that history had come out wrong. The spoken word and body language conveyed a sense that they should not have to see themselves as victims. They handled themselves differently; there was some lingering element of collective purpose and duty. My novel Safe Houses has a scene taken from real life when dozens of old men gather in a restaurant and sing forbidden Nazi Party songs.
Holt Rinehart had published my books in New York, and the day came when the editors there had a suggestion for me. They had bought the archive of a photojournalist by the name of Roger Schall. Somehow he had managed to obtain an Ausweis from the German Military Governor, giving him permission to go where he chose and photograph whatever he fancied in occupied Paris. My aim in Paris in the Third Reich, the book I published in 1981, was to provide historical context to his snapshots.
The book’s final section consists of interviews I had with Germans or Frenchmen whose particular experiences were worth recording. The German reactions were mixed. Albrecht Krause, a senior member of the Military Governor’s staff, rather exceptionally held that Germans would have to live with sackcloth and ashes for the next five hundred years to atone for what they had done. Gerhard Heller, the censor and therefore responsible ultimately to Josef Goebbels and the Propaganda Staffel, described the numerous writers beseeching him to put on their manuscripts his stamp of approval, complete with swastika, without which they could not be published. Jean-Paul Sartre was one of the most persistent, spending hours in Heller’s office.
The Düsseldorf in which Breker had come to settle in old age was very different from the city I had once been in. He himself was much like the type veering between boastfulness and resentment that I had encountered during national service. Museums and collectors fell over themselves to have one of his pieces, but “they,” whoever they were, boycotted him. More than thirty years had passed since he had accompanied Hitler in Paris, but the memory of that occasion still touched him because he saw it as the greatest compliment to his artistic gift as a sculptor. That same day, Hitler invited him to dine and awarded him the Nazi Party’s Golden Badge, its highest decoration.
We crossed a bit of garden to reach his studio, where busts and statues were assembled in some disorder. Hideous as ever, Nazi kitsch was on a support system in that studio. Bildnisse unserer Epoche, the book he pressed on me, is a collection of photographs of men and women, usually public figures who sat for him mostly in the 1950s and 1960s. Their features express admiration of power, conquest and will. Not just Germany but the whole of Europe has to pay the price for that.
CHRISTOPHER BURNEY
The Dungeon Democracy
1946
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY gave rise to the literature of the concentration camp, and it will be remembered for this special branch of historiography, perhaps for little else. The mindset of anyone with claims to be human is already conditioned by the century’s central political experience as recorded for example by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Varlam Shalamov, Hanns Mayer (writing as Jean Améry), David Rousset, Tadeusz Borowski, Etty Hillesum, Emanuel Ringelblum, and Primo Levi. Christopher Burney has his place in that select company. From August 1944 till the end of the war, he was in Buchenwald. How the British would have behaved under Soviet or Nazi dictatorship is an unspoken question about the identity of the nation. Only a hundred pages long, Christopher Burney’s The Dungeon Democracy is about staying true to oneself and surviving. Like Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man, it was written in the immediate aftermath of the war and published in 1946 when the world was not yet ready to come to terms with atrocity on the modern scale.
Burney’s story begins conventionally enough. Born in 1917, he was the direct descendent of Dr. Charles Burney (1726–1814), the composer and leading musicologist of his day. Charles’s daughter Fanny was a popular novelist who in the revolutionary year of 1794 married the French General Alexandre D’Arblay, and went to live in France. (London’s Soho still boasts its D’Arblay Street.) Pentwyn is our family farmhouse twenty minutes from Hay-on-Wye, and every time I drive to that bibliophile town I pass Oakfield, the handsome red-brick house that used to be the Burney home. At the age of seventeen, Christopher Burney ran away from Wellington in the hope of becoming a soldier rather than the classical scholar that the headmaster intended him to be. Rolling stone, laborer, mechanic, exile in Paris most of the time, he was undergoing just the right preparation for joining the wartime Special Operations Executive, whose purpose, as Churchill himself put it, was to set German-occupied Europe ablaze.
In 1942 Burney parachuted into France. He was 25. One or another instance of carelessness had allowed the Abwehr, German counter-intelligence, to round up all those with whom he had been due to cooperate. After he had been on the run for eleven weeks, the Gestapo succeeded in capturing him. To be in their hands, he found, was “absolutely terrifying.” They were within their rights to sentence him to death by a firing squad. Condemned, he was sent to Fresnes prison in Paris, where he spent more than 500 days alone in a cell. Spared from execution probably because the Germans hoped to trap other SOE agents through interrogation, he then had to endure deportation in a cattle truck and the ordeal of Buchenwald. “I could have told accurately what it is like to walk the last few steps on this earth,” he wrote in Solitary Confinement, his second and final book, as much of a masterpiece as his first.
His writing is lit with glimpses of the inner self that enabled him to confront Buchenwald. Sunday churchgoing in lost Herefordshire summers had formed his character, along with Shakespeare and The Wind in the Willows and roast beef. “I had been left free to scan the horizon of existence,” is how he saw himself. As for the concentration camp, “The most striking characteristic of the S.S. was their crass stupidity. They were all men who had seen in Hitler a man who offered them the means of living by the only gift they had – brute force.” To nickname them the Toad, Bat-ears or the Kindly One was to mock their stupid brutality. The Commandant SS Sturmbann-führer Koch was a sadist with a side-line in embezzling Party funds. Frau Koch was the pervert whose lampshades had to be made of tattooed human skin. The SS doctor, Hoven by name, was “a small dark man with shifty eyes… a murderer of no mean talent.” Among the prisoners were some fifty British pilots who had been shot down and as the war was coming to its end the Commandant started to hang two of them every day. With extraordinary altruistic courage, Burney went into hiding under the floor of one of the camp’s huts and through intermediaries he offered the Commandant a bargain. When the camp was in British hands, the Commandant would have to answer for his crimes. If he stopped these executions, Burney promised to speak for him in court. In horrific circumstances, he had done the right thing and it worked. Burney’s testimony was duly heard and judged not to be enough to spare Koch from the gallows. “If we follow only our emotions and our appetites, it will mean Back to Buchenwald for me and a maiden trip for most of you,” ar
e the closing words of The Dungeon Democracy.
Liberated, he was skeletal thin. In due course he made a life for himself, with a wife and children and various jobs, at one point in a bank and at another point writing a report for the United Nations. Friends had lent him a house with the pleasing name of La Carrotière in a small town in Normandy, about an hour by car from Paris. In the summer of 1973 I visited him there. He looked fit. Over a meal, I drew out of him things he had left unsaid in his books but which recurred in his dreams. He had carried corpses from the transports and laid them in piles. Once he was sent for punishment to the Buchenwald stone quarry and would have died there if an elderly Viennese socialist had not used his influence and rescued him. One morning four Russians in his block suspected a fifth of informing, and they bounced him to death.
To ask him why he now lived alone, as it were in self-induced solitary confinement, seemed to put me on a level with Toad or Bat-ears; besides, I couldn’t help noticing that his car had a yellow GIG badge, the initials standing for grand invalide de guerre. The French Government paid him a full pension as a former officer with the Resistance. A less grateful government awarded him the MBE, of all inopportune medals.
Back in London and angered by the indifference of officialdom to Burney, I took his case up with a ministerial pen-pusher. Mightily pleased with himself and hardly able to button his trousers over his belly, this oaf held that Burney had been on active service, and nothing need be done for him, certainly not in respect of a pension. I found I was talking to someone unable to imagine the Buchenwald ordeal or ask himself if he could have survived it. “Don’t incite the hornets” was his way of telling me in a letter that he had no expectations.