by Gore Vidal
I have no clear memory of meeting Paul Bowles. Doubtless, it was when he was working on one of Tenn’s plays. He was fifteen years older than I. A vivid blond with blue eyes. He had gone briefly to the University of Virginia; then fled to Paris to be a poet; was taken up—or was it taken in?—by Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Bluntly, Gertrude told him he was not a poet. So he became a composer, and studied with Aaron Copland. He was a descendant of Samuel Bowles, the pro-Lincoln New England publisher (I was already investigating American history and told Paul more than he ever wanted to know about his interesting connection). Apolitical, he had briefly been a Communist as was the custom in those days in New York art circles. But he was deeply bored by the party and soon lost all interest in politics, unlike the Bird who awakened, after a decade’s slumber, and said to me, “Gore, I think I slept through the sixties.” I told him, “Bird, you didn’t miss a thing but, if you were really asleep, God knows how you’re going to deal with what’s coming.” But the Bird, undaunted, promptly joined the anti–Vietnam War movement.
Paul and Jane Bowles were both significant cultural heroes in that small New York world which honored the arts. Jane’s witty stories and sardonic conversational asides were much quoted while his music with its Arabic themes became something of a cult. Lenny Bernstein, describing Paul’s work to me, extended both hands: “After all these years I can still feel his music in my fingers. Perfect miniatures.”
With some degree of guilt, Paul broke his marital pact with Jane and started to write stories and novels even more notable than hers. I can’t say I was much aware of any of this at the time. I knew I preferred his company to hers—he was serene; she was often frantic. She made scenes over food in restaurants. When he bought or rented an island off the coast of Ceylon he asked me to join him. But I missed the boat by a day—he never believed my story. But it was indeed true. I ended up that winter at New Orleans in a Dauphine Street flat.
A recent biographer of Bowles quotes him as saying to me, “Why the hell didn’t you write long ago and let me know that you had not taken the boat?” The lady biographer is inventing for Paul what she takes to be real American he-man dialogue that in no way resembles anything that he would have written, much less said to me. She also has another flight of fancy about Tangier and myself. As I have noted I went there twice in thirty or forty years only to see Paul not Jane. Now I read how, according to the lady, Jane is “caught up in a whirl of social activities being choreographed this time by Cecil Beaton, David Herbert, Gore Vidal, and Truman Capote.” I had nothing to do, ever, with any of this cast of characters nor did I join in “whirls” of social activities for Jane or anyone else. My name has been idly inserted into a context where it doesn’t belong. Then I read in her book that “biographer” Fred Kaplan described Tangier in 1949 as “a gathering place for traveling queens attracted there by the weather, beaches, cheap cost of living, easy availability of drugs, and the Arab ethos that permitted every sort of sex under terms totally independent of European Puritanism. The town’s dirt and widespread poverty, its total lack of intellectual culture, and the hovel Vidal rented in town, all were repugnant.” This is the Kaplan style in high gear. But if Bowles’s biographer invented this particular passage I find it actionable in court. I never rented—or set foot—in a hovel in Tangier. I stayed at the El Minzah hotel and never for more than a few days. If the lady biographer got this lurid nonsense from my “biographer” Fred Kaplan, who had been given a contract to complete the late Walter Clemons authorized biography of me, then Kaplan is the culprit. Later he claimed the book was not authorized and so he was boldly inaccurate as he let the chips fall where they didn’t belong. He was interested in my sex life about which he knew nothing other than what little I had written in Palimpsest. I’ve not read his book other than an occasional passage—just enough for me to realize how accurate the headline of the review of his book in The Times Literary Supplement was: “On Misreading Gore Vidal.”
Nonlinear lives make for awkward biographies by those who do not easily grasp the apparently conflicting identities—or masks—on view. When Paul came to write a memoir (“only for money” is how he always put it), he found himself as elusive to pin down as had these academic writers who tried to sum him up in conventional terms. Bill Burroughs had advised him to keep a journal but, always conscious of the purpose for writing anything, Paul could never determine for whom such a journal was ideally to be kept. If for himself it seemed idle, like making faces in the mirror. If for publication, like Gide, it seemed to him highly suspect, neither fish nor fowl.
Lately, while reading through Paul’s selected letters, I found myself recalling more of him than ever before, since to each correspondent he showed a different face; he also liked the flat detail which often suggests more than what he appears to want to confide. In his novels and stories he has rendered so thoroughly his North African world, both real and dreamed, that one needs the letters to get some idea of his American world which never entirely ceased, particularly when he took teaching jobs in Florida and Southern California where he is like someone from another planet trying to separate the flora from the fauna.
I spent an evening with him in Santa Monica shortly before he was to teach his first class at San Fernando Valley State College of Northridge. Earlier offers to teach had fallen through because of his brief, perfunctory membership in the Communist Party. But, finally, he was vetted to teach at Northridge. “The only problem is,” he said to me, “I have no idea what’s required.”
To Oliver Evans who taught at universities most of his life, Paul wrote rather desperately: “A Dr. Finestone wants to know what books I shall be using in my course. He also sent me my schedule: one meeting a week to consider creative writing (7pm to 10pm) and two a week to consider the existential novel (3 to 4:30)…Try to envisage my ignorance and explain to me what goes on in a classroom. What is a course? A lecture course? A seminar? A class? Who does the talking in each? What is the teaching process? Does one tell students one’s own reactions to books?” I’m afraid this was pretty much his conversation with me at Santa Monica, only I knew less than he did about teaching. He had gone for a year, I think, to the University of Virginia while I had never set foot in a university except as an unconventional lecturer. In the end, he wisely taught his own books.
Paul had a difficult time with his memoir because he tended to remember places more than people. He had given his agent a list of famous people he had known and then discovered, a bit late, that he had little or nothing to say about them. In a letter to his publisher who had written that “the book seems to be more ‘travel narrative’ than ‘subjective, personal commentary,’ ” Paul’s answer was to the point: “If the mention of the people whom I have glimpsed on my way past them lacks precision in describing them, it is only because I never really saw them or thought about them, since for me they were manipulable objects to be used or somehow got around, in order to continue my trajectory…I’ll do what I can to pad the passages on Williams, Vidal, Barnes, Guggenheim…and others.” I now recall that at one point Paul asked me jokingly, I thought, if I could think of anything interesting or memorable that I had said or done when he was around. I replied, accurately, that I had forgotten me, too. Fiction writers with a gift for inventing other universes cannot be held to the journalist role of describing someone actually observed at large in quotidian reality.
But what Bowles does describe in his letters is a mounting horror of his native land. To the writer James Leo Herlihy, whose novel Midnight Cowboy Paul had liked, he writes:
What I admire beyond the style is the easy way [you] capture the United States and its particular essence, without, however expressing any opinion extrinsic to the story, without even a hint of disaffection. Wonderful! I suppose that strikes me because I’ve always been afraid to tackle America; I know quite well that my hatred would show through all defences. For years I’ve thought of a thousand points of view which would aid me in masking my feelings and thu
s make it possible to use the place as a locale for a book, but there seems to be no way. It may be you don’t even have the murderous emotions about the US, but whether you do or don’t the miracle remains. You’ve either hit on the right way of looking at it (from the beginning) or found a way of hiding your hatred. In the latter case, it would be literary skill; in the former, you could consider yourself blessed by fortune first of all. It doesn’t matter either way.
But it continues to matter in Paul’s next letter to Herlihy.
It still seems to me that the formalized life of primitives must be emotionally satisfying, if only because so many of the acts of daily life are performed in the manner of a ritual, and before witnesses. (Then I worry: Could it be that my nostalgia for that lost childhood is merely a disinclination to assume the responsibilities that becoming civilized demands? Then I answer: No. We’re still primitives. We don’t really want to be civilized. In another ten thousand years, perhaps.)…And about the hatred of America: naturally I mask it, because I mask everything. Too much importance is given the writer and not enough to his work. What difference does it make who he is and what he feels, since he is merely a machine for transmission of ideas? In reality he doesn’t exist—he’s a cipher, a blank. A spy sent into life by the forces of death. His main objective is to get the information across the border, back into death. Then he can be given a mythical personality…I don’t think a writer ever participates in anything; his pretences at it are mimetic [Not mine, Paul]…This all sounds far too serious. But you got me started.
I rather wish that I had got him started rather than Herlihy. Both Bowles and I had been influenced by Sartre’s La Nausée. Writers of any complexity are not well served in biographies by schoolteachers, particularly American ones. In 1989 Paul wrote the editor of Black Sparrow Press how displeased he was with a recent biography of himself. He quotes me as saying “that if I collaborated, half the material would be wrong, and if I didn’t, everything would be wrong. In the course of events this was beautifully borne out.” If only I had had me to advise me (!) in a similar situation where everything was wrong.
I’m mildly surprised by Paul’s intense dislike of our native land in the year 1966. It is in part the fastidious dislike of a Flaubert for the mindless cud-chewing of the middle class anywhere which can often provide fuel in the form of spleen as well as satire in such private made-up cities of the plain as my Duluth. But Paul seems uncommonly, uncharacteristically fierce in his declaration to Herlihy. But then I have never thought the idea of a mere country could ever be sufficiently coherent to hate or to love as opposed to simply observe. I suspect that Paul found unfathomable my interest in how the American experiment was turning out—as exotic to him as I found his apparent passion for the primitive world of North Africa and other places to the far south and farther east. The idea of the writer as a Promethean figure crossing like a spy the boundaries separating life and death is a splendid metaphor for his own writing at its best, but the oddly bitter note he strikes with Herlihy he never did with me. I understand the disdain of high art for mediocrity but his objection is much deeper. He once defined decadence for, I think, The New York Times as “commercialism” and “a failure of energy,” not their expected answer.
I’ve been putting my memory to work to find a vulgar root for his need to mask all things, including his dislike of his native land not too much different from that of our own American master Henry James.
Once, while Paul and I were waiting to cross Fifth Avenue, I started to go against the light. “Don’t!” he said. Since there was no traffic, I asked him why not risk it? “Because my mother did when I was a child. She simply held up her hand and said, ‘Nonsense, we have the right of way.’ I stayed on the curb and she walked into the Fifth Avenue bus. She was lucky not to be killed.” Paul never forgot that utterly mistaken concept: “We have the right of way.”
Then there was his final break with the United States. He had entertained a youth at a hotel. The young man wanted money. Paul said no. The youth departed, to be replaced by two plainclothesmen. Since Paul did not have the cash they asked for, he made a date to see them the next day. By the time they returned, if they did, Paul was on the high seas. There are more details to the story but I have forgotten them. The essential point is that the criminalizing of drugs and sex is very much a sign of that malign primitivism which has always reigned in Freedom’s Land. For Bowles, Morocco was freedom, particularly as he penetrated the high Atlas and the Sahara desert, recording music that he was certain could be traced back to Roman times, while noting down stories that go back to the early days of our race which gave us Puritan New England that also gave birth to that original mind, masked or not, of Paul Bowles whose imagination responded with civilized hatred to the sort of primitive laws the two New York plainclothesmen were eager to exploit.
Despite my own troubles with my English publisher John Lehmann or, rather, his real and sometimes imagined troubles with British censorship, I got him to take Paul’s The Sheltering Sky which had been rejected in the United States on the absurd ground that it was not a novel. Lehmann did well by the book and later with Paul’s short stories. But Lehmann was too literary an English publisher to survive the deepening twilight of the Gutenberg age, in which only a few small American presses were thriving in the dusk. One was Black Swallow Press. In 1979, they wanted to collect in one volume Paul’s stories. Paul wanted no introduction. But the publisher did. Paul was averse to the sort of academic who might latch on to such a project; then he said that he wanted me to do it…“Having respect for Vidal’s critical mind I chose him rather than taking a chance on someone the publisher might find.” I was delighted. There is nothing like having to do a critical piece not only to concentrate the mind on a subject as complex as Bowles but to work out what it is that most draws one to a given writer’s work. With Tennessee’s stories it was a tone of voice the like of which had not been heard since Mark Twain. Each was a comic genius within a dark universe that the innocent persist in calling home sweet home. Bowles proved to be something of an inhuman observer like one of those vividly colored parakeets he doted on. Or, perhaps, the spirit of one. I enjoyed all of the stories except a few at the end where he notes that he had written them on kif. I thought them not as compelling as “Pages from Cold Point” and “The Delicate Prey.” He disagreed. Over the years he’d bring this up. After all, he’d say, everything he ever wrote had been written on kif, et cetera. He was also touchy about any hint that he had been influenced by the Marquis de Sade because he had found him boring; in fact, he said, he’d never really read him. I reminded him of that afternoon in Paris when he paid a lot of money to buy the Pléiade edition of Sade.
In due course Paul scrapped the collected edition and allowed his stories to fall back into their original small editions on the ground that a number of special volumes were more remunerative than a single large one.
Both Paul and Jane, together and separately, had, according to that polymath Virgil Thomson, dowsing rods for money. Libby Holman, the blues singer who may have killed her tobacco-heir husband, financed the Bowleses for years. It seems she had paid courtesy calls on Jane as well as developing a passion for Paul’s Arab lover from Tangier. But, by and large, the principals in our curious world steered clear of each other. Paul told me that Jane had been the first to abandon their conjugal duties. She told others that he had given up first. Once in New York when Tennessee and I had been prowling together one summer night, without success, he said, “Well, I guess that just leaves the two of us.” To which he claims I replied, “Don’t be macabre.” Donald Windham, his handsome collaborator on You Touched Me, when the Bird, in a similar situation, suggested that the two of them…Windham says he said, “I deplore your taste.” Where the British—at least Bloomsbury—never ceased to have affairs with friends, colleagues, relatives, Americans of the same sort try to separate, wisely I think, sex and friendship.
Paul’s last days were filled with various illnesses
, the usual fate. But there was a successful concert of his music in New York. There were still twilight Gutenberg ceremonies where his crystalline prose shone as though darkness did not exist. There was a conversation with his biographer about the great influences on his life and career, and he mentioned Gertrude Stein, Aaron Copland (of course, he added), Gore Vidal, and Tennessee Williams. He died November 18, 1999, missing the first years of the twenty-first century and the last years of the American Republic, which his ancestor Samuel Bowles had cared so much about.
TWENTY-TWO
I left myself at the end of my first memoir, Palimpsest, in the year 1964, when I was thirty-nine. It is now April 2005. I am in Los Angeles and at the beginning of May I shall have a cataract removed from my left eye. Everything they say about age proves to be true. For years I read to my blind grandfather and even led him onto the floor of the Senate. I also remember practicing being blind, eyes shut and walking, with arms outstretched. In World War Two, when we learned of the discovery of radar, my grandfather said, “Every blind man learns from personal experience about radar. As you walk toward a wall, say, you can feel the sound start to bounce off the wall, the principle on which radar is based.” Although he was not given to self-pity he did complain how slow reading was for him, being unable to glance through a book and determine what, if anything, was worth reading in it. He also had his own special marginal symbols for important passages. If there was something he might want to quote in a speech he would say “Q,” which one would write in the margin next to the passage to be remembered. In old age he lacked the phenomenal aural memory of his youth when he used to bemuse the Senate with long lists of statistics that he had memorized, all the time holding a text in his hand which he pretended to read.