Paul Bowles
It was an unconventional marriage: their intimate relationships were
with people of their own sex, but they maintained close ties to each
other

This
is the sixty-sixth post in a series highlighting the best gay and
lesbian authors from the 20th century (with a few before and after that
period) who have recorded in fiction, and nonfiction, the history of gay
people telling what life is, and was, during an important time of
history.

Paul
Frederic Bowles (December 30, 1910 – November 18, 1999) was an American
expatriate composer, author, and translator. Following a cultured
middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a
talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the
University of Virginia before making various trips to Paris in the
1930s. He studied music with Aaron Copland, and in New York wrote music
for various theatrical productions, as well as other compositions. He
achieved critical and popular success with the publication in 1949 of
his first novel The Sheltering Sky, set in what was known as French
North Africa, which he had visited in 1931.

In
1947 Bowles settled in Tangier, Morocco, and his wife, Jane Bowles
followed in 1948. Except for winters spent in Sri Lanka (then known as
Ceylon) during the early 1950s, Tangier was his home for the next
fifty-two years, the remainder of his life.
Paul Bowles died in 1999 at the age of 88. His ashes are buried in Lakemont Cemetery in upstate New York.

Bowles could read by the time he was 3
and within the year was writing stories. Soon, he wrote surrealistic
poetry and music. In 1922, at age 11, he bought his first book of
poetry, Arthur Waley's A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems, and at age
seventeen one of his poems, "Spire Song," was accepted for publication
in the twelfth volume of Transition, a literary journal based in Paris
that served as a forum for some of the greatest proponents of modernism —
Djuna Barnes, James Joyce, Paul Éluard, Gertrude Stein and others. His
interest in music also dated from his childhood, when his father bought a
phonograph and classical records (Bowles was interested in jazz but
such records were forbidden in the house). His family bought a piano and
the young Bowles studied musical theory, singing, and piano. When he
was 15 a performance of Stravinsky's The Firebird at Carnegie Hall made a
profound impression: "Hearing The Firebird made me determined to
continue improvising on the piano when my father was out of the house,
and to notate my own music with an increasing degree of knowing that I
had happened upon a new and exciting mode of expression."

Bowles
entered the University of Virginia in 1928, where his interests
included T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Prokofiev, Duke Ellington,
Gregorian chants, and the blues.  At the insistence of his parents he
returned to the University of Virginia, but left after one semester to
go back to Paris with Aaron Copland, with whom he had been studying
composition in New York. It was during the autumn of 1930 in Paris that
Bowles began work on his own first musical composition, the "Sonata for
Oboe and Clarinet", which he finished the following year and which
premiered in New York at the Aeolian Hall on Wigmore St, 16th December
1931, the whole concert (which also included work by Copland and Virgil
Thomson) was "panned" by New York critics. although his first known
completed compositional work was to translate some vocal pieces of Kurt
Schwitters to piano music in Berlin.

 1931-1946: France and New York
In
France, Bowles became a part of Gertrude Stein's literary and artistic
circle. On her advice he made his first visit to Tangier with Aaron
Copland in the summer of 1931. They took a house on the Mountain above
Tangier Bay. Morocco was later to become the home of Bowles (and the
inspiration for many of his short stories).From there he traveled back
to Berlin, where he met Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood,
before returning to North Africa the next year to travel throughout
other parts of Morocco, the Sahara, Algeria and Tunisia.

In
1937 he returned to New York, and over the next decade established a
solid reputation as a composer, collaborating with Orson Welles,
Tennessee Williams and others on music for stage productions as well as
orchestral pieces. In 1938 he married the author and playwright Jane
Auer.  and despite being frequently anthologised as a gay writer Bowles
always regarded such typecasting as both absurd and irrelevant.After a
brief sojourn in France they were prominent among the literary figures
of New York throughout the 1940s, with Paul working under Virgil Thomson
as a music critic at the New York Herald Tribune. His light opera The
Wind Remains, based on a poem by García Lorca, was performed in 1943
with choreography by Merce Cunningham and conducted by Leonard
Bernstein. His translation of Sartre's play Huis Clos ("No Exit"),
directed by John Huston, won a Drama Critic's Award in 1943.

 1947-1956: Early years in Tangier
In
1947 Paul Bowles received a contract for a novel from Doubleday and
moved permanently to Tangier, where Jane joined him in 1948. Bowles
commented "I was a composer for as long as I've been a writer. I came
here because I wanted to write a novel. I had a commission to do it. I
was sick of writing music for other people - Joseph Losey, Orson Welles,
a whole lot of other people, endless." Bowles traveled alone into the
Algerian Sahara to work on the novel. Bowles commented: "I wrote in bed
in hotels in the desert" The Sheltering Sky - the title came from a
song, "Down Among the Sheltering Palms", which Bowles had heard every
summer as a child - was first published by John Lehmann in England in
September 1949 after Doubleday rejected the manuscript.[Bowles commented
"I sent it out to Doubleday and they refused it. They said "We asked
for a novel." T

A belated first American
edition by New Directions appeared the following month. The plot
follows three Americans, Port, his wife Kit and their friend, Tunner, as
they journey through the Algerian desert, culminating in the death of
one (Port) and the descent into madness of another (Kit). The reviewer
for Time magazine commented that the ends visited upon the two main
characters "seem appropriate but by no means tragic", but that "Bowles
scores cleanly with his minor characters: Arab pimps and prostitutes,
French officers in garrison towns, [and] a stupidly tiresome pair of
tourists—mother & son." Tennessee Williams in The New York Times was
far more positive, commenting that the book was like a summer
thunderstorm, "pulsing with interior flashes of fire". The book quickly
rose to the New York Times best-seller list, going through three
printings in two months.

The
Sheltering Sky was followed in 1950 by a first collection of short
stories. Titled A Little Stone (John Lehmann, London, August 1950),
which excluded two of Bowles' most famous short stories, "Pages From
Cold Point" and "The Delicate Prey", on the advice of Cyril Connolly and
Somerset Maugham, that if they were included in the collection
distribution and/or censorship difficulties might ensue. The American
edition by Random House, The Delicate Prey and Other Stories, followed
later in November 1950 and contained the two stories that had been
excluded from the UK edition. When responding to the claim that almost
all of the characters in "The Delicate Prey" were victimized by either
physical or psychological violence, Bowles responded: "Yes, I suppose.
The violence served a therapeutic purpose. It’s unsettling to think that
at any moment life can flare up into senseless violence. But it can and
does, and people need to be ready for it. What you make for others is
first of all what you make for yourself. If I’m persuaded that our life
is predicated upon violence, that the entire structure of what we call
civilization, the scaffolding that we’ve built up over the millennia,
can collapse at any moment, then whatever I write is going to be
affected by that assumption. T

A
second novel, Let It Come Down, (John Lehmann, London, February 1952);
like The Sheltering Sky, was set in North Africa (this time explicitly
Tangier) and dealt with the disintegration of an American (Nelson Dyar),
who was unprepared for the encounter with an alien culture. The first
American edition by Random House followed later in the month.

A
third novel, The Spider's House, (Random House, New York, November
1955) was set in Fez (immediately prior to Morocco's Independence and
Sovereignty in 1956, away from the French Protectorate) and charted the
relationships among three expatriates and a young Moroccan: John
Stenham, Alain Moss, Lee Veyron and Omar.

While
Bowles was now concentrating on his career as a writer, he composed
incidental music for nine plays presented by the American School of
Tangier. The Bowleses became fixtures of the American and European
expatriate scene in Tangier. Visitors included Truman Capote, Tennessee
Williams and Gore Vidal. The Beat writers Allen Ginsberg, William S.
Burroughs and Gregory Corso followed in the mid-1950s and early 1960s.
In 1951, Bowles was introduced to the Master Musicians of Jajouka,
having first heard the musicians when he and Brion Gysin attended a
festival or moussem at Sidi Kacem. Bowles' continued association with
the Master Musicians of Jajouka and their hereditary leader Bachir Attar
is described in Paul Bowles' book, a diary entitled Days: A Tangier
Journal. In 1952, Bowles bought the tiny island of Taprobane, off the
coast of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where he wrote much of his novel The
Spider's House, returning to Tangier in the warmer months.

 1957-1973: Moroccan music and translation
In
1957 Jane Bowles suffered a mild stroke, which marked the beginning of a
long and painful decline in her health which was to preoccupy Paul
Bowles until Jane's death in 1973. This period also saw the first years
of full Moroccan independence and Bowles, with a grant from the
Rockefeller Foundation and sponsorship from the US Library of Congress,
spent the months of August to September of 1959 traveling throughout
Morocco with Christopher Wanklyn and Mohammed Larbi recording
traditional Moroccan music.

n
1959-1961, Paul Bowles recorded in Morocco a wide variety of music from
the different ethnic groups of that country, including the Jewish
communities of Meknes and Essaouira.


In 1970 Bowles and
Daniel Halpern started the Tangier literary magazine Antaeus which was
to feature many new authors, such as Lee Prosser, as well as more
established authors such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti and his own work, such
as "Afternoon with Antaeus", some fragments of an unfinished novel by
his wife Jane Bowles along with excerpts from "The Summer House", and
works by Daniel Halpern and others. Antaeus was published until 1994.

 1974-1999: Later years
After
the death of Jane Bowles on 4th May 1973 in Málaga, Spain, Bowles
continued to live in Tangier, writing and receiving visitors to his
modest apartment. In 1985 he published his translated version of one
short story "The Circular Ruins" of Jorge Luis Borges which was
published in a book of sixteen story translations (all by Bowles) called
"She Woke Me Up So I Killed Her". This Borges story had already been
translated and published by the three main Borges translators: Anthony
Kerrigan, Anthony Bonner and James E. Irby and it is interesting to note
the difference of styles amongst these four different translations.
Bowles's version is in typical Bowles prose style form and is very
identifiable from the other three, which all tend to stick to a more
conservative idiomatic form of translation.

In
the summers of 1980 and 1982 Paul Bowles conducted Writing Workshops in
Morocco, (under the auspices of the School of Visual Arts in New York)
at the American School of Tangier which were both very successful, so
much so that several of his former students including Rodrigo Rey Rosa
who was the 2004 Winner of the Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize in
Literature and who is also the literary heir of the estate of Paul
Bowlesand Mark Terrill went on to become successful authors.

In
1988, when Bowles was asked what his social life was like, he replied
"I don't know what a social life is... My social life is restricted to
those who serve me and give me meals, and those who want to interview
me." and in the same interview when asked how he would summarize his
achievement, replied "I've written some books and some music. That's
what I've achieved."

Bowles made a
cameo appearance at the beginning and end of the movie in the Bernardo
Bertolucci film adaptation of his novel The Sheltering Sky (1949) in
1990. Bowles music was mostly forgotten until the 1990s when a new
generation of American musicians and singers became interested in it
again. These charming, witty pieces are a treasure to be savored by art
song enthusiasts.

In 1995 Paul
Bowles made a rare and final return to New York for a special Paul
Bowles Festival celebrating his music at the Lincoln Center under the
conductorship of Jonathan Sheffer with the Eos Orchestra[31] and later a
symposium and interview held at the New School for Social Research.
Bowles
was interviewed by Paul Theroux in 1994, documented in the last chapter
of Theroux's travel book, The Pillars of Hercules.
In 1998, Bowles'
wit and intellect remained as sharp as ever. He continued to welcome
whomever turned up at his door into his apartment near the old American
consulate in Tangier. However, on the advice of his doctors and friends,
he began to limit interviews. One of his final reminisces about his
literary life occurred during an interview with Stephen Morison, Jr., a
frequent visitor and friend who was teaching at the American School of
Tangier at the time. The interview was conducted on July 8, 1998 and
appeared in the July/August 1999 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
His final formal interview took place on 6th June 1999; it was conducted
by Irene Herrmann, the executrix of the Paul Bowles Music Estate,
focused on his musical career and was published in September 2003.

Bowles
died of heart failure at the Italian Hospital in Tangier on November
18, 1999 at the age of 88. He had been ill for some time with
respiratory problems. His ashes were buried in Lakemont, New York, next
to the graves of his parents and grandparents.

 Paul Bowles and Tangier
Paul
Bowles lived for 53 of his 88 years in Tangier. Not surprisingly, he
became identified with the city: during his life visitors would seek him
out, and on his death obituary-writers without fail linked his life to
his residency: he became a symbolic American expatriate, and the city
became the symbol of his expatriate status.
At the time of his first
visit with Aaron Copland in 1931 Tangier had an anomalous status, a
Moroccan city which was not Moroccan, with a population at once Berber,
Arab, Spanish, and European, speaking Spanish, French, Berber and
Arabic, under the control of a consortium of foreign powers, one of them
the United States. Paul Bowles was entranced. On his return in 1947 the
city had already changed, but not enough to rob it of its aura of
strangeness and wonder. In 1955 there were anti-European riots, and in
1956 the city was returned to full Moroccan control.

Music
Paul
Bowles' reputation as a composer was ultimately overshadowed by his
writing. He studied with Aaron Copland. He wrote chamber music and
incidental music for the stage. The score of his 1955 opera Yerma is
especially memorable and gets much radio-play. He collected Moroccan
folk music. His compositions are being re-released.

 Achievement and legacy
Paul
Bowles was one of the last surviving representatives of a generation of
artists whose work has shaped 20th century literature and music.In the
Introduction to Bowles's "Collected Stories" (1979) Gore Vidal ranked
his short stories "among the best ever written by an American," writing:
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".

His
music, in contrast, is "as full of light as the fiction [is] of
dark...almost as if the composer were a totally different person from
the writer." During the early 1930s he studied composition
(intermittently) with Aaron Copland; his music from this period "is
reminiscent of Satie and Poulenc." Returning to New York in the mid-30s,
he became one of the preeminent composers of American theater music,
producing works for William Saroyan, Tennessee Williams, and others,
"show[ing] exceptional skill and imagination in capturing the mood,
emotion, and ambience of each play to which he was assigned." In his own
words, incidental music allowed Bowles to present "climaxless music,
hypnotic music in one of the exact senses of the word, in that it makes
its effect without the spectator being made aware of it.” At the same
time he continued to write concert music, his style assimilating some of
the melodic, rhythmic, and other stylistic elements of African,
Mexican, and Central American music.

In
1991 Paul Bowles was awarded the Rea Award for the Short Story, an
award that is made annually "to a writer who has made a significant
contribution to the short story as an art form". The jury gave the
following citation: “Paul Bowles is a storyteller of the utmost purity
and integrity. He writes of a world before God became man; a world in
which men and women in extremis are seen as components in a larger, more
elemental drama. His prose is crystalline and his voice unique. Among
living American masters of the short story, Paul Bowles is sui
generis.”[41] His works were added to the Library of America (aimed at
preparing scholarly editions of American literary classics and keeping
them permanently in print) in 2002


For his extensive credits go to  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Bowles