Born On This Day- December 30th... American Expatriate, Paul Bowles

Early 1980s, Seattle: I couldn’t help but notice him, mid-30s, lithe, sad expression, with a head of dark curly hair & almond eyes. We would ride the same bus, sometimes coming & going. I was never able to muster the courage to speak to him; his beauty was out of my league, intimidating & off-putting. So, I was more than a little surprised when he broke the ice by smiling across the aisle from me & holding up a well worn paperback copy of The Sheltering Sky. I was reading the same book in the same edition at the same time. He moved over to talk to me. We slowly became bus buddies because of our interest in Paul Bowles.


His name was invented: Jaxith. He was a costume designer & we knew a lot of the same theatre people. When he was kicked out of his home & disowned by family at age 16, he not only took a new name, but invented a past. He purchased snapshots at thrift shops & put them in a scrapbook with annotations containing names, dates & fictional events. We had a cocktail date once & he brought the scrapbook. It was truly a work of art. In his made up life, he was a direct relation of Marilyn Monroe. He was a survivor, but he couldn’t survive HIV in 1984. I thought of him this morning as I contemplated Paul Bowles for a birthday post.

Paul Bowles was one of the last surviving members of a generation of artists whose work shaped 20th century literature and music.In the Introduction to Bowles's Collected Stories (1979) Gore Vidal states: "his short stories are among the best ever written by an American: 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. During the early 1930s he studied composition with Aaron Copland; his music from this period is reminiscent of Eric Satie. In NYC in the 1930s, he became one of the most important composers of American theater music, producing works for Tennessee Williams & others. Bowles: "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, using some of the melodies & rhythm of African, Mexican, & Central American music.

Bowles was born in NYC in 1910. His father was a cold, inflexible man, full of secrecy, characteristics that would mark Bowels's life & writing. As a boy, Bowles had few friends & found solace in writing. He attended college, but academic life did not interest him, & he left for Paris abruptly in 1929. From 193, he would spend most of his life outside the USA.

Bowles's literary reputation focuses on his fiction, but until he was 35, he showed more interest in musical composition & poetry. Bowles was gifted in a number of fields: music for plays & films, short stories, autobiography, travel writing, & translations.

In Berlin, he met Stephen Spender & Christopher Isherwood. Isherwood later gave the name Sally Bowles to the main character of Goodbye to Berlin (the source for the musical- Cabaret). Bowles visited North Africa & travelled around Morocco, the Sahara, Algeria & Tunisia. He was entranced by what he perceived to be the transcendental nature of North African life as well as by a society tolerant of homosexuality. Over the next decade, Bowles composed a good body of music including sonatas, song cycles, & music for stage productions including Doctor Faustus directed by Orson Welles, the orchestration for George Balanchine's Yankee Clipper (at Lincoln Kirstein's request), & made early recordings of North African music.

In childhood, Bowles was fond of a homosexual uncle. While on a visit, he entered a room where men were dancing intimately together. The uncle's anger at his nephew, who had not been alarmed at this sight, gives light to Bowles's attitude to homosexual behavior: He liked to examine sexuality from a dispassionate perspective for its psychological suggestiveness. In his most explicit homosexual story, Pages From Cold Point (1947), a boy tries to seduce his father.

In 1938, he had married Jane Auer, & in 1947, they went to live in Tangier. Jane Bowles had published 2 Serious Ladies, & explored gay relationships in both her life & in her fiction. He was mostly gay & she was almost exclusively lesbian. They were devoted to each other.

With the arrival of the Bowles, the Tangier cult developed rapidly. American writers & artists William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg,Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, & others - visited & socialized with the couple; the ambience of Tangier, & the tolerant of experimental drug use & sexual expression proved liberating & stimulating.

Jane Bowles, always on the edge of a sexual scandal, died in 1973. Paul Bowles continued to attract interesting personalities &, in his discreet way, gained a cult following. He was very stable, & continued to produce a steady stream of work until his death in 1999.

His translation work started with the Sartre classic No Exit (1958) but became more significant with his translations of previously unknown works by Moroccan writers.

Paul Bowles lived for 53 of his 88 years in Tangier. He became identified with the city: during his life visitors would seek him out, & he became a symbolic American expatriate, & the city became the symbol of his expatriate status.

Bowles died of heart failure at the Italian Hospital in Tangier in 1999 at the age of 88. He had been ill for some time with respiratory problems. The following day a full page obituary was featured in The NY Times. Although he had lived in Morocco for 53 years, he was buried in Lakemont, New York, next to his parents & grandparents.