Paul Bowles

From Philosopedia

• Jane and Paul Bowles shortly after publication of his first novel,
• The Sheltering Sky, Tangier 1949
• Photograph by Cecil Beaton, 1949

Jane and Paul Bowles

Bowles, Jane (born Jane Auer) (22 February 1917 - 4 May 1973)

Paul Bowles’s wife, a writer who limped, once described herself: “I’m Jewish, homosexual, alcoholic, a communist - and I’m a cripple!”

When a teenager, she developed tuberculosis of the knee and was taken by her mother to Switzerland to be educated at a boarding school, after which she lived in Greenwich Village and began experimenting in bisexuality.

In 1938 she married the writer and composer Paul Bowles and they lived in New York until 1947, after which they moved to Tangier, Morocco.

In 1943, she wrote a novel, Two Serious Ladies, and a play, In the Summer House, which was performed on Broadway in 1953.

When 40, she had a stroke and, despite being treated in England and the United States, she was admitted to a clinic in Málaga, Spain, dying there in 1973.

Buried at the cemetery of San Miguel in Málaga, the body had been unclaimed by her husband when a freeway was built through the area. Alia Benlloch, a Spanish student from Marbella, asked Bowles for permission to rebury his wife—a late convert to Catholicism - in Marbella, about sixteen miles away. His response was that he did not “believe in graves” and that he had terrible memories of Málaga where Jane had been confined in a convent hospital for years before her death. But, propped up in bed with a painful leg and with tears in his eyes, he agreed to the request to allow her to pay for the reburial. In 1996, however, Málaga officials refused to allow such an essential literary figure to be moved elsewhere. The New Yorker (27 January 1997) quoted Bowles’s letter to a friend, “I feel rather sorry for the girl from Marbella. I don’t see why she should be stopped for carrying out her project. . . . But it is extraordinary that so much interest should have been aroused at this late date. . . . It shows that the age of books is not yet over.”

{CE; CL; WAS, 31 July 1956 and 19 April 1989}

Bowles, Paul (30 December 1910 - 18 November 1999)

Bowles, sometimes called “the only American existentialist,” was born in New York City. The son of a dentist whose “mere presence meant misery,” he remembered, Bowles after World War II moved to Morocco, where he wrote Blue Mountain Ballads (1979 - words by Tennessee Williams); Next to Nothing: Collected Poems 1926-1977, and the novels The Sheltering Sky (1949) and Up Above the World (1966).

An enigmatic figure, he insisted that no Westerner can comprehend Moroccan culture. He tried to explain it, however, to such of his many Tangier house-guests as Gertrude Stein (who originally suggested he move there), Tennessee Williams, and Aaron Copland (who once shared a house with him in Tangier).

Asked about humanism by Warren Allen Smith, he responded in 1956:

One of the most backbreaking tasks is that of categorizing oneself. How can I know what kind of humanist I am, or, indeed, whether I am a humanist at all? I can get only to the point of believing that any intellectual is a humanist insofar as he performs the task of existing consciously rather than automatically. Beyond that I have nothing much to say. It seems to me that each religion is a set of regional game rules. They can be got on without, but it is a good deal less fun. The difficulty for humanity now consists in taking its own rules seriously; self-disciple is so much harder than obedience.

In 1989, he again responded:

I don’t know the meaning of “humanism,” or what purpose it is supposed to serve. If I were obliged to endorse one of the seven varieties, I should have to choose atheistic humanism, even though the term “atheist” suggests a person who has given thought to the subject and rejected the concept of the existence of a divine consciousness. This is by no means my case; I am simply indifferent. (The question of religious belief vs. disbelief is to me a remote phenomenon, and of correspondingly slight interest.) So let it be “atheistic humanism.” The other categories you list seem to me next to meaningless.

Bowles, winner in 1950 of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, is the bisexual depicted in “Naked Lunch,” a film based upon the novel by William Burroughs. Conrad Knickerbocker, in a New York Times review, wrote that The Sheltering Sky ranked “with the dozen or so most important American novels published since World War II. Bowles avoided the spotlight and the world in which, according to Mel Gussow, he thought “innocence is corrupted and delirium thrives.” “When I die, there’s no telling where the moonlight will find my hair,” he once wrote in a song.

He died of a heart attack and his body was taken from Morocco to Mont Lake, New York.

Correspondence

Asked by Warren Allen Smith about various connotations of humanism WAS, Bowles responded:

{The New York Times, 19 November 1999; WAS, correspondence 1956 and 1989}