Paul Frederic Bowles 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 VirginiaThe University of Virginia is a public research university located in Charlottesville, Virginia, United States, founded by Thomas Jefferson...
before making various trips to Paris in the 1930s. He studied music with
Aaron CoplandAaron Copland was an American composer, composition teacher, writer, and later in his career a conductor of his own and other American music. He was instrumental in forging a distinctly American style of composition, and is often referred to as "the Dean of American Composers"...
, 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 SkyThe Sheltering Sky is a 1949 novel by Paul Bowles. The story centers on Port and Kit Moresby, a married couple originally from New York who travel to the North African desert accompanied by their friend Tunner...
, set in what was known as French North Africa, which he had visited in 1931.
In 1947 Bowles settled in
TangierTangier, also Tangiers is a city in northern Morocco with a population of about 700,000 . It lies on the North African coast at the western entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar where the Mediterranean meets the Atlantic Ocean off Cape Spartel...
,
MoroccoMorocco , officially the Kingdom of Morocco , is a country located in North Africa. It has a population of more than 32 million and an area of 710,850 km², and also primarily administers the disputed region of the Western Sahara...
, and his wife,
Jane BowlesJane Bowles, born Jane Sydney Auer , was an American writer and playwright.-Early life:Born into a Jewish family in New York, Jane Bowles spent her childhood in Woodmere, New York, on Long Island. She developed tuberculous arthritis of the knee as a teenager and her mother took her to Switzerland...
followed in 1948. Except for winters spent in
Sri LankaSri Lanka, officially the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka is a country off the southern coast of the Indian subcontinent. Known until 1972 as Ceylon , Sri Lanka is an island surrounded by the Indian Ocean, the Gulf of Mannar and the Palk Strait, and lies in the vicinity of India and the...
(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
LakemontLakemont is a hamlet in the town of Starkey, Yates County, New York, United States. It is part of the Finger Lakes region. Lakemont is located several miles north of Glenora.The American writer and composer Paul Bowles is buried there.-References:...
Cemetery in upstate New York.
1910–1930: Family and education
Paul Bowles was born in
Jamaica, QueensJamaica is a neighborhood in the borough of Queens in New York City, New York, United States. It was settled under Dutch rule in 1656 in New Netherland as Rustdorp. Under British rule, the Village of Jamaica became the center of the "Town of Jamaica"...
, New York City, the only child of Rena (née Rennewisser) and Claude Dietz Bowles, a dentist. His childhood was materially comfortable, but Bowles senior was a cold and domineering parent, opposed to any form of play or entertainment, feared by both his son and wife. According to family legend, he had tried to kill his newborn son by leaving him exposed on a window-ledge during a snowstorm; the story may not be true, but Bowles believed it was, and it encapsulates his relationship with his father. Such warmth as there was in his life as a child came from his mother, who read
Nathaniel HawthorneNathaniel Hawthorne was an American novelist and short story writer.Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in 1804 in the city of Salem, Massachusetts to Nathaniel Hathorne and the former Elizabeth Clarke Manning. His ancestors include John Hathorne, a judge during the Salem Witch Trials...
and
Edgar Allan PoeEdgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...
to him – it was to the latter that he later attributed his own desire to write stories such as "The Delicate Prey", "A Distant Episode", and "Pages from Cold Point"
Bowles could read by the time he was three and within the year was writing stories. Soon, he wrote surrealistic poetry and music. In 1922, at age eleven, he bought his first book of poetry,
Arthur WaleyArthur David Waley CH, CBE was an English orientalist and sinologist.-Life:Waley was born in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England, as Arthur David Schloss, son of the economist David Frederick Schloss...
'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
Transitiontransition was an experimental literary journal that featured surrealist, expressionist, and Dada art and artists. It was founded in 1927 by poet Eugene Jolas and his wife Maria McDonald and published in Paris...
, a literary journal based in Paris that served as a forum for some of the greatest proponents of
modernismModernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
—
Djuna BarnesDjuna Barnes was an American writer who played an important part in the development of 20th century English language modernist writing and was one of the key figures in 1920s and '30s bohemian Paris after filling a similar role in the Greenwich Village of the teens...
,
James JoyceJames Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
,
Paul ÉluardPaul Éluard, born Eugène Émile Paul Grindel , was a French poet who was one of the founders of the surrealist movement.-Biography:...
,
Gertrude SteinGertrude Stein was an American writer, poet and art collector who spent most of her life in France.-Early life:...
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
StravinskyIgor Fyodorovich Stravinsky ; 6 April 1971) was a Russian, later naturalized French, and then naturalized American composer, pianist, and conductor....
's
The FirebirdThe Firebird is a 1910 ballet created by the composer Igor Stravinsky and choreographer Michel Fokine. The ballet is based on Russian folk tales of the magical glowing bird of the same name that is both a blessing and a curse to its captor....
at
Carnegie HallCarnegie Hall is a concert venue in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, United States, located at 881 Seventh Avenue, occupying the east stretch of Seventh Avenue between West 56th Street and West 57th Street, two blocks south of Central Park....
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 VirginiaThe University of Virginia is a public research university located in Charlottesville, Virginia, United States, founded by Thomas Jefferson...
in 1928, where his interests included
T. S. EliotThomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
's
The Waste LandThe Waste Land[A] is a 434-line[B] modernist poem by T. S. Eliot published in 1922. It has been called "one of the most important poems of the 20th century." Despite the poem's obscurity—its shifts between satire and prophecy, its abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location and time, its...
,
ProkofievSergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev was a Russian composer, pianist and conductor who mastered numerous musical genres and is regarded as one of the major composers of the 20th century...
,
Duke EllingtonEdward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington was an American composer, pianist, and big band leader. Ellington wrote over 1,000 compositions...
, Gregorian chants, and the blues. He also heard music by
George AntheilGeorge Antheil was an American avant-garde composer, pianist, author and inventor. A self-described "Bad Boy of Music", his modernist compositions amazed and appalled listeners in Europe and the US during the 1920s with their cacophonous celebration of mechanical devices.Returning permanently to...
and
Henry CowellHenry Cowell was an American composer, music theorist, pianist, teacher, publisher, and impresario. His contribution to the world of music was summed up by Virgil Thomson, writing in the early 1950s:...
. In April 1929 he dropped out without informing his parents and sailed with a one-way ticket for Paris and no intention of ever returning – not, he said later, running away, but "running toward something, although I didn't know what at the time." Nevertheless, by July he returned to New York and took a job at Duttons Bookshop in Manhattan, where he began work on an unfinished book of fiction,
Without Stopping (not to be confused with his later autobiography of the same title). 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 CoplandAaron Copland was an American composer, composition teacher, writer, and later in his career a conductor of his own and other American music. He was instrumental in forging a distinctly American style of composition, and is often referred to as "the Dean of American Composers"...
, 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, 16 December 1931, the whole concert (which also included work by
CoplandCopland was a project at Apple Computer to create an updated version of the Macintosh operating system. It was to have introduced protected memory, preemptive multitasking and a number of new underlying operating system features, yet still be compatible with existing Mac software...
and
Virgil ThomsonVirgil Thomson was an American composer and critic. He was instrumental in the development of the "American Sound" in classical music...
) was "panned" by New York critics. (Bowles' first-known, completed compositional work was a translation of some Kurt Schwitters vocal pieces to piano music in Berlin).
1931–1946: France and New York
In France, Bowles became a part of
Gertrude SteinGertrude Stein was an American writer, poet and art collector who spent most of her life in France.-Early life:...
's literary and artistic circle. On her advice he made his first visit to
TangierTangier, also Tangiers is a city in northern Morocco with a population of about 700,000 . It lies on the North African coast at the western entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar where the Mediterranean meets the Atlantic Ocean off Cape Spartel...
with
Aaron CoplandAaron Copland was an American composer, composition teacher, writer, and later in his career a conductor of his own and other American music. He was instrumental in forging a distinctly American style of composition, and is often referred to as "the Dean of American Composers"...
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 SpenderSir Stephen Harold Spender CBE was an English poet, novelist and essayist who concentrated on themes of social injustice and the class struggle in his work...
and
Christopher IsherwoodChristopher William Bradshaw Isherwood was an English-American novelist.-Early life and work:Born at Wyberslegh Hall, High Lane, Cheshire in North West England, Isherwood spent his childhood in various towns where his father, a Lieutenant-Colonel in the British Army, was stationed...
(Isherwood being so taken with him that he named his character
Sally BowlesSally Bowles is a fictional character created by Christopher Isherwood. She originally appeared in Isherwood's 1937 novella Sally Bowles published by Hogarth Press. The story was later republished in the novel Goodbye to Berlin...
for him), before returning to North Africa the next year to travel throughout other parts of
MoroccoMorocco , officially the Kingdom of Morocco , is a country located in North Africa. It has a population of more than 32 million and an area of 710,850 km², and also primarily administers the disputed region of the Western Sahara...
, the
SaharaThe Sahara is the world's second largest desert, after Antarctica. At over , it covers most of Northern Africa, making it almost as large as Europe or the United States. The Sahara stretches from the Red Sea, including parts of the Mediterranean coasts, to the outskirts of the Atlantic Ocean...
,
AlgeriaAlgeria , officially the People's Democratic Republic of Algeria , also formally referred to as the Democratic and Popular Republic of Algeria, is a country in the Maghreb region of Northwest Africa with Algiers as its capital.In terms of land area, it is the largest country in Africa and the Arab...
and
TunisiaTunisia , officially the Tunisian RepublicThe long name of Tunisia in other languages used in the country is: , is the northernmost country in Africa. It is a Maghreb country and is bordered by Algeria to the west, Libya to the southeast, and the Mediterranean Sea to the north and east. Its area...
.
In 1937 he returned to New York, and over the next decade established a solid reputation as a composer, collaborating with
Orson WellesGeorge Orson Welles , best known as Orson Welles, was an American film director, actor, theatre director, screenwriter, and producer, who worked extensively in film, theatre, television and radio...
,
Tennessee WilliamsThomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams III was an American writer who worked principally as a playwright in the American theater. He also wrote short stories, novels, poetry, essays, screenplays and a volume of memoirs...
and others on music for stage productions as well as orchestral pieces. In 1938 he married the author and playwright
Jane AuerJane Bowles, born Jane Sydney Auer , was an American writer and playwright.-Early life:Born into a Jewish family in New York, Jane Bowles spent her childhood in Woodmere, New York, on Long Island. She developed tuberculous arthritis of the knee as a teenager and her mother took her to Switzerland...
. It was an unconventional marriage: their intimate relationships were with people of their own sex, but they maintained close ties to each other, 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 ThomsonVirgil Thomson was an American composer and critic. He was instrumental in the development of the "American Sound" in classical music...
as a music critic at the
New York Herald TribuneThe New York Herald Tribune was a daily newspaper created in 1924 when the New York Tribune acquired the New York Herald.Other predecessors, which had earlier merged into the New York Tribune, included the original The New Yorker newsweekly , and the Whig Party's Log Cabin.The paper was home to...
. His light opera
The Wind Remains, based on a poem by
García LorcaFederico del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús García Lorca was a Spanish poet, dramatist and theatre director. García Lorca achieved international recognition as an emblematic member of the Generation of '27. He is believed to be one of thousands who were summarily shot by anti-communist death squads...
, was performed in 1943 with choreography by
Merce CunninghamMercier "Merce" Philip Cunningham was an American dancer and choreographer who was at the forefront of the American avant-garde for more than 50 years. Throughout much of his life, Cunningham was considered one of the greatest creative forces in American dance...
and conducted by
Leonard BernsteinLeonard Bernstein August 25, 1918 – October 14, 1990) was an American conductor, composer, author, music lecturer and pianist. He was among the first conductors born and educated in the United States of America to receive worldwide acclaim...
. His translation of Sartre's play
Huis ClosNo Exit is a 1944 existentialist French play by Jean-Paul Sartre. The original French title is Huis Clos, the French equivalent of the legal term in camera, referring to a private discussion behind closed doors; English translations have also been performed under the titles In Camera, No Way Out...
("No Exit"), directed by
John HustonJohn Marcellus Huston was an American film director, screenwriter and actor. He wrote most of the 37 feature films he directed, many of which are today considered classics: The Maltese Falcon , The Treasure of the Sierra Madre , Key Largo , The Asphalt Jungle , The African Queen , Moulin Rouge...
, won a Drama Critic's Award in 1943.
In 1945 he began writing prose again, beginning with a few short stories including
A Distant EpisodeA Distant Episode is a famous and acclaimed short story by Paul Bowles. It was first published in the Partisan Review and republished in New Directions in Prose and Poetry, #10, 1948....
. His wife Jane, he said, was the main influence upon his taking up fiction as an adult, through the publication of her first novel,
Two Serious Ladies (1943).
1947–1956: Early years in Tangier
In 1947 Paul Bowles received a contract for a novel from Doubleday and moved permanently to
TangierTangier, also Tangiers is a city in northern Morocco with a population of about 700,000 . It lies on the North African coast at the western entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar where the Mediterranean meets the Atlantic Ocean off Cape Spartel...
, where Jane joined him in 1948. Bowles commented Bowles traveled alone into the Algerian
SaharaThe Sahara is the world's second largest desert, after Antarctica. At over , it covers most of Northern Africa, making it almost as large as Europe or the United States. The Sahara stretches from the Red Sea, including parts of the Mediterranean coasts, to the outskirts of the Atlantic Ocean...
to work on the novel. Bowles commented: "I wrote in bed in hotels in the desert."
The Sheltering SkyThe Sheltering Sky is a 1949 novel by Paul Bowles. The story centers on Port and Kit Moresby, a married couple originally from New York who travel to the North African desert accompanied by their friend Tunner...
— 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." They didn't consider it a novel. I had to give back my advance. My agent told me later they called the editor on the carpet for having refused the book — only after they saw that it was selling fast. It only had to do with sales. They didn't bother to read it." 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. The process of life presupposes violence, in the plant world the same as the animal world. But among the animals only man can conceptualize violence. Only man can enjoy the idea of destruction."
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. Reviewers noted that it marked a departure from Bowles' earlier fiction in that it introduced a contemporary political theme, the conflict between Moroccan nationalism and French colonialism. The UK edition (Macdonald) followed in January 1957.
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 CapoteTruman Streckfus Persons , known as Truman Capote , was an American author, many of whose short stories, novels, plays, and nonfiction are recognized literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's and the true crime novel In Cold Blood , which he labeled a "nonfiction novel." At...
,
Tennessee WilliamsThomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams III was an American writer who worked principally as a playwright in the American theater. He also wrote short stories, novels, poetry, essays, screenplays and a volume of memoirs...
and
Gore VidalGore Vidal is an American author, playwright, essayist, screenwriter, and political activist. His third novel, The City and the Pillar , outraged mainstream critics as one of the first major American novels to feature unambiguous homosexuality...
. The
BeatThe Beat Generation refers to a group of American post-WWII writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired...
writers
Allen GinsbergIrwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...
,
William S. BurroughsWilliam Seward Burroughs II was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th...
and
Gregory CorsoGregory Nunzio Corso was an American poet, youngest of the inner circle of Beat Generation writers...
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 GysinBrion Gysin was a painter, writer, sound poet, and performance artist born in Taplow, Buckinghamshire.He is best known for his discovery of the cut-up technique, used by his friend, the novelist William S. Burroughs...
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
TaprobaneTaprobane Island is a rocky private island with one villa, located just off the southern coast of Sri Lanka opposite the village of Weligama,. The island was named after the old Greek word for Sri Lanka. The island was previously owned by the Count de Maunay who, exiled from France, fell in love...
, off the coast of Ceylon (now
Sri LankaSri Lanka, officially the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka is a country off the southern coast of the Indian subcontinent. Known until 1972 as Ceylon , Sri Lanka is an island surrounded by the Indian Ocean, the Gulf of Mannar and the Palk Strait, and lies in the vicinity of India and the...
), 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 1959 traveling throughout Morocco with Christopher Wanklyn and Mohammed Larbi recording
traditional Moroccan musicThe music of Morocco ranges and differs according to the various areas of the country.-Berber folk music:There are three varieties of Berber folk music: village and ritual music, and the music performed by professional musicians....
.
From 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
MeknesMeknes is a city in northern Morocco, located from the capital Rabat and from Fes. It is served by the A2 expressway between those two cities and by the corresponding railway. Meknes was the capital of Morocco under the reign of Moulay Ismail , before it was relocated to Marrakech. The...
and
EssaouiraMogador redirects here, for the hamlet in Surrey see Mogador, Surrey.Essaouira is a city in the western Moroccan economic region of Marrakech-Tensift-Al Haouz, on the Atlantic coast. Since the 16th century, the city has also been known by its Portuguese name of Mogador or Mogadore...
.
The majority of these recordings are currently being transferred to the digital medium at George Blood Audio and Video in Philadelphia.
Another major project of these years was translating Moroccan authors and story-tellers including
Mohamed ChoukriMohamed Choukri , born on July 15, 1935 and died on November 15, 2003, was a Moroccan author and novelist who is best known for his internationally acclaimed autobiography For Bread Alone , which was described by the American playwright Tennessee Williams as 'A true document of human desperation,...
,
Ahmed YacoubiAhmed Yacoubi was a Moroccan painter and story-teller. He was born in Fes, Morocco in 1931.Paul Bowles translated Ahmed Yacoubi's stories from Maghrebi into English: "The Man and The Woman" , "The Man Who Dreamed of Fish Eating Fish" and "The Game" , and a play "The Night Before Thinking" which...
, Larbi Layachi (under the pseudonym Driss ben Hamed Charhadi), and Mohammed Mrabet.
In the autumn of 1968, at the invitation of his friend
Oliver EvansOliver Evans was an American inventor. Evans was born in Newport, Delaware to a family of Welsh settlers. At the age of 14 he was apprenticed to a wheelwright....
, Bowles spent one semester at the English Department of the San Fernando Valley State College, (now
California State University, NorthridgeCalifornia State University, Northridge is a public university in Northridge, a neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles, California, United States....
), teaching "Advanced Narrative Writing and the Modern European Novel."
In 1970 Bowles and Daniel Halpern started the Tangier literary magazine
AntaeusAntaeus was a literary quarterly founded by Daniel Halpern and Paul Bowles and edited by Daniel Halpern. It was originally published in Tangier, Morocco, but operations were later shifted to New York City. The first number appeared in the summer of 1970, the final issue in 1994...
which was to feature many new authors, such as Lee Prosser, as well as more established authors such as
Lawrence FerlinghettiLawrence Ferlinghetti is an American poet, painter, liberal activist, and the co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers...
and his own work, such as "Afternoon with Antaeus", some fragments of an unfinished novel by his wife
Jane BowlesJane Bowles, born Jane Sydney Auer , was an American writer and playwright.-Early life:Born into a Jewish family in New York, Jane Bowles spent her childhood in Woodmere, New York, on Long Island. She developed tuberculous arthritis of the knee as a teenager and her mother took her to Switzerland...
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 4 May 1973 in
MálagaMálaga is a city and a municipality in the Autonomous Community of Andalusia, Spain. With a population of 568,507 in 2010, it is the second most populous city of Andalusia and the sixth largest in Spain. This is the southernmost large city in Europe...
, 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 BorgesJorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo , known as Jorge Luis Borges , was an Argentine writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school, receiving his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. The family...
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 BonnerAnthony Bonner is an American former professional basketball player who was selected by the Sacramento Kings in the 1st round of the 1990 NBA Draft. He played six seasons in the NBA for the Kings, New York Knicks, and Orlando Magic averaging 6.9 ppg in his career...
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 readily distinguishable from the other three, which have 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 ArtsThe School of Visual Arts , is a proprietary art school located in Manhattan, New York City, and is widely considered to be one of the leading art schools in the United States. It was established in 1947 by co-founders Silas H. Rhodes and Burne Hogarth as the Cartoonists and Illustrators School and...
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 Bowles and 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 Bernardo Bertolucci's film version of
The Sheltering SkyThe Sheltering Sky is a 1990 British-Italian drama film directed by Bernardo Bertolucci starring Debra Winger and John Malkovich. The film is based on the 1949 novel by Paul Bowles about a couple who journey to northern Africa in the hopes of rekindling their marriage but soon fall prey to the...
in 1990. Bowles music was mostly forgotten until the 1990s when a new generation of American musicians and singers became interested in this work 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 Lincoln Center under the conductorship of Jonathan Sheffer with the Eos Orchestra and later a symposium and interview held at the New School for Social Research.
Bowles was interviewed by
Paul TherouxPaul Edward Theroux is an American travel writer and novelist, whose best known work of travel writing is perhaps The Great Railway Bazaar . He has also published numerous works of fiction, some of which were made into feature films. He was awarded the 1981 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his...
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 reminiscences 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 & WritersPoets & Writers, Inc. is one of the largest nonprofit literary organization in the United States serving poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers...
Magazine. His final formal interview took place on June 6, 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 YorkLakemont is a hamlet in the town of Starkey, Yates County, New York, United States. It is part of the Finger Lakes region. Lakemont is located several miles north of Glenora.The American writer and composer Paul Bowles is buried there.-References:...
, next to the graves of his parents and grandparents.
Paul Bowles and Tangier
Paul Bowles lived for 52 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
YermaYerma is a play by the Spanish dramatist Federico García Lorca. It was written in 1934, and first performed that same year. Lorca describes the play as "a tragic poem."-Plot:...
is especially memorable and gets much radio-play. He collected Moroccan folk music. His compositions are being re-released.
Bowles' recording of Moroccan music
Bowles was a pioneer in the field of North African ethnomusicology with his field recordings from 1959 to 1961 of traditional Moroccan music for the US Library of Congress. The collection includes dance music, secular music, music for Ramadan and other festivals, and music for animistic rituals. The motivation for the recordings was Bowles' realisation that modern culture would inevitably have an impact on traditional music. There was also a political element to his work, with Bowles commenting: "Instrumentalists and singers have come into being in lieu of chroniclers and poets, and even during the most recent chapter in the country's evolution – the war for independence and the setting up of the present regime – each phase of the struggle has been celebrated in song." The total collection of this recorded music is known as "The Paul Bowles Collection" and is archived in the US Library of Congress, Reference No. 72-750123. The Archival Manuscript Material (Collection) contains 97 x 2 track 7" reel-to-reel tapes, containing approximately sixty hours of traditional folk, art and popular music, one two box of manuscripts, 18 photographs and a map along with the 2 LP recordings called 'Music of Morocco' (AFS L63-64).
Bowles' translation of Moroccan authors and others
In the 1960s Bowles began translating stories from the oral tradition of native Moroccan storytellers. His most noteworthy collaborations included Mohammed Mrabet,
Driss Ben Hamed CharhadiDriss ben Hamed Charhadi is the pseudonym for Larbi Layachi, a Moroccan story-teller, some of whose stories have been translated by Paul Bowles from Moroccan Arabic to English. His Life Full of Holes was first tape-recorded and translated by Bowles over the course of several visits to his home by...
(Larbi Layachi),
Mohamed ChoukriMohamed Choukri , born on July 15, 1935 and died on November 15, 2003, was a Moroccan author and novelist who is best known for his internationally acclaimed autobiography For Bread Alone , which was described by the American playwright Tennessee Williams as 'A true document of human desperation,...
,
Abdeslam BoulaichAbdeslam Boulaich is a Moroccan story-teller, some of whose stories have been translated by Paul Bowles from Moroccan Arabic to English. Boulaich's stories have been studied in college courses.- References :...
, and
Ahmed YacoubiAhmed Yacoubi was a Moroccan painter and story-teller. He was born in Fes, Morocco in 1931.Paul Bowles translated Ahmed Yacoubi's stories from Maghrebi into English: "The Man and The Woman" , "The Man Who Dreamed of Fish Eating Fish" and "The Game" , and a play "The Night Before Thinking" which...
.
He also translated
Rodrigo Rey Rosa Rodrigo Rey Rosa is a Guatemalan writer.-Professional life:Not a lot is known about Rey Rosa's professional life until after he emigrated to New York after finishing his studies in Guatemala. Rey Rosa has based many of his writings and stories on legends and myths that are indigenous to Latin...
,
Jorge Luis BorgesJorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo , known as Jorge Luis Borges , was an Argentine writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school, receiving his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. The family...
,
Jean-Paul SartreJean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the leading figures in 20th century French philosophy, particularly Marxism, and was one of the key figures in literary...
,
Isabelle EberhardtIsabelle Eberhardt was a Swiss explorer and writer who lived and travelled extensively in North Africa. For the time she was an extremely liberated individual who rejected conventional European morality in favour of her own path and that of Islam...
, Guy Frison-Roche,
André Pieyre de MandiarguesAndré Pieyre de Mandiargues was a French writer born in Paris. He became an associate of the Surrealists and married the Italian painter Bona Tibertelli de Pisis...
,
Ramon Gomez de la SernaRamón Gómez de la Serna Puig was a Spanish writer, dramatist and avant-garde agitator. He strongly influenced surrealist film maker Luis Buñuel....
,
Giorgio de ChiricoGiorgio de Chirico was a pre-Surrealist and then Surrealist Italian painter born in Volos, Greece, to a Genovese mother and a Sicilian father. He founded the scuola metafisica art movement...
, Si Lakhdar, E. Laoust, Ramon Beteta, Gabino Chan, Bertrand Flornoy,
Jean FerryJean Levy known as Jean Ferry was a French writer and follower of the 'pataphysical tradition'.- See also :* La Loi des rues * Le Saint prend l'affût...
, Denise Moran, Paul Colinet, Paul Magritte, Popul Buj,
Francis PongeFrancis Jean Gaston Alfred Ponge was a French essayist and poet. In many ways, he combined the two — essay and poem — into a single art form.-Life:...
, Bluet d'Acheres and
Ramon SenderRamon Sender Barayón is a composer, writer and the co-founder, with Morton Subotnick, of the San Francisco Tape Music Center in 1961. He studied with George Copeland, Elliott Carter, and Robert Erickson....
Achievement and legacy
Paul Bowles was one of the artists whose work has shaped 20th century literature and music. In the Introduction to Bowles's "Collected Stories" (1979)
Gore VidalGore Vidal is an American author, playwright, essayist, screenwriter, and political activist. His third novel, The City and the Pillar , outraged mainstream critics as one of the first major American novels to feature unambiguous homosexuality...
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 CoplandAaron Copland was an American composer, composition teacher, writer, and later in his career a conductor of his own and other American music. He was instrumental in forging a distinctly American style of composition, and is often referred to as "the Dean of American Composers"...
; his music from this period "is reminiscent of Satie and
PoulencFrancis Jean Marcel Poulenc was a French composer and a member of the French group Les six. He composed solo piano music, chamber music, oratorio, choral music, opera, ballet music, and orchestral music...
." Returning to New York in the mid-30s, he became one of the preeminent composers of American theater music, producing works for
William SaroyanWilliam Saroyan was an Armenian American dramatist and author. The setting of many of his stories and plays is the center of Armenian-American life in California in his native Fresno.-Early years:...
,
Tennessee WilliamsThomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams III was an American writer who worked principally as a playwright in the American theater. He also wrote short stories, novels, poetry, essays, screenplays and a volume of memoirs...
, 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 StoryThe Rea Award for the Short Story is an annual award given to a living American or Canadian author chosen for unusually significant contributions to short story fiction.-The Award:...
, 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."
His works were added to the
Library of AmericaThe Library of America is a nonprofit publisher of classic American literature.- Overview and history :Founded in 1979 with seed money from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation, the LoA has published over 200 volumes by a wide range of authors from Mark Twain to Philip...
(aimed at preparing scholarly editions of American literary classics and keeping them permanently in print) in 2002.
Notable works
In addition to his chamber and stage compositions, Bowles published fourteen short story collections, three volumes of poetry, numerous translations, numerous travel articles, and an autobiography.
Music
- 1931 – Sonata for Oboe and Clarinet
- 1936 – Horse Eats Hat, play
- 1936 – Who Fights This Battle, play
- 1937 – Doctor Faustus, play
- 1937 – Yankee Clipper, ballet
- 1938 – Too Much Johnson, play
- 1938 – Huapango – Cafe Sin Nombre – Huapango-El Sol, Latin American folk
- 1939 – Denmark Vesy, opera
- 1939 – My Heart's in the Highlands, play
- 1940 – Loves Old Sweet Song, play
- 1940 – Twelfth Night, play
- 1941 – Liberty Jones, play
- 1941 – Watch on the Rhine, play
- 1941 – Love Like Wildfire, play
- 1941 – Pastorela, ballet
- 1942 – In Another Five Years Or So, opera
- 1943 – South Pacific, play
- 1943 – Sonata for Flute and Piano and Two Mexican Dances
- 1943 – Tis Pity She's a Whore, play
|
1944 – The Glass Managerie, play
1944 – Jacobowsky and the Colonel, play
1944 – Sentimental Colloquy, ballet
1945 – Ondine, play
1945 – Three, words by Tennessee WilliamsThomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams III was an American writer who worked principally as a playwright in the American theater. He also wrote short stories, novels, poetry, essays, screenplays and a volume of memoirs...
1945 – Three Pastoral Songs
1946 – Night Without Sleep, words by Charles Henri FordCharles Henri Ford was an American poet, novelist, filmmaker, photographer, and collage artist best known for his editorship of the Surrealist magazine View in New York City, and as the partner of the artist Pavel Tchelitchew...
1946 – Cyrano de Bergerac, play
1946 – The Dancer, play
1946 – Land's End, play
1946 – On Whitman Avenue, play
1946 – Twilight Bar, play
1946 – Cabin, words by Tennessee Williams, music by Paul Bowles
1946 – Concerto for Two Pianos
1947 – Sonata for Two Pianos
1947 – Pastorela: First Suite, a ballet/opera in one act
1947 – The Glass Menagerie, words by Tennessee Williams, two songs by Bowles
1948 – Concerto for Two Pianos, Winds and Percussion
1948 – Summer and Smoke, play |
1949 – Night Waltz
1953 – A Picnic Cantata
1953 – In the Summer House, play
1955 – Yerma, opera
1958 – Edwin Booth, play
1959 – Sweet Bird of Youth, play
1962 – The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, play
1966 – Oedipus (Sophocles), play
1967 – The Garden, play
1969 – The Bacchae (Euripides), play
1978 – Orestes, play
1978 – Caligula (Camus), play
1979 – Blue Mountain ballads, words by Tennessee Williams, music by Paul Bowles.
1984 – Camp Cataract, play
1984 – A Quarreling Pair, play
1992 – Hippolytos, play
1992 – Black Star at the Point of Darkness Black Star at the Point of Darkness is a spoken word album by American composer and author Paul Bowles, consisting of several poems, orchestral pieces, and recordings made in his travels...
1993 – Salome, play |
Fiction
- Novels
- 1949 – The Sheltering Sky
The Sheltering Sky is a 1949 novel by Paul Bowles. The story centers on Port and Kit Moresby, a married couple originally from New York who travel to the North African desert accompanied by their friend Tunner...
- 1952 – Let It Come Down
-Plot introduction:A dark, even bleak, novel, Let It Come Down follows American Nelson Dyar as he arrives in the International Zone of Tangier, Morocco to begin a new job and a new life...
- 1955 – The Spider's House
- 1966 – Up Above the World
Up Above the World is a novel by Paul Bowles first published in 1966 about an American couple—an aging physician and his young attractive wife—who go on a tour of Central America and are trapped by a mysterious young man whose motives remain unclear to them.-Plot summary:In the middle...
- 1991 – Too Far From Home (novella)
- 1992 – Too Far From Home (with Miquel Barceló: 28 watercolors)
- 1994 – Too Far From Home (with Maguerite McBey)
|
Short stories (collections)
1950 – A Little Stone
1950 – The Delicate Prey and Other Stories The Delicate Prey and Other Stories is a collection of 17 stories written by Paul Bowles, first published in 1950.- The stories :* at paso rojo* pastor dowe at tacaté* call at corazon* under the sky* señor ong and señor ha...
1959 – The Hours after Noon
1962 – A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard
1967 – The Time of Friendship
1968 – Pages from Cold Point and Other Stories
1975 – Three Tales
1977 – Things Gone & Things Still Here
1979 – Collected Stories, 1939–1976
1981 – In the Red Room
1982 – Points in Time
1985 – Midnight Mass
1988 – Unwelcome Words: Seven Stories
1988 – A Distant Episode
1988 – Call at Corazon
1989 – A Thousand Days for Mokhtar
1995 – The Time of Friendship Paul Bowles & Vittorio Santoro |
Poetry
1933 – Two Poems
1968 – Scenes
1972 – The Thicket of Spring
1981 – Next to Nothing: Collected Poems, 1926–1977
1997 – No Eye Looked Out from Any Crevice |
Translations
- 1946 – No Exit, by Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the leading figures in 20th century French philosophy, particularly Marxism, and was one of the key figures in literary...
- 1952 – The Lost Trail of the Sahara, by Guy Frison-Roche
- 1964 – A Life Full Of Holes, by Driss Ben Hamed Charhadi
Driss ben Hamed Charhadi is the pseudonym for Larbi Layachi, a Moroccan story-teller, some of whose stories have been translated by Paul Bowles from Moroccan Arabic to English. His Life Full of Holes was first tape-recorded and translated by Bowles over the course of several visits to his home by...
(Larbi Layachi)
- 1967 – Love With A Few Hairs, by Mohammed Mrabet
- 1969 – The Lemon, by Mohammed Mrabet
- 1969 – M'Hashish, by Mohammed Mrabet
- 1973 – For Bread Alone, by Mohamed Choukri
Mohamed Choukri , born on July 15, 1935 and died on November 15, 2003, was a Moroccan author and novelist who is best known for his internationally acclaimed autobiography For Bread Alone , which was described by the American playwright Tennessee Williams as 'A true document of human desperation,...
- 1973 – Jean Genet in Tangier, by Mohamed Choukri
- 1974 – The Boy Who Set the Fire, by Mohammed Mrabet
- 1975 – Hadidan Aharam, by Mohammed Mrabet
- 1975 – The Oblivion Seekers, by Isabelle Eberhardt
Isabelle Eberhardt was a Swiss explorer and writer who lived and travelled extensively in North Africa. For the time she was an extremely liberated individual who rejected conventional European morality in favour of her own path and that of Islam...
- 1976 – Look & Move On, by Mohammed Mrabet
- 1976 – Harmless Poisons, Blameless Sins, by Mohammed Mrabet
- 1977 – The Big Mirror, by Mohammed Mrabet
- 1979 – Tennessee Williams in Tangier, by Mohamed Choukri
- 1979 – Five Eyes, by Abdeslam Boulaich
Abdeslam Boulaich is a Moroccan story-teller, some of whose stories have been translated by Paul Bowles from Moroccan Arabic to English. Boulaich's stories have been studied in college courses.- References :...
, "Sheheriar and Sheherazade" Mohamed Choukri, "The Half Brothers" Larbi Layachi,
"The Lute" Mohammed Mrabet, and "The Night Before Thinking" Ahmed YacoubiAhmed Yacoubi was a Moroccan painter and story-teller. He was born in Fes, Morocco in 1931.Paul Bowles translated Ahmed Yacoubi's stories from Maghrebi into English: "The Man and The Woman" , "The Man Who Dreamed of Fish Eating Fish" and "The Game" , and a play "The Night Before Thinking" which...
|
1980 – The Beach Café & The Voice, by Mohammed Mrabet
1982 – The Path Doubles Back, by Rodrigo Rey Rosa Rodrigo Rey Rosa is a Guatemalan writer.-Professional life:Not a lot is known about Rey Rosa's professional life until after he emigrated to New York after finishing his studies in Guatemala. Rey Rosa has based many of his writings and stories on legends and myths that are indigenous to Latin...
1983 – The Chest, by Mohammed Mrabet
1983 – Allal"Allal" is a short story written by American writer, composer, and world traveler Paul Bowles. This story was first published in Rolling Stone Magazine on January 27, 1977 and since has been included in many compilation short story books. "Allal" is about an outcast boy and his fascination with a...
, by Pociao
1984 – The River Bed, by Rodrigo Rey Rosa, (a short story)
1985 – She Woke Me Up So I Killed Her, [16 authors' short stories from various languages]
1986 – Marriage With Papers, by Mohammed Mrabet
1986 – Paul Bowles: Translations from the Moghrebi, by various authors
1988 – The Beggar's Knife, by Rodrigo Rey Rosa Rodrigo Rey Rosa is a Guatemalan writer.-Professional life:Not a lot is known about Rey Rosa's professional life until after he emigrated to New York after finishing his studies in Guatemala. Rey Rosa has based many of his writings and stories on legends and myths that are indigenous to Latin...
1989 – Dust on Her Tongue, by Rodrigo Rey Rosa
1990 – The Storyteller and the Fisherman, CD by Mohammed Mrabet
1991 – The Pelcari Project, by Rodrigo Rey Rosa
1991 – Tanger: Vues Choisies", by Jellel Gasteli
1992 – Chocolate Creams and Dollars, by various authors
2004 – Collected Stories, by Mohammed Mrabet |
Travel, autobiography and letters
- 1957 – Yallah, text by Paul Bowles, photos by Peter W. Haeberlin (travel)
- 1963 – Their Heads are Green and Their Hands Are Blue (travel)
- 1972 – Without stopping (autobiography)
- 1990 – Two Years Beside The Strait (autobiography)
- 1991 – Days: Tangier Journal (autobiography)
- 1993 – 17, Quai Voltaire (autobiography of Paris, 1931,1932)
- 1994 – Photographs – "How Could I Send a Picture into the Desert?" (Paul Bowles & Simon Bischoff)
- 1995 – In Touch – The Letters of Paul Bowles (edited by Jeffrey Miller)
Editions
- 1984 – Paul Bowles Selected Songs (edited by Peter Garland)
- 1993 – Too Far from Home (edited by Daniel Halpern) ISBN 0-88001-295-1
- 1994 – The Portable Paul and Jane Bowles (edited by Millicent Dillon)
- 1995 – Paul Bowles: Music (edited by Claudia Swan) ISBN 0-9648083-0-7
- 2000 – The Paul Bowles Reader (Peter Owen) ISBN 0-7206-1091-5
- 2001 – The Stories of Paul Bowles (Ecco) ISBN 0-06-621273-1
- 2002 – The Sheltering Sky, Let It Come Down, The Spider's House (Daniel Halpern, ed. Library of America
The Library of America is a nonprofit publisher of classic American literature.- Overview and history :Founded in 1979 with seed money from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation, the LoA has published over 200 volumes by a wide range of authors from Mark Twain to Philip...
) ISBN 1-931082-19-7
- 2002 – Collected Stories and Later Writings (Daniel Halpern, ed. Library of America
The Library of America is a nonprofit publisher of classic American literature.- Overview and history :Founded in 1979 with seed money from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation, the LoA has published over 200 volumes by a wide range of authors from Mark Twain to Philip...
) ISBN 1-931082-20-0
- 2010 – Travels: Collected Writings, 1950–93 (Mark Ellingham, ed. Sort Of Books, London) ISBN 978-0956003874
|
Film appearances and interviews
- Paul Bowles in Morocco (1970), produced and directed by Gary Conklin
Gary Conklin is an independent American filmmaker based in Los Angeles, California.Conklin works predominantly in the documentary genre. His films focus on cultural icons of the 20th century...
57 minutes
- Paul Bowles": South Bank Show London Studios (1988), produced by ITV
ITV is the major commercial public service TV network in the United Kingdom. Launched in 1955 under the auspices of the Independent Television Authority to provide competition to the BBC, it is also the oldest commercial network in the UK...
, directed by Melvyn BraggMelvyn Bragg, Baron Bragg FRSL FRTS FBA, FRS FRSA is an English broadcaster and author best known for his work with the BBC and for presenting the The South Bank Show...
, 54 minutes
- In 1990
The year 1990 in film involved some significant events.-Events:* CGI technique is expanded with motion capture for CGI characters, used in Total Recall .* The first digitally-manipulated matte painting is used, in Die Hard 2....
Bernardo BertolucciBernardo Bertolucci is an Italian film director and screenwriter, whose films include The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris, 1900, The Last Emperor and The Dreamers...
adapted The Sheltering SkyThe Sheltering Sky is a 1990 British-Italian drama film directed by Bernardo Bertolucci starring Debra Winger and John Malkovich. The film is based on the 1949 novel by Paul Bowles about a couple who journey to northern Africa in the hopes of rekindling their marriage but soon fall prey to the...
into a film in which Bowles has a cameo role and provides partial narration. 132 minutes
- "Things Gone and Things Still Here" 1991, Directed by award winning BBC Filmmaker 'Clement Barclay. This film tries to decode the world of Paul Bowles in a one hour documentary. Chicago Film festival winner.
- "Paul Bowles The Complete Outsider" 1993, by Catherine Hiller Marnow and Regina Weinreich
Regina Weinreich is a writer, journalist, teacher, and scholar of the artists of the Beat Generation.Her work includes the documentary Paul Bowles: The Complete Outsider, books entitled The Beat Generation: An American Dream, Kerouac's Spontaneous Poetics, Kerouac's Book of Haikus, and her blog...
57 minutes.
- "Halfmoon" 1995, four stories by Paul Bowles, Frieder Schlaich and Irenve von Alberti. First Run Features, 91 minutes
- "Halbmond" 1995, German version of "Halfmoon", Frieder Schlaich and Irenve von Alberti. First Run Features, 90 minutes
- "Let It Come Down" 1998, Requisite Productions, Zeitgeist Films, pub. 72 minutes, not rated. – this film is likely the definitive portrait of the author late in life. Directed by Jennifer Baichwal, includes footage of the final meeting between Bowles, William Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg which took place in 1995 in New York. 72 minutes
- "Night Waltz" 2002, Owsley Brown Film of the music of Paul Bowles, with Phillip Ramey
Phillip Ramey is an American composer, pianist, and writer on music.He studied composition with the Russian-born composer Alexander Tcherepnin from 1959 to 1962, first at the International Academy of Music in Nice, France, then at DePaul University in Chicago...
and an Interview with Jonathan Sheffer, conductor of the Eos Orchestra. 77 minutes
Biographies and memoirs
- Paul Bowles: 2117 Tanger Socco, Robert Briatte (1989), ISBN 2-259-02007-0 The first biography of Paul Bowles (in French)
- An Invisible Spectator: A Biography of Paul Bowles, Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno (1989)
- You Are Not I: A Portrait of Paul Bowles, Millicent Dillon (1998)
- Paul Bowles: A Life, Virginia Spencer Carr (2004), ISBN 0684196573
- Isherwood, Bowles, Vedanta, Wicca, and Me, Lee Prosser (2001), ISBN 0-595-20284-5
- Paul Bowles, Magic and Morocco, Allan Hibbard (2004), ISBN 978-0932274618
- February House, Sherill Tippins (2005), ISBN 0-618-41911-X
- Paul Bowles by his Friends, Gary Pulsifer (1992), ISBN 0-7206-0866-X
- Second Son, David Herbert (1972), ISBN 0-7206-00272-6
- The Sheltering Sky, (movie edition) Bertolucci and Bowles (1990), ISBN 0-356-19579-1
- Here to Learn, Mark Terrill (2002), ISBN 1-891408-29-1
- Yesterday's Perfume,Cherie Nutting with Paul Bowles (2000), ISBN 0-609-60573-9
Literary criticism of Paul Bowles
- Paul Bowles: Romantic Savage, Gena Dagel Caponi (1994), ISBN 0-8093-1923-3
- Paul Bowles: The Inner Geography, Wayne Pounds (1985), ISBN 0-8204-0192-7
- Paul Bowles: The Illumination of North Africa, Lawrence D. Stewart (1974), ISBN 0-8093-0651-4
- Paul Bowles: Twayne's Authors Series, Gena Dagel Caponi (1998), ISBN 0-8057-4560-2
- The Fiction of Paul Bowles: The Soul is the Weariest Part of the Body, Hans Bertens (1979), ISBN 90-6203-992-8
Published interviews with Paul Bowles
- Conversations with Paul Bowles, Gena Dagel Caponi (1993), ISBN 0-87805-650-5
- Desultory Correspondence, Florian Vetsch (1997), ISBN 3-9520497-7-8
Catalog and archive editions on Paul Bowles
- Paul Bowles: A Descriptive Bibliography, Jeffrey Miller (1986), ISBN 0-87685-610-5
- Paul Bowles on Music, edited by Timothy Mangan and Irene Herrmann (2003), ISBN 0-520-23655-6
Other References
- The Dream at the End of the World: Paul Bowles and the Literary Renegades in Tangier, Michelle Green (1991) ISBN 0-06-016571-5
- Paul Bowles: Le Reclus de Tanger", Mohamed Choukri (1997)
- Stars in the Firmament: Tangier Characters 1660–1960", David Woolman (1998) ISBN 1-57889-068-3
- The Tangier Diaries", John Hopkins (1998) ISBN 932274-50-1-0
Official website
Writing and music
- Paul Bowles Collection at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin
The University of Texas at Austin is a state research university located in Austin, Texas, USA, and is the flagship institution of the The University of Texas System. Founded in 1883, its campus is located approximately from the Texas State Capitol in Austin...
- Paul Bowles Online Exhibit, University of Delaware
- Paul Bowles audio and music web published on the Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine
Launched from the Lower East Side, Manhattan, in 1983 as a subscription only bimonthly publication, the Tellus cassette series took full advantage of the popular cassette medium to promote cutting-edge downtown music, documenting the New York scene and advancing experimental composers of the time...
project archive at UbuwebUbuWeb is a large web-based educational resource for avant-garde material available on the internet, founded in 1996 by poet Kenneth Goldsmith. It offers visual, concrete and sound poetry, expanding to include film and sound art mp3 archives.-Philosophy:...
Interviews with Paul Bowles
More interviews on the official Paul Bowles website
Assessments
Reviews and obituaries
- Review of "The Sheltering Sky", TIME magazine, 5 December, 1945
- Review of "Let It Come Down", "Critique" magazine.
- Review of "The Spider's House", New York Times, 1955
- Review of "Up Above the World", New York Times, 1966
- New York Times obituary, 19 November 1999
- Manchester Guardian obituary, 19 November 1999
- BBC World obituary, 19 November 1999
- Bowles's grave site at findagrave.com