An imagined conversation with Paul Bowles, who lived in Tangier for fifty-two years and died there in 1999. I get to ask the questions. He can answer however he wants.
Me: Mr. Bowles.
Bowles: Paul is fine. I stopped being Mr. Bowles when I decided not to return to New York, which was in 1947, and it has been Paul ever since, and it will remain Paul.
Me: The Spider’s House. 1955. The novel you wrote in Fez during the last years of the French protectorate in Morocco. Most Americans know your first novel, The Sheltering Sky, and know it mostly from the Bertolucci film. Most Americans do not know you wrote a second, and third, and fourth novel, and that the second novel, The Spider’s House, is the one that was actually about Morocco.
Bowles: The Sheltering Sky is about Americans. The Spider’s House is about Morocco. That is the distinction my critics did not always grasp. The Americans in The Sheltering Sky were what the American reader wanted from a novel set in North Africa. The Moroccans in The Spider’s House were what North Africa was. There is no money in the second kind of book. There was not then. There is not now.
Me: The book is set in Fez in 1954, during the run-up to the Sultan’s exile by the French and the beginnings of the independence movement. Amar, the boy at the center of the novel, is fifteen, illiterate, devout, and wholly inside a traditional Moroccan worldview that the political events of the book are about to destroy. You wrote him with a precision most European writers did not attempt. How did you get him right.
Bowles: I did not get him right. I got him specific. The people who thought I got him right were Europeans, because they had no way to check. The Moroccans who read the book — and there were some, over time — told me where I was wrong, and where I was right, and I listened to both. Amar is a compromise between what I observed in Fez over nine years and what a 1955 American literary novel was willing to let a Moroccan boy be.
Me: Stenham. The American novelist in the book who meets Amar and has to decide what to do with him. Is he you.
Bowles: He is the version of me I would have been if I had been less patient. Stenham in the novel is a tourist who has stayed too long to be a tourist and who has not stayed long enough to be anything else. He loves Morocco the way a collector loves a first edition. I loved Morocco the way a man loves his street — because he walks down it every day, because the baker knows him, because the baker’s son now owns the bakery, because the baker’s son’s son is starting to ignore him the way the young ignore all foreign men who have not gone home when they should have. I had something Stenham never achieved, which was tenure in the place. He was a visitor. I was a resident. The books I wrote about Morocco after Spider’s House are the books of a resident. That is the tonal difference.
Me: The book’s politics were unwelcome on both sides. The French thought you were too sympathetic to the Istiqlal nationalists. The nationalists thought you were too sympathetic to the traditional order Amar represented. American critics thought you were too gloomy. Morocco eventually thought you were too old.
Bowles: Correct on all counts. An exile who takes a political position pleases no one, and a novelist who takes a political position through an illiterate fifteen-year-old Moroccan boy pleases fewer still. I was not trying to please. I was trying to get the 1954 Fez down on paper before it ceased to exist, which it did — shortly and completely. The city you can visit now is not the city Amar walked through. The city Amar walked through ended in 1956. My novel is the last American document of that city, and it is wildly imperfect, and it is also, for an American reader who wants to know what was lost, the only document.
Me: You lived to see Tangier become a kind of cultural pilgrimage site for American writers — Burroughs, Ginsberg, Capote, the Rolling Stones. The beat caravan. Did that amuse you.
Bowles: It amused me for about five years. Then it stopped amusing me. The writers who came were interesting. The writers who came after the writers who came were less interesting. The writers who came after those were tourists. By the late 1970s, I was hiding from young Americans who had read Sheltering Sky in an airport and wanted me to sign it. I had lived in Tangier longer than most of them had been alive. I was not their mentor. I was their host, and a reluctant one.
Me: Last question. Jane. Your wife. She died in 1973 in a Spanish convent after the stroke and the long decline. You lived another twenty-six years after her. You never wrote about her directly, except in interviews. Why.
Bowles: Because what I had to say about Jane belonged to Jane. Not to the reader. Not to the biographer. Not to the literary scholarship. Jane wrote her own books. If anyone wants to know Jane, they should read Jane. She is a better writer than I am. I have said this in every interview I gave for forty years, and the interviewers have never believed me, and the readers have never checked, and Jane’s books are still in and out of print while mine stay in, and this is the single most persistent injustice of my literary life. Correct it if you can. I could not.
A related vagobond.com piece: On Translation and Survival.
Readers and fans of The Spider’s House will really enjoy Keys to the Riad — my novel set inside a Moroccan house, written by a man who lived in Fez and Sefrou long enough to have tenure in the place, not merely a visa. Bowles’s century is over. This is what comes after. Have a look and let me know what you think.
CD Damitio writes at indignified.substack.com — essays on utopias, dystopias, and the spaces between. Free to read. No algorithm, no sponsored content. His books can be found on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/CD-Damitio/author/B001JP7NWA
CD Damitio writes INDIGNIFIED — utopias and dystopias explored. Free to read.
