Paul and Jane Bowles were both significant cultural heroes in that small New York world which honored the arts. Jane’s witty stories and sardonic conversational asides were much quoted while his music with its Arabic themes became something of a cult. Lenny Bernstein, describing Paul’s work to me, extended both hands: “After all these years I can still feel his music in my fingers. Perfect miniatures.”
With some degree of guilt, Paul broke his marital pact with Jane and started to write stories and novels even more notable than hers. I can’t say I was much aware of any of this at the time. I knew I preferred his company to hers—he was serene; she was often frantic. She made scenes over food in restaurants. When he bought or rented an island off the coast of Ceylon he asked me to join him. But I missed the boat by a day—he never believed my story. But it was indeed true. I ended up that winter at New Orleans in a Dauphine Street flat.
A recent biographer of Bowles quotes him as saying to me, “Why the hell didn’t you write long ago and let me know that you had not taken the boat?” The lady biographer is inventing for Paul what she takes to be real American he-man dialogue that in no way resembles anything that he would have written, much less said to me. She also has another flight of fancy about Tangier and myself. As I have noted I went there twice in thirty or forty years only to see Paul not Jane. Now I read how, according to the lady, Jane is “caught up in a whirl of social activities being choreographed this time by Cecil Beaton, David Herbert, Gore Vidal, and Truman Capote.” I had nothing to do, ever, with any of this cast of characters nor did I join in “whirls” of social activities for Jane or anyone else. My name has been idly inserted into a context where it doesn’t belong. Then I read in her book that “biographer” Fred Kaplan described Tangier in 1949 as “a gathering place for traveling queens attracted there by the weather, beaches, cheap cost of living, easy availability of drugs, and the Arab ethos that permitted every sort of sex under terms totally independent of European Puritanism. The town’s dirt and widespread poverty, its total lack of intellectual culture, and the hovel Vidal rented in town, all were repugnant.” This is the Kaplan style in high gear. But if Bowles’s biographer invented this particular passage I find it actionable in court. I never rented—or set foot—in a hovel in Tangier. I stayed at the El Minzah hotel and never for more than a few days. If the lady biographer got this lurid nonsense from my “biographer” Fred Kaplan, who had been given a contract to complete the late Walter Clemons authorized biography of me, then Kaplan is the culprit. Later he claimed the book was not authorized and so he was boldly inaccurate as he let the chips fall where they didn’t belong. He was interested in my sex life about which he knew nothing other than what little I had written in Palimpsest. I’ve not read his book other than an occasional passage—just enough for me to realize how accurate the headline of the review of his book in The Times Literary Supplement was: “On Misreading Gore Vidal.”
Nonlinear lives make for awkward biographies by those who do not easily grasp the apparently conflicting identities—or masks—on view. When Paul came to write a memoir (“only for money” is how he always put it), he found himself as elusive to pin down as had these academic writers who tried to sum him up in conventional terms. Bill Burroughs had advised him to keep a journal but, always conscious of the purpose for writing anything, Paul could never determine for whom such a journal was ideally to be kept. If for himself it seemed idle, like making faces in the mirror. If for publication, like Gide, it seemed to him highly suspect, neither fish nor fowl.
Lately, while reading through Paul’s selected letters, I found myself recalling more of him than ever before, since to each correspondent he showed a different face; he also liked the flat detail which often suggests more than what he appears to want to confide. In his novels and stories he has rendered so thoroughly his North African world, both real and dreamed, that one needs the letters to get some idea of his American world which never entirely ceased, particularly when he took teaching jobs in Florida and Southern California where he is like someone from another planet trying to separate the flora from the fauna.
I spent an evening with him in Santa Monica shortly before he was to teach his first class at San Fernando Valley State College of Northridge. Earlier offers to teach had fallen through because of his brief, perfunctory membership in the Communist Party. But, finally, he was vetted to teach at Northridge. “The only problem is,” he said to me, “I have no idea what’s required.”
To Oliver Evans who taught at universities most of his life, Paul wrote rather desperately: “A Dr. Finestone wants to know what books I shall be using in my course. He also sent me my schedule: one meeting a week to consider creative writing (7pm to 10pm) and two a week to consider the existential novel (3 to 4:30)…Try to envisage my ignorance and explain to me what goes on in a classroom. What is a course? A lecture course? A seminar? A class? Who does the talking in each? What is the teaching process? Does one tell students one’s own reactions to books?” I’m afraid this was pretty much his conversation with me at Santa Monica, only I knew less than he did about teaching. He had gone for a year, I think, to the University of Virginia while I had never set foot in a university except as an unconventional lecturer. In the end, he wisely taught his own books.
Paul had a difficult time with his memoir because he tended to remember places more than people. He had given his agent a list of famous people he had known and then discovered, a bit late, that he had little or nothing to say about them. In a letter to his publisher who had written that “the book seems to be more ‘travel narrative’ than ‘subjective, personal commentary,’ ” Paul’s answer was to the point: “If the mention of the people whom I have glimpsed on my way past them lacks precision in describing them, it is only because I never really saw them or thought about them, since for me they were manipulable objects to be used or somehow got around, in order to continue my trajectory…I’ll do what I can to pad the passages on Williams, Vidal, Barnes, Guggenheim…and others.” I now recall that at one point Paul asked me jokingly, I thought, if I could think of anything interesting or memorable that I had said or done when he was around. I replied, accurately, that I had forgotten me, too. Fiction writers with a gift for inventing other universes cannot be held to the journalist role of describing someone actually observed at large in quotidian reality.
But what Bowles does describe in his letters is a mounting horror of his native land. To the writer James Leo Herlihy, whose novel Midnight Cowboy Paul had liked, he writes:
What I admire beyond the style is the easy way [you] capture the United States and its particular essence, without, however expressing any opinion extrinsic to the story, without even a hint of disaffection. Wonderful! I suppose that strikes me because I’ve always been afraid to tackle America; I know quite well that my hatred would show through all defences. For years I’ve thought of a thousand points of view which would aid me in masking my feelings and thus make it possible to use the place as a locale for a book, but there seems to be no way. It may be you don’t even have the murderous emotions about the US, but whether you do or don’t the miracle remains. You’ve either hit on the right way of looking at it (from the beginning) or found a way of hiding your hatred. In the latter case, it would be literary skill; in the former, you could consider yourself blessed by fortune first of all. It doesn’t matter either way.