I remember saying, tentatively: I think I’ve got an idea for another novel. Bowles nonchalantly said, I haven’t had an idea in twenty years.
We intended to take him to dinner but didn’t. We visited him three times and met him on the street once. We took photographs of him alone, with Buffie, and of Buffie alone. David took some of me and them. Bowles didn’t like being photographed and turned wooden. I made him laugh in one and that shot came out blurred. It was too bad. He looked very handsome laughing.
Paul Bowles never mentioned Kathy Acker’s quote. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Some years before I’d mailed him a story in which I’d quoted a line from his autobiography, Without Stopping. He wrote a long letter about it and questioned me on an interesting point of grammar. He never mentioned my tribute to him. His reserve, discretion or secretiveness was impressive, intimidating, or disturbing.
It’s unsettling and strange rendering this account and calling up faulty memory to describe my pilgrimage, if that’s what it was, to him and the spirit of Jane Bowles. I was as close to her as I’d ever be. Her presence was almost palpable — I wanted her to be there — and always evanescent, like life itself. Even stranger was the sensation I had when I was with Paul. Sometimes I felt I was his daughter, as if that quote had created a symbolic link between us, even a blood tie, in an extraordinary demonstration of the power of fiction. It was a feeling, too, that I got, after my father died, around older men I liked who were difficult to know, the way my father was. I admired Bowles’s writing, its inscrutability, lack of apology and explanation, its dark humor, reserve, mystery. He had all of this, too. I didn’t know him, I liked him, I didn’t know what he thought of me. We laughed together, and I can like or feel familiar around anyone who’s funny.
I gave up the film, returned one of the grants, was allowed to keep the other and use it toward writing the novel I’d mentioned to Bowles. It was called Motion Sickness, which now seems an appropriate title for the experience of writing this weird history of failure and desire. Two Serious Ladies has still not been made into a film.
After visiting Bowles, I began my letters “Dear Paul B.” I sent him and Buffie copies of the photographs we’d taken, and he wrote a postcard thanking me. It ended, “Your visit to Tangier was very short, unfortunately. Another time, perhaps?” I haven’t returned, but I did fly to Atlanta in 1995 to visit him when he came to the States for an operation. It was his first visit since 1968. I also saw him briefly at Lincoln Center for a concert of his music. These last years he’s been ill and doesn’t answer most letters. I treasure the ones I have.
— August 1999
Paul Bowles died on November 18, 1999, at the age of 88.
Adieu, American Abroad
A young American was intent on becoming a writer, and in the spirit of the Lost Generation and earlier American writers, believed that living in Europe, or out of America, as expatriate or alien, was what she needed to free herself or lose herself, and write.
In 1972, I was living in Amsterdam, and decided to edit an anthology of American writers abroad. Paul Bowles reigned as the preeminent American abroad. I told my Dutch publisher that his presence in the book was essential, and assured him that Bowles would definitely be in it. All bravado. I was a complete unknown. Anxiously, I wrote a letter to Paul Bowles, requesting his important participation. Shockingly fast, he wrote back, Yes.
I can’t remember what Bowles first sent me. But soon the book’s publication was delayed, and whatever piece it was, he had given it to someone else. I quickly and humbly asked for another piece; he amiably sent one along. I really didn’t know what I was demanding of such a distinguished, sought-after writer. I knew nothing, I was a kid, and all my ideas about being an editor came from reading literary histories and writers’ biographies. I had requested unpublished material from everyone. The long delays continued, and every piece Bowles sent me was eventually published somewhere else.
By the third or fourth delay, and subsequent go-rounds with Bowles and a few other writers, I had returned to America, a prodigal daughter home, because, for one thing, hearing English spoken by Dutch and English people didn’t foster my American writing. By now, the correspondence between Bowles and me had grown friendly: we wrote anecdotes to each other, even reported a few dreams, and discussed much more than the putative anthology.
After the first publisher reneged — the novelty division was dissolved — a second publisher came forward to save the book, a friend with a small Dutch press who promised to bring the anthology out, fast. He didn’t. I’m not sure how much time passed, but once again I needed to ask Bowles for new writing. Now he had no unpublished work at all, nothing to give; he was very sorry. Desperate, I wrote: Don’t you have anything? I don’t care what it is. Bowles kindly mailed a few poems he’d written in the early 1930s, noting that they weren’t very good, but I could use them if I wanted. He didn’t have anything else. Again, he was very sorry.
It never occurred to me that he might have been, with excellent reason, courteously bailing out of my long-sinking enterprise. But I was young, naive, hopeful, and these traits, mixed with others, allowed me not only to ignore that possibility but also to agree with his negative assessment of his poems. Yes, they’re not very good, I wrote him. Of course I’ll publish them anyway. You must be in the anthology. But, I pleaded, don’t you have anything else? How about letters you wrote home from Europe?
Not long after, an airmail letter arrived, on onionskin as ever, but thicker than the one page he usually sent. He, or a helper, had typed copies of two letters he had written his mother on his very first trip to Europe. He had traveled there with composer Aaron Copland; Copland had been his music teacher, then a close friend. In one letter Bowles tells the hilarious tale of their sailing to Tangier. The second was written after he and Copland had settled in Tangier, about their travails with their piano, and also about Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, who were their friends. Use the letters if you want, Bowles wrote. I read them over and over, delighted with each line, and also by glimpsing his intimate and sympathetic relationship with his mother; I knew he despised his father. (In his autobiography, Bowles admitted to wanting to kill him.) Now it was worth it, every delay, everything — the letters were jewels.
Over those years, the anthology had gone through many transformations. Mostly I added people: it was hard for me to say no to friends, even those who weren’t writers. When the second Dutch publisher stopped answering my letters, I finally gave up, though the book had been designed, typeset, and was actually on boards. I knew it would never be published. Curiously, I took this failure in stride, seven or eight years of work and waiting, making promises and breaking them. By then I was doing other things, living in New York and writing. Maybe more significant, the anthology had come to feel unnecessary to me, a leftover from an existence I no longer had or wanted. I’d done it, and was done with my romance of the American abroad — along with the rest of the world. Being in Europe had helped me unlearn some of what I’d been taught or unconsciously believed. Any writer knows that what’s left out is as essential, if not more so, than what’s there. Unlearning works that way. I unlearned the model of being an editor like Ezra Pound with T.S. Eliot, the unconscious belief that America was the center of the world, and that honesty meant saying what I thought and always being direct. (The Dutch and the English, former competitors for world dominance, taught me the wisdom of waiting as well as withholding.) As to new lessons: I learned I could be miserable anywhere in the world. I learned I really was an American.