Bowles and I continued corresponding, hardly ever mentioning the ill-fated anthology. He had suffered much worse fates than the ups and downs of publication, of course, specifically, the slow, sad decline of Jane Bowles and her death in 1972. In some ways I think he was forever amused by something invisible buzzing around him, and that something kept him going. Maybe he was amused just to be alive.
I wanted to meet him and visited Tangier in 1987. There was another motive: I’d written a script and hoped to direct a film of Jane Bowles’ novel, Two Serious Ladies, but even if there wasn’t that desire and wish for his blessing, I would have traveled to Morocco to meet him one day.
Meeting him wasn’t anticlimactic, because I’d heard one couldn’t really know him. I don’t think I had unusual expectations, but I felt anxious, so maybe I did. In a way I believed I knew him from his letters, a writer writing; and in the flesh, he was the person who wrote those funny, smart, ironic letters. He spoke like his letters. His apartment was kept dark, shades drawn; Mohammed Mrabet stood in the shadows, appearing only to serve tea, and Paul’s writing could be exquisitely cruel and dark. But he had a sunny smile and liked to tell stories and laugh.
I saw Bowles twice more. First, in Atlanta, Georgia, in the spring of 1994, when he traveled there for a heart operation. A number of us, devotees, acolytes, friends, acquaintances, writers, artists — I didn’t know what scale he weighed me on or how to measure myself — flew down for a party in his honor. I shared a hotel room with Cherie Nutting, a photographer and the manager of her Moroccan husband’s joujouka band. (They later divorced but she still manages the band.) She and Paul were close, like father and daughter, I imagined; they spent a lot of time together in Tangier.
Thirty or forty people gathered in Atlanta at the home of Virginia Spencer Carr. Carr was writing Bowles’ biography (it was published in 2004), and had also arranged for Paul’s heart operation. The party was on a Saturday night, some days before it. All night Paul sat in a comfortable club chair, and people came by to greet and talk to him. They sat on the floor, pulled up a chair, or stood above him. He seemed tired and fragile, but he was gracious and pleasant to everyone, looking at us from under hooded eyes. He was probably overwhelmed by the fuss, with these people he knew well, or barely, around him all at once. The last time he’d been to the States, he told me, was 1968.
Paul usually fretted about the mail’s getting through from Morocco. He often wrote that he was paranoid about it. He would double-check that I’d received something he mailed. Now he asked, “Did you get the postcard I sent about Cast in Doubt?” This was the morning after the party, or the early evening before it; we were in front of Virgina Carr’s house. I remember it was light out, a late or early sunlight. “No, I didn’t get it,” I said. (Cast in Doubt was my third novel.) “Oh, too bad,” he said. Then he said something I heard but also didn’t quite hear, his words at the edge of audibility. A slim, handsome Moroccan man pushing his wheelchair — not Mohammed Mrabet, happily — pushed him on, while Paul continued talking. I think he said he liked it, and something else, or I hope he said that, but I didn’t feel I could ask him again, as if that would be craven. Now I’m sorry I didn’t.
The operation was a success. It gave Paul five more years. I still wonder why I flew down to say hello or even goodbye to Paul. In retrospect I find my behavior mysterious. I did feel an emotional or literary attachment to him, a man who was detached and puzzling, but more significant to me as a younger writer, I had read his books, admired them and we had formed some kind of relationship. My greater attachment was to Jane Bowles, and he also represented her to me.
The third and last time I saw Paul was in 1995; he was in New York for a concert of his music at Lincoln Center. He had started out as a composer and begun writing fiction after Jane Bowles’ brilliant, sui generis and only novel, Two Serious Ladies, appeared in 1943. Everyone who thinks about their marriage also ponders how his novel, The Sheltering Sky, especially its very successful publication, affected Jane. Her novel was a succès d’estime; his drew wider acclaim. Jane Bowles never wrote another novel, and some blame him. I don’t. There was nothing simple about either of them together or singly. And no one cause could ever explain her not finishing any writing after 1949.
For the concert — a night I won’t forget, at least I believe I won’t — my date was Charles Henri Ford, another sophisticated, elderly and former American abroad, a poet, artist and filmmaker. I watched Charles and Paul greet each other, Paul in his wheelchair, Charles bending down to talk to him. Both must have been somewhat stunned, I thought, but both were elegant, world-weary men, casual about the moment and unexpected events. “I haven’t seen Paul in fifty years,” Charles told me as we walked to our seats. He said it blithely, without any importance, and I wondered if, some night, I might experience something similar.
Paul Bowles died in 1999, Charles Henri Ford in 2002. Their lives encompassed and contributed to the twentieth century, what some once called The American Century. They also lived long enough to see the end of that.
C is for Character
Cut Up Life
Dear Poet
Charles Henri Ford
Did the lake overturn
When Narcissus fell in
Become opaque
A mad lake—
Oh poet dear
Please make it clear
And let it recover
The reflected image
Of that foolish lover—
Amazedly
Florine Stettheimer
Charles Henri (né Henry) Ford made his entrance on February 10, 1908, in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, to Gertrude Cato and Charles Lloyd Ford. It was his idea to change the spelling of Henry to Henri. “I was tired of being asked if I was related to Henry Ford,” he says, “and a young girl wrote me on lavender paper and in red ink and made a mistake that I liked so I kept it.”
Ford’s parents, and his father’s brother’s, owned hotels in various small cities in Mississippi and Texas — Ford was born in a hotel that burned down soon after — and his early life was peripatetic. His mother, whom he compares in his diary with Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, was an artist herself and seems to have been a dramatic, beautiful and compelling character. This primary love led the way to Ford’s two great loves — Djuna Barnes and Pavel (Pavlik) Tchelitchew.
All spoken remarks are Charles Henri Ford’s to the author in two recent conversations. All other quoted material is from Water from a Bucket, unless a source is cited.
Ford met Barnes in New York in 1929, before he left for Paris in 1931, and lived with her in Morocco, where he typed the manuscript of her novel Nightwood. “She couldn’t spell,” he says. His most enduring relationship was with Russian painter Pavlik Tchelitchew. They lived together for 23 years. Ford and Tchelitchew met in Paris, in 1933, at an opening, when Ford was 24 and Tchelitchew, 35. Of the meeting Ford notes in his diary that he wrote Parker Tyler at the time, “I’ve found a genius.” In a powerful way, the diary circles around and is about Pavlik, “his great heart,” and their complicated love and long relationship.