“Ten or twelve years ago there came to live in Tangier a man who would have done better to stay away.” This wickedly portentous sentence, which begins Paul Bowles’s story “The Eye,” could just as easily serve as the opening of most of his novels and stories—especially if we expand the list of ill-advised travel destinations to include nearly all of Morocco and a virtual Baedeker of hellish jungle outposts in Latin America and Asia. For Bowles’s obsessive subject, to which he returned again and again, and which he wrote about brilliantly, was the tragic and even fatal mistakes that Westerners so commonly make in their misguided and often presumptuous encounters with a foreign culture.
One can hardly imagine a more timely theme, one more perfectly suited to the poisonous and perilous world in which we find ourselves. Yet, strangely, Paul Bowles’s name never (as far as I know) appeared on those rosters of writers one saw mentioned in the aftermath of September 11, classic authors whose work appears to speak across centuries and decades, directly and helpfully addressing the crises and drastically altered realities (terrorism, violence, our dawning awareness of the hidden costs of colonialism and globalization) of the present moment. Perhaps it’s because the books that were commonly cited (War and Peace, The Possessed, The Secret Agent, and so forth) seemed, even at their darkest, to offer some hope of redemption, some persuasive evidence of human resilience and nobility, whereas Bowles’s fiction is the last place to which you would go for hope, or for even faint reassurance that the world is anything but a senseless horror show, a barbaric battlefield.
Frequently, Bowles begins his fiction in ways that seem to promise (or threaten) the sort of narrative we might expect from other writers who have focused on the confrontation between East and West, from novelists as dissimilar as Conrad and Waugh, Naipaul and Forster, from works in which a naive colonial sightsees his way into one heart of darkness or another—and lives to regret it. But soon we can watch Bowles part company with his fellow authors and enter territory that he has claimed as uniquely his own, a moral universe that few, if any, of us would willingly choose to inhabit—which is not to say that Bowles’s lifelong residence in that bleak and harsh (though often grimly hilarious) landscape seems voluntary, exactly.
In his characteristically distanced, clinical, quietly confident, and authoritative tone, employing a rigorously unadorned, quasi-journalistic prose style, Bowles approaches his material and his characters in a way that seems relentlessly anthropological, scientific, distanced, unbiased by either contempt and derision on the one hand or sympathy and affection on the other—or by any powerful or particular tribal loyalties of his own.
Writing about expatriates and Moroccans warily coexisting in the crowded medinas, wealthy suburbs, and desert encampments of North Africa, he depicts all these groups acting badly, even brutally. Every community seems capable of committing any crime, no matter how mindless or vile—willing and able to do anything, that is, except understand one another. What mostly (if not entirely) exempts Bowles from the charges of racism that his portrayals of brutal and scheming Moroccans have, at times, occasioned is the fact that his dispatches from the various frontiers of savagery and bad behavior are so evenhanded and broadly inclusive. It’s not at all clear that the merchants in his story “The Delicate Prey,” who take revenge on the man who murdered three of their kinsmen by burying the killer up to his neck in the desert sand and leaving him there to die, are any better or worse than the Frenchmen in his remarkable 1955 novel The Spider’s House who round up all the young males in the medina of Fez (boys who have done nothing to them, men they don’t even know) and bring them into the police station to be tortured and perhaps killed. “As far as I can see,” said Bowles in a 1981 Paris Review interview, “people from all corners of the earth have an unlimited potential for violence.”
Readers accustomed to parsing literature for clues to the personal history of a writer or for instruction on how to live may be puzzled by the discrepancies between a body of work that seems to advise against ever leaving home and the facts of Bowles’s unusually peripatetic existence. An avid and intrepid traveler, Paul (a dentist’s son from Queens) abandoned a promising career as a composer and spent much of his early adulthood in Paris and Germany, North Africa, Mexico, Guatemala, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. From the 1940s until his death in 1999, he was a more or less permanent resident of Tangier, where he lived with his famously eccentric and fascinating wife, Jane, author of the dazzlingly original novel Two Serious Ladies. He also formed a series of intimate relationships with Moroccan men and translated books of Maghrebi oral narratives.
Bowles was immensely proud and fiercely territorial about his knowledge of North African customs, music, and folktales, his familiarity with Islam, his fluency in Maghrebi, his ability to understand the North Africans around him, or at least (unlike most foreigners) to admit, and know why, he would never understand them.
Near the beginning of The Spider’s House, there’s an incisive and revealing passage in which an American writer named Stenham (the character who, one might argue, most nearly seems like a stand-in for the author) considers the possibility that his own fondness for making such statements “gave him a small sense of superiority to which he felt he was entitled, in return for having withstood the rigors of Morocco for so many years. This pretending to know something that others could not know, it was a little indulgence he allowed himself, a bonus for seniority. Secretly he was convinced that the Moroccans were much like any other people, that the differences were largely those of ritual and gesture.”
The Spider’s House should top those lists of novels that speak to our current condition. Set in Fez during the first upheavals that announced a more radical and violent phase of the Moroccan struggle for independence from the French, the book seems not merely prescient but positively eerie in its evocation of a climate in which every aspect of daily life is affected—and deformed—by the roilings of nationalism and terrorism, by the legacy of colonialism, and by chaotic political strife. It’s chilling to hear its characters speculate on the root causes of insurrection (“If people are living the same as always, with their bellies full of food, they’ll just go on the same way. If they get hungry and unhappy enough, something happens”), on the grim satisfactions of terrorism (“the pleasure of seeing others undergo the humiliation of suffering and dying, and the knowledge that they had at least the small amount of power necessary to bring about that humiliation”), and on the sources of anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world: “The arms used against the Moroccan people were largely supplied by your government,” a nationalist tells Stenham. “They do not consider America a nation friendly to their cause.” Yet another agitator speculates on the most efficient means of getting American attention. “Once we’ve had a few incidents directly involving American lives and property, maybe the Americans will know there’s such a country as Morocco in the world. . . . Now they don’t know the difference between Morocco and the Senegal.”
What makes this all the more intriguing, and all the more convincing, is that Bowles never thought of himself as a political writer—and, perhaps as a result, few readers see him that way. In the preface to The Spider’s House, he wrote:
Fiction should always stay clear of political considerations. Even when I saw that the book that I had begun was taking a direction which would inevitably lead it into a region where politics could not be avoided, I still imagined that with sufficient dexterity I should be able to avert contact with the subject. But in situations where everyone is under great emotional stress, indifference is unthinkable; at such times all opinions are construed as political ones. To be apolitical is tantamount to having assumed a political stance, but one which pleases no one. Thus, whether I liked it or not, when I had finished, I found that I had written a “political” book which deplored the attitudes of both the French and the Moroccans.
The last sentence is particularly telling. To be a political writer (as the term is generally understood) suggests strongly held opinions, a polemical agenda, a taking of sides—something that would have been not merely aesthetic anathema but a characterological impossibility for the exquisitely detached Bowles. The novel’s characters (both Moroccan and American) repeatedly express their contempt for those fanatics who would willingly sacrifice individual lives to gain political objectives. Moreover, what Bowles tells us at the start (and what subsequently emerges) is that his initial impulse for writing the book derived from his fear that the medieval city of Fez (and, by extension, the rest of Morocco) would be changed and modernized beyond recognition—an anxiety that he wisely mistrusts as stemming from the most self-indulgent sort of romanticism.
As Stenham realizes, “It did not really matter whether they worshipped Allah or carburetors . . . In the end, it was his own preferences which concerned him. He would have liked to prolong the status quo because the decor that went with it suited his personal taste.” Throughout Bowles’s work, you can watch the author battling his own inherent romanticism (one of the characters in The Spider’s House calls Stenham “a hopeless romantic without a shred of confidence in the human race”) and straining to see the world and its denizens as they really are—without romance, without sentimentality, without blinders.
However unintentional, the political subtext of his fiction proves that when you write accurately and comprehensively about human beings, politics inevitably comes into your story, since—it hardly needs to be said—politics exerts such an enormous influence on every aspect of our lives. Even Chekhov, whom we also tend to think of as a largely apolitical writer (in contrast to, say, Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy), frequently established or clarified the nature of his characters by informing the reader about their political sympathies. How peculiar it suddenly seems to mention Chekhov and Bowles in the same paragraph, or even the same essay! Were there ever two more dissimilar literary sensibilities?
With his apparent cold-bloodedness and lack of empathy, his chilly skepticism, his refusal to demonstrate an even passing interest in the process of spiritual transformation or individual redemption, Bowles strikes us as the anti-Chekhov. Which may be why he seems, right now, as necessary as Chekhov, equally valuable in his contribution to the chorus of voices that constitute our literary heritage, and no less essential in his ability to remind us of who we are, of how we live, and of what we can—and inevitably will—do, in accordance with our nature.
In an era in which circumstances much like those that inspired The Spider’s House force us, whether we like it or not, into an often passionate political engagement, we would do well to be aware, and wary, of the dangers and pitfalls of such an engagement: dogmatism, intolerance, the unshakable conviction of one’s own righteousness and blamelessness. What Paul Bowles reminds us of, what he won’t let us forget, is that all of us, regardless of nationality or religion, are capable of acting from highly suspect, compromised, “primitive” motives and of behaving in ways that, we would prefer to think, we could never even imagine.