Books: Steps off the Beaten Path

COLLECTED STORIES: 1939-1976 by Paul Bowles Black Sparrow; 417pages; $14 hardcover, $6 paper

Paul Bowles is a Renaissance man born into an age that applauds specialization. Doing several things very well indeed has, paradoxically, brought him less public acclaim than he might have received had he stuck to one. Bowles, 68, has been a distinguished composer; in 1947 Musician Virgil Thomson called him “America’s most original and skillful composer of chamber music.” He has written music for the stage, particularly for the plays of his friend Tennessee Williams. He has also been a tireless collector of folklore and legends, especially from Morocco, where he has lived on and off since the early 1930s. There he and his wife, the late novelist Jane Bowles, presided over a lively colony of literary émigrés and pilgrims. Bowles translated Sartre and founded Antaeus, a superb quarterly; his publications include novels (The Sheltering Sky. Let It Come Down), collections of poetry and short stories, travel essays, oral histories translated from the North African Moghrebi dialect and an autobiography. His work has been highly esteemed by other writers, including a few (Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal) with no love for each other. Yet Bowles remains less familiar to general readers than dozens of his inferiors.

Collected Stories: 1939-1976 provides a chance to isolate and trace one strand of Bowles’ remarkable career. The book’s 39 tales are not only worth reading on their own, but their assembly should dispel several myths that have grown up around Bowles’ work. First, spreading his talent wide has not meant that he spread it thin; any short list of the best contemporary American stories should include two or three from this volume. Second, Bowles’ reputation as a pitiless chronicler of the bizarre and sadistic is undeserved; many of his stories are unquestionably grotesque, but the impact of this collection is much more complex and humane.

The essential Bowles plot charts a clash between two cultures, one usually Western and the other primitive. Primitive almost always gets the home court advantage; Bowles favors settings in North Africa, near the deadly lure of the Sahara, or in stifling, vegetation-choked places in Mexico or South America. Visitors come to feast on the picturesque and take one step too many off the beaten path. From that point on, they are more truly on their own than they ever dreamed possible. Sometimes their fate is terrible. In A Distant Episode, a linguistics professor studying North African dialects stumbles foolishly into the hands of a gang of marauding nomads; they cut out his tongue and then teach him clownish tricks to perform at their revels. Other interlopers get gentler treatment. In Pastor Dowe at Tacaté, an ineffectual missionary is driven away from an Indian village by an act of generosity; local custom obliges him to accept a villager’s seven-year-old daughter as his wife.

Bowles’ outsiders can be predators as well as victims. A city woman in At Paso Rojo visits her brother’s ranch and makes a pass at one of his Indian employees; he loses his job as a consequence. After causing this injustice, the woman “shrugged her shoulders, got into the bed … blew out the lamp, listened for a few minutes to the night sounds, and went peacefully to sleep, thinking of how surprisingly little time it had taken her to get used to life at Paso Rojo, and even, she had to admit now, to begin to enjoy it.” Bowles’ irony passes by like a night chill. The woman is not “getting used to” life at the ranch but perverting it.

One Bowles character jots down a “recipe for dissolving the impression of hideousness made by a thing: Fix the attention upon the given object or situation so that the various elements, all familiar, will regroup themselves. Frightfulness is never more than an unfamiliar pattern.” Bowles may believe this, but his stories regularly do the reverse. They fix the attention on beauty and then suggest the frightfulness within. Pages from Cold Point, Bowles’ best, eeriest tale, paints an idyllic Jamaican setting. But the narrator soon learns that his 16-year-old son is homosexual and has been cruising in dangerous native waters. Violence must be forestalled. The father is too civilized to confront the boy with what he knows, nor can he tell him to stop. So he allows his son to seduce him.

Readers who remember this iridescent story simply for the shock of incest forget that it is also about sacrifice and love. Similarly, The Time of Friendship can be mistaken for a bleak vision of estrangement. On one of her annual visits to the Sahara, a Swiss schoolteacher befriends a poor young Muslim boy. They develop a bond that the teacher hopes will lead to mutual understanding. Their differences remain too great, as the teacher learns: “She had assumed that somehow his association with her had automatically been for his ultimate good, that inevitably he had been undergoing a process of improvement as a result of knowing her.

In her desire to see him change, she had begun to forget what Slimane was really like.” Worse still, revolution is afoot in North Africa, and the local French officer orders her to go. Yet the poignancy of her leavetaking, with the young man running beside her departing train “until all at once there was no more platform,” represents triumph as well as defeat. Sadness is possible where before there had been only indifference.

In a haunting tale called The Circular Valley, Bowles portrays an Atlájala, an anima or genius loci that can inhabit the bodies of all creatures. Local Indians know enough to stay away, but over the centuries monks come and, then, robbers and soldiers; the Atlájala is fascinated at the complexities he finds when he looks out through the eyes of men. Finally, a man and woman unhappily in love enter the valley, and the spirit enters him. It finds “a world more suffocating and painful than the Atlájala had thought possible.” Within the woman, though, “each element was magnified in intensity, the whole sphere of being was immense, limitless.” At the top of his art, Bowles is an anima; to inhabit this book is to experience pain and immensity.

Excerpt

“The primeval freshness, spilled down out of the jungle above the house, was held close to the earth by the mist. Outside and in, it was damp and smelled like a florist’s shop, but the dampness was dispelled each day when the stinging sun burned through the thin cape of moisture that clung to the mountain’s back. Living there was like living sideways, with the land stretching up on one side and down on the other at the same angle. Only the gorge gave a feeling of perpendicularity; the vertical walls of rock on the opposite side of the great amphitheatre were a reminder that the center of gravity lay below and not obliquely to one side. Constant vapor rose from the invisible pool at the bottom, and the distant, indeterminate calling of water was like the sound of sleep itself.”