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Al-Ahram Weekly 16 - 22 December 1999 Issue No. 460 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 16 - 22 December 1999 Issue No. 460
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Debate Focus Profile Living Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters 
Sheltered by night
By Denys Johnson-Davies
Everyone no doubt keeps in mind a half dozen or so books that have at various times made a special impact upon him and which he is continually advising his friends to read. Sometimes such a book, especially if it is a novel, has been read so long ago that on being asked what it is about, one can provide only the vaguest of answers: the book has entered so deeply into our being, its several ingredients have been so well digested, that it can no longer be reconstituted.
Such a novel for me was Paul Bowles's The sheltering Sky. Read when it first appeared under the John Lehmann imprint nearly half a century ago, I clearly lent it out once too often, for that copy is no longer on my shelves, though the image of its beautifully evocative dust-jacket has remained, like the flavour of the book itself, in my memory. My impression was that Paul Bowles had somehow been overlooked in today's mad scramble for new titles. (How is it that none of our 'enterprising' paperback publishers did not give him a new lease of life?) And then, with surprise and delight, I found this book numbered among the Top Twenty post-war American novels chosen by a group of English critics for the Book Marketing Council. (While books, one feels, should not need to be treated like pop records, such marketing methods are perhaps justifiable if they result in the rescue of such a novel from oblivion.) Inevitably a film was then made of the book.
It seems, though, that Paul Bowles has fared little better in his native country, America. Gore Vidal, in an excellent introduction to Bowles's Collected Stories, printed in the States by a small specialist publisher, gives it as his opinion that as a writer of short stories Bowles has had few equals in the second half of this century. He then asks the inevitable question: "If he is so good, why is he so little known?" Gore Vidal seeks to answer this question by wryly remarking that great American writers "are supposed not only to live in the greatest country in the world, but to write about that greatest of all human themes: the American Experience," and he reminds us that Paul Bowles has lived most of his life in Morocco and that much of his writing is about that country. He might also have given as a reason for Paul Bowles not being on the shelves of every public library, the uncompromising nature of his work, his refusal to cater to the generally salacious taste of today's reader (even though an early story of his combines the twin taboos of homosexuality and incest), and the fact that several of his best stories and his Top Twenty novel make for 'uncomfortable' reading.
Paul Bowles is cosmopolitan to an extent achieved by few people, and it is significant that for his home he has chosen Tangier, that enclave in which Europe overlaps into Africa. In this way, while living in a town many of those inhabitants are equally at home in French and Spanish, he can be directly in touch with the folkloric traditions, musical and verbal, of Morocco, which he has made his special interest.
He came to the writing of fiction relatively late in life, having been told by no less than Gertrude Stein during his time in Paris that he was no poet. In Paris he was studying composition with Aaron Copland and first attained fame as a composer; he wrote two operas, works for ballet, as well as chamber music and pieces for piano. With fluency in both French and Spanish, he has translated a considerable volume of work from both languages, including early translations of some of the stories of the Argentinian writer Borges. However his greatest achievement in the field of translation has been to tape and translate some ten volumes of stories told to him by creatively talented but illiterate Moroccans in the Maghrabi dialect, the Arabic dialect which is perhaps the most remote from the classical language. Certainly no one else has done for any other Arabic oral tradition what Bowels has done for the Moroccan. Additionally, in his role of musicologist, Bowles has been responsible for preserving much of Morocco's local music, having been commissioned by the Library of Congress to make recordings of as much as possible of the country's rich but diminishing repertoire of tribal music. In his book Their Heads are Green he describes this music as "the most important single element in Morocco's folk culture."
Many of the essays in this volume describe journeys to different parts of that relatively small but incredibly diverse country in search of material to record for the archives in Washington (Has any of it ever emerged in the form of commercial recordings?). This volume of travel pieces contains some of his most typical writing. He excels in descriptions of landscape, of sighs and sounds suddenly come upon, of the sense of mystery and dread that can lurk in some situation or location. One of the longest essays in the book is entitled 'The Route to Tassemsit' and describes a journey to the south of Morocco, to places inland and south of Agadir, now developed as a tourist centre. It is doubtful if many of the European sun-seekers trouble to visit such places as Taroudant, Tiznit and Tafraout that lie within easy motoring distance and which feature in this essay. A few lines will suffice to give an idea of the texture of his descriptive writing:
"Great dust-coloured valleys among the naked mountains, dotted with leafless argan trees as grey as puffs of smoke...and there is a peppering of locust-ravaged date palms whose branches look like the ribs of a broken umbrella. Or hanging to the flank of a mountain a thousand feet below is a terraced village, visible only as an abstract design of flat roofs, some the colour of the earth of which they are built, and some bright yellow with the corn that is spread out to dry in the sun. The argan trees are everywhere, thousands of them, squat and thorny, anchored to the rocks that lie beneath them in their dubious shade...Their scaly bark looks like crocodile hide and feels like iron. Where the argan grows the goats have a good life."
For me who, more than thirty years ago, used to pay regular visits to the red-walled town of Taroudant, an unspoiled Marrakesh in miniature, these apparently effortlessly written words evoke with beautiful economy that sparse landscape with the goats improbably scaling its trees.
Gore Vidal ranks Bowles's short stories very highly and certainly the best of them are unlike those of any other writer. Deeply disturbing, they depend in no way on surprise denouements or tappings of plot; they possess an ageless directness and simplicity of expression that makes it possible to read them again and again and still be jolted into an awareness that they are saying something about lie, and perhaps more particularly about death, that is peculiar to Bowles. A Distant Episode starts off with the statement: "The September sunsets were at their reddest the week the Professor decided to visit Ain Tadoirt..." We are told that the Professor is a linguist and is making a study of Maghrabi dialects. He is therefore no ordinary tourist or traveller and represents the cultivated naiveté of the West when faced with a way of life and values that he only half understands and which -- perhaps for that very reason -- mesmerise him. The childishness of his outward sophistication is exemplified by his desire to make a collection of specimens of the small boxes which the members of a certain nomadic tribe that visits this area make from camel udders. Drawn by some inner drive -- "it occurred to him that he ought to ask himself why he was doing this irrational thing" -- he is directed to where a group of these black-clad nomads are encamped and is made captive by them. A ghastly fate awaits him at the hands of these primitive people for whom he is of no more importance than is the fly to the child who tears off its wings for a few moments' diversion. The way in which the Professor is turned into a dumb animal-like creature and made to dance for the amusement of his captors' women and children is told with an unflickering eye that shows as little emotion as do the protagonists of the story; even for the Professor himself there is a sense of inevitability about his degradation, as though he had at last found the role for which long ago he had been destined.
Bowles's fiction is primarily concerned with the individual's predicament in an essentially inscrutable and hostile world. For him the social interplay of characters, the stage of most fiction, is kept to a minimum in those examples which are most characteristic of his writing. In his autobiography, for the most part an unexpectedly pedestrian book for someone who has led such an unusual and full life, Bowles says: "Like any romantic I had always been vaguely certain that sometime during my life I should come into a magic place which in disclosing its secrets would give me wisdom and ecstasy -- perhaps even death." Thus Bowles makes no bones about being a romantic -- why should he? Who, with any blood in his veins, isn't in some way a romantic? But just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder so too is the romantic. Once there is any real understanding of a person or a place, it must needs cease to be romantic. The Arab world has been a traditional hunting ground for romantics. Paul Bowles, too, is sometimes guilty of using the 'mystery' of Morocco to his own artistic ends, and some at least of his writing would cause the likes of Edward Said to place Bowles among those orientalists who have been castigated for creating or perpetuating the mystique that surrounds the Arab world in the Western mind and thus prevents it from being truly perceived.
Bowles is of course aware of this. In an interesting two-page introduction to the book of travel essays already referred to, he writes: "My own belief is that the people of the alien cultures are being ravaged not so much by the by-products of our civilisations, as by the irrational longing on the part of their educated minorities to cease being themselves and become Westerners."
This is the despairing cry of the romantic at seeing his world being stripped of those trapping which he can imbue with the secret longings of his restless soul. Bowles's words, let it be remembered, were written more than thirty years ago, since when Islamic fundamentalism has appeared, showing in extreme form a rejection of Western patterns and values. But such fundamentalism, with its demands for doing away with those elements upon which the romantic appetite feeds, will please the romantics no better than 'the irrational longing' to become Westerners.
A critic wrote of The Sheltering Sky that it was a novel "which does not repeat the pattern of commonplace existence that readers of novels know so well, but makes us realise that our life is extraordinary." And reading it again today I find the book as disturbing as I previously did. It tells of a young American couple who undertake a trip into the Sahara. Products of western culture, introspective and spiritually rootless, they are seeking some gratuitous life-experience, some extreme meaning to their existence, from their adventurous journey. But the real risks in their journey are the seeds of self-destruction they carry within themselves. The strange, strained relationship that exists between this husband and wife is a relationship in which love can never be achieved, can never be allowed to be achieved. Early on in the book there is a scene in which the husband, Port, "who is unable to break out of the cage into which he had shut himself, the cage he had built long ago to save himself from love", talks of his sensation that the sky is something solid protecting him from what is behind it. When Kit, his wife, asks him what is behind it, he answers: "Nothing, I suppose. Just darkness. Absolute nigh." He then tells her that he believes them both to be afraid of the same thing, that they have never managed to "get all the way into life". This nihilistic life-view drives Port, twice in the course of the book, to seek some unlikely fulfillment, spiritual rather than merely sexual or emotional, in the arms of a prostitute. The second time it is his sudden desire for a blind girl whom he has briefly glimpsed. "Now that she was gone, he was persuaded, not that a bit of enjoyment had been denied him, but that he had lost love itself...in bed, without eyes to see beyond the bed, she would have been completely there, a prisoner."
And so, just as the husband persuades himself that in this blind young girl he would have discovered something that lay beyond that 'absolute night' that he talked of existing behind the sheltering sky, so Kit, his wife, is propelled towards her own fate, a degradation which she accepts in all its awfulness with the fervour of someone meeting martyrdom. The Sheltering Sky contains echoes of that equally disturbing though more explicit novel The Story of O (though 'echoes' is hardly the word, for Bowles's novel was published five years earlier than the French classic of eroticism).
The themes of much of Bowles's writing are the vain attempts of individuals of different cultures to understand each other, and the mostly horrific though sometimes comic situations that result. As a background he has most often used Morocco, through a Morocco fashioned to the purposes of his art. He has made of it 'the magic place' which, in his autobiography, he talked of hoping on day to find. It has inspired a novel of rare power.
