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It is hard to imagine a more elusive American writer than Paul Bowles. By one measure, this elusiveness is predicated on his hardly being American at all: in his early 20s he decided to spend the bulk of his adult life self-exiled in Tangier, and yet-- even as many of his stories and novels are set there-- his themes of the struggle for personal integrity and isolation are profoundly American. But in Bowles's case there is another facet to his elusiveness. Although he's touted by some as one of the greatest storytellers and stylists of the 20th century, his work is, essentially, unread now. Sure, like other great writers who slip in and out of obscurity-- Patricia Highsmith, Jean Rhys, James Purdy, Cornell Woolrich, as well as Bowles's wife Jane-- Bowles has had a series of mini-revivals over the last decades in which his books come back into print with glowing blurbs from famous literary figures, and then often disappear quietly to dusty shelves in used bookstores or library stacks.

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This elusiveness is not really a surprise-- indeed, in many ways Bowles almost invites it. Although his prose is direct and uncomplicated, it has a disturbing emotional power that unsettles readers looking for a nice, clean and sanitized classic. (This is also true of Highsmith, Rhys, Woolrich, Purdy, and Jane Bowles as well.) There is nothing "nice" about Paul Bowles's novels and stories-- they are harsh even cold, intellectually pristine, and often emotionally catastrophic. If there is another American writer to whom he bares a close resemblance it is-- surprisingly-- Emily Dickinson with her spare style and unflinching view of the cruel vicissitudes of nature and human weakness. Both Bowles and Dickinson are simply unafraid to look into the void and report, in unsentimental terms, what they see.

Virginia Spencer Carr's new work-- Paul Bowles: A Life-- is a smart, well written, and quite dependable personal biography of Bowles and his world. Carr (who also penned a noted biography of Carson McCullers) had a close friendship with Bowles over the last decade before his death in 1999 and it is clear that she writes from a place of significant affection and with the eye and ear of an intelligent reader. One of the problems with a Paul Bowles biography-- and this was true of Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno's 1989 An Invisible Spectator: A Biography of Paul Bowles as well as Millicent Dillon's 1998 You Are Not I: A Portrait of Paul Bowles-- is that it is such a good story, all attempts at interpretation take a back seat. Bowles's life was such a cavalcade of literary and social-- and gay-- history that the simple recitation of the facts is pleasurable.

Born in 1910 in Queens, New York, Bowles had the inclination to be a writer and musician composer at a young age (he composed an opera at age nine) and followed through on these instincts clearly and quickly. At 19 he went to Europe, but returned to New York. On his second European sojourn he met and became friends with Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau, Jean Rhys, Virgil Thompson, Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood (who names his most famous character-- Sally Bowles-- after him). By 1934 he is composing ballet scores for Balanchine and Lincoln Kristin, and in 1938, despite his mostly homosexual attractions, marries Jane Auer an extraordinarily talented, deeply disturbed, bisexual woman who fits perfectly into his artistic circles.

In 1947 Bowles-- living variously with or apart from Jane-- essentially moves to Tangier and in 1949 writes The Sheltering Sky, which becomes a bestseller. He continues writing and by the mid-1950s becomes a cult figure for Beat writers such as William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac. From the 1950s to his death in 1999-- Jane dies in 1973-- Bowles remains productive, writing three more novels, numerous short stories, reporting on world events for US magazines, translating stories by Moroccan writers, and composing music for a wide range of theatrical performances. Throughout much of this time Bowles-- even though he was at the center of several major cultural worlds-- is not a particularly famous or a well-known author. Even though his novels and short stories come in and out of print over these decades, Bowles essentially remains a cult writer read by a literary audience.

Virginia Carr's Paul Bowles give us an excellent sense of the simple chronology and geography of the artist's life and times. Carr's prose is straightforward, often elegant, and her sense of narrative is sure and precise. She has an eye for detail and knows a great deal of the literary world in which Paul and Jane Bowles traveled, so there is never any confusion as to who is who and their importance in culture. Carr clearly relishes telling this story and certainly give us a kind, generous portrait of Bowles. While she doesn't skirt some of the messier details-- although one has the idea that in his life, Bowles often avoided grappling with the emotional tumult and pain that he and Jane's behavior (she was a pill-popping alcoholic as well as a genius) may have caused other people and even themselves-- she certainly makes Bowles's life feel like one long string of artistic and literary successes. This makes for great reading-- but we always have the feeling that something is missing.

Take, for instance, the events that unfold in the early part of 1953. Jane is in New York working on the final arrangements for the production of her play In the Summer House and asks Paul to come over from Tangier to write the incidental music. Paul comes to New York with Ahmed Yacorbi, his 22-year-old lover, and decides to stay in Treetops, the Connecticut estate of Libby Holman (the famous 1920s torch singer who was accused, in 1932 of murdering her husband, the heir to a tobacco fortune), who had been widely rumored to have had an affair with Jane, but nevertheless did propose marriage to Paul years before in Africa. Paul and Ahmed stay in Connecticut, but Jane stays in Manhattan since she doesn't want to deal with Ahmed. Well, at Treetops Libby gets a crush on Ahmed and they began to have an affair (replete with her buying him expensive gifts) and Paul decides to go back to Tangier. Oh, and Montgomery Clift, with whom Libby is having an on-and-off again affair fueled by excessive drinking, is also at Treetops, but he didn't seem to notice anything. Anyway. Ahmed gets shipped back to Morocco in a few months after Libby's seven-year old son announces that his mother's new lover tried to drown him (even though Ahmed declared it was an accident) and that he also came into his room at night and fondled his penis.

Carr relates all of this in an engaging, easy-going manner moving from what must have been one high-pitched drama to the next as though she is speaking about the arrangement for a church social. The good-- actually, quite useful-- part of this technique is that we get a full sense of Bowles life and what happened. The downside is that Carr misses out on what must have been one insane emotional roller-coaster after another. Did I mention that in Tangier Jane was lovers with Cherifa, a Moroccan woman she met at the same time that Paul met Yacorbi, who often claimed to be a witch and carried a switchblade with which to castrate men?

But if Paul Bowles: A Life isn't a melodramatic, drama-queen page-turner, that's OK. What Carr has given us is a careful telling of complicated, very full life of a major artist. The other biography of Bowles that might be written-- the one filled with the lurid hysterical details and flagrantly self-destructive behaviors-- would be highly entertaining, but only part of a more complicated picture. If Carr's Paul Bowles: A Life can get readers to turn to the masterpieces he and Jane wrote-- last year the Library of America released a two volume set of most of Bowles novels and stories-- it will have accomplished quite a lot.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com