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Paul Bowles: Novels and Collected Stories, vols. 1 & 2
Daniel Halperin, editor
Library of America
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Our civilization is doomed to short life: its component parts are too heterogeneous. I am personally content to see everything in the process of decay. The bigger the bombs, the quicker it will be done. Life is visually too hideous for one to make the attempt to preserve it. Let it go."

This is the beginning of Paul Bowles most famous short story "Pages From Cold Point." It is also pretty much the summation of much of the author's world view: poetic nihilism with just the faintest ray of hope, maybe, sort of. Bowles is one of those American writers-- Patricia Highsmith is another one-- who is famous and critically acclaimed without being read very much. He is always making lists of writers who are in the American canon, but his novels and stories have never been very popular. Even after the release of Bernardo Bertolucci's film of The Sheltering Sky in 1990 (a fairly dreadful adaptation of Bowles's most popular novel) did little to widen his audience. If it weren't for Black Sparrow Press, who in the 1970s republished much of Bowles's work, almost all of it would have been out of print until now. Now this two volume collection of most of his writings brings his work again to a readership who can discover him and his world.

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Born in 1910 Bowles became, by the age of 22 an accomplished composer. By age 27 he was lauded for his score to Orson Wells's production of Doctor Faustus. Although he composed constantly for the next ten years (and had his work performed to both positive and negative notices), he turned to writing, and after some short stories (including "Pages From Cold Point") in 1948 published The Sheltering Sky, which met with critical acclaim. During this time he marries Jane Auer, and when they are not living apart move to Tangier; they also both take lovers of the their own sex. Although in the dead-center of avant-garde American literary and musical culture from the late 1940s onward-- they were friends with Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Allan Ginsberg, George Orwell, William Burroughs, Ned Rorem, Gian-Carol Menotti, Leonard Bernstein-- the Bowles's work (she published her novel Two Serious Ladies in 1943) generally went unnoticed or received negative criticism from the mainstream. And reading through these volumes it is little wonder that some of Paul Bowles's work was published at all.

On edge

Smart, ironic, precise, and often emotionally harrowing they presented themes that were, in those years, decidedly distressing. It isn't just that Bowles takes what might be vulgarly called an existential world view (although he did translate Sartre's No Exit for Broadway) but that he took aspects of existentialism to odd places: The Sheltering Sky is about a woman who has a breakdown, becomes lost in the desert and essentially has a transformation through being forced to have sex; "Pages From Cold Point" is about a homosexual father who has designs on his own son only to find out that the son is far more knowledgeable about queer sex than he is. Other stories explore how sexual desire and passion-- often unexplored and then erupting into violence, despair, or emotional isolation-- are not simply central to the lives of his characters, but indeed, define their lives. For Bowles-- in collections like The Delicate Prey and Things Gone and Things Still Here-- sexuality and existentialism are so interconnected that they are not so much inseparable, but indistinguishable. From the 1950s on Bowles also translated and published the work of Driss ben Hamed Charhadi and Mohamed Choukri-- all of which are resonate with his own themes and obsessions.

Bowles has always been classified-- by those who think it is a positive category and those who think it isn't-- as a gay writer. This isn't only because there are themes of homoeroticism that run through his writing, or that he himself was a lover of men and boys, but because so much of his work is infused with an outsider's eroticism and a feeling for sexuality that is both celebratory and suspicious all at the same time. Sex for Bowles is an enormous blessing and often a surprising, and ironic curse. In Bowles's novels and stories sex is transformative in ways that are exciting, dangerous, and exhilarating: it is never normalizing or safe. And that, in the end, is pretty queer.

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