Paul Bowles

"The likeness of those who choose other patrons than Allah is as the likeness of the spider when she taketh unto herself a house, and lo! the frailest of all houses is the spider's house, if they but knew."
Koran.

"He watched her. For her the Moroccans were backward onlookers standing on the sidelines of the parade of progress; they must be exhorted to join, if necessary pulled by force into the march. Hers was the attitude of the missionary, but whereas the missionary offered a complete if unusable code of thought and behavior, the modernizer offered nothing at all, save a place in the ranks. And the Moslems, who with their blind intuitive wisdom had triumphantly withstood the missionaries' cajoleries, now were going to be duped into joining the senseless march of universal brotherhood; for the privilege each man would have to give up only a small part of himself--just enough to make him incomplete, so that instead of looking into his own heart, to Allah, for reassurance, he would have to look to the others. The new world would be a triumph of frustration, where all humanity would be lifting itself by its own bootstraps--the equality of the damned. No wonder the religious leaders of Islam identified Western culture with the works of Satan: they had seen the truth and were expressing it in the simplest terms."
The Spider's House, Paul Bowles


For many years he counted his life as begining at 14, when \he began to think for myself and buck against the suffocating constrants of my family. There was no happy chldhood. There was nowhere we could be taken to find peace. Deliberately blanked out; it was as if those days had never existed; he had sprung half grown into the world. They couldnt' have been more shadowy. If he thought of those times at all it was in terms of snaking belts and the agony of the dense, brick green bush; the pain of the Australian landscape. He never went unmasked. He was cruel in his indifference to his earlier self; that was not who he was meant to be.

For years he had adored Paul Bowles, his mentor, his artisitic hero. He read The Sheltering Sky several times; once trekking across Morrocco, wreathed in hash, the desert mountains dissolving in visual tableaus before him. The boyfriend would be gone, sooner or later, but the obsession with Bowles would last much of his life.

It was natural, when he was in Tangiers, to track him down, look him up. There was a bookshop which sold English language books, and on the advice of one of the ever-prsent boys that's where he went. He is a friend of mine, the owner declared, after some delays, and I will check for you. Eventually we were taken to the rundown, modern by Tangier standards but rundown nonetheless, apartment where he lived. We went up in some creaking lift, and were greeted at the door. It was his afternoon salon time, four to six, the only time of the day when visitors were welcome. I would have cheerfully dumped Martin about this point; this wasn't his destiny, it was mine. He wasn't the one with the great love of Paul's books; with the utter fascination for the milieu of which Paul had been a part. Bowles had met, for God's sake he had known, William Burroughs in his addict days in Tangiers. He had known Tennessee Williams and the kindness of strangers. Jane Bowles really had been his friend and wife. He had been a part of the great tradition of letters which spilled down the decades to this point.

I, well we, were from Australia and the great rivers of literary tradition didn't exactly embrace Australia. There was Patrick White and Voss and the Nobel Prize, but none of these people had met him. He didn't hang out with William Burroughs; he wasn't part of the tradition that I then adored, the ticket that exploded, the dusky smell of rotting oranges, fish boys ejaculating on silver streams. Scaffolds of the dying. An overwhelming sense of decay. Paul Bowles was part of history and there couldn't have been anywhere more I wanted to be.

We sat around in a circle, in his rundown apartment, outside his driver and his rundown car. He might have been world famous but he lived simply. I caught a glimpse of his single bed in the alcove, the medicine bottles lined up alongside it. I had expected some sumptuous middle eastern fantasy; something redolent of another age, as extravagantly beautiful a house as his writing. But it wasn't like that, not for a moment. There was a circle of us, some woman visiting from Britain he obviously knew well, the young Morroccan men he spnsored, the Moroccan author he translated into English, handsome of course. He smoked kif constantly, and the pipe went round and round. He was frail, even then, ethereal almost, as if the world was too vivid a place for him, which was why he sheltered in this apartment, away from it all.

Years later, when Sam was one year old, there are pictures of him somewhere on the balcony of the hotel in Tangier, where he had his birthday, years later I returned with a son perched in a backpack on my back and the boyfriend no longer in tow. I looked Bowles up again, I wanted him to meet my son, and at first he confused me with some journalist he was expecting from Australia, there was always a steady stream of journalists visiting him. But then he invited me in, and we got talking once again, and Sammy crawled around on the floor of the famous writer, and I tried to tell hm everything that had happened since last I had seen him, as if he was a great uncle or something. He was kind, he was always kind, but tales of dumping the boyfriend and emerging from detox and finding myself going out with a girl I had met, of suddenly having children after a lifetime sitting on the bar stool, I'm not sure that it made much sense to him.

We walked down the hill together to get his mail, in those far off days when people actually wrote letters.

Will you write another novel? I asked.
You have to have something to say, he said.

As if life had already happened aad these were the unexpected days, when he had outlived everybody.

The last time I saw him he was sick, increasingly frail, the line of various medications beside his bed even longer than before.

I was back in Australia working as a journalist when he died in the 1990s. I wrote a story about him for the literary pages of the paper, talking about the connection I had always felt, as if I was his emissary in a far off land. But it was dismissed, what would I know? A humble hack on the highways of print. How could I possibly have known one of the all time greats; the shambolic, alcoholic chaos that I had become, clinging to a job but barely. But I had known him, by simple stint of knocking on his door, but I had always loved him, the person that he was, the days undiscovered when greatness was granted only to a few. He was like a tourist site, he told me once, people felt compelled, entitled, to go and have a look. He didn't mind, as long as it was during his salon hours between four and six, but thank God the sixties were over, he said. Brash Americans would arrive, barely knowing who he was, dumping their backpacks at his feet and drawling: "Mind if I crash here maaan?"

I walked down the Tangier hill with him, slowly, he was so frail, and we talked as if there was everything to be fitted into a single afternoon; we talked of far off Australia and the creative muse; and I told him my dreams in a way I had never told anybody else; the bewildered pact a young child made to dedicate himself to the crative life. The desperate struggle to make sense of it all. The encroaching sense of failure, as if greatness was already passing him by. The yearning hope that one day one of his books would succeed, the huge fascination he held for this exotic country. And Paul, from an entirely different world, talked of the work he did for the American national library collecting origal Morrocan music, the work he did translating local authors; of his absolute determination not to return to the America of his birth. This was his life now, the chaotic Tangier streets, the dust, the donkeys, the crowds of boys running in the streets. He wasn't writing then; he had been compiling a collection of correspondence, published years later, and had struck such a lonely figure, sorting through decades old correspondence. He had always been a great letter writer, that lost art. This day, we collected his correspondence from the central post office, an impressive swag of interesting looking letters; and we said goodbye and I went back out into the great world. And a few years later, I heard the news that he had died; and felt as sad as if a close friend had died. I'm still out in the great world; and many friends have died now. What a different place the future is.

THE BIGGER STORY:

The American man has watched the young boy get up from his table where he was drinking tea and go out into a small courtyard where there was a pool of water. The American man ignores the woman and follows the boy as he goes out and sits by the edge of the pool.

...The boy had taken off his shoes and was wading in the pool, a sight which, because of his state of mind, did not at once strike him as peculiar. When he saw him bend over and fish a large, bedraggled insect out of the water, he became interested. Now the boy held his hand very close to his face, studying his prey, smiling at it' he even moved his lips a few times, as though he were talking to it.

"What is it? What are you staring at?" she asked.

"Trying to make out what that kid's doing out there, standing in the middle of the water."

Suddenly the insect had flown away. The boy stood looking after it, his face expressing satisfaction rather than the disappointment Stenham [the American dude's name] had expected to see. He climbed out of the pool and sat down at its edge where he had been before.

Stenham shook his head. "Now, that was a strange bit of behavior. The boy made a special trip into the water just to pull out some kind of insect."

"Well, he's kind-hearted."

"I know, but they're not. That's the whole point. In all my time here I've never seen anyone do a thing like that."

He looked at the boy's round face, heavy, regular features, and curly black hair.

"He could be a Sicilian, or a Greek," he said as if to himself. "If he's not a Moroccan, there's nothing surprising about his deed. But if he is, then I give up. Moroccans just don't do things like that."

..."You want another tea?"

"No," she said. "One's plenty. It's so sweet. But anyway, I don't believe you can make such hard and fast general rules about people."

"You can in this case. I've watched them for years. I know what they're like."

"That doesn't mean you know what each one is like individually, after all."

"But the whole point is, they're not individuals in the sense you mean," he said.

"You're on dangerous ground," she warned.

For fear that she might take exception to his words, he was quiet, did not attempt to explain to her how living among a less evolved people enabled him to see his own culture from the outside, and thus to understand it better. It was her express desire that all races and all individuals be "equal," and she would accept no demonstration which did not make use of that axiom. In truth, he decided, it was impossible to discuss anything at all with her, because instead of seeing each part of total reality as a complement to the other parts, with dogged insistence she forged ahead seeing only those things which she could twist into the semblance of an illustration for her beliefs.

...The boy came through the door, glanced shyly at them, and turned to sit down at his table. Stenham called out to him: "Qu'est-ce qui se passe dehors?" The boy stared at him, uncomprehending. So he was a Moroccan, after all. "Smalhi," Stenham said. "Chnou hadek el haraj?"

The other looked at him with wide eyes, clearly wondering how anyone could be so stupid. "That's people yelling," he said.

The Spider's House, Paul Bowles.