Hello,
Summer’s over, I guess. In some ways, this one felt like it never quite began—Sam and I were ejected from our apartment in June, thanks to a water leak from upstairs that’s turned into an ongoing nightmare of construction, and so we’ve spent the past few months couch-surfing and hotel-hopping—but here we are. For a week or so we were up in Ojai, where I was able to finish off the last copy edits and legal queries for The Golden Hour, and then I found myself at loose ends. I’d burned through the handful of books I’d packed when we peeled out of our place and so I had to choose something to read off our hosts’ thankfully well-appointed shelves. My eye slid past the Zola, the water-logged copy of The Brothers Karamazov (I’ve read it recently enough, though the notion of it being read in a swimming pool, which this copy clearly had been, made me laugh) and settled on The Sheltering Sky, a book I’ve owned in multiple editions over the years but somehow had never gotten around to reading.
Why not? Particularly given that I’d read and enjoyed other Bowles novels over the years (Let it Come Down was a favorite, in my twenties) and a bunch of his short fiction as well, albeit “enjoyed” may be a rather hedonic term for the experience of reading something like A Distant Episode, one of the hairiest and most perturbing stories in the modern lexicon. Maybe that’s why I hadn’t gotten around to it. One might not require sweetness and light from the novel—I don’t—but an ambient temperature slightly higher than the far side of the moon’s, at least, is generally appreciated. Then again, there I was in the middle of an orange grove during a string of hundred-degree days. Not exactly as dry as Bowles’s Sahara, but fittingly hot, and fitting too as something to chase those copy edits with. Part of the reason I chose to go with Ecco for The Golden Hour was because the press’s founder, Daniel Halpern, had also founded the literary magazine Antaeus, a periodical I’d battened onto obsessively in the eighties. It was in Antaeus that I’d first read Bowles (who, I think, put up the money for Halpern to get it up and running) alongside Guy Davenport, Cormac McCarthy, Kay Boyle, Czeslaw Milosz, and a ton of other writers who were likewise formative for me. It seemed right to bookend the experience of writing The Golden Hour, then, by reading Bowles’s best-known novel, a book about which I’d managed to remain curiously ignorant. I knew that it, like much of Bowles’ fiction, was set in North Africa—in this case, Oran, and various points south—and that it involved an American couple whose marriage slowly disintegrates under the psychological and atmospheric stresses of the desert. I knew, of course, that Bertolucci had directed an adaptation in 1990, although somehow (perhaps it was the oily and off-the-mark-seemig casting of John Malkovich, Deborah Winger, and Campbell Scott as the three points of a love triangle) I’d managed never to see that either. But this was all.
Port, and Kit. These are the names of Bowles’s travelers, names that might border on the arch considering there’s no safe harbor to be had for either of these underprepared Americans (Oran is a port city, naturally, but the novel turns almost immediately towards the interior.) They’re already on the outs sexually, and a fellow American named George Tunner, who’s hitched on to them, has his eye on Kit. Port wanders off from the hotel that first night to a cafe in the old quarter, where he meets a man who leads him to a place beyond the city walls: a tent, and inside it, a girl . . .
Sexual wanderlust, naturally, will prove to be the least of Port and Kit’s problems. Soon, they will meet another American—a weaselly man named Eric Lyle, traveling with an older woman he claims is his mother—and their situation will devolve sharply from there, but I was struck immediately by the book’s ultra-vivid sense not just of its place but of a kind of residuum of experience, and of the glum erasures of colonialism.
The bar was stuffy and melancholy. It was full of the sadness inherent in all deracinated things. “Since the day the first drink was served at this bar,” he thought, “how many moments of happiness have been lived through, here?” The happiness, if there was any, existed elsewhere: In sequestered rooms that looked onto bright alleys where cats gnawed fish heads; in shaded cafes hung with reed matting, where the hashish smoke mingled with the fumes of mint from the hot tea; down on the docks, out on the edge of the sebhka in the tents (he passed over the image of Marhnia, the placid face); beyond the mountains in the great Sahara, in the endless regions that were all of Africa. But not here in this sad colonial room, where each invocation of Europe was merely one more squalid touch, one more visible proof of isolation; the mother country seemed farthest in such a room.
An excellent passage, but, as someone who’d always bracketed Bowles alongside, say, Burroughs and various other Beats (probably the closest thing Bowles had to a cohort besides his wife Jane), a surprising one. Bowles’s Moroccan exile may have seemed alluringly cool to a number of his American peers, people like Norman Mailer who credited him with “opening up the world of Hip” and inviting various nihilistic currents into contemporary literature, but The Sheltering Sky turns out to be a lot closer to Conrad, or even Flannery O’Connor (Eric Lyle’s “mother” is a spectacular grotesque, very much reminiscent of the grandmother in “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” a story Bowles admired tremendously) than it is to Naked Lunch.
Bowles, of course, can’t be held liable for whatever misprisions may have sprung up around his work—for whatever hip or gaudy notions might have summoned tourists and writers to Morocco in his wake—and while the question of Orientalism has dogged him, perhaps not unfairly (Edward Said hated his work, as does Colm Toibin apparently), I took the novel down in a pair of sittings. Summer may be gone, but there are worse ways to beat the heat still.
In many ways, the most engaging thing to come out of reading The Sheltering Sky has been a reminder to turn back to Bowles’s wife’s work. In many ways, she was the stronger writer of the two, and pulling Two Serious Ladies, her only completed novel, off the shelf for the first time in several decades also, it has lost none of its radically alienated majesty. (Plus, one isn’t forced to consider Jane’s sexual tourism, as one is, alas, with Paul.) Their marriage may have been a strange one—like Kit and Port, they were sexually estranged for the bulk of its duration, albeit because they were each more interested in same-sex partners—but as a creative pairing it’s one of the more interesting unions of the 20th Century.
All for now, but I’ll be back soon with more on The Golden Hour, and perhaps on a figure that’s begun to entice me in advance of the next book, small inklings of which are starting to appear. Apparently it’s going to be scorching this week in LA, so Sam and I may well be forced to seek refuge elsewhere yet again,
Matthew
The Bowles are equally fascinating. His short stories are full of dread. And I never knew of Said’s take on Paul Bowles. That’s interesting. I do have all of Bowles works, including his writings on music. And I also like his music.
Exile. Escape as fate, although in your case I hope not.