A TALK WITH PAUL BOWLES

PHILLIP RAMEY:  It has been several years since your last work of fiction, the short novel Too Far From Home, was published.  You are about to be eighty-seven.  Will you write more fiction?

PAUL BOWLES:  No.  Never.

Why is that?

Because of my eyesight.  It's got so bad that I can't see well enough to write. 

That's recent, isn't it?

It's recent, but it's real. 

Do you still have ideas for stories?

It's the writing itself that gives me ideas.  Since I can no longer write, there are none.

What was your procedure in starting a story?  Would you write just any sentence? 

Yes.  The old Surrealist method.

Invent a sentence now.

"In those days he always walked by the pool, because he was not worried about what might be in it.  But now he felt different."

Spooky, and very Bowlesian.

Well, that could begin a story.

If your eyesight should improve, would you still feel you are finished as a writer? 

Yes.  I don't want to write any more.

You've had an unusual dual career as both a writer and composer.  Until fairly recently, your concert music had been pretty much forgotten.  But there has been a spate of new recordings, there was a three-day festival of your musical works in New York in 1995 and now there is to be a film about your career as a composer.  What's your reaction to that?

It's flattering—ego massage.  But I see my music as part of the past.  I'm curious to know how it holds up, but in the context of the 1930s, not the 1990s.

Do you still have the desire to write music?

Perhaps more than fiction.

Once a composer, always a composer.

Or, as Virgil Thomson used to say, "Once a deadhead, always a deadhead."  (laughs)

You once noted that you thought that music and prose involved different parts of the brain.

Who knows how the mind is divided?  I always found it a great relief to write if I had been composing; and if I had been writing it was wonderful to sit down and compose.

Your fiction is notable for its nihilism and fascination with violence, while your music tends to be light and charming.  A real dichotomy there.

I suppose.  But perhaps I just didn't know how to compose "dark" music.  I only tried to do that once, in a piano piece that was lost for over fifty years and only recently discovered in a publisher's closet, called Tamanar.  The music was loud and sinister, by which I mean the harmony was sinister—dissonant and heavy.  When I worked at it, in Berlin in 1931, people would begin screaming, "Fenster zu!"—"Shut the window!"—across the courtyard, threatening to call the police. 

Ultimately, your serious side came out in your books.

Certainly not in my musical compositions.  Lenny Bernstein always said that my music sounded post-coital.

Aside from that dissonant piano piece, have you ever attempted to write any "serious", "impressive" music?

It would embarrass me too much.  I would be ashamed of it.  It would be like writing prose that seeks to impress.  In my music I never liked to raise my voice.  It was often more in the manner of an aside.  That's partly why I prefer French music to German. 

Your fiction is full of horrific incidents that might, in a sense, be considered gestural.  They catch the reader's attention somewhat in the way musical gestures catch the listener's.

But I don't think that's so shameful in prose because it's connected with the meaning of the story.

Musically, you are a self-confessed miniaturist.

For me, short, simple pieces were the most satisfying, perhaps because I didn't know how to appreciate long, complex ones.

Do you feel that applies to you also as a writer?  That your short stories are more successful than your novels?

I think it's true.  I've written several books over the years, and I suppose that I'm least ashamed of some of the short stories, more so than any of the novels.  Among the stories I consider the most successful are "A Distant Episode", "Pastor Dowe at Tacaté", "Señor Ong and Señor Ha" and "Call at Corazón".  Those are all early stories, and they're probably better than the later ones.  They seem to be more compact:  in the material, in the way it's presented.  I don't know if that's a question of language, but of course in prose everything is.  When  people ask me which of my novels I prefer, I always say Up Above the World, because of the way things are expressed there in a very concise, rather terse fashion.

I notice your list doesn't include the notorious "Pages from Cold Point", which is perhaps your best-known story.

Since practically no one seems to understand it, it doesn't make much sense to cite it.  Critics and readers have regularly misunderstood it, for they have the impression that the father corrupted his son.  If they think that, they haven't understood the story, which means it doesn't exist.

I thought it was clear that Racky, the son, seduces the father in the process of blackmailing him.

I would think it was, but apparently it isn't.  People just can't believe that a child could seduce an adult.  It's the adult who has to do the seducing.

The idea of a corrupting child is too shocking for many readers?

I think so.  But, after all, plenty of children are corrupt.  When John Lehmann published my first collection of stories, A Little Stone, in England in 1950, "Pages from Cold Point" was excluded, because both Cyril Connolly and W. Somerset Maugham warned Lehmann that there might be problems of censorship with the printers' union.  The objection, if you can believe it, was not to the sexual element but to the idea of a child blackmailing his parent.

Had Racky been planning to blackmail his father?

I don't think so.  He was just having fun, going out and having sex with all the young men within ten miles.  On shady beaches, in coves, in boats.

The idea of reverse incest is rather bizarre, even in fiction.

Not really, is it?  I'm sure that, in life, it's not unheard of.  It seems such an obvious procedure for an adolescent to take.  But, of course, in the story it doesn't actually say that the boy had sex with his father.

I've heard people argue it both ways.  So:  did Racky and his father do it? 

I wasn't there.  (laughs)

Sure you were.  You were looking through the keyhole, a Peeping Paul.

Oh, all right.  I think sex did occur.  But just that one night.

What sort of sex?

Well, I think the boy let his father screw him.   It leads up to that in the description beforehand.  During all that time in bed, Racky is still, he never moves.  It says that he could have been asleep, but of course he couldn't have.  Whatever happened was what Racky wanted to have happen.

In one of his books, Ned Rorem strongly implied that he and his father, when they visited you a long time ago in Mexico, were the inspiration for "Pages from Cold Point."  Ned recently told me he believes it to be true, though he didn't expect you to admit it. 

I certainly won't, because it's completely wrong.  What makes him think that, I wonder?  It's so untrue it's funny.  Ned's so incredibly egoïste.

Why did you once refuse permission for "Cold Point" to be filmed?

Because the scenario was so bad.  It would take an extremely good scriptwriter to present that story accurately.

So, if someone came up with a screenplay that really followed the story, you'd allow a movie to be made?

Sure.  I think it would be fine.  Tell Ned next time you see him that Paul has finally found a film director who will do "Pages from Cold Point", and that Paul wants you to be in it.  He thinks you'll make a wonderful father.  (laughs)

There's nothing remotely similar to "Cold Point" in your output.

It's the only story of mine that treats of male homosexuality.

How do you feel about it being included in anthologies of homosexual stories? 

It's absurd.  As though that was why it was written.

What about being typecast as a "gay" author, primarily because of one story?

I don't like that at all.

Because the description is not relevant to most of your work? 

It's not even relevant to most of my life.

Your autobiography is entitled Without Stopping.  William Burroughs wrote that it should have been called Without Telling.

What he meant by that I don't know.

You know very well that he meant that you never say who was sleeping with whom.

Well, I wouldn't.  I didn't think it was proper.

Even if the people involved were dead?

Even so.  My idea of what's right isn't the same as someone else's, that's all.  It seems to me that it would be extremely bad taste of anyone to accuse X of having slept with Y in 1953.

Then you must have been displeased by your friend Ned Rorem publishing his confessional diaries.

I was appalled and disgusted that anyone would write such nonsense.  And he actually took those books seriously.

Did you let Ned know what you thought?

Yes.  I wrote him and told him that I couldn't understand why he would be interested in such details, and why he would use actual names in telling about his drunken orgies.  It was all right, I suppose, for him to describe what he did, no matter how abjectly he was behaving, but it wasn't all right to involve other people.

Curious that particular letter wasn't included in the recent volume of your and Ned's letters.

Not so curious.

Without Stopping wasn't especially well received when it came out in 1972.  I remember reading a negative review by Virgil Thomson in the New York Review of Books.

I didn't have time to write the book properly, that's the trouble.  My first contract with Putnam gave me a year, and when it was up I hadn't even finished my card system.  I had a card for every month of every year.  I had to know what was going on, for I had no documents.  I just had to remember everything.  Where was I in October 1928?  What was I doing in June 1933?  Writing that book was agony.

How do you feel about the result?

I more or less agree with a critic who said, "It's a shaggy book," by which he meant it was not carefully levelled.

I remember when I first visited you here in Tangier in 1982, you were correcting proofs of Points in Time, which was published later that year in England.  It is perhaps your most unusual book.

The American publisher called it a novel, but that's absurd.  When I wrote it I thought of it as a lyrical history of Morocco, although it's scarcely that.  Points in Time is a book taken from actual historical accounts, and it skips over centuries.

So it's not folklore or legend?

No, it's fictionalized accounts of actual occurrences, presented as though it were fiction.  For instance, the story of the Franciscan monks who came to Morocco and were encouraged to live in Fez.  They took so long getting here that the Sultan had changed, so that the person they had introductions to was no longer the ruler.

Did you invent any of the incidents in the book?

No.  I stuck to the accounts.

In addition to your own work, you've translated quite a few books of Moroccan storytellers.  Last summer, in an article in the Threepenny Review, you complained about the difficulties you have had with three of them, Mohammed Mrabet, Larbi Layachi and Mohamed Choukri, over money demands, and declared that you will never again collaborate with a Moroccan.  Did their ingratitude surprise you?

I never expected gratitude from them.

The one you've worked with most closely is Mrabet.

Yes, and I finally agreed to give him $1,000 for each book that had been published.  There were twelve.

He wasn't actually owed that money?

No.  It was just to shut him up.

You've sometimes been accused of writing Mrabet's stories and novels for him. 

That's ridiculous.  Tahar ben Jelloun started it all, in an article in Le Monde.  According to him, I took on Moroccan names and wrote books by, for instance, Mrabet, who, he said, doesn't exist.  And even if Mrabet does exist, he couldn't have "written" those books because he was a fisherman, which meant that he had no education.  It is quite true that Mrabet had no education, but it never occurred to Tahar ben Jelloun that Mrabet could construct a novel without education.  Still, he did.

You mean, he could make up stories and put them together into something resembling a novel.

Yes.

If the translator's first responsibility is to render the work accurately, what else is important?

To make it sound as though it were not a translation.  That's what is difficult:  you don't want the smell of translation sticking to it.

Some critics have claimed that your translations have a Bowlesian tone.

Naturally, if I translated, everything in English would be Bowlesian.