DURING HIS EXTENDED second visit to Europe, in the spring of 1932 Paul Bowles took a side trip to Fez, Morocco, where he witnessed a crowd of several thousand adepts of one of the Moroccan religious brotherhoods, “stamping, heaving, shuddering, gyrating, and chanting, all of them aware only of the overpowering need to achieve ecstasy” (WOS, 151). Bowles comments that “Here for the first time I was made aware that a human being is not an entity and that his interpretation of exterior phenomena is meaningless unless it is shared by the other members of his cultural group” (WOS, 151). Although the autobiography where this event is related has been scoffed at as concealing rather than revealing the life that it purports to describe, as I have shown previously in chapter 2, Without Stopping is in fact a carefully constructed narrative of intellectual development that presents Bowles’ discovery and development of his basic ideas and values. An important part of Bowles’ life story is his rejection of post-Puritan New England social and cultural conditioning in order to capture the spontaneous flow of existence. However, there is another side to Bowles’ transcendental and existential individualism that is expressed in his description of the ecstatic religious procession in Fez—that is, an individual is part of a social community, which gives one's individual life meaning. Here again, we find another facet of Bowles’ life that is “in the American grain”: the individual's exploration and development of self initially takes on a trajectory away from society, but ultimately one's individuation takes on a path that finally returns and benefits society. Emerson expresses this idea throughout his writings, but the locus classicus is found in his funeral oration for Henry David Thoreau, cited near the end of this chapter. In his professional and personal life Bowles demonstrates the importance of social connections through his works of fiction and nonfiction, and through his work on incidental music for film and theater, as well as in his openness to unplanned visits from strangers and in his maintaining contacts with friends and acquaintances over the better part of eight decades, as seen in his voluminous correspondence. His second novel, Let It Come Down, is Bowles’ most extended treatment of the individual need for connectedness.

PAUL BOWLES’ FICTION is often thought of as depicting the impenetrability of foreign cultures and, by implication, the impossibility of significant intercultural understanding. Tourists such as the Slades in Up Above the World find themselves in a Central American landscape that is as alien as their murderous host's psychological landscape; the “sojourners” Port and Kit in The Sheltering Sky find death and insanity in the Sahara; the missionary in “Pastor Dowe at Tacaté” penetrates the culture of a Latin American indigenous tribe and subsequently flees in horror; the professor in “A Distant Episode” has considerable intercultural experience including a knowledge of French and Arabic in North Africa, but is destroyed because of his inadequate understanding of the Reguibat renegades he encounters; and the French expatriate woman in “The Time of Friendship,” despite all the good will in the world, is shut out from contact with an Arab child because of political events. In short, whatever commonalties we might assume among humans from different traditions, culture seems to be the ultimate divide between individuals in Bowles’ fiction.

Bowles himself lived in North Africa for more than fifty years yet never expressed any desire to “go native,” nor did he ever have any illusions about the possibility of doing such a thing. Yet at the same time he had an abiding interest in ethnology and anthropology that went back to his childhood when his paternal grandfather spoke to him about “the Amerind,” which was his term for Native Americans (WOS, 18). During the 1940s and 1950s, in the wake of Jungian concepts of archetypes and the collective unconscious, Joseph Campbell was formulating his ideas of the “monomyth,” and Claude Lévi-Strauss, the famed anthropologist, ethnologist, and structuralist, was searching different traditions for common links in comparative mythology. Bowles, by contrast, was writing stories and novels that portray the irreducibility of comparative cultures. Nevertheless, along the way there are indications in Bowles’ life and fiction that in spite of cultural barriers, individuals can learn about themselves and their own culture through the experience of foreign cultures.

IN CHAPTER 2 I EXAMINED Paul Bowles’ natural disposition toward the linked but mutually exclusive experiences of existence and consciousness during his earliest recorded moments in his autobiography, and the ways in which such impulses were reinforced by his upbringing and New England social and intellectual traditions, including a childhood reading of Emerson's Essays, and the post-Emersonian New England spiritualism and theosophy that were conveyed to him through his paternal grandmother and her siblings. In the present chapter I examine in passing indirect Emersonian influence on Bowles through Emerson's pervasive influence on Nietzsche, who in turn was an important influence on Gide, whom Bowles read and absorbed during his high school years and afterward. To recapitulate from the introduction above, when we consider the influence of Emerson on Nietzsche, “We are dealing with an intellectual and spiritual relationship that is so profound and pervasive that the word influence doesn't do justice to it” (3), which “raises the question of whether it is Emerson or his Danish contemporary, Søren Kierkegaard, who is entitled to be called ‘the first existentialist’” (9). These historical connections include a circularity of influence that, in addition to Emerson's original influence on Bowles, also leads from Emerson to Nietzsche to Gide to Bowles in an arc that takes in Western Europe and sweeps across North Africa. Such influences, affinities, and reflections become increasingly fascinating even as they become increasingly extensive and, sometimes, elusive. In the present chapter I propose to trace influences and affinities between André Gide and Paul Bowles in order to show two streams of transcendental and existential influence emanating from Emerson to Bowles to demonstrate that Bowles’ reflections of European existentialism is thoroughly “in the American grain.” Gide reflects many of the basic existential ideas of Nietzsche, who had reached a high point of popularity and influence in France around the turn of the twentieth century. The precocious Bowles read Gide in French while he was still in high school, and years later in his autobiography, he describes how during his intellectually formative youth he considered Gide as “the master.”

WE HAVE BEEN tracing a pattern in the works of Paul Bowles that runs from early to late, in which classic American transcendentalism and its derivative existentialism are the foundations for the stories, novels, autobiography, letters, and life. Such foundations include an important strain of moralism found in Emerson and Thoreau that is often hidden or latent in the works of Bowles but occasionally becomes surprisingly obvious and reiterates his ties to homegrown American traditions, despite his inveterate expatriate status. An important difference between Bowles and the American transcendentalists is that while Bowles portrays similar conflicts between existence and consciousness, culture and nature, and between the individual and society—in his works as well as in his own life—any positive view or hopefulness, if it exists at all, is at best—in Robert Frost's terms—“a diminished thing.” Although some readers perceive Bowles as a dark presence in American literature, or even, in Leslie Fiedler's terms, a “horror pornographer,” there is consonance with the darker perspectives in Hawthorne and Melville and, for astute readers, in Emerson and Thoreau as well—as in the Emerson of “Experience” in Essays: Second Series (1844), and “Fate” in The Conduct of Life (1860), or the Thoreau of Walden who occasionally reveals the existential failure in his own life project. However, for Bowles, as befits someone who lived through two world wars and numerous other conflicts around the world, darkness is the norm, and hope is mostly concealed. There are important reasons for this, including the historical context as well as the nature of life itself, both practical and philosophical. In short, Bowles plays on existential themes that one can find in Hawthorne (but without the solution of personal love in both the life and the works), and in Melville (in the conundrums of Moby Dick, The Confidence Man, The Encantadas, “Bartleby,” and other works).

I have tried to illuminate appropriate cultural and philosophical New England backgrounds in the works of Bowles, as found in Without Stopping and the letters, which are important and useful adjuncts to the stories and novels. In the process I became unwittingly drawn into the life itself, which, like the fiction, demonstrates existential patterns.

THE TITLE OF Jeffrey Miller's edition of Bowles’ letters, In Touch, is particularly apt: it can ironically suggest physical contact, yet at the same time it indicates communication from a distance. Given Bowles’ predilection for travel and for life as an inveterate expatriate, communication from a distance was a necessity, and his attraction to distant and exotic places may also suggest a desire to avoid close proximity, which further suggests that distance and letter writing for Bowles were a means to initiate and maintain contact, yet at the same time to control or even avoid it. This dialectic, this push-pull of self and society, resonates in Bowles’ personal psychology and art, and also reflects the basic Emersonian dialectic of existence and consciousness, self and society, nature and culture that we have been following in our discussions of Bowles’ fiction. On many occasions in his letters Bowles refers to problems of representation, especially in the letters with his equally precocious school friend, Bruce Morrissette, who attended the University of Richmond during Bowles’ brief attendance at the University of Virginia. In addition, from time to time in his letters Bowles discusses his New England roots that were part of the historical backdrop to the intellectual foundations of the Emersonian antinomian tradition that is so consonant with Bowles’ own attitudes toward life. And of course the letters are a rich mine of information about Bowles’ personal life and attitudes. I begin by addressing the tradition of letter writing, which in the electronic age is rapidly going the way of the horseless carriage and the fully-vested pension plan. At the same time, I show how Bowles’ use of letter writing as a trope in his stories and novels gives insight into his own letter-writing practice and reflects his basic attitudes toward existence. Moreover, Bowles’ early letters reflect his attempts to shape an emerging identity based on transcendental and existential attitudes that generally prefer process to stasis, and existence-in-the-moment to a life of routine or habituation.

Paul Bowles spent more than fifty years living in Tangier, Morocco, where he developed a mystique as a cult writer. Because he was conservative in his attitudes toward travel and communication, Bowles generally avoided air travel and tended to communicate through old-fashion letter writing: he usually set aside time each day for his correspondence and wrote many letters a week.

IN FEBRUARY 1966, Paul Bowles responded by letter to a prepublication review of his shortest and final novel, Up Above the World, which was published by Simon & Schuster in the middle of the following month. As previously noted in passing (introduction, above), Bowles’ comment to the reviewer was that “A sentence from Borges should have been included in the front of the book, ‘Each moment as it is being lived exists, but not the imaginary total’” (PB1, 1058, notes).

The omitted epigraph indirectly suggests that, apart from individual “moments,” our existence is a fiction, so that insofar as we conceive of the “imaginary total,” we are conscious or unconscious artists of our own lives. For many people, the construction of an “imaginary total” is furnished by the social constructions of one's society—the news, the history, the urban legends, and so forth. Perhaps the most powerful social constructions of the American experience were the New England Puritan traditions that Emerson helped to transform into a secular gospel and that for more than a century widely influenced the “imaginary total” of what it meant to be an American. In contrast to the potentially hopeful implications of Emersonian thought, a consistent theme of Bowles’ fiction is his characters’ inability to use their imaginations to overcome self- and socially-imposed limitations. In the previous chapters of the present work, my approach to Bowles’ fiction is to see it as an analysis of the various obstacles to the kind of creative perception that might lead to greater satisfaction and fulfillment in the lives of his protagonists and, by implication, in our own lives as well. The Emersonian dream of “engineering for America,” as Emerson put it in his speech at Henry David Thoreau's funeral, has in our own time, of course, become bait for the rubes, the naïve, the Boy Scouts. Nevertheless, the diminished view of at least “engineering for a regenerate self” seems to be consistently implied in Bowles’ fiction. Such a moralistic view of Bowles’ work has been obscured by his cult status, as described above in the introduction, but despite occasional sensational elements in a few stories and scenes in his novels, much of Bowles’ work is highly conservative in technique, content, and perspective.

THE SEMINAL DOCUMENT about Paul Bowles’ life is his own autobiography, Without Stopping, which was first published in New York by G. P. Putnam's Sons in 1972, and again in New York by the Ecco Press in 1985. The autobiography was written under duress, for money, to pay for the medical expenses for the terminal illness of Jane Bowles, who died on 4 May 1973. A 6 February 1983 letter from Paul Bowles to Richard Peabody, novelist and editor, is explicit and succinct:

Putting aside that Without Stopping was written for money during the painful time surrounding the approaching loss of a loved one, I believe that for Bowles the autobiography was “a terrible bore and devoid of interest” because it was completely antithetical to his phenomenological and existential life project: if one is recreating the past, one is not generally “living” the present. It is a disposal of existence for the never-never land of Being. Bowles suggests something of the sort on the last pages of Without Stopping:

WE ALL KNOW ABOUT the uses and misuses of philosophy, whereby idealistic thinkers are inappropriately contextualized to support behavior they would never condone. For example, years ago, Fritz Perls, Gestalt psychiatrist at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, coined a catchy slogan, part of which reads:

During my college years, some wag printed this slogan under a photo of Hitler, suggesting that the “Gestalt prayer” was an excuse for abdication of personal responsibility. And I recall a movie a decade or so later in which a couple, after the husband loses his lucrative job during the 1970s aerospace industry slump in Los Angeles, go on a crime spree. But before they begin their antics, they first appeal to the wife's wealthy parents— who refuse to help, but they cover their selfish materialism by gushing about how the couple will have a chance to learn “self-reliance,” as they point to a large portrait of Emerson that hangs over the fireplace mantle.

On a more sober note, today it might be tempting to see a consanguinity between Bowles and Emerson as another inappropriate contextualization— a sort of subterranean projection of Emersonian individualism and spontaneity. After all, it is one thing when Emerson tells us in “Self- Reliance” that “if I am the devil's child, I will then live from the Devil” or that “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind” (RWE, Essays, First Series, “Self-Reliance,” 262, 261), and something altogether different when Nelson Dyar, Bowles’ protagonist in his novel Let It Come Down, kills his Moroccan acquaintance Thami in a drug-induced state by driving a nail through his ear and into his skull (PB2, 521). Hence, at first glance Bowles may appear to embody another example of a philosophy gone wrong or a perversion of thought that was initially intended for other purposes. However, we have seen in the previous chapter that Bowles represents himself in his autobiography as having an instinctive awareness of existence from his earliest primal memories, as well as an important contact with Emerson's essays during a formative period of his early youth.

AS EDWARD SAID COMMENTED a good while back, “all cultures impose corrections upon raw reality, changing it from free-floating objects into units of knowledge.” From there, it is no great leap to consider how various institutions—including family, class, gender, and so forth— influence and control individuals, as we have already seen in chapter 4 on Bowles’ short fiction. But the same process of “imposing corrections” can also occur from the opposite direction as individuals interpret and construct their own reality. From early childhood on, Paul Bowles was acutely aware of his own and others’ marginalization in a variety of contexts, and such concerns are reflected everywhere in his fiction. In his third novel, The Spider's House (1955), Bowles engages in the traditional and peculiarly American project of examining the way human consciousness, even in a highly conservative religious society, constructs and projects a reality that is a mixture of personal and cultural elements. The novel is set during the Moroccan revolution of the mid-1950s and is therefore contemporaneous with the writing of the novel, although the author at the time of writing was living on a tiny island off the southern tip of Ceylon. Bowles had visited Fez—the main setting of the novel and the cultural capital of Morocco—in the early 1930s, and he visited the city many times after he moved to Morocco in 1947. Owing to the preferences of Jane Bowles, the couple settled in the colonial International Zone in Tangier, where Paul later experienced the political fallout and aftermath of the Moroccan struggle for independence. (Since Tangier was part of the International Zone, its independence and unity with the rest of Morocco occurred later, as described in Bowles’ autobiography.) Although Bowles deliberately focuses on an important political upheaval, his keen awareness is often reserved for the “psychology of politics” rather than the strictly historical. I take his phrase to mean the way historical and political events are refracted through the human imagination and become part of our individual stories, as well as the way such individual refractions, consciously or unconsciously, in turn influence politics and history. So, once again we are in the realm of Emerson's and Bowles’ transcendental and existential concern with existence and consciousness, but in a way that is less narrowly focused than in “A Distant Episode” and the first two novels.

FROM 2003 TO 2005 I SERVED as a Fulbright professor in Morocco, where I lived for a year in Tétouan and a year in Tangier. Before leaving the States, a friend and colleague suggested I should read Paul Bowles, whom I had never read. At the time, I had recently retired from a tenured career of teaching literature in the Colorado trustee system of colleges, and twenty-seven years earlier I had emerged from graduate school as an Americanist, although during most of my career I taught world literature or comparative literature. In retrospect it seems astonishing that I could have been so ignorant of an important twentieth-century American literary figure, and of course the blame is mine—but not all of the blame. Bowles had an important cult status in the 1950s and 1960s, but during the time I was in graduate school, his works were generally out of print although he had begun translating the oral tales of Moroccan storytellers from Moghrebi Arabic into English. It was in the 1980s and 1990s that his work began to be republished in “little presses” and a gradual resurgence of his work occurred, so that in 1998 Millicent Dillon's You Are Not I: A Portrait of Paul Bowles begins with the statement, “In the past decade, since Paul Bowles has become an international legend […]” (Dillon, ix). The Bowles resurgence was crowned by the 2002 twovolume Library of America edition of Bowles’ works, edited by Daniel Halpern. But even today Bowles’ works continue to be considered noncanonical in many quarters. The last time I looked, the then-latest 2007 edition of the multivolume Norton Anthology of American Literature— well over ten thousand pages of text and well over one hundred pages of bibliography—made no mention whatsoever of Paul Bowles, not even in the index or summaries of periods. I suppose this might be the basis for a good argument against canons, but part of my argument in the present volume is that Bowles is indeed canonical.

IN CHAPTER 1 WE SAW how Bowles in his late novella, Too Far from Home, contrasts different modes of perception and existence between the American siblings, Tom and Anita, in the Niger River Valley of the South Sahara. Tom, through his art, works to experience a foreign culture without injecting into it his own culturally conditioned awareness, while his sister Anita consciously insists on viewing the foreign culture through the culturally conditioned lens of her New York intelligentsia background in order to reject such experience. And in chapter 3, we saw how Bowles in his early short story, “A Distant Episode,” contrasts two radically different modes of perception and existence in a linguistics professor in the Algerian Sahara, where he undergoes a traumatic experience that transforms him from a narrow, completely culturally conditioned academic who is largely incapable of experiencing existence in the passing moment, to a subhuman being who has lost all cultural bearings and who exists in a meaningless flow of pure existence. In these two works we can see Bowles’ major concern, both early and late, with the way culturally conditioned perception and awareness determine and limit the quality of our existence. This literary theme places Bowles in the antinomian tradition of Emerson and his existential followers in both the United States and Europe, and places him securely “in the American grain.” A traditional way to examine the conflict between existence and consciousness is through the traditional terms of “nature versus culture” or “the individual versus society.” In the present chapter we will examine how various cultural institutions such as religion, class, family, socioeconomic culture, and sexual mores mold individuals to see life in a certain way, and in the process blind them to alternative perspectives that might enable greater individual fulfillment.

By focusing on the ways in which culture forms and distorts individual existence, Bowles is following in the path of Emersonian transcendentalism, which seeks to free individuals from distorted perceptions created by society and culture so that they can experience their own individuality. Emerson often focuses on both the quality of existence—“Life is an Ecstasy” (The Conduct of Life, “Illusions,” 1116)—as well as the matrix of existence—“What we are, that only can we see” (Nature, “Prospects,” 48).

IN SEPTEMBER 2001 I had recently retired from my tenured position in the Colorado Trustee Colleges and had moved to California to take a full-time position as adjunct professor at San Diego State University. During the second week of classes I walked into my eight o’clock Tuesday morning Shakespeare class to find the students watching the TV monitors, which showed a plume of black smoke rising from one of the World Trade Center towers in New York City. I turned off the monitor and proceeded to lead a discussion of an early Shakespeare history play: Part 1 of King Henry VI. At the time, like everyone else except the “perps,” I had no idea what was happening or how it would impact my life, but by the end of the academic year I realized that my full-time adjunct position was in jeopardy because of plummeting California tax revenues, which would cause sharp budget cuts to a university system that was already suffering from years of austerity measures. By the end of the academic year I was receiving not-so-subtle hints that my nontenured position was not secure: when I cruised through the department office, the chairperson would look at me sideways (“Well, you know, you’re the highest paid adjunct …”). On two previous occasions I had served as a Fulbright professor (Ankara 1984–86; Istanbul 1995–96), so I decided to apply for another Fulbright, this time to Morocco, in order to weather the storm for a couple of years and then return to California after the economy returned to normal. I surmised that since Tangier and San Diego had nearly the same latitude and were west coast climates, and since both Southern California and Morocco had ocean, mountains, and desert, it would be a good move. Thus, I set out with my family for Morocco, where I spent two years, from 2003 to 2005, living first in Tétouan and then in Tangier, while teaching at Abdelmalek Essaâdi University. Before leaving the United States, on the advice of a colleague and friend I purchased The Selected Stories by Paul Bowles, whom I had never read before. Thus began a journey that resulted in Paul Bowles: In the American Grain.