In Touch: The Letters of Paul Bowles

A collection of correspondence from the author of The Sheltering Sky discusses his attempts to record primitive Moroccan music, nature and the craft of writing, the Beat writers, living in North Africa, and other topics.

Expatriate American novelist, story writer and composer Bowles, who has lived in Morocco for nearly a half century, is a prolific letter writer, as attested to by his expansive, conversational correspondences with the likes of Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gore Vidal and Virgil Thomson. A vast humming tableau of the avant-garde, these 400-plus letters extending from 1928 to 1991, vividly evoke Bowles's frenetic activity in the Paris of the 1930s and '40s, where he met Jean Cocteau, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and painter Pavel Tchelitchew. Peppered with firsthand impressions of Tennessee Williams, Leonard Bernstein, Kurt Schwitters, Aaron Copland and many others, the volume, edited by his biographer, also contains Bowles's sharp lyrical travel observations from Mexico to Ceylon, as well as his reflections on the unconscious processes that guide his writing of fiction. Most revealing are his letters to his wife Jane Bowles during her 16 years of suffering from a neurological disorder that destroyed her eyesight and led to strokes, convulsive seizures and electroshock therapy for depression. Photos.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

``Places have always been more important to me than people,'' Bowles (b. 1910) confesses in one of more than 400 letters collected here by Miller. Spanning more than seven decades, the letters offer no intimate revelations and little celebrity gossip- -but they're full of dazzling descriptions of faraway places. ``At Asni the trees are full of peacocks that scream murder. The road swarms with children who hand us amethysts till we have nowhere to put them.'' With campy wit, Bowles compares the exotic to the homegrown mundane: In a Saharan oasis, the coarse grass ``looks like the stuff they put in Woolworth's windows on the floor of the display cases at Easter time''; in a Berber village, ``the streets and walls look as if someone had poured tons of white cake- icing over them.'' It's not surprising, then, that Bowles-the- writer's letters add up to a book that one would rather quote than discuss. What is surprising is the strength of Bowles-the- composer's devotion to Berber music and Bowles-the-husband's devotion to his wife through long years of illness. Descended from New England Puritans, Bowles read Poe at age six and took off from there. In the 30's, he was close to Gertrude Stein and Aaron Copland. In the 50's, he befriended Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and Gore Vidal. In his pursuit of sexual adventure and his reliance on the drug kif, he was way ahead of the pack--led by Ginsberg and Burroughs--that hit Tangier in the 60's. More recently, Ph.D. candidates have elicited from him pithy statements on writing (on the hermetic absorption needed to complete a novel: ``Don't let the air in; it kills the fetus''). About a quarter of the collection is dead wood--chat about agents, contracts, fees--but read in one sitting, it's a fascinating, tonic history of the counterculture in what was for a time the American century. (Photographs) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

American-born composer and writer Bowles settled in Tangier after traveling extensively in Europe, Africa, and Latin America. These letters, culled from more than 7000 pages of correspondence, record Bowles's activities and friendships from 1928 through 1991. Correspondents include Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thompson, Tennessee Williams, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs, among others. The subjects covered in the letters vary greatly, but many of them deal with one of Bowles's favorite themes--travel. Among the most interesting letters are those dealing with Jane Bowles's breakdown and hospitalization. The work includes biographical notes and an Arabic glossary. Recommended for contemporary literature collections.
- William Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNY
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.