Murad has to remain in Morocco, where he often makes money by offering to show tourists Paul Bowles’ sites. In 1981 the Paris Review stated, “Any American who comes to Tangier bearing more than a casual curiosity about Morocco and a vague concern for music and literature considers a visit with Bowles an absolute must; for some, it even assumes the reverential character of a pilgrimage.” Who is Paul Bowles, and why is he such a big deal to Westerners who visit Tangier? We will look at this figure in order to illuminate Lalami’s commentary on tourism vs. immigration, as well as why Murad might feel irritated that this is all people want to see when they come to Tangier.
Paul Bowles was born in Queens, New York to a strict father and a mother who read him classic American literature. He attended the University of Virginia, but decided he wasn’t going to stay there and left without warning for France on an old Dutch steamer. He worked as a switchboard operator at the Herald Tribune in Paris, then moved back to New York and got a job at Dutton’s Bookshop. In 1938, he married Jane Auer, a lesbian author and playwright (the two were emotionally but not physically intimate, both preferring their own sex). The couple joined the Communist Party but Bowles was ejected so they left it not long after.
Bowles wrote poetry during this time, publishing in a surrealist magazine. He studied composition with Aaron Copland and befriended literary luminaries like Gertrude Stein and her companion Alice B. Toklas. It was Gertrude Stein who suggested Bowles go to Tangier, Morocco: “You don't want to go to Ville Franche. Everybody's there. And St Jean-de-Luz is empty and with an awful climate. The place you should go is Tangier. Alice and I've spent three summers there, and it's fine."
He and Copland traveled to Tangier together in 1931 and stayed in a villa that overlooked the Strait of Gibraltar. He was enraptured by the place, returning the following year and traveling to other parts of Morocco, the Sahara, Tunisia, and Algeria. Of his first impressions of Tangier he said, “dream city... rich in prototypal dream scenes: covered streets like corridors with doors opening into rooms on each side, hidden terraces high above the sea, streets consisting only of steps, dark impasses, small squares built on sloping terrain so they looked like ballet sets designed in false perspective, with alleys leading off in several directions; as well as the classical dream equipment of tunnels, ramparts, ruins, dungeons, and cliffs... a doll’s metropolis.”
In 1947, Bowles and his wife established a permanent residence in Tangier after Bowles received an advance for a novel. It was there that he wrote his most famous novel, The Sheltering Sky (1949), which was set in French North Africa.
Bowles wrote numerous short stories in his later life, but also became known for his translations of Moroccan oral storytellers (decades earlier he’d been given a Rockefeller grant to record Moroccan folk music). The Guardian states that “Some western critics accused Bowles of writing these tales himself, an accusation he always strongly denied. One or two of these storytellers, with an exaggerated sense of the sales potential of their books, would later allege that Bowles was pocketing their royalties. In fact, Bowles was always a soft touch when it came to his close Moroccan male friends - although less so to others on occasion.”
Bowles died on November 18, 1999. Of his two loves, music and prose, he said in an interview, “Music and prose: For one thing I had always felt extremely circumscribed in music. It seemed to me there were a great many things I wanted to say that were too precise to express in musical terms. Writing music was not enough of a cathartic. Nor, perhaps, would writing words be if I should do it exclusively. The two together work very well. As to the influence, I think there is a considerable one. I am extremely conscious of the sound of the word, the phrase and the sentence.”
