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16 If Paul Bowles said that he had never known anyone who dared throw himself into Moroccan life as fast as Alfred Chester, Jane Bowles added that Alfred had gotten more from Morocco than anyone she’d ever known. And, indeed, from the first day, he not only started picking up the language, with its cognate relationship to his childhood Hebrew that he learned in school, but his involvement with Dris and Dris’s family also gave him entrée into Moroccan life. His letters to me and other friends reveal a Morocco as seen from the inside, as well as his often stormy, mostly blissful, relationship with Dris. They’re full of his transatlantic battles with his family, agents, and publishers (sometimes resulting in lawsuits), plus reports of his complex negotiations with Paul and Jane Bowles and, woven throughout, portraits of the expatriate, literary, and beatnik colony, both in the Tangier Medina, where the hippies lived, and on The Mountain, the fashionable suburb where snobbish, titled Englishmen like Cecil Beaton and The Honorable David Herbert had luxurious homes. At that time, the richest of all the foreign colony, 144 145 though, was not a Mountain resident but the heiress Barbara Hutton, who grandly claimed to live in the Casbah, the ancient walled fortress dominating the town, when actually her house, made up of a group of houses joined into one, was just below the Casbah, in the lowlier Medina. Alfred’s epistolary style was neither that of his fiction nor his essays, but a livelier, more informal amalgam that went beyond both. The charm of these letters, and what makes them his most important writing, I believe, is that the voice of his entire being is expressing itself, the demanding, impossible, brilliant, and entertaining Alfred Chester, the voice he was always seeking in his prose, all the while lamenting the fragmentation of his “I.” He was just being himself. After a few days with Paul Bowles in Asilah, Alfred had escaped his clutches, he wrote me, by renting a house nearby, also on the sea wall but simple and unfurnished. Dris soon moved in, bringing his bed with him. Expected to rise at dawn to go out with his fishing boat, Dris often slept late and was fined by the Spanish company that owned the fleet. His family depended on his earnings, and Alfred had to make up for the loss. Dris finally gave up his job after the couple moved to Tangier. Although Alfred had hoped to escape the New York literary scene by coming to Morocco, even there he had to eat, and if he could basically live on one hundred dollars a month, there were all kinds of extra expenses, and the windfall of the six hundred dollars from the New York landlord did not last long. Luckily, Richard Kluger, the editor of Book Week, a supplement of the New York Herald Tribune, offered him one hundred dollars for a monthly column. And he continued to write reviews, though less frequently than before. He reviewed Candy by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg, originally published in the porn series, The Traveler’s Companion, followed by an enthusiastic piece on In Cold Blood by his early idol, Truman Capote, for Book Week, and most notably, a long study of Jean Genet for Commentary. A vivid picture of him at work on the Genet essay (during the holy month of Ramadan) is given in his letters to me: Jan. 20, 1964 . . . My Genet essay tears everything down, the whole of western civilization. . . . [It] says that when Christ died in the 19th Century, Europe woke from a sweet dream with a bloody knife in its hand. It couldn’t face its guilt, 2000 years of godless murder. . . . “Freud comes briefly to Europe’s rescue with his brilliant diversion . . . making it possible for a man to ignore history in favor of his childhood. . . . What a relief to be guilty of nothing worse than coveting mama. (And what a perfect totalitarian weapon psychoanalysis potentially, if not actually, is. It reduces all opposition to expressions of personal and misdirected hostility. It makes all protest infantile.).” On and on goes my inexorable logic, until the coup: “Hitler had the genius to turn Christianity inside out, to make that of which the Christians were most guilty into the ideals of a new order.” The fascinating thing about this and the following quotes from the piece he was writing is that all this material was...

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