You Are Not I: A Portrait of Paul Bowles (review)

You Are Not I: A Portrait of Paul Bowles by Millicent Dillon University of California Press, 1998, 340 pp., $27.50 Paul Bowles occupies a unique place as an expatriot artist, partly because of the exoticism of his life and subject matter and partly because he composed both music and literature. Eighty-eight this year, he is internationaUy famous as an author through his novels, collections of short stories and nonfiction, and he continues to be weU regarded as a composer, too. MiUicent DiUon first met Bowles in March of 1977, when she went to Tangier to gather information about his deceased wife, the writer Jane Bowles. The resulting biography, A Little Original Sin: The Life and Work ofJane Bowles, was published in 1981. Dillon continued to correspond with Bowles and in 1992 went again to Tangier to begin work on You Are Not I (a title borrowed from one of his stories). The fact that fans, journalists and film crews had long since beaten a path to Bowles' door never completely dispelled the aura of secrecy around him, but Dillon's previous fifteen-year acquaintance with the author gave her a special entrée. In this portrait, she combines her conversations with Bowles with a perceptive narrative, and the result is an extremely aUve and readable book. A fascinating story it is. Born in 1910 on Long Island, Bowles evidenced a gift for composing and writing at an early age. In 1929 he abruptly left the United States for Europe without completing his freshman year at the University ofVirginia. His departure marked the beginning of his life as an emigré, although he did return to the U.S. for short interludes . On the advice of Gertrude Stein, he traveled to Morocco for a time to study with Aaron Copland, and sixteen years later he returned to make Tangier his permanent home. He met Jane Auer in 1937, and when they married in 1938 they forged one of literature's most unusual alliances. With characteristic candor, Ms. DUlon writes that later in the same year the Bowleses began to "live separate sexual lives." Paul's work with Jane on the manuscript that became her novel Two Serious Ladies (pubUshed in 1943) inspired him to begin writing his own fiction again, and he embarked on the work that has now secured his reputation as a styUst and explorer of previously uncharted literary waters. Although Jane suffered a stroke in 1957 from which she never recovered physicaUy or mentally , Paul remained devoted to her until her death in 1973. After Jane's death, Paul temporarily stopped writing (he had finished his autobiography, Without Stopping, during her final illness). At one point he commented that after Jane was gone, he had "no one to write for" What comes through about his present life—in which physical discomfort , fatigue, and the demands of others are constants—is the portrait of a patient and courteous, if rather weary gentleman, unflamboyant yet charismatic. But finaUy, it's DUlon's ability to show us the workings of the younger, more fiery mind that created those intense and fabulous fictions that makes reading You Are Not I an adventure. (EK) 170 · The Missouri Review ...