5. Small Figures in Large Landscapes

Paul Bowles’s first view of North Africa was enough to tell him that he had landed in his landscape of desire. Only twenty-one years old and still a musician rather than a writer, he had found his spiritual home:

Straightway I felt a great excitement. Always without formulating the concept, I had based my sense of being in the world partly on an unreasoned conviction that certain areas of the earth’s surface contained more magic than others. Had anyone asked me what I meant by magic, I should probably have defined the word by calling it a secret connection between the world of nature and the consciousness of man, a hidden but direct passage which bypassed the mind. (The operative word here is “direct,” because in this case it was equivalent to “visceral.”) Like any Romantic, I had always been vaguely certain that sometime during my life I should come into a magic place which in disclosing its secrets would give me wisdom and ecstasy—perhaps even death. And now, as I stood in the wind looking at the mountains ahead, I felt the stirring of the engine within, and it was as if I were drawing close to the solution of an as-yet-unposed problem.

(Without Stopping, hereafter WS, 125)

This is one of the many passages in Bowles’s writings where he reveals a passion for North Africa and, most of all, for the Sahara, at least equal to Abbey’s for his desert and Broyles’s and Bowden’s for theirs. It’s all the more odd that Bowles found his way there by chance concatenations, especially the suggestion of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas that he go to Africa as an alternative to the trite American apprenticeship in France. Bowles later declared, “Like my fifteen-year-old counterparts all over the world, I was seduced by Lafcadio’s acte gratuite” (WS 67). While it seems unlikely that fifteen-year-olds all over the world were reading André Gide’s novel Les Caves du Vatican, whose protagonist’s principal ethos is to act on whim, in one incident pushing a man out of a train to his death simply because the thought occurs to him, the tendency is consistent with Bowles, who let gratuitous suggestions lead him to momentous choices.

Eventually, the Sahara became not only Bowles’s muse but also part of his being in the world. He discovered in it the nothing that is: “I realized that I loved all those things: the sun, the silence, the nothingness” (Conversations with Paul Bowles, hereafter C, 225). When very young, Bowles adopted the “practice of pretending not to exist” (WS 131), but this did not work well in Morocco; a blond westerner could hardly escape notice. Still, the desert’s appeal was in its negation of ego. As Bowles commented to an interviewer, “I don’t see myself, really, I have no ego” (C 115). This is why he didn’t engage in the kind of literary gamesmanship for which, say, Norman Mailer is known: “To take part in such games, you have to believe in the existence of your personality in a way that I don’t” (C 119). This skepticism about the value of salient selfhood very much carries over to his fiction: “For years critics have objected to the facelessness of my fictional people, although that is deliberate on my part. And at the time I was writing [. . .] I did not have reactions to people as people, but only as forces to propel me, as a glider uses air currents” (In Touch: The Letters of Paul Bowles, hereafter L, 439). The gratuitous act substitutes for personal motivation. More importantly, it is the landscape, not the people, that is central; the usual foreground and background of fiction switch off: “Places have always been more important to me than people. That is to say, people give the landscape scale; the landscape is not a background to them” (L 440). Thus in The Sheltering Sky the apparent protagonist, Port Moresby, dies halfway through. The Sheltering Sky is not quite like...