Letters, a short story, and memories of Paul Bowles

Click all images of the manuscripts and letters to enlarge...

Paul Bowles (December 30, 1910 - November 18, 1999), was a powerful novelist and musician, who often seemed to be in the right place at the right time. He met with, partied with, and worked with people like W.H. Auden, Leonard Bernstein, Christopher Isherwood, Orson Welles, Virgil Thompson, Gertrude Stein, Jack Kerouac, Truman Capote, William Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg, as well as a few truly masterful Moroccan storytellers, whose work he translated and helped popularize in the west. He was married to Jane Bowles, an excellent writer as well, who Tennessee Williams, John Ashberry and others consider one of the most underrated American writers. It was an odd marriage indeed, but somehow it worked. Jane served as the model for one of the main characters in The Sheltering Sky. At least one movie has been made about their marriage.

Paul Bowles wrote classic 20th century novels like Let It Come Down, The Spider's House, and The Sheltering Sky. He also published fourteen collections of excellent short stories, as well as translations of several native Moroccan authors, most notably numerous novels and collections of the strange and compelling writer Mohammed Mrabet (who people often claimed didn't exist and was merely an alter-ego of Bowles). Bowles also wrote a truly crazy autobiography, Without Stopping, and a masterful travel book: Their Heads Were Green, Their Hand Were Blue.



I was (and am) a big fan. When we started Scape magazine in 1981, I contacted him, and begged for stories, photos, anything. To my shock, he answered with a warm note. And then, to really knock my socks off, a few weeks later, he sent me a story for Scape (to us! Instead of Anteus, or The New Yorker, or The Paris Review!). These are scans of some of the notes from him, as well as the story he sent to Scape.

I blew my one chance to meet him. In 1982, Keelin and I were traveling in Europe, and spent a week in Morocco. In Tangier, I was dog sick with food poisoning (contracted in Granada, Spain) and could not pull my act together to spend any time with him...











--------o0o--------