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The Tangier that once greeted Bowles in 1931, promising “wisdom and ecstasy,” bears little resemblance to the Tangier of the 1970s. The frenetic medina, with its souks, its endless array of tourist boutiques, its perennial hawkers and hustlers is still there, of course, though fifty years ago it had already been dwarfed by the European city and its monuments to colonialism: the imperious French Consulate, the Café de Paris, luxury hotels in the grand style (the Minzah, the Velasquez, the Villa de France), the now forlornly abandoned Teatro Cervantes, and the English church with its cemetery filled with the remains of knight commanders, baronets, and the prodigal sons of former empires. The days of Tangier as the wide-open international city of intrigue are gone forever. Today it is simply one city of a third-world country in flux, slowly but steadily coming to grips with the twentieth century.

For those of a romantic bent, however, the power of Tangier to evoke images of the inscrutable East remains potent, despite the ravages of modernity. It still seems an appropriate place to find Paul Bowles. 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. In no way, however, does Bowles see himself as an object of special interest. Indeed, such an attitude strikes him as being amusingly naive, if not downright silly.

He lives in a three-room apartment in a quiet residential section of Tangier. His flat, located in a fifties-futuristic building in sight of the American consulate, is comfortably unimposing, though it does testify to his days as a world traveler: souvenirs from Asia, Mexico, black Africa; a bookcase lined with personally inscribed volumes by Burroughs, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Vidal; an entryway in which vintage trunks and suitcases are stacked shoulder high, as if a voyage of indefinite length were perpetually in the offing.

Our first meeting took place in the summer of 1976. I arrived at his door in the early afternoon. I found him newly awakened, his thick white hair tousled and pale blue eyes slightly bleary; he was obviously surprised that anyone would come to call at that hour of the day. As he finished his breakfast and lighted up his first cigarette, his thin, somewhat wiry frame relaxed noticeably. He became increasingly jovial.

Evidently, however, my timing hadn’t been particularly good. The tape recorder had just begun to roll when a series of visitors announced themselves with persistent rings of the doorbell: his chauffeur, his maid, a woman friend from New York, an American boy who’d taken the apartment downstairs, and, eventually, Mohammed Mrabet. Handsome in a rugged and brooding way, Mrabet asked me to bring him, on my return to Tangier, a pistol with nine chambers as there were apparently nine people upon whose elimination he was intent at that time.

As it turned out, I had reason to be grateful for his and the other interruptions. They enabled me to return and talk at length with Bowles that evening, the next day, and two more times over the following year and a half.

 

INTERVIEWER

For many people, the mention of your name evokes romantic images of the artist’s life in exotic, faraway places. Do you see yourself as a kind of consummate expatriate?

            PAUL BOWLES

I’m afraid not. I don’t see myself as a consummate anything. I don’t see myself, really, I have no ego. I didn’t find the United States particularly interesting and once I found places that were more interesting I chose to live in them, which I think makes sense.

INTERVIEWER

Was this decision to leave the United States an early one?

BOWLES

I made it at seventeen, so I guess you’d say it was an early decision. Some people absorb things more quickly than others, and I think I had a fairly good idea of what life would be like for me in the States, and I didn’t want it.

INTERVIEWER

What would it have been like?

BOWLES

Boring. There was nothing I wanted there, and once I’d moved away I saw that all I needed from the States was money. I went back there for that. I’ve never yet gone there without the definite guarantee of making money. Just going for the pleasure of it, I’ve never done.

 INTERVIEWER

Since your contact with foreign places has so obviously nurtured your writing, perhaps you would never have been a writer if you had stayed in the States.

 BOWLES

Quite possibly not. I might have gone on as a composer. I cut the composing cord in 1947, when I moved here, although, as I say, I went back several times to write scores for Broadway.

 INTERVIEWER

Did you cut the composing cord because writing and music were getting in each other’s way?

 BOWLES

No, not at all. You do them with separate parts of the brain, I think. And you derive different kinds of pleasure from them. It’s like saying, “Is it more fun to drink a glass of water when you’re thirsty or eat a good meal when you’re hungry?” I gave up composing professionally simply because I wanted to leave New York. I wanted to get out of the States.

 INTERVIEWER

Did giving up an entire career because you disliked life in America leave you feeling hostile toward the place?

 BOWLES

No, no. But when you say “America” to me, all I think of is New York City where I was born and brought up. I know that New York isn’t America; still, my image of America is New York. But there’s no hostility. I just think it’s a great shame, what has happened there. I don’t think it will ever be put right; but then again, I never expect anything to be put right. Nothing ever is. Things go on and become other things. The whole character of the country has changed beyond recognition since my childhood. One always thinks everything’s got worse—and in most respects it has—but that’s meaningless. What does one mean when one says that things are getting worse? It’s becoming more like the future, that’s all. It’s just moving ahead. The future will be infinitely “worse” than the present; and in that future, the future will be immeasurably “worse” than the future that we can see. Naturally.

 INTERVIEWER

You’re a pessimist.

 BOWLES

Well, look for yourself. You don’t have to be a pessimist to see it. There’s always the chance of a universal holocaust in which a few billion people will be burned. I don’t hope for that, but it’s what I see as a probability.

 INTERVIEWER

Can’t one also hope for things like a cure for cancer, an effective ban on nuclear arms, an upsurge of concern for the environment, and a deeper consciousness of being?

 BOWLES

You can hope for anything, of course. I expect enormous things to happen in the future, but I don’t think they’ll be things which people born in my generation will think are great and wonderful. Perhaps people born in 1975 will think otherwise. I mean, people born in 1950 think television is great.

 INTERVIEWER

Because American technology has already contributed so much to making what you regard as an inevitably undesirable future, I guess it’s understandable that living outside your indigenous culture became almost a compulsion with you.

 BOWLES

Not almost; it was a real compulsion. Even as a small child, I was always eager to get away. I remember when I was six years old, I was sent off to spend two weeks with someone—I don’t know who it was or why I was sent—and I begged to stay longer. I didn’t want to go home. Again, when I was nine and my father had pneumonia, I was sent off for a month or two and I kept writing letters asking, “Please, let me stay longer.” I didn’t want to see my parents again. I didn’t want to go back into all that.