An American in Morocco
Francis King
The Spider's House Paul Bowles (Peter Owen £10.95) The cruellest misfortune that can befall a writer is to produce a first book so outstanding that no other book can surpass it. This has been the fate of the American novelist and composer Paul Bowles, whose The Sheltering Sky won him world-wide acclaim. With extraordinary confidence and concentration, that work handled themes that not merely were to become increasingly fashionable in the ensuing decades but were to continue to obsess its author. In it, an American couple, Kit and Port Moresby, are confronted by the realisation of their existential solitude, barrenness and emptiness when they jour- ney out to confront the solitude, barren- ness and emptiness of the Sahara. In Bowles's subsequent three novels, Let It Come Down (about an American clerk whose character mildews and rots on exposure to criminality and vice in Tan- gier), Up Above the World (about an American couple who suffer a similar moral disintegration as they travel through an unnamed South American banana re- public), and The Spider's Web, first pub- lished in 1955 and now reissued in this country, world-weary, self-questioning sophisticates once again find that to ven- ture abroad is to venture outside the selves defined by the society in which they have been bred, once again see their Christian, humanistic or materialistic values dissolve as they clutch at them in panic, and once again succumb to the angels or the demons (they can never decide which) of the seductive, dangerous places of their exile.
In The Spider's Web, four expatriates come together in Fez at the moment when resistance to French rule is about to boil over; but of these four — an English millionaire painter, an English M.G. own- er, an American writer, a rootless Amer- ican woman — only the last two are of importance in the narrative. The American writer, with whom Bowles clearly identifies himself, has sympathy neither for the increasingly brutal French colonists nor for the opportunistic Istiqlal or resistance movement. Both, as he sees it, pose an equal threat to an ancient Muslim way of life. In contrast, the elegant, frivolous American woman believes in modernisa- tion and progress — it is all very well, she says in effect, for foreigners to look out of the windows of their hotels or hired cars and to exclaim 'Oh, isn't it all ravishing!', but they should themselves try to live in hovels, with no running water, sewage or electricity and nothing but witchcraft or the most primitive medicine to cure their ills. That argument has, of course, gone on for a long time; and there are passages when it seems to go on for too long a time here, in a book of more than 400 pages.
The lives of the two Americans become entangled, at the moment when Fez seems about to be engulfed in bloodshed, with that of an illiterate 15-year-old Arab boy, an apprentice potter, who believes that he has inherited the magic gift, also possessed by novelists in general and by the Amer ican novelist in particular, of often being able to know the secret feelings and thoughts of others. Too late this boy realises that he and the American are fellows in their desire to preserve all ancient way of life, based first on an acceptance of fate and then on an obedi- ence to ritual. This ancient way of life is described by the American as a culture of 'and then', in contrast to a culture of 'because', since it denies that any one thing results from another and, instead, insists that every fact of existence is isolated from every other fact, with no inexorable chain of cause and effect such as that in which the West believes.
The things that are finest in this novel are, firstly, its exquisitely poetic evocations of the mediaeval city of Fez, with its labyrinthine alleys, its teeming souks and its secret courtyards and gardens — the American sees it as a symbol of everything in the world that is subject to change and even to extinction — and then the un- canny skill with which Bowles, most sophisticated of Americans, enters into the narrow crevices of his 15-year-old Arab's soul.
As so often in his writing, Bowles makes use of the machinery of the thriller to keep his narrative moving; but the machinery, it must be admitted, is pretty ramshackle — how much more effectively it would purr along in the hands of a Graham Greene or a Norman Lewis. The French, whether hoteliers, taxi-drivers or policemen, all present the same blank, pink faces; and although the Arab resistance leader, who in the end is cynically prepared to sacrifice the boy to his own safety, emerges more clearly, the various plots and counterplots of which, spider-like, he is both creator and centre differ from a spider's web — of spider's house, as the title has it — in that they lack any pattern, merely hanging here and there haphazard, like so many frag- ments of gossamer. The book, in its final and most moving section, ends in betrayal. The boy wishes to attach himself to the American, having at last realised that they are brothers, despite all differences of race, creed and educa- tion; but the American, having now be- come the lover of the American woman, heedlessly rejects him. As so often In Bowles's work, a woman comes between two men.
The Sheltering Sky suggested that here, potentially, was a great American writer. This book suggests merely that here is .a good American writer. In settling al Morocco, Bowles certainly found his sub- ject; but in finding his subject, as distinct from a subject, he doomed himself to a constant retreading of the same narrow plot, instead of the exploration of pre- viously untrodden jungle.
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