Using every man after his desert
Francis King
TOO FAR FROM HOME by Paul Bowles Peter Owen, £13.50, pp. 93 The publishers describe this book as `Paul Bowles's first novel for 25 years'. But large print, wide margins and some charm- ing illustrations by Marguerite McBey, American widow of that remarkable artist James McBey, cannot conceal the fact that, at some 15,000 words, it is no more a novel than a handkerchief is a bedsheet. It would have been more honest to the reader and more helpful to the author to have called a work so exiguous a novella or even a long short story.
It was Gertrude Stein who advised Bowles and his no less talented wife Jane to go to live in Tangier. As so often, Stein's advice was wrong. In the close, kif-laden atmosphere of Sodome-sur-mer, the Bowles's marriage and Jane's psyche both distintegrated, and a potentially major novelist remained a minor one.
If Bowles had quit Tangier for Los Angeles or New York or Paris or London — or, indeed, for anywhere else — after he had produced his one indisputable master- piece, The Sheltering Sky, his talent might well have expanded and deepened. As it was, with the exception of one novel, a handful of short stories and some collabo- rations with Arab protégés, he went on rewriting that one novel over and over again. The present 'novel' is little more than a tenuous variation on it. But though tenuous, it must be admitted that it has, like some tropical liana, a surprising tough- ness and strength.
Once again, as in The Sheltering Sky, a young American couple — in this case siblings, such as Paul and Jane Bowles in effect eventually became to each other quit New York for the African desert. The man, Tom, an artist, absorbed in painting whatever is in front of his eyes just as throughout his life Bowles has been absorbed in describing whatever is in front of his eyes — is able to objectify a strange world and to keep it at a distance.
In contrast, idle, bewildered and discon- tented — she has recently gone through a divorce — Anita is unable to get used to what she calls, in a letter to New York, 'this crazy life here'. The huge, rambling house which the couple have rented in a town in the Niger Valley lacks both light and water. Knowing no Arabic and, despite having majored in the subject, deficient in French, she has difficulty in communicating with the shadowy people, some servants, some hangers-on, who seem to regard the house as belonging as much to them as to its ten- ants. At first she does not know which is worse, daytime, when it is insufferably hot, or night-time, increasingly troubled by the recurrence of a horrendous dream.
This dream, Anita convinces herself, is willed into her sleeping mind by a strong, stern, taciturn Arab, said to be a chieftain, who is one of those who frequent the house. This Arab, she is certain, glides silently into her room each pitch-dark night and, standing motionless, takes over her unconscious. Oddly, she never thinks of the expedient of keeping a lamp constantly lit beside her.
With brilliant economy, Bowles evokes both the stifling claustrophobia of life with- in the house and the agoraphobia of the glaring, limitless spaces around it. Anita, who has little appreciation for art, is indifferent to the paintings which Tom, impervious to heat and discomfort, pro- duces in rapid succession. He, in turn, is unsympathetic to her inability to come to terms with a world so unlike anything she has ever encountered before.
Two crude young American tourists, rid- ing a motor-bike, all but colide with Anita and injure the Arab chieftain in a narrow street of the town; and, in a spasm of hatred, she then puts a curse on them, not expecting it to be fulfilled. The youths die in horrible circumstances, having crashed on their bike in the desert and been seri- ously injured. She might have rescued them, but deliberately does not do so. After such behaviour, of which she would have been totally incapable at home, she decides to quit Africa for America.
Anita is the last of a succession of spiri- tual and geographical wanderers created by Bowles. Within these wanderers, there is an emptiness. When they are confronted by the even vaster and drier and more glaring emptiness of the desert, their geographical displacement becomes a spiritual one. They must then either escape — as Anita does — or surrender themselves completely to self-annihilation.
It is useless to speculate what Bowles might have written had he not holed up for a virtual lifetime in Tangier. All one can say is that this brief recapitulation of a by now familiar theme, though certainly arresting, makes one wish that long since, like his Tom and Anita, he had headed for somewhere else.
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