Paul Frederic Bowles ( / b oʊ l z / ; December 30, 1910 – November 18, 1999) was an American composer, author, and translator. He became connected with the city of Tangier in Morocco, where he moved in 1947 and lived for 52 years until his death.
After growing up in a middle-class family in New York City, where he showed talent for music and writing, Bowles studied at the University of Virginia. In the 1930s, he traveled to Paris several times and studied music with Aaron Copland. In New York, he wrote music for plays and other works. His first novel, The Sheltering Sky (1949), became widely praised. The story is set in French North Africa, a place Bowles had visited in 1931.
In 1947, Bowles moved to Tangier, which was then part of the Tangier International Zone. His wife, Jane Bowles, joined him there in 1948. Except for winters spent in Ceylon during the early 1950s, Tangier was Bowles’s home for the rest of his life. He became well known as a representative of American expatriates living in the city.
Life
Paul Bowles was born in Jamaica, Queens, New York City, as the only child of Rena (née Winnewisser) and Claude Dietz Bowles, a dentist. His childhood was comfortable, but his father was strict and controlling, not allowing any play or entertainment. His father was feared by both his son and wife. According to family stories, Claude once tried to harm his newborn son by leaving him outside during a snowstorm. Though this may not be true, Bowles believed it and felt it described his relationship with his father. His mother provided warmth by reading books by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe to him. Bowles later said that reading Poe inspired his own writing, including stories like "The Delicate Prey," "A Distant Episode," and "Pages from Cold Point."
Bowles could read at age 3 and wrote stories by age 4. He soon created surrealistic poetry and music. In 1922, at age 11, he bought his first poetry book, Arthur Waley’s A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems. At 17, his poem "Spire Song" was published in transition, a Paris-based literary journal that featured writers like Djuna Barnes, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. Bowles also had an interest in music, which began when his father bought a phonograph and classical records. His father forbade jazz records, but Bowles studied piano, musical theory, and singing. At 15, he attended a performance of Stravinsky’s The Firebird at Carnegie Hall, which inspired him to continue composing music. Bowles attended Jamaica High School in Queens, NY.
In 1928, Bowles entered the University of Virginia, where he studied works like T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, listened to music by Prokofiev, Duke Ellington, and others, and explored blues and Gregorian chant. In April 1929, he left the university without telling his parents and traveled to Paris with no plan to return. He worked for the Paris Herald Tribune and became friends with the Romanian poet Tristan Tzara. Later, he returned to New York and worked at Duttons Bookshop, where he began writing a book of fiction titled Without Stopping.
At his parents’ request, Bowles returned to the University of Virginia but left after one semester to go back to Paris with Aaron Copland, a composer he had studied with in New York. Copland was both a mentor and a romantic partner to Bowles, who later said Copland was "other than Jane the most important person in my life." They remained friends for life.
In 1930, Bowles began writing his first musical piece, the Sonata for Oboe and Clarinet, which he completed in 1931. It premiered in New York but was poorly received by critics. Earlier, in Berlin, Bowles had adapted some music by Kurt Schwitters for the piano. In Paris, Bowles joined Gertrude Stein’s circle of artists and writers. Stein encouraged him to visit Tangier, Morocco, with Copland in 1931. Bowles later lived in Morocco full-time, and his experiences there inspired many of his short stories. He also traveled to Berlin, where he met writers Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood. Isherwood named a character in his novel after Bowles. Bowles later returned to North Africa, visiting parts of Morocco, the Sahara, Algeria, and Tunisia.
In 1937, Bowles returned to New York, where he gained recognition as a composer, working with Orson Welles, Tennessee Williams, and others on stage productions and orchestral music. In 1938, he married Jane Auer, an author and playwright. Their marriage was unconventional, as they reportedly had relationships with people of the same sex but remained close. They joined the Communist Party of the USA but left after Bowles was removed from the party.
Bowles was often included in anthologies as a gay writer, though he believed such labels were not meaningful. After a short time in France, the couple became well-known in New York during the 1940s. They briefly lived at February House, a writers’ residence, but had conflicts with other residents. Bowles worked as a music critic for the New York Herald Tribune and composed a zarzuela titled The Wind Remains, based on a poem by Federico García Lorca. His translation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s play Huis Clos (No Exit) won a Drama Critic’s Award in 1943.
In 1945, Bowles returned to writing fiction, starting with short stories like "A Distant Episode." His wife, Jane, influenced him to write novels after she published her first book, Two Serious Ladies (1943). In 1947, Bowles signed a contract with Doubleday to write a novel and moved permanently to Tangier with the advance money. Jane joined him there the next year. Bowles said, "I was a composer for as long as I’ve been a writer. I came here because I wanted to write a novel. I had a commission to do it. I was sick of writing music for other people."
Bowles traveled alone into the Algerian Sahara to work on his novel. He later said, "I wrote in bed in hotels in the desert." He drew inspiration from his own life, noting that "Whatever one writes is in a sense autobiographical, of course. Not factually so, but poetically so." He titled his novel The Sheltering Sky, after a song he had heard as a child. It was first published in England in 1949 after Doubleday rejected the manuscript. A first American edition appeared the following month. The story follows three Americans—Port, his wife Kit, and their friend Tunner—as they travel through the Algerian desert. A TIME magazine reviewer noted that the fates of the two main characters "seem appropriate but by no means tragic," while praising Bowles’s portrayal of minor characters like Arab pimps, French officers, and others.
Bowles and Tangier
Paul Bowles lived in Tangier, Morocco, for 52 years, from 1947 until his death. He became well known as the most famous American living in the city during that time. He first visited Tangier in 1931 with the musician Aaron Copland. At that time, Tangier was an international zone managed by a group of foreign countries, including the United States, France, and Spain. The city had a population made up of many different ethnic groups, such as Berber, Arab, Spanish, and French people, and it was an important trading port in the Mediterranean Sea.
When Bowles returned to live in Tangier permanently in 1947, the international zone was still in place. In 1955, unrest began as Moroccan people protested against French rule. Morocco gained independence in 1956, which ended the international zone status in Tangier. After that, the city became part of the Kingdom of Morocco.
Music
Paul Bowles first studied music with Aaron Copland. In the fall of 1931, after being introduced by Copland, he began studying with Virgil Thomson.
Bowles initially considered himself a poet. He had published some poems while briefly attending the University of Virginia in a magazine called transition. However, the quality of his poetry was not well received by intellectuals he later met in Paris, including Gertrude Stein. She gave him the nickname "the manufactured savage" and encouraged him to stop writing poetry.
At the same time, Bowles's music, which showed a talent for playing the piano in a style similar to French composer Maurice Ravel, pleased both Copland and Thomson. In his book Copland On Music (Doubleday & Company, New York, 1960), Copland wrote:
"Some people believe Bowles is only a casual musician. Bowles himself often acts as if he is not a professional, even about his own music.
His music comes from a unique personality. It is full of charm and creative melodies, sometimes made in a natural way without formal training.
I personally prefer someone like Bowles, who is not formally trained, over someone who is highly trained in music school."
Copland always admired Bowles's music. Later in life, he said, "Paul Bowles's music is always fresh; I’ve never known him to write a dull piece."
However, Bowles's early musical talent did not match the level of training he later lacked. Copland tried to teach him music theory in New York but found Bowles difficult to teach. In Paris, Bowles asked Nadia Boulanger for lessons, and Thomson recommended him to Paul Dukas. In the end, Bowles did not study with either.
Besides occasional advice from Vittorio Rieti, Bowles never received formal music lessons, even though Copland and Thomson tried to convince him otherwise. However, with help from Thomson, Bowles found success in New York as a producer of music for plays. He worked with many famous people, including George Balanchine, Joseph Losey, Leonard Bernstein, Elia Kazan, Arthur Koestler, José Ferrer, Salvador Dalí, Orson Welles, William Saroyan, and Tennessee Williams.
During World War II, Bowles worked as a reviewer for the New York Herald Tribune, where Thomson was the music critic. Thomson said Bowles was well-suited for the job because he wrote clearly and had good judgment.
After Thomson retired from his critic job in 1954, he said he wished Bowles had taken over the position. Bowles replied, "I don’t think I could have handled it, any more than I could have followed a career in composition. I lacked the musical training that [Virgil] and Aaron had."
After the war, Bowles moved to Tangier, Morocco, where he continued his musical and literary work. Over time, he stopped focusing on music and became a well-known novelist, as Virgil Thomson described him.
Bowles called Tangier "a place where it is still hard to find a piano in tune." He explained his shift to writing:
"Little by little, I became aware of atmospheres that I could only describe through writing. I could not fully express my emotions through music. My music was joyful as I was myself. The more serious, nighttime side of my personality, I managed to express through language."
With the success of his book The Sheltering Sky, Bowles took his first step toward independence. Over time, his earlier musical work was overshadowed by his reputation as a writer.
Only in the decade before his death did interest in his music from the 1930s and 1940s grow again. This revival may have reached its peak in May 1994 at the Théâtre du Rond-Point in Paris, where a live concert featured his original songs and piano pieces, along with musical tributes by Virgil Thomson, Leonard Bernstein, and Phillip Ramey. At the time, 83-year-old Bowles attended the event.
This renewed interest in Bowles’s music led to several recordings. In 2016, the Invencia Piano Duo (Andrey Kasparov and Oksana Lutsyshyn), working with Naxos Records, released two CDs of Bowles’s complete piano works.
The first CD includes pieces inspired by Latin American themes, reflecting Bowles’s interest in the culture and his knowledge of Spanish. The second CD ends with arrangements of Blue Mountain Ballads (1946), set for piano duet by Andrey Kasparov, and three other pieces arranged for two pianos by Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale. These arrangements were discovered in the Gold and Fizdale Collection at The Juilliard School. Kasparov reconstructed the original manuscripts, allowing these duets to be recorded for the first time.
Bowles was a pioneer in North African ethnomusicology, recording traditional Moroccan music for the US Library of Congress from 1959 to 1961. In five months, he documented 250 examples of Moroccan music, including dance music, secular songs, music for Ramadan and celebrations, and music for rituals. Bowles believed modern culture would change traditional music, so he wanted to preserve it.
Bowles once said about the political role of traditional music:
"Musicians and singers have taken the place of chroniclers and poets. Even during the recent struggle for independence and the creation of the current government, each stage of the fight was celebrated in song."
The complete collection of Bowles’s field recordings is called The Paul Bowles Collection and is stored in the US Library of Congress (Reference No. 72-750123). It includes 97 two-track 7-inch reel-to-reel tapes (about 60 hours of music), one box of manuscripts, 18 photographs, a map, and a two-LP recording called Music of Morocco (AFS L63-64).
Translating other authors
In the 1960s, Bowles started translating and collecting stories from the oral tradition of native Moroccan storytellers. His most important collaborators included Mohammed Mrabet, Driss Ben Hamed Charhadi (Larbi Layachi), Mohamed Choukri, Abdeslam Boulaich, and Ahmed Yacoubi.
He also translated writers whose original work was written in Spanish, Portuguese, and French: Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Jorge Luis Borges, Jean-Paul Sartre, Isabelle Eberhardt, Roger Frison-Roche, André Pieyre de Mandiargues, Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Giorgio de Chirico, Si Lakhdar, E. Laoust, Ramon Beteta, Gabino Chan, Bertrand Flornoy, Jean Ferry, Denise Moran, Paul Colinet, Paul Magritte, Popul Buj, Francis Ponge, Bluet d'Acheres, and Ramón Sender.
Achievement and legacy
Paul Bowles is recognized as one of the artists who influenced 20th-century literature and music. In his "Introduction" to Bowles's Collected Stories (1979), Gore Vidal described the short stories as "among the best ever written by an American," stating: "the floor to this unstable society we have built cannot support our weight much longer. It was Bowles's talent to reveal the dangers hidden beneath that floor, as fragile, in its way, as the sky that protects us from an endless, vast world."
Critics have noted that his music contrasts with his fiction, describing it as "full of light" compared to the "dark" themes in his stories, "as if the composer were a completely different person from the writer." In the early 1930s, Bowles studied composition (sometimes) with Aaron Copland; his music from this time "resembles the styles of Satie and Poulenc." Returning to New York in the mid-1930s, Bowles became a leading composer of American theater music, creating works for William Saroyan, Tennessee Williams, and others. His music "showed great skill and creativity in capturing the mood, emotion, and atmosphere of each play he worked on." Bowles explained that such incidental music allowed him to create "music without dramatic peaks, hypnotic in the true sense of the word, because it makes an impact without the audience noticing it." At the same time, he continued writing concert music, incorporating melodic, rhythmic, and other stylistic elements from African, Mexican, and Central American music.
In 1991, Bowles received the annual Rea Award for the Short Story. The jury stated: "Paul Bowles is a storyteller of the highest purity and honesty. He writes about a world before God became human; a world where people in extreme situations are seen as parts of a larger, more basic drama. His writing is clear and his voice is unique. Among living American masters of the short story, Paul Bowles is one of a kind."
The historic American Legation building in Tangier includes a wing dedicated to Paul Bowles. In 2010, the building received a donation of furniture, photographs, and documents collected by Gloria Kirby, a longtime resident of Tangier and a friend of Bowles.
In 2002, the Library of America published an edition of Bowles's works.
Works
Besides his music for chamber ensembles and stage performances, Bowles wrote 14 short story collections, several novels, three books of poetry, many translations, many travel articles, and a book about his own life.