I first came across Paul Bowles in 1951 when, as a sixth former, I was shattered by his novel The Sheltering Sky in which a troubled American intellectual couple, Port Moresby and his wife Kit, and their shallow socialite friend Tunner disembark in North Africa and head into the Sahara. Their empty Western souls confront the immensity of the sky and the desolate, unforgiving yet majestic desert. The terror and the loneliness were conveyed in fastidious, pellucid prose and Cyril Connolly called it the finest postwar novel in English. From then on, I was a dedicated fan
Born in 1910, the gay son of a stern, wealthy New York dentist, he rebelled against his middle-class background, allied himself with the international avant-garde and historically is a link between Hemingway's Lost Generation of the Twenties and the Beat Generation. Gertrude Stein took him under her wing in Paris; Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs beat a path to his door when he settled in Tangier in the Fifties. In Berlin, Isherwood borrowed his name for Sally Bowles.
In New York, he and his wife, writer Jane Bowles, shared a house with Auden, Britten, and Carson McCullers. He composed music for Orson Welles's Mercury Theatre and plays by Lillian Hellman and Tennessee Williams, and translated Sartre's Huis Clos for John Huston's Broadway production.
Meanwhile, his stories and travel writing appeared in leading magazines. In 1959, Norman Mailer wrote of him: 'Paul Bowles opened the world of Hip. He let in the murder, the drugs, the incest, the death of the Square, the call of the orgy, the death of civilisation; he invited all of us to these themes a few years ago and he wrote one short story, "Pages from Cold Point", which is one of the best short stories ever written by anyone.'
In 1985, I at last had the opportunity of meeting Bowles when I spent two days with him in Tangier to write a profile for The Observer, talking at his apartment and being driven around the countryside with my wife by Bowles and his devoted Moroccan chauffeur in a 20-year-old Ford Mustang convertible.After an often bizarre life of travel and adventure, he seemed happy and serene, commenting sardonically and wittily on life, literature and art, diverting too personal questions with fascinating anecdotes as he puffed a little relaxing kef. It was an unforgettable experience.
I once tried to persuade John Boorman to film The Sheltering Sky, and even offered to collaborate on the screenplay, but he thought it was unfilmable. Fortunately Bernardo Bertolucci didn't agree. In 1990, Bowles, then aged 80, appeared in Bertolucci's distinguished version of The Sheltering Sky in the background of several scenes, observing his distant creations and reading passages from the novel on the soundtrack. The director is faithful to the spirit and letter of the book, even making Port and Kit Moresby a composer and playwright respectively, and cutting the hair of John Malkovich and Debra Winger so they resemble pictures of Paul and Jane in the 1940s.
The film at times evokes Hollywood's love of Oriental exoticism, which brings to mind a story Bowles told me of returning home from Morocco in the 1930s and giving a reel of photographs he'd taken in Marrakesh and the Sahara to be developed in Hollywood. When he picked them up, the shopkeeper said: 'Great pictures. Which backlot were they shot on?'
