Paul Bowles' Aesthetics of Containment: Surrealism, Music, the Short Story

259 Pages·2014·1.15 MB·English

Copyright and use of this thesis
This thesis must be used in accordance with the
provisions of the Copyright Act 1968.
Reproduction of material protected by copyright
may be an infringement of copyright and
copyright owners may be entitled to take
legal action against persons who infringe their
copyright.
Section 51 (2) of the Copyright Act permits
an authorized officer of a university library or
archives to provide a copy (by communication
or otherwise) of an unpublished thesis kept in
the library or archives, to a person who satisfies
the authorized officer that he or she requires
the reproduction for the purposes of research
or study.
The Copyright Act grants the creator of a work
a number of moral rights, specifically the right of
attribution, the right against false attribution and
the right of integrity.
You may infringe the author’s moral rights if you:
- fail to acknowledge the author of this thesis if
you quote sections from the work
- attribute this thesis to another author
- subject this thesis to derogatory treatment
which may prejudice the author’s reputation
For further information contact the University’s
Director of Copyright Services
sydney.edu.au/copyright
Paul Bowles’ Aesthetics of Containment
Surrealism, Music, the Short Story

Sam V. H. Reese

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Faculty of Arts
The University of Sydney
2014
Acknowledgments 3
Introduction 5
Chapter 1: Bowles, Freedom and America
Bowles and the Critics 13
Freedom and Liberal Criticism 26
Patterns of Words 41
Narratives of Containment 61
Chapter 2: Bowles and Surrealism
American Surrealist? 74
Surrealism in America 93
Violence as a Gateway to the Surreal 103
A Dream Logic 118
Chapter 3: Bowles and Music
“Essentially American” 131
“Hack work was often the rule” 148
“The Culmination of Beauty” 160
Fragments of Culture 173
Chapter 4: Bowles and the Short Story as Genre
Bowles and the Question of Genre 187
Bowles and Poe 202
Composition and Intoxication 212
Fragmentation and the Short Story 231
Conclusion 239
Bibliography 248
2
Acknowledgments

This thesis grew out of two general interests of mine: the short story, and surrealism
in literature. I want to thank my supervisor, Prof. Paul Giles, for his guidance, advice
and support throughout its development, from those rather abstracted beginnings to its
final incarnation. His wisdom, and seemingly limitless knowledge were balanced with
a consistent faith in my abilities, and I am grateful for both the free rein he allowed
me, and for his astute interventions. My associate supervisor, Prof. Peter Marks,
deserves thanks too, especially for the perspective he gave me on the project in its
final stages.
More broadly, I would like to thank the English Department at the University
of Sydney for the constant support I received throughout my candidature. Parts of this
thesis were presented at the MSA conference in 2013, while other parts developed out
of archival research completed at the University of Delaware archives; these trips
would have been impossible without the funding provided by the University, for
which I am very grateful. Outside of the University, I would like to thank the special
collections staff at the library of the University of Delaware for their help with my
archival research. This thesis also benefitted from the insights of Joanna Pawlik,
editor of Papers of Surrealism, and Jana Argersinger, co-editor of Poe Studies, whose
journals provided venues for me to develop sections of this thesis.
Throughout this thesis, I was extremely lucky to have the support of my
family, and I thank Jo, Kate, Jessy, Linda, Rebekah, Kaitlyn and Nicky for their love
and friendship. Particular thanks to go to Mark, Kent and Rafe for proofreading parts,
if not all, of the thesis in its final stages, and to my friends for listening to endless
Paul Bowles anecdotes.
3
Most importantly, I want to thank my wonderful wife, Alexandra. She has
been there for me from the very beginning, offering constant support and love; I owe
to her both my happiness and sanity.
4
Introduction

During the 1930s and 1940s, Paul Bowles enjoyed an almost singularly diverse
artistic career. A prominent classical composer, responsible for the ‘Tennessee
Sound’ that accompanied Tennessee Williams first major theatrical successes, Bowles
was also a highly regarded translator, whose profile was such that Jean Paul Sartre
commissioned him to translate his play Huis Clos, which Bowles rendered in tellingly
claustrophobic terms as No Exit.1 His poetry was published in major avant-garde
magazines, such as transition, and he was an important contributor to the American
surrealist magazine View. The short stories he wrote over this period, which he would
continue to consider as his most important works throughout his life, found
publication in such venues as Harper’s Bazaar and Mademoiselle, alongside the
intellectual redoubt of The Partisan Review. The significance of this work, however,
and the implications of the context within which it was produced, have been
overlooked by critics thus far, and in this thesis I hope to provide some balance to the
critical framework within which Bowles’ writing is understood.
The relatively limited focus with which critics have considered Bowles’
writing can be attributed in large part to his long-term residence in Tangiers. Indeed,
his popular image and later career were both shaped by this self-imposed exile in
Morocco, where he lived for more than half a century. As his residence in Tangiers
extended, the criticism of his works increasingly took his place of residence as its
reference point, to the extent that the first book-length study of his work, the 1974
Paul Bowles: the Illumination of North Africa by Lawrence D. Stewart, was framed

1 Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit, trans. Paul Bowles (New York: Samuel French 1958).
5
explicitly as a work as much about North Africa as it was about Bowles.2 Stewart’s
title suggests, moreover, the fundamental relationship that critics have posited within
his work: the mediation of ‘Eastern’ Morocco to ‘The West’. Such a perspective,
which renders Bowles predominantly as a cultural conduit, tends to subsequently
consider Bowles within the parameters of Orientalism. Since Stewart’s book was
published, the body of criticism on Bowles has grown steadily. Brian Edwards has
shown how “Bowles played a significant part in imagining the relationship of
Americans to the foreign in general and to Europe’s former colonies in particular”,
and argues that “Bowles’s career challenged the circumscribed sense of what counts
as American literature”.3 In the same vein, Raj Chandarlapaty has suggested that
Bowles’ writings “mark a beginning for countercultural synthesis [of east and west]”
within American letters, and that “discussion of Bowles’s later works… are certainly
substantial ground in the context of rapidly growing and internationally proactive
American ‘counterculture’”.4 Along similar lines, Rob Wilson has more recently
framed Bowles within the context of the Beat movement, exploring the “ethos of self-
denial at the core of the life and work of Bowles from his first more to Tangier in
1947 until his death in 1999”.5 All of these perspectives, however, focus on the
connection between the site of Bowles’ literary production, and the ideals with which
he engages; Edwards posits that Bowles’ “residence in Tangier... corresponds with a
deep involvement in Moroccan affairs by the US government during which Bowles
wrote frequently about North African politics and culture”.6 The focus of Bowles

2 Lawrence D. Stewart, Paul Bowles: the Illumination of North Africa (Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1974).
3 Brian T. Edwards, Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghreb, from Casablanca to the
Marrakech Express (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 307.
4 Raj Chandarlapaty, The Beat Generation and Counterculture: Paul Bowles, William S. Burroughs,
Jack Kerouac (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 19, 66.
5 Rob Wilson, “Masters of Adaptation: Paul Bowles, the Beats, and ‘Fellaheen Orientalism’,” Cultural
Politics 8.4 (2012): 194.
6 Edwards, Morocco Bound, 307.
6
criticism, therefore, has been skewed by the facts of his biography, and by the
enduringly romantic image of Morocco.
Along with the question of geography, however, the focus of criticism can
also be attributed to the forms in which different examples of Bowles’ works were
produced. Certainly, the works that have received most critical attention have been
those set in Morocco or North Africa; although at the start of his career Bowles used
Latin America and even the US as the setting for his writing, over the long term his
writing increasingly reflected his involvement in the culture of North Africa,
particularly Tangiers. Equally, however, these North African works were published in
a form that critics have been predisposed to prefer: the novel. Not only were all of
Bowles’ first three novels set in North Africa, the work that occupied the latter stage
of his authorial career was also decidedly novelistic. Beginning in 1964 with the text
A Life Full of Holes, Bowles enjoyed a secondary literary career recording,
transcribing and translating Moroccan oral storytellers, whose work Bowles generally
produced into the form of ‘novels’; over the next 30 years, Bowles translated and
published over 20 works by Moroccan authors.7 Given the intersection of North
African setting and novelistic form, it is not surprising that Bowles’ work within the
genre of the short story has been critically occluded.
Looking specifically at the case of Ernest Hemingway, Robert Lamb has
described the place of the short story in academia as “something of a bastard
stepchild”, “rarely… appreciated in the context of genre”.8 Although the last 20 years
have yielded two general, longitudinal studies of Bowles’ short fiction, one in English
and one in German, the focus of critical attention has been shaped nonetheless by a

7 Driss ben Hamed Charhadi, A Life Full of Holes, trans. Paul Bowles (New York: Grove, 1964).
8 Robert Lamb, Art Matters: Hemingway, Craft, and the Creation of the Modern Story (Louisiana;
LSUP, 2010), xii.
7
general bias towards the novel as a literary form.9 From a number of specific
perspectives, however, it is Bowles’ short stories that still require the most critical
attention. Accordingly, this thesis takes as its central focus Bowles’ work within the
genre of the short story. The first chapter focusses on the social and political contexts
of mid-century America, considering the initial critical response to Bowles’ writing,
and exploring why it found a hostile reception. Bowles’ involvement with surrealism,
and career as a composer, guide the second and third chapters respectively; both
consider the ways in which Bowles created an aesthetic model alternative to the
dominant values espoused by postwar criticism. Finally, the thesis considers Bowles’
conceptualisation of the short story as a genre, and the ways in which his writing used
form to disrupt his readers’ wider ideas about fiction and society
Bowles’ first volume of short fiction, The Delicate Prey, was dedicated
obliquely to the American master of the short story form, Edgar Allan Poe, reading:
“To my mother, who first read me the stories of Poe”.10 This subtle nod belies the
extent to which Bowles actively styled both his personal life and his style of writing
on his earliest literary influence; he explained the dedication of The Delicate Prey in a
letter to David McDowell, at Random House, as follows:
The introduction should be ‘For my mother, through whom I first became
acquainted with Poe.’ As a small child, I used to be read to by her, and the
first short stories with which I came in contact that way were Poe’s Tales of
Mystery and Imagination. They also made the greatest impression; and she
told me the story of his life, so that I resolved then to go to the University of
Virginia, which I did, solely because he had attended it.11

9 Allen Hibbard, Paul Bowles: a Study of the Short Fiction (New York: Twayne, 1993); Elke Stracke-
Elbina, Die Short Stories von Paul Bowles, 1939-1990 (Hildesheim and New York: G Olms, 1995).
10 Paul Bowles, The Delicate Prey and Other Stories (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006), Dedication.
All further references to this text will be made with in-text citation (DP).
11 Paul Bowles, In Touch: The Letters of Paul Bowles, ed. Jeffrey Miller (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1995), 219.
8
Although sometimes reticent to discuss his own writing from a theoretical
perspective, maintaining the position that he had “never been a thinking person,”
Bowles not only openly drew inspiration from Poe but, more broadly, was invested in
the short story as a literary genre.12 While his novels may have proven financial
successful, as this thesis will argue his model of short story had much greater long
term repercussions for the development of the form. Recognised today as one of its
most important twentieth century practitioners, Bowles was invested in the form of
the short story to the point that he constructed his first novel, The Sheltering Sky, as
an extended short story – a formal development of short fiction, rather than a text
constructed with stylistic principles of novel.13
Alongside its descent from Poe, the same volume of stories, The Delicate
Prey, reflects another neglected aspect of Bowles’ earlier literary career: his
involvement in interwar European artistic culture, particularly the movement of
surrealism. Despite the wider connotations that the adjective ‘surreal’ has since
accumulated, the surrealists themselves were originally an exclusive, self-regulating
group of largely French, German and Spanish artists. Although never a member of
this group, Bowles was closely affiliated with them – indeed, along with poet and
editor Charles Henri Ford, he was the American writer most involved in the surrealist
movement. This involvement was not limited to writing, however, and included
musical compositions, magazine editing, and acting in surrealist film; during the
1930s in Paris, and the 1940s in New York, Bowles’ artistic production continually
intersected with the movement. In terms of his writing, moreover, Bowles was not
only involved in the production of explicitly surrealist works – which ranged from

12 Paul Bowles, in conversation with Jeffrey Bailey, “The Art of Fiction LXVII: Paul Bowles,” Paris
Review 81 (1981): 75.
13 Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky (London: Penguin, 2009). All further references to this text will be
made with in-text citation (SS).
9