Daniel Halpern: An Interview With Paul Bowles by Daniel Halpern

HALPERN: Are you in the habit of using kif in order to write?

BOWLES: No, I don't think that would be possible. When I was writing Up Above the World I smoked when I felt like it, and worked all day wandering around in the forest with a pen and notebook in my hand.

HALPERN: To what extent does the ingestion of kif play a role in your writing?

BOWLES: I shouldn't think it has an effect on anyone's writing. Kif can provide flashes of insight, but it acts as an obstacle to thinking. On the other hand, it enables one to write concentratedly for hours at a stretch without fatigue. You can see how it could be useful if you were writing something which relied for its strength on the free elaboration of fantasy. I used it only once that way, as I say‑‑for the fourth section of Let It Come Down . But I think most writers would agree that kif is for relaxation, not for work.

HALPERN: Does your work require a great deal of revision?

BOWLES: No, the first draft is the final draft. I can't revise. Maybe I should qualify that by saying I first write in longhand, and then the same day, or the next, I type the longhand. There are always many changes between the longhand and the typed version, but that first typed sheet is part of the final sheet. There's no revision.

HALPERN: Many critics like to attribute a central theme to your writing: that of the alienation of civilized man when he comes in contact with a primitive society and its natural man.

BOWLES: Yes, I've heard about that. It's a theory that makes the body of writing seem more coherent, perhaps, when you put it all together. And possibly they're right, but I'm not conscious of having such a theme, no. I'm not aware of writing about alienation. If my mind worked that way, I couldn't write. I don't have any explicit message; certainly I'm not suggesting changes. I'm merely trying to call people's attention to something they don't seem to be sufficiently aware of.

HALPERN: Do you feel trapped or at a disadvantage by being a member of Western civilization?

BOWLES: Trapped? No. That's like being trapped by having blond hair or blue eyes, light or dark skin. . No, I don't feel trapped. It would be a very different life to be part of another social group, perhaps, but I don't see any difference between the natural man and the civilized man, and I'm not juxtaposing the two. The natural man always tries to be a civilized man, as you can see all over the world. I've never yearned to be a member of another ethnic group. That's carrying one's romanticism a little too far. God knows I carry mine far enough as it is.

HALPERN: Why is it that you have traveled so much? And to such remote places?

BOWLES: I suppose the first reason is that I've always wanted to get as far as possible from the place where I was born. Far both geographically and spiritually. To leave it behind. I'm always happy leaving the United States, and the farther away I go the happier I am, generally. Then there's another thing: I feel that life is very short and the world is there to see and one should know as much about it as possible. One belongs to the whole world, not to just one part of it.

HALPERN: What is the motivation that prompts your characters to leave the safety of a predictable environment, a Western environment, for an unknown world that first places them in a state of aloneness and often ends by destroying them, as in the case of Port and Kit in The Sheltering Sky and Dyar in Let It Come Down ?

BOWLES: I've never thought about it. For one thing there is no "predictable environment." Security is a false concept. As for the motivation? In the case of Port and Kit they wanted to travel, a simple, innocent motivation. In the case of Nelson Dyar, he was fed up with his work in America. Fed up with standing in a teller's cage. Desire for freedom. I suppose; desire for adventure. Why do people leave their native habitat and go wandering off over the face of the earth?

HALPERN: Many of your characters seem to pursue a course of action that often leads them into rather precarious positions, pushed forward by an almost self-destructive curiosity, and a kind of fatalism‑‑for example, the night walks of Port, or the professor in A Distant Episode .

BOWLES: I'm very aware of my own capacity for compulsive behavior. Besides, it's generally more rewarding to imagine the results of compulsive rather than of reflective action. It has always seemed to me that my characters act naturally, given the circumstances; their behavior is foreseeable. Characters set in motion a mechanism of which they become a victim. But generally the mechanism turns out to have been operative at the very beginning. One realizes that Kit's and Port's having left America at all was a compulsive act. Their urge to travel was compulsive.

HALPERN: Do you think that these characters have an "unconscious drive for self-destruction"?

BOWLES: An unconscious drive for self-destruction?. . Death and destruction are stock ingredients of life. But it seems to me that the motivation of characters in fiction like mine should be a secondary consideration. I think of characters as if they were props in the general scene of any given work. The characters, the landscape, the climatic conditions, the human situation, the formal structure of the story or the novel, all these elements are one‑‑the characters are made of the same material as the rest of the work. Since they are activated by the other elements of the synthetic cosmos, their own motivations are relatively unimportant.

HALPERN: You have been accused of favoring neurotic characters in your fiction.

BOWLES: Most of the Occidentals I know are neurotic. But that's to be expected; that's what we're producing now. They're the norm. I don't think I could write about a character who struck me as eccentric, whose behavior was too far from standard.

HALPERN: Many people would consider the behavior of your characters far from standard.

BOWLES: I realize that if you consider them objectively, they're neurotic and compulsive; but they're generally presented as integral parts of situations, along with the landscape, and so it's not very fruitful to try to consider them in another light. My feeling is that what is called a truly normal person (if I understand your meaning) is not likely to be written about, save as a symbol. The typical man of my fiction reacts to inner pressures the way the normal man ought to be reacting to the age we live in. Whatever is intolerable must produce violence.

HALPERN: And these characters are your way of protesting.

BOWLES: If you call it protest. If even a handful of people can believe in the cosmos a writer describes, accept the workings of its natural laws (and this includes finding that the characters behave in a credible manner), the cosmos is a valid one.

HALPERN: Critics often label you an existential writer. Do you consider yourself an existentialist?

BOWLES: No! Existentialism was never a literary doctrine in any case, even though it did trigger three good novels‑‑one by Sartre ( La Nausée ) and two by Camus ( L'Étranger and La Peste ). But if one's going to subscribe to the tenets of a formulated belief, I suppose atheistic existentialism is the most logical one to adopt. That is, it's likely to provide more insight than another into what attitudes to take vis-à-vis today's world.

HALPERN: But you do share some of the basic tenets of existentialism, as defined by Sartre.

BOWLES: He's interested in the welfare of humanity. As Port said, "What is humanity? Humanity is everybody but yourself."

HALPERN: That sounds rather solipsistic.

BOWLES: What else can you possibly know? Of course I'm interested in myself, basically. In getting through my life. You've got to get through it all. You never know how many years you've got left. You keep going until it's over. And I'm the one who's got to suffer the consequences of having lived my life.