Daniel Halpern: An Interview With Paul Bowles by Daniel Halpern

HALPERN: Is this why so many of your characters seem to be asocial?

BOWLES: Are they? Or are they merely outside and perhaps wishing they were inside?

HALPERN: Do you think of yourself as being asocial?

BOWLES: I don't know. Probably very, yes. I'm sorry to be so stubborn and impossible with all this, but the point is I just don't know any of the answers, and I have no way of finding them out. I'm not equipped to dig them up, nor do I want to. The day I find out what I'm all about I'll stop writing‑‑I'll stop doing everything. Once you know what makes you tick, you don't tick any more. The whole thing stops.

HALPERN: You are against Sartre's taking aspects of this life so seriously. Yet when you say about your life that you are just trying to get through it the best you can, it sounds to me as if you take living very seriously.

BOWLES: Oh, everyone takes his own existence seriously, but that's as far as he should go. If you claim that life itself is serious, you're talking out of turn. You're encroaching on other people's lives. Each man's life has the quality he gives it, but you can't say that life itself has any qualities. If we suffer, it's because we haven't learned how not to. I have to remind myself of that.

HALPERN: Then life is a painful experience for you?

BOWLES: You have to keep going, and try at least to keep a pleasant face.

HALPERN: Life seems to be inaccessible to many of your characters. By their going beyond a certain point, past which they are pulled by an unconscious force, they place themselves in a position where return to the world of man is impossible. Why are they pushed beyond that point?

BOWLES: It's a subject that interests me very much; but you've got to remember that these are all rationalizations devised after the fact, and therefore purely suppositious. I don't know the answers to the questions; all I can do is say, "Maybe," "It could be," or "It could be something else." Offhand I'd suggest that the answer has to do with the Romantic fantasy of reaching a region of self-negation and thereby regaining a state of innocence.

HALPERN: Is it a kind of testing to find out what it's like beyond that point?

BOWLES: It could be. One writes to find out certain things for oneself. Much of my writing is therapeutic. Otherwise I never would have started, because I knew from the beginning that I had no specific desire to reform. Many of my short stories are simple emotional outbursts. They came out all at once, like eggs, and I felt better afterward. In that sense much of my writing is an exhortation to destroy. "Why don't you all burn the world, smash it, get rid of everything in it that plagues you?" It is a desire above all to bring about destruction, that's certain.

HALPERN: So you don't want to change the world. You simply want to end it.

BOWLES: Destroy and end are not the same word. You don't end a process by destroying its products. What I wanted was to see everyone aware of being in the same kind of metaphysical impasse I was in. I wanted to know whether they suffered in the same way.

HALPERN: And you don't think they do?

BOWLES: I don't think many do. Perhaps the number is increasing. I hope so, if only for selfish reasons! Nobody likes to feel alone. I know because I always think of myself as completely alone, and I imagine other people as part of something else.

HALPERN: And you want to join the crowd?

BOWLES: It's a universal urge. I've always wanted to. From earliest childhood. Or to be more exact, from the first time I was presented to another child, which was when I was five.

HALPERN: And you were rejected?

BOWLES: It was already too late. I wanted to join on my own terms. And now it doesn't matter.

HALPERN: And so now you alienate your characters, the way you were alienated?

BOWLES: I don't think the judge would allow that question. Life is much harder if one is alone. Shared suffering is easier to bear.

HALPERN: Sartre says somewhere that a man's essential freedom is the capacity to say "No." This is something your characters are often incapable of. Do they achieve any kind of freedom?

BOWLES: My characters don't attain any kind of freedom, as far as I'm aware.

HALPERN: Is death any kind of freedom?

BOWLES: Death? Another nonexistent, something to use as a threat to those who are afraid of it. There's nothing to say about death. The cage door's always open. Nobody has to stay in here. But people want freedom inside the cage. So what is freedom? You're bound by physical laws, bound by your body, bound by your mind.

HALPERN: What does freedom mean to you?

BOWLES: I'd say it was not having to experience what you don't like.

HALPERN: By the alienation that your characters go through in their various exotic settings, are they forced into considering the meaning of their lives, if there is meaning to life?

BOWLES: I shouldn't think there is meaning to life. In any case, there's not one meaning. There should be as many meanings as there are individuals‑‑you assign meaning to life. If you don't assign it, then clearly it has none whatever.

HALPERN: In L'Étranger , Meursault is put in jail, a form of alienation, and at that point he considers "the meaning of life."

BOWLES: Camus was a great moralist, which means, nowadays, to be preoccupied with social considerations. I'm not preoccupied in that way. I'm not a moralist. After all, he was a serious communist; I was a very unserious one, a completely negative one.

HALPERN: What was it about communism that appealed to you?

BOWLES: Oh, I imagined it could destroy the establishment. When I realized it couldn't, I got out fast and decided to work on my own hook.

HALPERN: Back to destroying the world. .

BOWLES: Well, who doesn't want to? I mean, look at it!

HALPERN: It's one thing to dislike something you see and another to want to destroy it.

BOWLES: Is it? I think the natural urge of every human being is to destroy what he dislikes. That doesn't mean he does it. You don't by any means get to do what you want to do, but you've got to recognize the desire when you feel it.

HALPERN: So you use your writing as a weapon.

BOWLES: Right. Absolutely.

HALPERN: And your music?

BOWLES: Music is abstract. Besides, I was writing theater music. It was fun but it's a static occupation. I always have to feel I'm going somewhere.

HALPERN: Has your desire to destroy the world always been a conscious one?

BOWLES: Yes, I was aware that I had a grudge, and that the only way I could satisfy my grudge was by writing words, attacking in words. The way to attack, of course, is to seem not to be attacking. Get people's confidence and then, surprise! Yank the rug out from under their feet. If they come back for more, then I've succeeded.

HALPERN: If they enjoy your work you have succeeded‑‑in the sense that their minds have been infected.

BOWLES: Infected is a loaded word, but all right. They have been infected by the germ of doubt. Their basic assumptions may have been slightly shaken for a second, and that's important.

HALPERN: But you don't regard your goals as being negative.

BOWLES: To destroy often means to purify. I don't think of destruction as necessarily undesirable. You said "infecting." All right. Perhaps those infected will have more technique than I for doing some definite destroying. In that sense I'm just a propagandist, but then all writers are propagandists for one thing or another. It's a perfectly honorable function to serve as a corrosive agent. And there certainly is nothing unusual about it; it's been part of the Romantic tradition for the past century and a half. If a writer can incite anyone to question and ultimately to reject the present structure of any facet of society, he's performed a function.