Daniel Halpern: An Interview With Paul Bowles by Daniel Halpern

HALPERN: And after that?

BOWLES: It's not for him to say. Après lui de déluge . That's all he can do. If he's a propagandist for nihilism, that's his function too.

HALPERN: To start the ball rolling?

BOWLES: I want to help society go to pieces, make it easy.

HALPERN: And writing about horror is part of your method.

BOWLES: I don't write "about horror." But there's a sort of metaphysical malaise in the world today, as if people sense that things are going to be bad. They could be expected to respond to any fictional situation which evoked the same amalgam of repulsion and terror that they already vaguely feel.

HALPERN: Are you, as Leslie Fiedler suggests, a secret lover of the horror you create?

BOWLES: Is there such a creature as a secret or even an avowed lover of horror? I can't believe it. If you're talking about the evocation of horror on the printed page, then that's something else. In certain sensitive people the awakening of the sensation of horror through reading can result in a temporary smearing of the lens of consciousness, as one might put it. Then all perception is distorted by it. It's a dislocation, and if it's of short duration it provides the reader with a partially pleasurable shiver. In that respect I confess to being jaded, and I regret it. A good jolt of vicarious horror can cause a certain amount of questioning of values afterward.

HALPERN: Is that what you hope to accomplish through the horror you evoke?

BOWLES: I don't use horror. If reading a passage of mine triggers the suspension of belief in so-called objective reality for a moment, then I suppose it has the same effect on the reader as if I had consciously used horror as a device.

HALPERN: I'd like to talk a little about your translating. Some critics are convinced that the stories from the Moghrebi are really yours.

BOWLES: I know, but they're not. They're translations. Each Moroccan writer has a different style in English because the cadence of each one's speech is different in Moghrebi. I keep the tapes. Anyone who listens to them and understands the language can hear the differences.

HALPERN: Has your writing been affected by the translations you've done?

BOWLES: A little. I noticed that it had been when I wrote A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard . I was trying to get to another way of thinking, noncausal. . Those were experiments. Arbitrary use of disparate elements.

HALPERN: You did some translating of Borges' work, didn't you?

BOWLES: I did one short story, which I particularly liked, called Las Ruinas Circulares ‑‑back in 1944, I think it was. He was completely unknown in the United States. His cousin, Victoria Ocampo, was in New York. She was the editor of Sur , in Buenos Aires, and was the woman who eventually bought La Prensa and went to jail under Perón. She was a very spectacular woman. One afternoon she tossed me a book, which she said was a new work by her cousin (it was one that she herself had published). It was called El Jardín de los Senderos Que se Bifurcan . A marvelous book. Since then it has been translated as Ficciones . I had read some Borges four years before that, and already admired him. I think that was the first translation into English of a short story by Borges.

HALPERN: Did you have much difficulty in translating that story?

BOWLES: Well, Borges writes in classical Castellano, and the ideas are simply put; he's an easy man to translate. I should think the important thing would be to retain the particular poetic flavor of the prose in each story.

HALPERN: What do you feel is the importance of the Moroccan translations you've done?

BOWLES: I think they provide a certain amount of insight into the Moroccan mentality and Moroccan customs, things that haven't been gone into very deeply in fiction. I haven't noticed many good novels about Morocco, so in that sense they're of use to anyone interested in the country. Literary importance? I have no idea.

HALPERN: As an admirer of Paul Bowles, I can't help but wonder why you spent so much time on these translations instead of on your own writing?

BOWLES: Because Jane, my wife, was ill, and to write a novel I need solitude and great long stretches of empty time; I haven't really had that since 1957. The summer of 1964, of course, I did go up on the mountain, Monte Viejo, you know, and write Up Above the World .

HALPERN: Are you a great fan of Jane Bowles's work?

BOWLES: I am indeed. I've read Two Serious Ladies ten times‑‑I think I can quote most of it. Also, it was going over the manuscript of Two Serious Ladies that gave me the original impetus to consider the possibility of writing a novel.

HALPERN: You met Jane before she started writing Two Serious Ladies , didn't you?

BOWLES: Oh, yes. She began writing Two Serious Ladies in 1938, in Paris, the year we were married. She wrote a few scenes that were later much modified, but still they were the nucleus. And then she went on writing it in New York and finally in Mexico.

HALPERN: Was it difficult living with another writer?

BOWLES: That's hard to say, since I've lived only with Janie. She was the only writer I've ever lived with, and also the only woman I've ever lived with, so I don't know which difficulties come from her being a woman and which come from her being a writer. Naturally, you always have some difficulties with your wife, but whether these had anything to do with the fact that she was a writer, I can't tell you.

HALPERN: Was there ever any question of competition?

BOWLES: Competition between us? Competition's a game. It takes more than one to play. We never played it.

HALPERN: Among your own books do you have a favorite?

BOWLES: Of published volumes I like The Delicate Prey the most. Naturally that doesn't mean I'd write the stories the same way now.

HALPERN: Do you have much contact with other writers?

BOWLES: When other writers come through Tangier and look me up, I see them, yes. And I knew a few before I settled here. One of the first was Bill Saroyan, who came to New York with the script of a play for which he wanted me to write music. It was My Heart's In the Highlands , and the old Group Theatre produced it. About that time I met Auden. I always held him in great respect: he was erudite, and he had an unparalleled ability to use the English language. An infallible, like Stravinsky. And of course I knew Isherwood and Spender. There was one spring when I used to have lunch with them every day at the Café des Westens in Berlin. Although I never felt that I knew them, because they were English, and enough older than I to be intimidating. It was only much later, long after he had gone to America, that I knew Isherwood better. And Tennessee Williams. Certainly I've seen a lot of him and in many different places: Acapulco, New York, Rome, Tangier, Paris, Hollywood. . It used to be I who was the traveler, but nowadays Tennessee moves around a good deal more than I do. This is probably because he doesn't refuse to take planes. Truman Capote was here for a whole summer, staying at the Farhar, and we ate our meals together every day during those months. Gore Vidal came, and Allen Ginsberg, and Angus Wilson, and Cyril Connolly. And of course Bill Burroughs lived here for years. Even Susan Sontag came, although she didn't stay very long.

HALPERN: What about Djuna Barnes?

BOWLES: Yes, Djuna came here to Tangier and took my house on the Marshan one year. She was writing a book she called Bow Down . Later she called it Nightwood . I used to see a lot of Carson McCullers when we lived in Middagh Street, and then we used to go and visit her up in Nyack‑‑spend weekends up there. And of course Sartre, who came to America for a while. We'd have lunch together and then wander around the poorer sections of New York, which he wanted very much to see. That was the year I got the rights to translate No Exit . Later he was annoyed with me in Paris, so I don't know him any more.