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.
HALPERN: Annoyed about what, if I may ask?
BOWLES: He was annoyed because I was unable to keep the director of No Exit from changing the script. He considered that my province, which it should have been, but the point was that I didn't have a percentage in the show and he didn't know how Broadway works. I was simply the translator, so I had no rights whatever. He sent telegrams of protest from Paris before we opened, and I was obliged to send back replies that were dictated by John Huston. His anger should have been directed against John, not me.
HALPERN: What about contemporary writers? Are there any you enjoy reading?
BOWLES: Let's see, who's alive? Sartre is alive, but he did only one good novel. Graham Greene is alive. Who's alive in America? Whom do I follow with interest? Christopher Isherwood's a good novelist. They're mostly dead. I used to read everything of Gide's and Camus'.
HALPERN: Do you have an opinion on the writing being done in America today?
BOWLES: There are various kinds of writing being done, of course. But I suspect you mean the "popular school," as exemplified by Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, John Barth, Thomas Pynchon‑‑that sort of thing? I don't enjoy it.
HALPERN: Why not?
BOWLES: It's simply that I find it very difficult to get into. The means it uses to awaken interest is of a sort that would be valid only for the length of a short piece. It's too much to have to swim around in that purely literary magma for the time it takes to read a whole book. It fails to hold my attention, that's all. It creates practically no momentum. My mind wanders, I become impatient, and therefore intolerant.
HALPERN: Is it the content that bothers you or the style of the writing? Or both?
BOWLES: Both. But it's the point of view more than anything else. The cynicism and wisecracking ultimately function as endorsements of the present civilization. The content is hard to make out because it's generally symbolic or allegorical, and the style is generally hermetic. It's not a novelistic style at all; it's really a style that would be more useful in writing essays, I should think.
HALPERN: Let me go back to the critics for a moment. Do you think they have missed the point of your writing?
BOWLES: They have, certainly, on many occasions. I've often had the impression they were more interested in my motive for writing a given work than they were in the work itself. In general, the British critics have been more perceptive; language is more important to them than it is to us. But I don't think that matters.
HALPERN: One thing that particularly interests many who meet you is the great discrepancy between what you are like as a person and the kind of books you write.
BOWLES: Why is it that Americans expect an artist's work to be a clear reflection of his life? They never seem to want to believe that the two can be independent of each other and go their separate ways. Even when there's a definite connection between the work and the life, the pattern they form may be in either parallel or contrary motion. If you want to call my state schizophrenic, that's all right with me. Say my personality has two facets. One is always turned in one direction, toward my own Mecca; that's my work. The other looks in a different direction and sees a different landscape. I think that's a common state of affairs.
HALPERN: In retrospect, would you say there has been something that has remained important to you over the years? Something that you have maintained in your writing?
BOWLES: Continuing consciousness, infinite adaptability of human consciousness to outside circumstances, the absurdity of it all, the hopelessness of this whole business of living. I've written very little the past few years. Probably because emotionally everything grows less intense as one grows older. The motivation is at a much lower degree, that's all.
HALPERN: When you were first starting to write you were, emotionally, full of things to say. Now that has faded somewhat, what springboard do you have?
BOWLES: I can only find out after I've written, since I empty my mind each time before I start. I only know what I intended to do once it's finished. Do you remember, in A Life Full of Holes, the farmer comes and scolds the boy for falling asleep, and the boy says: "I didn't know I was going to sleep until I woke up."
Tangier, 1970
Copyright © 1970, Daniel Halpern and The Ecco Press, 1993. All Rights Reserved.
DANIEL HALPERN met Paul Bowles in 1968 when Bowles was teaching for one semester at California State University at Northridge. Bowles invited Halpern to visit him in Morocco, and in 1969 Halpern moved to Tangier where he was a neighbor of Bowles in the apartment building Immeuble Itesa for two years. In 1969 Bowles and Halpern founded the literary journal Antaeus. Upon his return to the United States, Halpern established The Ecco Press in 1972, and the inaugural list of publications included a reissue of a collection of Paul Bowles' short stories, The Delicate Prey. Daniel Halpern is editorial director of The Ecco Press, an imprint of HarperCollins. Halpern is the author of seven collections of poems, and he has received many grants and awards, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Halpern divides his time between New York City and Princeton, New Jersey, where he lives with his wife and daughter. The 1970 interview on this site used with permission from the author, was taken from The Ecco Press edition of Too Far From Home: The Selected Writings of Paul Bowles, edited by Daniel Halpern, with an Introduction by Joyce Carol Oates.