In a Cruel Light

Paul Bowles, poet-novelist-translator-composer-traveler, made his quirky mark in all those fields but dominated none of them in his long life, which spanned most of the last century. He seemed to invite criticism that he was a dabbler, putting much of his craft and ingenuity into concealing his artistry. He flouted established narrative conventions yet let his era’s mania for stylistic innovation pass him by; he put his characters into extreme, harrowing circumstances but rarely expended much energy in analyzing their psyches or souls. Bowles, who was born in 1910 in Jamaica, N.Y., and died in 1999, spent most of his life in Europe and North Africa yet, unlike his near-contemporary expatriates Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, he never possessed an ideal that could be betrayed or an illusion worth shattering. Bowles dedicated his career to elaborating variations on a single theme: the evil that befalls people when they visit places where they don’t belong. Beginning with his first novel, “The Sheltering Sky,” published in 1949, he created a fictional sub-genre that has been variously called African Gothic and Travel Horror. This collection of his stories, the most comprehensive ever published, reveals that he saved his most macabre chops for his short works.

An early story in the volume, “A Distant Episode,” published in 1947, sets the tone. The Professor, a linguist traveling in North Africa, comes down from the high country to visit a friend in the desert: “Now facing the flaming sky in the west, and now facing the sharp mountains, the car followed the dusty trail down the canyons into air which began to smell of other things besides the endless ozone of the heights: orange blossoms, pepper, sun-baked excrement, burning olive oil, rotten fruit.” When he arrives in the village, he learns that his friend is dead. On a whim, against his better instincts, the Professor sets off on a nocturnal shopping expedition in search of boxes made of camel udders. A sinister guide leads him to a deserted quarry, where he is ambushed by bandits. They cut out the linguist’s tongue, tie him up, dump him into a sack and carry him off into the desert. The Professor’s captors deck him out in a tinkling armor of tin-can bottoms and sell him into slavery as an object of entertainment, a human dancing bear.

It’s not the most gruesome story here: In another, the hearts of stolen babies are eaten and the remains consumed by crocodiles. In “The Delicate Prey,” Bowles’ most famous story, a traveler is brutally emasculated yet the punishment of the man who inflicts the mutilation is, if anything, even more horrible. Much of the havoc is psychological; in “Pages From Cold Point,” incest between father and son is presented in so offhand a manner that you have to reread the key passages to be sure you haven’t imagined it.

Yet for all his originality, Bowles does have his antecedents: “Senor Ong and Senor Ha,” about Chinese drug dealers in a small Central American town, seethes with the claustrophobic atmosphere of moral rot that pervades the tales of Joseph Conrad and W. Somerset Maugham; several stories, weaker ones, rely on one of Maugham’s favorite plot devices, the native cook poisoning her employer. Yet the writer Bowles most strongly resembles is the first master of the short story, Edgar Allan Poe--not only in the macabre subject matter but also in the feverish ambience and his vivid portrayals of the sick mind. The narrator of “If I Should Open My Mouth” (1954), who puts poisoned gum in candy machines on subway platforms in Manhattan, or imagines that he does, is a direct descendant of the maniacs in such Poe stories as “The Tell-Tale Heart.” What makes Bowles’ best stories so powerful is their wry, detached tone; horrific events are reported as commonplaces, in the same low-key fashion as travel details or a dinner menu.

At the same time he was writing the earliest of the short stories included in this collection, Bowles was achieving renown as a translator of contemporary French and Latin American literature; in 1946 he produced what remains the standard English version of Jean-Paul Sartre’s play “Huis Clos,” bestowing upon it the title “No Exit.” While Bowles never loaded his fiction with the self-conscious philosophizing of the French existentialists, their atmosphere of futility and world-weariness pervades his stories, perfumed with the smoke of a hookah and saturated with Saharan sunlight.

Bowles wrote music and poetry from a young age. Transition, the prestigious French surrealist magazine, published his poems while he was still in high school. His career as a world traveler began when he was 18; after a visit to Paris, where Gertrude Stein told him he wasn’t “a real poet,” he devoted himself to music. He studied with Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson and achieved respectable success, composing several ballets and music for the dramatic stage, including Orson Welles’ “Horse Eats Hat” and Tennessee Williams’ “Summer and Smoke.”

In 1938, he met a young writer named Jane Auer, who was about to achieve acclaim for her first novel, “Two Serious Ladies.” They married, and he, inspired by her dedication to the art of fiction, began writing again in earnest. He produced a clutch of fine short stories, including some of the best in the present collection; when an editor told him that to publish them he needed a novel, he wrote “The Sheltering Sky,” which became a bestseller. He settled with his wife in Tangier, Morocco, where he continued to live for the half-century that remained of his life.

In his later years, Bowles became a hip icon. The young man who had paid court to the cultural lions of Paris between the world wars became himself the grand pooh-bah of a literary salon, receiving everybody who was anybody passing through Morocco, from Allen Ginsberg to the Rolling Stones. In 1989, Bernardo Bertolucci filmed “The Sheltering Sky” with John Malkovich and Debra Winger, and Bowles provided the voice-over narration.

Although most of his stories take place in exotic places, primarily North Africa and Latin America, he was always a tolerant, curious American in his outlook and set a few great tales in his native land. “The Frozen Fields” is a hilarious, mordant view of a country Christmas celebrated by a spectacularly dysfunctional family. The story is told from the point of view of a little boy, Donald, who receives a lavish gift from a man who, the reader discerns from the grown-ups’ elliptical remarks, is the lover of his uncle: “It was too good to believe: a fire engine three feet long, with rubber tires and a bell and a siren and three ladders that shot upward automatically when it stopped. Donald looked at it, and for a moment was almost frightened by the power he knew it had to change his world.”

Bowles’ later stories, from the ‘70s and ‘80s, sometimes decline into self-parody. What makes his best stories work so well is that he never draws attention to himself; his intimate, intuitive understanding of the alien cultures he writes about is simply taken for granted, immanent in the texture of the tale. Yet when he wanders far from his usual stomping grounds, in places such as Sri Lanka and Thailand, the narratives have the whimsical air of amazing travel stories heard at a dinner party or read in a newspaper item. In a few of the shorter pieces, the deadpan presentation of the macabre becomes merely coy, as in “Hugh Harper,” about a man who drinks blood; there is little apparent point to the story except to report an eccentricity. Three slight, unpunctuated monologues remind one how useful punctuation is.

Though many modern American masters of the short story, such as Flannery O’Connor and J.D. Salinger, devoted their craft to excavating the horror buried in everyday life, Bowles examined the outer limits of human experience in fiction as strange as the most bizarre truth. By treating horrific events at the extreme edges of experience as everyday occurrences, he invites the reader on a mind-bending journey that leads, paradoxically, inward, on a search for the essentials that define the human condition. Living and working in an age obsessed with ranking and classifying literature as though it were a sport, Bowles was often dismissed as “minor”; this collection proves how irrelevant such terms are in judging a writer with so profoundly original a vision.