In Touch: The Letters

by Paul Bowles, Jeffrey Miller

This extraordinary collection of correspondence by Paul Bowles spans eight decades and provides an evolving portrait of an artist renowned for his privacy. From his earliest extant letter, written at the age of four, to his precocious effusions to Aaron Copeland and to Gertrude Stein; from his meditations on mescaline as relayed to Ned Rorem, to his intensely moving letters to Jane Bowles during her illness, In Touch fills in the lacunae left by previous biographers and offers a rare look at the many aspects of Bowles's brilliant career—as composer, novelist, short-story master, travel writer, translator, ethnographer, and literary critic.

Here is Bowles on the genesis of his first novel, The Sheltering Sky; on his distaste for Western melodies and his dogged attempts to record indigenous Moroccan music; on the Beats, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Tennessee Williams; on the nature and craft of writing; on Bernardo Bertolucci, David Byrne, and Sting; on the decline of American and the challenges of living in North Africa. Gossipy, reflective, enlightening, and always entertaining, In Touch stands as an epistolary autobiography of one of the legendary writers of our time, and a unique chronicle of the twentieth-century avant-garde.

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography

636 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Paul Frederic Bowles grew up in New York, and attended college at the University of Virginia before traveling to Paris, where became a part of Gertrude Stein's literary and artistic circle. Following her advice, he took his first trip to Tangiers in 1931 with his friend, composer Aaron Copeland.

In 1938 he married author and playwright Jane Auer (see: Jane Bowles). He moved to Tangiers permanently in 1947, with Auer following him there in 1948. There they became fixtures of the American and European expatriate scene, their visitors including Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal. Bowles continued to live in Tangiers after the death of his wife in 1973.

Bowles died of heart failure in Tangier on November 18, 1999. His ashes were interred near the graves of his parents and grandparents in Lakemont, New York.

Reviews

[Edita · Rating 5 out of 5]

Inside I am waiting to escape somewhere else. I don't quite know where. Naturally one always wants to escape if one has no reason for being anywhere.. And I have no reason for being anywhere, that is certain. If I work, I don't think of that, and feel the escape urge less, so that the work is largely therapeutic. But when one feels that the only reason for working is in order to be able to forget one's life, and that the only reason for living is in order to work, one is sometimes tempted to consider the work slightly absurd, like the pills one takes to make one's digestion easier. There should be something else in between, but what it is, is anyone's guess. Some will say one thing, others something else. I suppose the trouble is that one thinks one's life instead of living it. Occasionally one enters into contact for a split second, when the wind blows across one's face, or when the moon comes out from behind a cloud, or a wave breaks against the rocks in some particular way which it would be impossible to recognize or define. The one catches oneself being conscious of the contact and it is lost. Thus, a great desire to lose consciousness. Yet in sleep nothing is different; there is always the same cage around. One is conscious that one is dreaming, and that the same forces operate there as elsewhere. Actually the pleasantest solution is a rather regimented day, with a certain number of hours of work, and the whole thing arranged as if one were in a sanatorium. "I am here on earth for my health"- you know!

―to Peggy Glanville-Hicks, February 25, 1951 Tangier

*
But for me writing fiction is the same sort of therapy. When life is unbearable, I apply the principle of the counteriritant: I invent something still worse, beside which the actuality seems fairly benign. I suppose the necessity is to persuade the reader of the impossibility, or even of the undesirability, of happiness. Once I've found the pattern that makes it possible to get it off my chest, I feel better.

-to James Leo Herlihy April 30, 1966 Tangier

[Tosh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Paul Bowles is one of those once-in-a-life time characters. So cool he was almost dead to the world. This dandy character was one of the great writers in the 20th Century -and his letters like his memoir - exposes nothing! Yet always fascinating. A great traveler to mysterious locations, Bowles is truly a superb stylist and the most coolest man on the planet.

[JerryDeanHalleck · Rating 2 out of 5]

Stylish, well written letters by one of America's most famous Expats. The ones from the 1930s and 1940s are the most interesting. They become much less interesting after 1960. I'd give them a higher rating except Bowles was somewhat like his writings. Stylish and restrained. Not cold or remote. But no emotional outbursts, drama, or episodes of depression or elation. No matter what happens, Bowles is almost always even-tempered, matter-of-fact, and full of wry humor.