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Tangier: City of the Dream
No city in the world has quite the exotic allure of Tangier. From the 17th century, it has been a city of refuge and excitements - a city where sex is cheap, drugs are plentiful, and a place where the outcasts of the world can breathe easily. The golden years of Tangier began after World War I and barely survived World War II. Among those who sought sanctuary or inspiration from the city were Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Ronnie Kray, the unhappy Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton, Tennessee Williams, Joe Orton, Kenneth Halliwell, Cecil Beaton, Ned Rorem and Truman Capote.
372 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1992
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80 people want to read
About the author
Iain Finlayson
13 books1 followerAcclaimed author and journalist, Iain Finlayson is the author of several books including Writers in Romney Marsh and a life of Boswell. He lives in Hay on Wye.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
February 25, 2015
Tangier is a fascinating book about the oddball city itself, and the oddballs who have frequented it or lived there. As an "expatriate" currently living in Oaxaca, I understand well how truly cringeworthy we can be when we colonize another piece of paradise. Because of its strategic location on the Straits of Gibraltar, the unique "solution" invented by the European powers was to make Tangier an international city, a tax haven, and what turned out to be an "anything goes" place of escape for the idle rich, the misanthrope, the criminal, the writer, and the artist. All this in an otherwise strict Islamic State ruled from Fez by a corrupt Sultan.
The author, Iain Finlayson is a brilliant writer himself, which makes this book so much more than it might have been in less skilled hands. He lays the context for the series of ex-pat travesties with his pungent history of the city, its political and cultural conflicts, and then moves into descriptions of the waves of writers who descended, Paul and Jane Bowles, William Burroughs and the Beats, Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams. Though this era is long gone, my own fascination with the place has not lessened. For now I content myself with excursions down the Boulevard Pasteur via Google maps….
The author, Iain Finlayson is a brilliant writer himself, which makes this book so much more than it might have been in less skilled hands. He lays the context for the series of ex-pat travesties with his pungent history of the city, its political and cultural conflicts, and then moves into descriptions of the waves of writers who descended, Paul and Jane Bowles, William Burroughs and the Beats, Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams. Though this era is long gone, my own fascination with the place has not lessened. For now I content myself with excursions down the Boulevard Pasteur via Google maps….
March 13, 2018
Lots of great stories about the place. I'm a fan of the Beats, and it had a good section on Burroughs. I hadn't realized just how popular it was for writers and artists.
March 15, 2022
I came to Tanger (deliberately dropping the 'i' as I prefer so) to spend a month away from London town, in search for something slower, different, surprising. I chose this city because of Burroughs and Paul Bowles...been on my mind for well over a decade.
I decided to read some books to understand more about this city. This is the first one.
I enjoyed it and found it interesting.
The history: the Greeks, the Romans, the Muslimisation of the city, the multiple conquests, its build-ups and destructions, the International Zone, the turmoils in 1952, the independence in 1956.
A centre of exchanges of all sorts since forever with its unique position and the importance of its port, its trade, its pirates (Raisuli), its focus on money and commerce. Sex as a currency too. Attracting homosexuals, as well as derelicts and pederasts from all over the globe, able to operate undisturbed and for the cost of just a few dirhams till the end of the 60s.
Paul and Jane Bowles, William Burroughs and the Beats (including Kerouak and Ginsberg), David Herbert and Barbara Hutton...Matisse, Cecil Beaton, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Jean Genet, Delacroix...the list goes on and on...all have passed through here...some for longer, some for less time...some loving it and some hating it...everyone in some way forever changed by this city. And then the local writers Mrabet, Choukri, Layachi...all recorded and translated by P. Bowles.
This book covers it all, including its iconic places. Some forever gone: Dean's Bar, the Parade, Porte's, Bar la Mar Chica...some still standing: Tingis Cafe, Cafe de Paris, Bar Centrale., Sidi Hosni..the Soccos (Petite and Grande).
It's a great introduction to this city that has so many layers it is hard to explain...I would recommend reading it.
I decided to read some books to understand more about this city. This is the first one.
I enjoyed it and found it interesting.
The history: the Greeks, the Romans, the Muslimisation of the city, the multiple conquests, its build-ups and destructions, the International Zone, the turmoils in 1952, the independence in 1956.
A centre of exchanges of all sorts since forever with its unique position and the importance of its port, its trade, its pirates (Raisuli), its focus on money and commerce. Sex as a currency too. Attracting homosexuals, as well as derelicts and pederasts from all over the globe, able to operate undisturbed and for the cost of just a few dirhams till the end of the 60s.
Paul and Jane Bowles, William Burroughs and the Beats (including Kerouak and Ginsberg), David Herbert and Barbara Hutton...Matisse, Cecil Beaton, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Jean Genet, Delacroix...the list goes on and on...all have passed through here...some for longer, some for less time...some loving it and some hating it...everyone in some way forever changed by this city. And then the local writers Mrabet, Choukri, Layachi...all recorded and translated by P. Bowles.
This book covers it all, including its iconic places. Some forever gone: Dean's Bar, the Parade, Porte's, Bar la Mar Chica...some still standing: Tingis Cafe, Cafe de Paris, Bar Centrale., Sidi Hosni..the Soccos (Petite and Grande).
It's a great introduction to this city that has so many layers it is hard to explain...I would recommend reading it.
September 16, 2023
The amazing thing about this book is actually how good it is, how amusing, intelligent and fun - which is everything I didn't expect it to be - even at only £1 I kept avoiding it in my local charity shop - why? because I just couldn't bear, so I thought, another camp account of the good old days with Paul and the Beats and the boys and the hashish and the cheap hashish and the plentiful hashish and the even more plentiful and cheap BOYS! I am no prude but I do get embarrassed over the exalting over the way favourable exchange rates allowed some people to go and live a foreign country and mercilessly exploit the natives while all the while complaining about them. And the snobbery of the little circle of pompous, second rate, second sons who couldn't keep their hands off working class boys but who avoided all consequences by living abroad and, after all you could find servants cheap - but the surprising thing is that this wasn't an embarrassing trawl through expected memoirs and anecdotes, be assured the best are there, as are all the Beats and other artists, real and phony, and the scandalous remittance men and even an odd woman.
Tangier was a ridiculous anomaly that lasted far too long but it was the home for various lengths of time for some important expatriate writers. Finlayson tells the story of how the city came to be, its peak hey days of notoriety, its eccentric and repellent residents and its end. If you want to know about the world of Tangier to make sense of the bolloocks the Beat writers produced then this is an excellent place to start.
Tangier was a ridiculous anomaly that lasted far too long but it was the home for various lengths of time for some important expatriate writers. Finlayson tells the story of how the city came to be, its peak hey days of notoriety, its eccentric and repellent residents and its end. If you want to know about the world of Tangier to make sense of the bolloocks the Beat writers produced then this is an excellent place to start.
January 4, 2020
I’m not really sure why I picked this up. I had spotted it in Foyles on a previous visit and it piqued my interest. I have been to Tangier once, on an interrail trip in 1999, and being a young, naive teenager hated the place for it’s complete otherness from everywhere I had been before (meaning basically England). We visited Casablanca on the same trip and I was violently ill for the rest of the time in Morocco and I swore at the time that I would never go back.
However over the years my aversion has mellowed and while I haven’t been back, I no longer say never.
Indeed, one of the reasons I picked up Street of Thieves by Mathias Enard, apart from the fact it was Mathias Enard, was that it started off in Tangier. Something again tugged at my interest.
In Tangier, Finlayson recounts the history of Tangier, from a thoroughly western perspective, through the long line of drug and boy chasing westerners who filed through or called it home because of it’s lawlessness and freedom from conventional norms, thanks partly to it’s freedom from jurisdiction from any one authority.
It should be said though that this is a dense book. It goes on and on. The foreward alone is seventeen pages, before you’ve even started. Kicking off with the general history, Finlayson homes in on Paul and Jane Bowles, authors and playwrights who lived in Tangier for a large portion of their lives, before covering in lurid detail William Burroughs exploits, David Herbert, Barbara Hutton, the Woolworths heiress who tried to spend her way out of her unhappiness, Cecil Beaton and a whole cast of other characters including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Truman Capote. There are excerpts from diaries and biographies, but I never felt like I was wading through endless text, and as someone who has no interest in any of these people I still found the book engaging. Indeed I was surprised near the end to see Ronnie Kray turning up in a place so far from East London.
All these artists, seemingly living on scraps of advances or borrowed money (except Hutton) dived fully into their own world, which seemed to run parallel to that of the native Moroccan’s in Tangier, and the two worlds collide only infrequently, even after Moroccan independence and Tangier is brought slowly back into the Moroccan state, and the ‘good old days’ are gone forever.
It was some of the lesser characters of these times in Tangier that I found interesting. Particularly the Green women, Jessie Green, Ada Kirby Green and Feridah Green. They feature briefly but I found them more fascinating than many of the other more famous people and would be interested to read more about them. But given the length of the book and the larger than life characters that Finlayson covers, as well as the supporting cast of bar flies and journalists and occasionally the odd Moroccan, I can see why not everyone get’s equal share of the text.
Perhaps one to read more if you’re interested in Bowles, or Burroughs more than Tangier. I can’t help feeling that while this must have been a large element of Tangier life and history, it seems that there would be so much more from a native’s perspective, and while Finlayson does frequently reference this, he is very much focused on the west’s focus on the debauchery of Tangier, and it’s enjoyable enough for all that.
(blog review here)
However over the years my aversion has mellowed and while I haven’t been back, I no longer say never.
Indeed, one of the reasons I picked up Street of Thieves by Mathias Enard, apart from the fact it was Mathias Enard, was that it started off in Tangier. Something again tugged at my interest.
In Tangier, Finlayson recounts the history of Tangier, from a thoroughly western perspective, through the long line of drug and boy chasing westerners who filed through or called it home because of it’s lawlessness and freedom from conventional norms, thanks partly to it’s freedom from jurisdiction from any one authority.
It should be said though that this is a dense book. It goes on and on. The foreward alone is seventeen pages, before you’ve even started. Kicking off with the general history, Finlayson homes in on Paul and Jane Bowles, authors and playwrights who lived in Tangier for a large portion of their lives, before covering in lurid detail William Burroughs exploits, David Herbert, Barbara Hutton, the Woolworths heiress who tried to spend her way out of her unhappiness, Cecil Beaton and a whole cast of other characters including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Truman Capote. There are excerpts from diaries and biographies, but I never felt like I was wading through endless text, and as someone who has no interest in any of these people I still found the book engaging. Indeed I was surprised near the end to see Ronnie Kray turning up in a place so far from East London.
All these artists, seemingly living on scraps of advances or borrowed money (except Hutton) dived fully into their own world, which seemed to run parallel to that of the native Moroccan’s in Tangier, and the two worlds collide only infrequently, even after Moroccan independence and Tangier is brought slowly back into the Moroccan state, and the ‘good old days’ are gone forever.
It was some of the lesser characters of these times in Tangier that I found interesting. Particularly the Green women, Jessie Green, Ada Kirby Green and Feridah Green. They feature briefly but I found them more fascinating than many of the other more famous people and would be interested to read more about them. But given the length of the book and the larger than life characters that Finlayson covers, as well as the supporting cast of bar flies and journalists and occasionally the odd Moroccan, I can see why not everyone get’s equal share of the text.
Perhaps one to read more if you’re interested in Bowles, or Burroughs more than Tangier. I can’t help feeling that while this must have been a large element of Tangier life and history, it seems that there would be so much more from a native’s perspective, and while Finlayson does frequently reference this, he is very much focused on the west’s focus on the debauchery of Tangier, and it’s enjoyable enough for all that.
(blog review here)
November 17, 2016
The chapter on Paul ("The Sheltering Sky") Bowles and his wife, Jane ("Two Serious Ladies") is superb. Jane's demise is a particularly moving story and the conjugal arrangements of the two, fascinating. Worth reading for this chapter alone.
February 3, 2014
This book bored me. Tremendously.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews