An Invisible Spectator (Magill Book Reviews)

Paul Bowles occupies a unique position in American letters. Born in Jamaica, New York, he has spent virtually all of his adult life living abroad, primarily in North Africa. After a rather haphazard and incomplete university career, Bowles was encouraged by Aaron Copland to study music composition in Paris with Nadia Boulanger. It was while in Paris that he met Alice Toklas, Gertrude Stein’s friend, who suggested that he visit Morocco, thus began Bowles’s exile in North Africa. He became interested in writing prose during the 1930’s and from that time on has pursued an active career as both a writer and translator.

As a result of a brief period of experimentation with drugs, Bowles became the spiritual father of the Beat movement during the 1950’s and after a period of neglect he was again discovered in the 1970’s, when he became, according to this biography, one of the central reference points for a new generation of American writers.

Although Bowles published an autobiography, WITHOUT STOPPING, in 1972, his account of his own life is rather taciturn. Based on extensive interviews both with Bowles’s friends and with Bowles himself, Sawyer-Laucanno’s biography probes beneath the surface of the life of this withdrawn and private writer.

This is the first biography of Bowles, and although there are several literary studies devoted to his writing, this volume far exceeds the others in placing Bowles in the literary culture of his times. Sawyer-Laucanno is to be congratulated on writing an excellent study of an extremely difficult subject. He amply makes the case for further study of Bowles’s life and career. In the past Bowles has been too easily dismissed as an expatriate writer of limited interest to mainstream American literature. In fact, as Sawyer-Laucanno shows, Bowles’s work belongs to a significant American tradition of outward-seeking fictions in the vein of Mark Twain, Herman Melville, and Ernest Hemingway.

Sources for Further Study

Library Journal. CXIV, April 15, 1989, p.76.

New Statesman & Society. II, August 4, 1989, p.27.

The New York Review of Books. XXXVI, November 23, 1989, p.6.

The New York Times Book Review. XCIV, August 6, 1989, p.3.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXXV, May 12, 1989, p.271.

The Times Literary Supplement. September 15, 1989, p.995.

The Washington Post Book World. XIX, June II, 1989, p.3.