From the Publisher

Paul Bowles — novelist, composer, expatriate, rebel, and bisexual — is one of the most compelling and mythologized figures in twentieth-century American culture. Born in 1910, Bowles grew up in Jamaica, New York, a precocious child who could read by the age of three and was writing stories within the year. At eighteen, he embarked on an artistic journey that led him all over the world. Remarkably gifted, Bowles entered the vibrant art and literary world of the late 1920s and early '30s as a poet and composer. He studied music with composer Aaron Copland and was a friend of Gertrude Stein, W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Ned Rorem, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Stephen Spender, and Christopher Isherwood (who named his character Sally Bowles after him). Over the course of his career he composed scores for films and innumerable plays, including many works by Tennessee Williams and Orson Welles. It wasn't until after he married Jane Auer that he began writing fiction: The Delicate Prey, The Spider's House, Let It Come Down, and The Sheltering Sky, which he wrote after moving to Tangier in 1947, and which was immediately hailed as a classic.

It is Bowles's flamboyant life that most fascinates people — his friendships, his appetites, his controversial marriage, his leftist politics, his voluntary exile to Morocco, and his stature as a countercultural and gay icon. Through ten years of research, thirteen trips to Bowles's home in Tangier, extensive interviews with some two hundred of Bowles's acquaintances, and her own intimate relationship with Bowles, who died in 1999, Virginia Spencer Carr has gathered a wealth of informationabout Bowles and has written a masterful, riveting, and definitive account of an extraordinary life.

Kirkus Reviews

Blinkered by the friendship she developed with her subject over the last ten years of his life, academic biographer Carr (Dos Passos, 1984, etc.) presents a one-sided and less than reliable account of America's supreme decadent genius. Her narrative runs through Bowles's long life (1910-99) at breakneck speed, virtually ignoring the 26 years after wife Jane's death. Born in Queens, only child of a rather unserious mother and an authoritarian father he abhorred, Bowles was single-minded and almost cold-blooded about his life's pursuit: to leave home and travel, meet as many people as he could to help him along, and become a poet and musician. He had startling early success: his poems were published in transition while still in high school; he obtained an introduction to study with Aaron Copland, who became his patron and perhaps the love of his life; and he developed important friendships with Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, Orson Welles, Tennessee Williams, and numerous influential others. Supporting himself by writing incidental compositions for the theater, Bowles traveled to Morocco largely for the cheap availability of homosexual sex and hashish. In 1937 he met sheltered virgin Jane Auer, who "considered him a threat to her lesbianism" but married him to placate her mother. The couple lived and worked often in harmonious separation until her 1973 death from drug and alcohol abuse. Carr deeply mines Bowles's childhood and early years as a spokesman for non-Western music; her account of his initial success as a novelist (The Sheltering Sky, inspired by Jane's writing) moves blithely and is chock-full of encounters with famous musicians and belletrists. But she has enmeshed herself soexclusively in her subject that she fails to offer a sense of the compelling currents of the day-modernism, surrealism, existentialism, all important to Bowles-except as dates and names. Consequently, this is useful only to those who already have a working knowledge of his life. Nonanalytical and nonjudgmental, very much the way Bowles would have wanted it. Agents: Georges and Anne Borchardt

Product Details

• ISBN: 0641702841
  
• ISBN-13: 9780641702846
• Format: Hardcover, 432pp
• Publisher: Scribner
• Pub. Date: November 2004
• Edition Description: Bargain
• Sales Rank: 286,605

• Table of Contents
• Read an Excerpt
• Read a Sample Chapter

Table of Contents

Read an Excerpt

Paul Bowles hated his father. There was never a time that he could remember not hating him. When Bowles was six, his grandmother Henrietta Winnewisser told him that his father had tried to kill him when he was an infant. Henrietta could not abide her son-in-law and hoped that he would simply disappear before the child was irreparably injured. Bowles never doubted for a moment that his grandmother spoke the truth.

Claude Dietz Bowles, Paul Bowles's father, was a dentist who spent far more time with his patients than he did with his family, whom he sometimes found asleep when he climbed the steep steps of the old brownstone at 317 Fulton Street in Jamaica, New York, where he lived with his bride of fourteen months and a son whose presence he resented. If Claude did not appear promptly at 6:00 P.M. for dinner — when he insisted that it be ready and on the table — his wife, Rena, ate alone, then left the dining room to breast-feed her infant in the nursery. On such nights Claude found his dinner in the oven, and he picked at it grudgingly as though he resented each bite. Claude saw his interloping son as the real culprit. A fresh-air enthusiast, he hated finding the infant swaddled in blankets in a stuffy nursery. One evening when his son was scarcely three weeks old, Claude stripped him naked and placed him in a wicker basket beneaththe window, which he threw open to its full height. Had Henrietta not been awakened by her grandson's persistent cries and discovered him lying under a dusting of snow, she was certain he would not have survived the night. To Claude she had overstayed her welcome, and he was impatient for her to leave. He even offered to hire a maid, temporarily, to help with the chores, but his wife would not hear of it and insisted that her mother could stay as long as she wished.

Paul Frederick Bowles was not a pretty sight upon his breach birth on December 30, 1910. An ugly gash creased the side of his head, and on both temples a doctor's forceps had left deep imprints. His mother's two sisters noted that their nephew's brow and crown were stretched grotesquely out of shape, but said nothing for fear of offending Rena herself. As a child, upon poring over early photographs, Bowles concluded that he resembled the pinheads at whom people gawked and snickered in the circus midway to which his mother's two brothers had taken him. He, too, had gawked at his baby pictures and demanded an explanation. Rena admitted that for a time she had concealed his misshapen head under flounced bonnets, but onlookers were quick to assume that something terrible had occurred in the birth process. "The scar over my eye today is a reminiscence of those natal difficulties," said Bowles, whose father begrudged the precious time he had taken from his dental practice to accompany his wife to the hospital. Scarcely an hour after their son's birth, two nuns marched ceremoniously to her bedside and wrenched the infant from her arms.

"Your baby must be baptized into the Roman faith at once," the nuns whispered ominously. Rena threatened to scream and thwarted their mission. She and her husband were atheists, and the state of their son's soul was a moot point should he fail to survive the night.

Rena's parents had traveled by train from their home in Bellows Falls, Vermont, to see their newborn grandson, and Henrietta stayed on for several weeks to help with the chores. She could tell that Claude was inordinately jealous of the baby and warned her daughter that his ill will would mount if she were not vigilant. When Rena announced that she wanted to name their son after her brothers, Frederick and Paul, Claude did not object. Any name suited him so long as the child was not a junior.

Despite his inauspicious appearance as an infant, Bowles developed into a handsome boy with full lips, a well-shaped nose, a hint of a dimple in each cheek, a broad high forehead, blue eyes, and a crop of reddish-blonde curls that his mother refused to cut until he entered first grade. Bowles was twenty months old when Rena sent his picture to her sister Emma. "Paul has changed some since you saw him, hasn't he?" she wrote on the back of the snapshot.

Even Claude was startled when at the age of two his son was reading aloud from cereal boxes and the labels on various household objects. Some of Bowles's earliest recollections were of a circle of adults around him while he answered orthographical questions. Claude, already displaying his lifelong skepticism of his son's talents, concluded that his wife had tutored him so that he would appear far brighter than he was. At three, Bowles wrote his first short story, an animal tale of two pages. "I wrote many short stories at that age, all of them about animals. I wrote every day, but seldom showed them to anyone, even my mother. Sometimes I read them to my Aunt Emma when she stayed with us, and she seemed impressed."

Among Bowles's fondest memories as a child was the half hour he was allowed to spend with his mother after dinner in the privacy of his bedroom. "Here I could count on having her all to myself. I could carry on a conversation with my mother, who treated me as an adult. When I was very young, she called me 'Honeybunch.' I could sit on her lap and put my arms around her and hug her, but such behavior was strictly forbidden by my father once he witnessed it. I hated him for coming between us and spent much time thinking how I might retaliate."

Bowles was four when his mother read to him the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, which both terrified and intrigued him. "Looking back now, I am sure I would have discovered Poe eventually on my own, for we had five volumes of his books in that sad little first apartment. I was six when I read, from cover to cover, every Poe volume in the house, and before the year was out I read them all again." Yet nothing by Poe was more horrifying to Bowles than his mother's account of her brothers' noses being smashed with a hammer by their father. She said that her grandfather's nose had also been smashed, as were the noses of his brothers, a tale her father confirmed. "I was astonished when he told me that if the blow were performed well, there would be no permanent discoloration. Although I thoroughly disliked my father, I was relieved that I was not a Winnewisser. My nose was bad enough as it was," he concluded.

Bowles's mother told him that she herself had devoted many hours to the improvement of his nose by gently squeezing and pressing the tender cartilage at its bridge. "Young bones and cartilage were malleable, she told me, and you had to be very careful what shape they took. I wondered privately if I were slated to be the next victim of the hammer," said Bowles, who made no connection at first between his mother's massaging of his nose and a conversation he overheard regarding a cousin's allegation that the family was Jewish. Both before and during World War I, Marjorie Winnewisser spent several years in Berlin studying voice and performing in opera, and after the war she returned home to announce her engagement to an officer in the Royal Dutch Naval Reserve. "Why didn't you tell me we were Jewish?" she demanded upon confronting her father. She told him that in Germany the name Winnewisser was originally spelled Vennevitz, and that her friends in Berlin feared for her safety. The name is "definitely Jewish," they insisted and urged her to go home before she was persecuted.

"Tell me the truth, Mother, are we Jewish?" asked Bowles.

Rena replied that if it were so, she had no knowledge of it. "Your great-grandfather was a firebrand when he came to this country. He didn't think much of religion and wanted nothing to do with it." Bowles concluded that his mother was skirting the question. A few months later he observed her looking at a photograph of herself in profile and heard her exclaim with obvious disdain: "'Jewy, Jewy, Jewy!' I am sure my mother thought she looked Jewish, but I had no idea what characterized 'a Jewish look,' and still don't," he added.

Composer Leonard Bernstein, who knew Bowles well over the years, whispered upon meeting his mother: "Oh, Paul, she's such a nice Jewish lady, and so very pretty." Bowles was taken aback by his friend's glib assumption and assured Bernstein that his mother was by no means Jewish.

"Get off it! Are you pretending, don't you know she is or what?" Bernstein retorted.

Bowles never knew for certain if the Winnewissers actually were Jewish, but declared that if they were, it would serve his father right since he was "rigidly anti-Semitic" and never got over his marrying Jane Stajer Auer, a Jew.

Bowles's great-grandparents Frederick George Winnewisser and Caroline Christiana Landshultz left Germany in 1848, as did thousands of other emigrants of all ethnicities and national origins. Whether Frederick and Caroline knew each other before leaving their homeland is unclear, but both families came from the region of Essen, in Westphalia. Whereas Winnewisser came alone as a young man, Caroline was accompanied by her parents and brother and settled in the village of Hazardville, Connecticut, later known as Enfield.

On April 3, 1854, Frederick and Caroline were married by a clergyman; they went on to have six children. Only one did not survive. The oldest was Bowles's grandfather August Frederick Winnewisser, who assumed the head of the household and the running of the farm after his father drowned at fifty in the Connecticut River. August was twenty-one when he claimed his inheritance and set out alone on horseback for Rockingham, Vermont. It was here that he met Henrietta Frances Barker, whose family had been New Englanders since the 1620s. After a brief courtship, they were married on Christmas Day, 1877. Henrietta and her siblings were the sixth generation of Barkers born in New England, all descended from Richard Barker and his wife, Joannah, who had left Yorkshire, England, in 1623 and settled in Andover, Massachusetts.

Of August and Henrietta's eight children, five survived infancy: Emma, Rena, Ulla, Frederick, and Paul. The family lived first in a large wood-frame house at 48 Canal Street in Bellows Falls, just above the river and two doors from the general store that August had established before his marriage. A successful merchant, he soon moved his business a hundred yards above the river to Westminster Square, where the town hall, opera house, theater, shops, doctors' offices, and library were situated.

A Bellows Falls historian reported that Winnewisser "believed in the 'nimble sixpence' rather than the 'slow shilling,'" and sold "at bottom prices." Large signs affixed to the front of the store featured its wares of furniture, crockery, paper hangings, carpets, silver, plated ware, glassware, and picture frames. Soon Winnewisser was joined by two of his brothers, who opened shops of their own.

Rena and her brother Frederick attended preparatory schools in Exeter, New Hampshire, while Emma, their oldest sister, was studying painting in New York City. With only Paul and Ulla at home, Winnewisser moved his family to a new two-story brick house on School Street, at the top of a wide bluff that had a sweeping view of the town and river. Had their home not been next door to the Immanuel Episcopal Church, an imposing edifice of stone and stained glass, and across the street from the First Baptist Church, Winnewisser, an atheist, would have relished even more his new location.

A decade later, after being thrown from a horse, Winnewisser retired from merchandising and moved his family, first to Brooklyn, then to Lockwood, New York, where they lived briefly, and finally, to a farm outside the tiny community of Brimfield, Massachusetts, just off the Boston Post Road. A two-story clapboard house overlooked 165 acres of rolling, forested hillsides, a large apple orchard, and a deep-running brook that emptied into the Connecticut River. Although the farm had been abandoned for over a year, Winnewisser and his sons soon made the house livable, scraping and painting a room at a time, rebuilding windowsills and doorjambs, replacing broken glass, installing flues, and settling in before the first snow; moreover, Henrietta performed tasks she had never anticipated: supervising the canning and preserving of food from the garden, harvesting apples, overseeing the curing of meats, and cooking for her family and two hired hands.

Each January, between snowfalls, she packed a valise and left the men to their own devices to spend three weeks with each daughter — all now married — who in turn left their husbands for a spring vacation with their parents at what they now called Happy Hollow Farm. At Christmastime each daughter returned to the farm with her husband and children.

Bowles was ecstatic when at the age of three he rode the train with his parents to Springfield, but the fun did not begin until after his father had deposited them on the farm and returned to New York. Each summer Bowles and his mother spent two weeks at Happy Hollow Farm, which he cherished since it meant being free to roam as he saw fit. One summer his grandfather summoned him and two cousins who also were visiting and demanded to know if they believed in God. Having already decided that God was an invention by adults in order to manage their children more easily, Bowles said nothing, but his cousins answered quickly with enthusiasm: "Oh yes, Grampa, of course we do!"

"Pah! There's no god," countered Winnewisser with a grimace. "It's a lot of nonsense. Don't you believe it."

Bowles had no idea until several years later that he had been christened at the age of one by his great-uncle the Reverend Henry Green, a Unitarian minister. "Of course my christening made no sense," declared Bowles, who suspected that his parents had consented to it to humor Green. "I am sure they feared I would grow up a heathen. I could not help sympathizing with Gramma Winnewisser, who obviously worked harder than anyone else at Happy Hollow Farm. I surmised that she was a heathen, too. I can't say that I loved Gramma, but I liked her and respected her. It even occurred to me that she would have made a nice mother, yet the thought itself seemed irreverent since I already had a mother."

Although Bowles usually visited his father's family in Elmira, New York, each summer after leaving the farm, he knew little about them except what he observed. At seventeen he was surprised when his mother mentioned that he and his father were related to several generations of distinguished publishers and newspaper editors in Springfield, all named Samuel Bowles. The first Samuel was twenty-six when he founded a weekly newspaper, the Republican, which his son took over and converted into an evening daily, the Springfield Daily Republican. As the Springfield Republican, under the editorship of the third Samuel Bowles, the paper became the preeminent daily in the country for its advocacy of the ballot to every man regardless of creed or color, and also for its promotion of women's suffrage. Bowles had no desire to know more about the Samuel Bowleses, since they were links to his father.

He was only vaguely interested when he learned that still another antecedent, Harvey Edward Bowles, his great-grandfather, was a medical doctor in New Jersey before moving to Northampton, Massachusetts, for the birth of his son, Frederick Theodore, Bowles's grandfather. Frederick Bowles became a traveling salesman for the Corticelli Silk Company, and for a time his route included Elmira, New York, which held promise as a site for the harvesting of raw silk, mulberry trees having once dotted the town's Chemung River landscape as far as the eye could see. In 1833 the Chemung Canal opened to river traffic, and the burgeoning town became readily accessible to upstate New York by way of Seneca Lake and the Erie Canal. "My only interest in that regard was in the geography of the area, but I much preferred to create my own," said Bowles.

Frederick's wife, Ida Twiss Bowles, shared her husband's disdain for organized religion and thought it ironic when they moved to Elmira that they lived on Church Street, which cut a mile-long swath between a dozen blocks of impressive three-story houses of Queen Anne and Tudor Revival design. Characterized by tall, asymmetrical rooflines, towers, turrets, and multiple porches, each house was set off by manicured lawns and gardens. It was the Church Street house that Bowles remembered visiting as a child, and it was here where he first met his paternal grandparents, whose "solemn, tight-lipped, and strait-laced" demeanor reminded him of his father.

Frederick and Ida Bowles disavowed religion in any form and demanded that their three children follow unswervingly their mandates of restraint and practicality. Prattle was unacceptable and privacy sacrosanct. Bowles gathered that his own tendency for secrecy evolved from his father's side of the family.

By the time Claude graduated from the Elmira Free Academy, his brother, Shirley, had finished his own program at the Philadelphia Dental School and was practicing dentistry in Washington, D.C. Claude reluctantly followed suit and entered the same dental school from which Shirley graduated. It was Bowles's impression that his father suffered a mental breakdown halfway through his program and found refuge in Montevallo, Alabama, where his half uncle, Charles Frederick Robbins, arranged for him to be a foreman of a railroad work crew. "I am sure my father's railroad work was meant to be constructive therapy, but he never spoke of it to me," said Bowles. After several months of recuperation, he returned to dental school, graduated in the spring of 1901, and practiced for two years with his brother in Washington, D.C., until moving back home to practice dentistry with Dr. Carl Waples, whose office was walking distance from Church Street. The last mention of Claude Bowles, Doctor of Dentistry, in the 1907 Elmira Business Directory was that he had given up his practice with Dr. Waples and relocated in New York City.

It was the same year that Rena Winnewisser left Boston and moved to New York. Upon graduation from Robinson Female Seminary in Exeter, New Hampshire, Rena moved in with her sister Emma in Boston to attend Simmons, a private women's college, bent now upon enrolling in a professional program leading to certification in domestic science. After graduating from Simmons, Rena began teaching domestic science at the New York State Normal School in Jamaica, Long Island, where she met Claude Dietz Bowles, whom she perceived as steadfast, hardworking, and intent upon marriage. Bowles concluded later that his father was smitten by his mother's trim figure, playful personality, pretty face, and luxurious brown hair, which she brushed carefully and pinned up each morning. For two years Rena taught at the New York State Normal School, then returned to Vermont to prepare for her marriage. On October 16, 1909, the weekly Bellows Falls Times reported the event in her parents' home as a "charming, Saturday morning wedding" at which the bride was "becomingly gowned in a gray traveling suit" and given away by her father.

Upon their marriage, the couple moved into a cramped third-floor apartment on Fulton Avenue, a thoroughfare that eventually stretched through the business district of Jamaica to the easternmost reaches of Long Island, New York. It was here that young Bowles spent his formative years. "When I finally learned to walk, having put it off as long as possible, I hated being made to go outside, yet invariably, out I went into the fenced backyard for an hour of play and what my father called deep breathing." From there, Bowles could see only the roofs of other buildings, the windows of his father's office on the second floor, and the windows of his family's living room on the third. "I knew nothing of swings, slides, or sandboxes with which most children distracted themselves during outdoor play. I had no friends and knew only my own backyard, which I hated," said Bowles. If his mother looked out the window and noticed him standing idly or staring at the clock, she rapped on the pane and gestured that he should move about and play. Bowles obeyed by galloping back and forth a few times, an activity that prompted his father to shout down from the window of his office: "Calm down, young man!"

Bowles's most overarching feelings of childhood were his abject loneliness and sense of deprivation. One event he remembered was his mother's having told him that he must stay in bed because she needed to go out alone for a few minutes. "Of course I stayed. But I felt as though there was no one else in the world, and at that moment, for me, there wasn't. My mother returned, but to a six-year-old at home alone, she stayed away much too long."

Bowles found solace in a rag doll named Jimmie that his aunt Emma had made for him. "I was devoted to Jimmie, who was as big as I was and had a huge, hideous painted face. I also had a small doll named Kitty Campbell and a dog with hound ears that I called Nippie. I remember being two when I named a scarecrow Donty Be. I was always naming things. I suppose it made me feel less alone."

When his hour in the backyard was up, he was allowed to play in the dining room, where his father insisted that his toy box be kept. "I had no idea why I couldn't have my toy box in my room, but had it been there, my father could not have monitored it. Since we ate in the dining room, everything with which I occupied myself throughout the day had to be put away by 6:00 P.M., when my father usually appeared. If he should find anything outside the box, I was convinced it would be confiscated. It was not that anything actually was confiscated. The important element was the threat that hung over the toys."

Bowles sat in the living room with a book until his father summoned him to the table. "Other than Poe, there was a dearth of books in that third-floor apartment compared to what I discovered later in my grandfather's library in Elmira," Bowles recounted. Of his grandparents, it was his paternal grandfather who interested him most because his library was filled with volumes of Balzac, Dumas, Hugo, and Zola. "My Grandfather Bowles, whom I called Daddypapa, taught himself French and Spanish so he could read books in their original languages. My grandmother read, too, but Daddypapa's books were not her 'cup of tea,' she told me." Daddymama was particularly critical of her grandson's desire to be alone so much. "It is unnatural," she told his mother.

In their day-to-day lives at home in Jamaica, Claude relied upon Rena to live within a well-defined budget. Bowles remembered his mother's careful planning of each meal and her preparation of the dishes his father especially liked. "She was a good cook, baked all of our bread, and served us special breakfasts on weekends. When my father seemed irritable at the end of his workday, which was often, he found fault with almost everything Mother cooked. 'We have to make allowances for his temper,' she told me. 'He's under a terrific strain.'"

From the sidelines, Bowles pondered why he and his mother had to make allowances for his father's temper and the nature of the strain from which he suffered, but he reached no satisfactory conclusions. He also watched silently as Rena coddled her husband, with whom she seemed infinitely patient despite his own impatience and moodiness with them. "I saw her try every trick imaginable to lift her husband from his doldrums. Perhaps my father's brittle exterior was a means of disguising his depression and latent anger that always seemed on the verge of exploding," Bowles concluded.

Since his parents were never demonstrative of any affection that may have existed between them, Bowles did not know what to think when he heard little cat sounds and purrings made by his father one afternoon when he walked into the house. "Sometimes he called out in imitation of a tomcat: 'Ow row! Ow row!' My mother replied with a purring sound loud enough to be heard no matter where he was in the house. Their feline dialogue ended only when they sat down to dinner, often to be resumed after they had gone to bed. In my naïveté I never thought anything of it." There was no such thing as sex in Bowles's consciousness then. As a child, it did not occur to him that there was anything singular about the sexes, although he did notice that his maternal grandmother had a more ample chest than most men. "I never saw either of my parents in any state of undress. They kept the door to their bedroom locked when they were in it, and I was instructed to lock the door to the bathroom when I went in. Of course I was told never to lock my bedroom door," said Bowles, who gathered that if he did, there would be dire consequences.

Whereas Claude sometimes interrupted his wife with a "little pitchers have big ears" refrain if she were recounting something in front of their son that did not bear repeating outside of the home, Rena was inclined to address such issues head-on. "You mustn't tell anyone you saw Daddy in bed with Aunt Emma," she instructed, Bowles having walked into the guest room one Sunday morning without knocking, curious about the shrieks of laughter he heard from within. He saw his mother leaning over the footboard of his aunt's bed "holding her sides from having laughed too much," and his aunt "squealing and shrieking" in the bed. "My father, still in his pajamas, was giggling and lying in bed beside Aunt Emma. When he saw me he leapt to his feet and exclaimed: 'Let's get to those buckwheat cakes.'"

Whereas Bowles thought little of the incident, he was taken aback when his mother insisted later that he never speak of it. "I grew up believing that one should hide everything." He was four when he wrote a poem for his aunt to cheer her up and printed it out by hand:

Poor Aunt Emma, sick in bed

With an ice-cap on her head.

She's very sick, but she's not dead.

Touched by her nephew's offering, Emma laughed as she read it, then hugged him. "Why did you laugh?" he asked.

"Because I like the poem. You do love your old aunt, don't you?"

Already uncomfortable with any expression of emotion directed at him, and disquieted by his aunt's expectation of an emotional response, he averted her glance and replied softly, "Of course," then retreated from the room.

Bowles had become increasingly aware that not only was he his father's enemy, but also that his father was his enemy. Intuitively, Bowles refined his subtle strategy of passive aggression, having learned from both parents that he must never be demonstrative since being demonstrative meant showing how he actually felt.

When an argument erupted between his parents regarding some aspect of child rearing, his mother's authority was a fat green book by a Dr. Riker called Child Psychology. "My father was annoyed that my mother spent so much time with Dr. Riker's book and tried to impose Riker's philosophies upon him. She went to great pains to keep me from seeing the book, which made me even more curious about its contents." By this time he knew to avoid displaying overt curiosity about anything in which he took a special interest.

Bowles's skill at manipulating language and deflecting questions that made him uncomfortable or seemed irrelevant characterized his behavior. Although such evasiveness may have been calculated to avoid offending an interrogator, more often it was a means of matching wits or engaging in subtle gamesmanship with an opponent. The desire to keep the other person off balance, to provoke uncertainty, to perpetuate an air of mystery — all became inordinately satisfying to him and were traits that Bowles curried throughout his life.

Since his mother and father seldom informed him in advance of any activity in which he, too, might participate, Bowles knew that a trip was imminent only when his mother appeared at his bedroom door with a valise and began packing his clothes. His paternal grandparents owned three cottages a few miles north of Elmira in the town of Glenora, and vacations there were the highlight of Bowles's summer. Although he had no idea which cottage they were to occupy until they arrived, he was fondest of the Boat House since it stretched thirty feet over the lake. It had boat slips on the first level, a kitchen and servant's room on the second, and the family's living quarters at the top. On all levels the rooms abutted the bare shale cliff behind it, the shale itself forming the back wall of the structure. From the top floor, a large open porch extended across the back of the house, and from it, two more flights of stairs provided access to the woods and ridge above. Across a narrow road to the rear was a cottage named Red Rough, and southwest of the road was Horseshoe Cabin, where his paternal grandparents usually stayed.

One of Bowles's favorite pastimes at the lake was inventing lists of place-names for his imaginary railroad. He drew maps and prepared timetables so that his train would arrive on schedule and depart each station without keeping its passengers waiting. One afternoon he printed the names of each station on small squares of paper and anchored them at intervals under bits of shale. Just before dark, he hurried back to Horseshoe Cabin to wash up for dinner, all the while taking exquisite pleasure in visualizing his railroad. What he had not anticipated was his father's discovery of some of the slips of paper during his own excursion beside the lake. Certain that he had stumbled upon a code of some sort, Claude confronted his son and demanded an explanation.

"He was right. I had violated the unwritten rules of the community: that one must refrain at all times from scattering any kind of litter along the paths in the woods," said Bowles. In the manner of a prosecuting attorney, Claude presented his case to the family, now seated around the dinner table. First he exhibited the square of paper on which was printed the word NOTNINRIVO. Having found it at the edge of a dry creek bed above the lake, he announced glibly that the word obviously meant "nothing in the river."

"That's not what it means," his son interrupted, incensed by his father's intrusion.

"What does it mean then?" Claude demanded.

"You wouldn't understand," Bowles replied. "I had no intention of revealing to anyone that NOTNINRIVO was merely the name of the preceding station spelled backward."

Claude seized his son and shook him. "It's just a bid for attention," he snapped, and again demanded an explanation.

Bowles fled the house to reclaim his treasures, his game having soured. He retrieved each slip, ran to a remote cove down the shore, and burned them, then pounded the smoldering embers into the ground. In a final solemn moment, he selected three flat rocks of shale amidst a bed of leaves and stacked them carefully to mark the shallow grave. Making his way back to his grandfather's cottage in the dark, Bowles vowed anew to conceal from anyone who attempted to intrude upon his private life the slightest evidence of anything that mattered.

Upon the family's return to Jamaica, Bowles hid each notebook, more aware than ever before that he had entered a new phase of stealth and subterfuge. In one notebook he had recorded such names as Shirkingsville, 645th Street, Clifton Junction, El Apepal, Hiss, Ickerbona, Norpath Kay, Wen Kroy, Snakespiderville — scores of names, his imaginary world expanding in spurts. Yet his life in the real world of mealtimes and hostile, intrusive adults continued as though his interior world of magic, mystery, and inversion did not exist. In another notebook, Bowles created a planet on which he drew land masses and gave names to its four continents — Ferncawland, Lanton, Zaganokword, and Araplaina — and to the seas that surrounded them. He drew maps of rivers and tributaries, hills, mountain ranges, deserts, towns, cities, and the railroad lines that linked them. Bowles insisted that he never connected himself in any way with his maps of the world, nor did he inhabit any of the continents he invented. The whole point of the imaginary world was that it allowed him not to exist.

Despite his resolution to exercise caution at every turn, Bowles unwittingly invited disaster by drawing in his notebook before breakfast, an act he had hoped to conceal by locking his door. "I listened to a blue jay complaining loudly, and for a time I was that blue jay. I wanted to draw houses to add to my real estate collection and had just opened my notebook when my father bounded up the stairs and tried to get into my room....I hid my notebook under the bedcovers, and he stormed in and made me show him what I had been doing."

"Just for that I'm going to give you a good hiding."

"I offered no protest, whereupon my father asked between slaps if I had had enough." Bowles made no reply, and again his father demanded to know if his son had had enough.

Again, the youth made no reply.

"Now?" Claude scowled as he again raised his belt.

"Whatever you say," answered Bowles, his voice unwavering.

"Give me every notebook," his father hissed.

One by one Bowles extracted each notebook from his closet and laid it out on the bed. "I was convinced that I was seeing them for the last time, but I would not allow myself to grovel for their continued existence." He was astonished that his father confiscated them for only two months. "It was the shortest sentence my mother could wangle for me, and almost the only time she interceded for me. It was also the only time my father actually beat me, and it began a new stage in the development of our hostilities, for I realized that I could take any verbal abuse or physical punishment at the hands of my father and not shed a tear." Bowles realized, too, that power was the significant ingredient in their conflict. As soon as Claude discovered something that his son wished to do, he withheld permission.

At five Bowles was old beyond his years, having developed the art of feigning enthusiasm through facial expression and gesture for anything he disliked and to express disgust or abhorrence for whatever he might secretly desire. "I was convinced that dealing with my father was merely a question of holding out. To endure was to win. I also vowed to devote my life to my father's destruction, even though it could mean my own," said Bowles. "For many years it was my sole obsession."

Copyright © 2004 by Virginia Spencer Carr

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Paul Bowles

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Chapter One

"At birth I was an exceptionally ugly infant. I think my ugliness caused the dislike which my father immediately formed for me." - -Paul Bowles to Bruce Morrissette, Jamaica, New York, January 14, 1930

Paul Bowles hated his father. There was never a time that he could remember not hating him. When Bowles was six, his grandmother Henrietta Winnewisser told him that his father had tried to kill him when he was an infant. Henrietta could not abide her son-in-law and hoped that he would simply disappear before the child was irreparably injured. Bowles never doubted for a moment that his grandmother spoke the truth.

Claude Dietz Bowles, Paul Bowles's father, was a dentist who spent far more time with his patients than he did with his family, whom he sometimes found asleep when he climbed the steep steps of the old brownstone at 317 Fulton Street in Jamaica, New York, where he lived with his bride of fourteen months and a son whose presence he resented. If Claude did not appear promptly at 6:00 P.M. for dinner - when he insisted that it be ready and on the table - his wife, Rena, ate alone, then left the dining room to breast-feed her infant in the nursery. On such nights Claude found his dinner in the oven, and he picked at it grudgingly as though he resented each bite. Claude saw his interloping son as the real culprit. A fresh-air enthusiast, he hated finding the infant swaddled in blankets in a stuffy nursery. One evening when his son was scarcely three weeks old, Claude stripped him naked and placed him in a wicker basket beneath the window, which he threw open to its full height. Had Henrietta not been awakened by her grandson's persistent cries and discovered him lying under a dusting of snow, she was certain he would not have survived the night. To Claude she had overstayed her welcome, and he was impatient for her to leave. He even offered to hire a maid, temporarily, to help with the chores, but his wife would not hear of it and insisted that her mother could stay as long as she wished.

Paul Frederick Bowles was not a pretty sight upon his breach birth on December 30, 1910. An ugly gash creased the side of his head, and on both temples a doctor's forceps had left deep imprints. His mother's two sisters noted that their nephew's brow and crown were stretched grotesquely out of shape, but said nothing for fear of offending Rena herself. As a child, upon poring over early photographs, Bowles concluded that he resembled the pinheads at whom people gawked and snickered in the circus midway to which his mother's two brothers had taken him. He, too, had gawked at his baby pictures and demanded an explanation. Rena admitted that for a time she had concealed his misshapen head under flounced bonnets, but onlookers were quick to assume that something terrible had occurred in the birth process. "The scar over my eye today is a reminiscence of those natal difficulties," said Bowles, whose father begrudged the precious time he had taken from his dental practice to accompany his wife to the hospital. Scarcely an hour after their son's birth, two nuns marched ceremoniously to her bedside and wrenched the infant from her arms.

"Your baby must be baptized into the Roman faith at once," the nuns whispered ominously. Rena threatened to scream and thwarted their mission. She and her husband were atheists, and the state of their son's soul was a moot point should he fail to survive the night.

Rena's parents had traveled by train from their home in Bellows Falls, Vermont, to see their newborn grandson, and Henrietta stayed on for several weeks to help with the chores. She could tell that Claude was inordinately jealous of the baby and warned her daughter that his ill will would mount if she were not vigilant. When Rena announced that she wanted to name their son after her brothers, Frederick and Paul, Claude did not object. Any name suited him so long as the child was not a junior.

Despite his inauspicious appearance as an infant, Bowles developed into a handsome boy with full lips, a well-shaped nose, a hint of a dimple in each cheek, a broad high forehead, blue eyes, and a crop of reddish-blonde curls that his mother refused to cut until he entered first grade. Bowles was twenty months old when Rena sent his picture to her sister Emma. "Paul has changed some since you saw him, hasn't he?" she wrote on the back of the snapshot.

Even Claude was startled when at the age of two his son was reading aloud from cereal boxes and the labels on various household objects. Some of Bowles's earliest recollections were of a circle of adults around him while he answered orthographical questions. Claude, already displaying his lifelong skepticism of his son's talents, concluded that his wife had tutored him so that he would appear far brighter than he was. At three, Bowles wrote his first short story, an animal tale of two pages. "I wrote many short stories at that age, all of them about animals. I wrote every day, but seldom showed them to anyone, even my mother. Sometimes I read them to my Aunt Emma when she stayed with us, and she seemed impressed."

Among Bowles's fondest memories as a child was the half hour he was allowed to spend with his mother after dinner in the privacy of his bedroom. "Here I could count on having her all to myself. I could carry on a conversation with my mother, who treated me as an adult. When I was very young, she called me 'Honeybunch.' I could sit on her lap and put my arms around her and hug her, but such behavior was strictly forbidden by my father once he witnessed it. I hated him for coming between us and spent much time thinking how I might retaliate."

Bowles was four when his mother read to him the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, which both terrified and intrigued him. "Looking back now, I am sure I would have discovered Poe eventually on my own, for we had five volumes of his books in that sad little first apartment. I was six when I read, from cover to cover, every Poe volume in the house, and before the year was out I read them all again." Yet nothing by Poe was more horrifying to Bowles than his mother's account of her brothers' noses being smashed with a hammer by their father. She said that her grandfather's nose had also been smashed, as were the noses of his brothers, a tale her father confirmed. "I was astonished when he told me that if the blow were performed well, there would be no permanent discoloration. Although I thoroughly disliked my father, I was relieved that I was not a Winnewisser. My nose was bad enough as it was," he concluded.

Bowles's mother told him that she herself had devoted many hours to the improvement of his nose by gently squeezing and pressing the tender cartilage at its bridge. "Young bones and cartilage were malleable, she told me, and you had to be very careful what shape they took. I wondered privately if I were slated to be the next victim of the hammer," said Bowles, who made no connection at first between his mother's massaging of his nose and a conversation he overheard regarding a cousin's allegation that the family was Jewish. Both before and during World War I, Marjorie Winnewisser spent several years in Berlin studying voice and performing in opera, and after the war she returned home to announce her engagement to an officer in the Royal Dutch Naval Reserve. "Why didn't you tell me we were Jewish?" she demanded upon confronting her father. She told him that in Germany the name Winnewisser was originally spelled Vennevitz, and that her friends in Berlin feared for her safety. The name is "definitely Jewish," they insisted and urged her to go home before she was persecuted.

"Tell me the truth, Mother, are we Jewish?" asked Bowles.

Rena replied that if it were so, she had no knowledge of it. "Your great-grandfather was a firebrand when he came to this country. He didn't think much of religion and wanted nothing to do with it." Bowles concluded that his mother was skirting the question. A few months later he observed her looking at a photograph of herself in profile and heard her exclaim with obvious disdain: "'Jewy, Jewy, Jewy!' I am sure my mother thought she looked Jewish, but I had no idea what characterized 'a Jewish look,' and still don't," he added.

Composer Leonard Bernstein, who knew Bowles well over the years, whispered upon meeting his mother: "Oh, Paul, she's such a nice Jewish lady, and so very pretty." Bowles was taken aback by his friend's glib assumption and assured Bernstein that his mother was by no means Jewish.

"Get off it! Are you pretending, don't you know she is or what?" Bernstein retorted.

Bowles never knew for certain if the Winnewissers actually were Jewish, but declared that if they were, it would serve his father right since he was "rigidly anti-Semitic" and never got over his marrying Jane Stajer Auer, a Jew.

Bowles's great-grandparents Frederick George Winnewisser and Caroline Christiana Landshultz left Germany in 1848, as did thousands of other emigrants of all ethnicities and national origins. Whether Frederick and Caroline knew each other before leaving their homeland is unclear, but both families came from the region of Essen, in Westphalia. Whereas Winnewisser came alone as a young man, Caroline was accompanied by her parents and brother and settled in the village of Hazardville, Connecticut, later known as Enfield.

On April 3, 1854, Frederick and Caroline were married by a clergyman; they went on to have six children. Only one did not survive. The oldest was Bowles's grandfather August Frederick Winnewisser, who assumed the head of the household and the running of the farm after his father drowned at fifty in the Connecticut River. August was twenty-one when he claimed his inheritance and set out alone on horseback for Rockingham, Vermont. It was here that he met Henrietta Frances Barker, whose family had been New Englanders since the 1620s. After a brief courtship, they were married on Christmas Day, 1877. Henrietta and her siblings were the sixth generation of Barkers born in New England, all descended from Richard Barker and his wife, Joannah, who had left Yorkshire, England, in 1623 and settled in Andover, Massachusetts.

Of August and Henrietta's eight children, five survived infancy: Emma, Rena, Ulla, Frederick, and Paul. The family lived first in a large wood-frame house at 48 Canal Street in Bellows Falls, just above the river and two doors from the general store that August had established before his marriage. A successful merchant, he soon moved his business a hundred yards above the river to Westminster Square, where the town hall, opera house, theater, shops, doctors' offices, and library were situated.

A Bellows Falls historian reported that Winnewisser "believed in the 'nimble sixpence' rather than the 'slow shilling,'" and sold "at bottom prices." Large signs affixed to the front of the store featured its wares of furniture, crockery, paper hangings, carpets, silver, plated ware, glassware, and picture frames. Soon Winnewisser was joined by two of his brothers, who opened shops of their own.

Rena and her brother Frederick attended preparatory schools in Exeter, New Hampshire, while Emma, their oldest sister, was studying painting in New York City. With only Paul and Ulla at home, Winnewisser moved his family to a new two-story brick house on School Street, at the top of a wide bluff that had a sweeping view of the town and river. Had their home not been next door to the Immanuel Episcopal Church, an imposing edifice of stone and stained glass, and across the street from the First Baptist Church, Winnewisser, an atheist, would have relished even more his new location.

A decade later, after being thrown from a horse, Winnewisser retired from merchandising and moved his family, first to Brooklyn, then to Lockwood, New York, where they lived briefly, and finally, to a farm outside the tiny community of Brimfield, Massachusetts, just off the Boston Post Road. A two-story clapboard house overlooked 165 acres of rolling, forested hillsides, a large apple orchard, and a deep-running brook that emptied into the Connecticut River. Although the farm had been abandoned for over a year, Winnewisser and his sons soon made the house livable, scraping and painting a room at a time, rebuilding windowsills and doorjambs, replacing broken glass, installing flues, and settling in before the first snow; moreover, Henrietta performed tasks she had never anticipated: supervising the canning and preserving of food from the garden, harvesting apples, overseeing the curing of meats, and cooking for her family and two hired hands.

Each January, between snowfalls, she packed a valise and left the men to their own devices to spend three weeks with each daughter - all now married - who in turn left their husbands for a spring vacation with their parents at what they now called Happy Hollow Farm. At Christmastime each daughter returned to the farm with her husband and children.

Bowles was ecstatic when at the age of three he rode the train with his parents to Springfield, but the fun did not begin until after his father had deposited them on the farm and returned to New York. Each summer Bowles and his mother spent two weeks at Happy Hollow Farm, which he cherished since it meant being free to roam as he saw fit. One summer his grandfather summoned him and two cousins who also were visiting and demanded to know if they believed in God. Having already decided that God was an invention by adults in order to manage their children more easily, Bowles said nothing, but his cousins answered quickly with enthusiasm: "Oh yes, Grampa, of course we do!"

"Pah! There's no god," countered Winnewisser with a grimace. "It's a lot of nonsense. Don't you believe it."

Bowles had no idea until several years later that he had been christened at the age of one by his great-uncle the Reverend Henry Green, a Unitarian minister. "Of course my christening made no sense," declared Bowles, who suspected that his parents had consented to it to humor Green. "I am sure they feared I would grow up a heathen. I could not help sympathizing with Gramma Winnewisser, who obviously worked harder than anyone else at Happy Hollow Farm. I surmised that she was a heathen, too. I can't say that I loved Gramma, but I liked her and respected her. It even occurred to me that she would have made a nice mother, yet the thought itself seemed irreverent since I already had a mother."

Although Bowles usually visited his father's family in Elmira, New York, each summer after leaving the farm, he knew little about them except what he observed.

Continues...

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Excerpted from Paul Bowles by Virginia Spencer Carr Copyright © 2004 by Virginia Spencer Carr. Excerpted by permission.
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