“Not all the ravages caused by our merciless age are tangible ones. The subtler forms of destruction, those involving only the human spirit, are the most to be dreaded”. So wrote Paul Bowles in the preface of the 1981 edition of his novel, “The Spider’s House”. I discovered the book in an antiquarian bookshop in Kalk Bay near Fish Hoek, a kind of Hebden-Bridge-by-the-sea on the way to Cape Point. A limited edition cloth bound trade copy at R120; it was one of those rare bargains.
Bowles was a New Yorker who spent most of his adult life in Tangier, North Africa, watching people and writing about them. He lived well into his 90’s. In his early years he was a composer of music, sharing an apartment at one time with Aaron Copeland. So, not a lightweight. Another novel of his is “The Sheltering Sky” which became a film with John Malkovich and Debra Winger. His collected short stories are a fitting salute to the genre.
His writings form an astute commentary on the white man’s naïve and inept incursion into the continent of Africa. As you read, you get the sense that Africa stalks him, seduces him, exposes him and then watches him self-destruct. The stumbling and hapless pale-skin is unaware of the unseen predator in every encounter. The visitor, in a reversal of appearances, becomes the subject of the hunt, an object of stealth, caught in the sights of an ancient invisible menace. Like a lost animal in the savannah who has wandered into the wrong territory. In his stories, it is the innocent who are smart and the smart that are innocent. Bowles unveils the Souk and the Bazaar as amphitheatres of cruel irony in which the white man wanders in the shadows, unaware of the penetrating eyes all around him. He always ends up on his knees, perplexed and shaken, shorn of his arrogant presumptuousness, finally revealed as a fool in another man’s land.
As I look around me through the borrowed lens of a Paul Bowles, down here in the Cape townships, I am all too aware that those watching me are sensitive to the foul odour of pride and arrogance veiled beneath the layers of good intentions. The pride and prejudice of the white man. Subtle forms of destruction…and the most to be dreaded.
I dedicate this blog to my friend Paul Bailey with whom I discovered the genius of Paul Bowles.
Thank you for the dedication Michael! I well remember the discussions we used to have about Bowles. The sense of alienation and unreality that he creates in his novels and stories is perhaps similar to the sensations described by the psychiatric patients that I see at work. We both admired the way he describes ordinary people in ordinary lives who suddenly find themselves staring into an abyss.
ReplyDeleteA couple of years ago I bought the DVD of "The Sheltering Sky", but I have never watched it - maybe I was afraid that it would ruin the book for me. Perhaps now I'll pluck up the courage to watch it.
Paul