promoting the works of Paul and Jane Bowles in the written, musical and theatre forms and working with caring attitude towards helping people in need in Morocco The definitive unofficial fan site for people who like Paul and Jane Bowles Visited by people who like Paul and Jane Bowles from more than 119 countries This site has been online since May 1st 2000 Copyright Notice All content on this page is the work of The International Paul Bowles Society and has previously been published in our printed publications These graphics and text may not be used by any party ©The International Paul Bowles Society, 2000 Biography of Paul Bowles December 30th 1910 November 18th 1999 Part 1: 1910-1990 Paul Frederic Bowles was born in Jamaica, New York City on December 30, 1910. He was an only child and exhibited very early the existentialist's sense of alienation. Bowles was published at the age of seventeen, abandoned college, and in 1929 began his life of travels with a trip to Paris, where he hoped to establish himself as a poet. Bowles shared an apartment in Paris with his friend, Harry Dunham, at 17, Quai Voltaire. When Gertrude Stein told him that he was 'not a real poet,' because 'beetles don't pant' (a reference to the end of the first line of his poem 'Spire Song' from his first published work 'Two Poems', 1928) he agreed with her. Virgil Thomson was also of the same mind, with regards to Bowles's poetry. His artistic priorities then turned to that of a musical nature and he became a self-taught composer, for a period that was to last for almost twenty years. In these early years, music was the shape that his creativity sought to make. Outstandingly, Paul Bowles wrote more than twenty seven complete musical works which cover Sonatas, Concertos, Preludes, Operettas, short piano works and vocal music, in all totalling more than one hundred and fifty pieces. Paul also composed the music for Tennessee Williams' 'Blue Mountain Ballads.' He also made several spoken word recordings of his own short stories. In this respect, Paul Bowles is known primarily as a composer - and not the famous author that he became known as, especially during the last eight or nine years of his life, and due mostly in part to a resurgence in interest of his written works through the release of the 1990 Bertolucci movie 'The Sheltering Sky'. Paul once said that he 'would like to be remembered as a composer but that was hardly likely to be the case.' Paul's own musical taste was primarily Stravinsky, although he liked Prokofiev and other French music -Saint Saens and Satie. In later years, after moving to Morocco, Paul submerged himself into ethnic Moroccan music, and was somewhat of an authority on Gnawa and Jilala fraternity music. In later years he also adored The Master Musicians of Jajouka and was a close friend of the Leader, Bachir Attar. In New York in 1930, Paul studied composition with Aaron Copland, whom he also accompanied to Paris, Berlin, and Tangier and went on to produce a number of still-produced mostly-orchestral pieces. Most famously, Paul 'stood up' Prokofiev as a music teacher and took the 3pm train instead from Paris to the mountains. Back in the USA and with the support of Copland and Virgil Thomson, Bowles found work in New York writing incidental music and scores for ballet and theatre. His successful career as a composer took off during the Depression with work for the Federal Theatre Project. Bowles became one of the foremost composers of American theatre music, producing works for William Saroyan, Tennessee Williams, who was a friend and supporter of the talents of both Paul and his wife Jane, among others. Bowles moved to Morocco and shared a house with Aaron Copland in Tangier for a brief time in 1931. In 1937, delicate and in ill-health, Paul returned to New York City where he met the aspiring writer Jane Auer, and during 1937, Paul was a member of a circle that Virgil Thomson called the 'Little Friends', a group which consisted of Paul Bowles, Harry Dunham, John Latouche, Marian Chase, Theodora Griffis and Jane Auer, whom Paul married the following year, and who shortly afterwards achieved critical acclaim for her first novel, 'Two Serious Ladies' (1943.) The couple travelled extensively though Mexico, Puerto Rico the Caribbean and Guatemala. Inspired by Jane Bowles's success and her dedication to writing, Bowles began his own career as an author, eventually surpassing his already successful reputation as a composer. Since the 1940s, he has produced numerous works of fiction, essays, travel writing, poems, autobiographical pieces, and other works. Among Bowles's best-known fictional works are the novels 'The Sheltering Sky' (1949) 'Let It Come Down' (1952) 'The Spider's House' (1955) and two early short story collections, 'A Little Stone' (UK) and 'The Delicate Prey and Other Stories' (USA) both in 1950. Interestingly enough, Bowles's first novel was refused by Doubleday on the grounds that 'they had contracted for a novel and I had produced something else' and the book was taken on by the London publisher, John Lehmann. Thus Bowles's first novel was published first in the UK. It was published in the USA the same year (1949) by James Laughlin's 'New Directions' publishers. Paul Bowles is also known as a translator. He bestowed the title 'No Exit' upon Jean-Paul Sartre's 'Huis Clos' and his 1946 translation of that play remains the standard version for English language productions. He also translated stories by Jorge Luis Borges, a book by Guy Frison-Roche called 'The Lost Trail of the Sahara' and the Isabelle Eberhardt book 'The Oblivion Seekers.' In 1959, Paul Bowles received a Rockefeller Foundation grant to record the ethnic music of Morocco for the archives of The US Library of Congress. It took Bowles two years to accomplish what was intended to be a six month assignment, because of the vastness and richness of the music that he sought. The USLoC released two double LPs called 'The Music of Morocco' and 'Sacred Music of the Moroccan Jews.' The Bowles title 'Their Heads are Green and their Hands are Blue' records details of some of this time. Paul and Jane Bowles spent much of their married life travelling throughout the world and in the late 1940's made Tangier, Morocco, their permanent home. Major figures in the world of letters and the arts and the 'international society' frequently visited them there - some of them even bought cheap property in Tangier and decided to hang out there for a while, writing, painting, holding court, partying and such like, although the majority of them started to leave in the 1960's, and only a few remained. During the 1950's and '60's many so-called 'Beat Generation' people visited the Bowles' in Tangier. It became 'de-rigeur' to do so. William Burroughs wrote 'The Naked Lunch' in a cheap hotel in Tangier, where he lived for several years in the 1950's. Bob Dylan also wrote his famous 'If you see her, Say Hello' which also included a mention in tribute to Tangier. Yup, Tangier was definitely the place to be, back in the '50's and '60's. Paul Bowles Island - Taprobane, Ceylon From 1949 through the mid '50's, Paul and Jane travelled extensively in India and Ceylon, where they bought a smallisland called 'Taprobane.' They sold the island later on. Paul and Jane were both self-confessed bisexuals and had long term partners, while still remaining married, although they didn't talk much about it. Paul lived for many years with a Moroccan artist, Ahmed Yacoubi and Jane shared a house with a Moroccan woman called Sherifa. This separate accommodation by both Paul and Jane was pretty much a permanent one. When the house in the medina was sold in the mid 1950's due to the anti-westernism that arose due to Moroccan independence, they rented two apartments in the same block, in the Ville Nouvelle of Tangier and Paul lived in his one until he died. Starting in the 1940's through to the 1980's, Paul had many reviews and short stories published in Anthology Magazines, and throughout the 1950's featured in some of the so-called 'Beat' magazines - 'Big Table 2' being the first that springs to mind. After the 1960s, Bowles translated the poems and stories of a wide variety of European and Moroccan authors. Bowles taped and transcribed from the Moghrebi tales by Moroccan story tellers and his translations have broadened the readership of several writers through their connections with him. Bowles has translated several works related to North African culture and geography, and over the years has generously introduced and prefaced photographic collections, travel writing, and stories by other authors who promote those interests. In 1968 Paul taught 'Advanced Narrative Writing' and 'The European Novel' at San Fernando Valley State College, California for one semester and after four months went back to Tangier. In 1969, Paul then co-founded the excellent poetry magazine 'Antaeus', with Daniel Halpern, which continued for some time to be a successful forum for new writers of modern prose and poetry (Charles Bukowski et al.) Paul continued as both consulting editor and contributor to the magazine for over twenty years. Biography: The Later Years Part 2: 1990-1999 Home Dedicated to the life and work of Paul and Jane Bowles ©The International Paul Bowles Society, 2000 a non-profit organisation in England