In a 1975 interview, the poet Daniel Halpern asked the author and composer Paul Bowles why he’d spent such a significant chunk of his life scrambling about the globe. I imagine Bowles’s speaking voice here as matter-of-fact, exegetic: “I’ve always wanted to get as far as possible from the place where I was born,” he answered (that place was Flushing, Queens, in 1910; he was the only child of a rancorous, unloving father and a meek, bookish mother). “Far both geographically and spiritually. To leave it behind. One belongs to the whole world, not just one part of it.”
What was Bowles darting around after for all those years? Travel invariably expands a person’s parameters, like air huffed into a balloon: there is an intellectual broadening, a widening of the precincts. But there’s a metaphysical utility to that kind of movement, too. Who among us has not left home expressly to find home, casting about for a place that feels like the right place, that isn’t necessarily the ancestral plot but, instead, is where a person feels whole, awake to something, realized?
Bowles first journeyed overseas in 1929, when he excused himself from the University of Virginia and procured a one-way ticket to Paris. Then, in the summer of 1931, at age twenty, he visited North Africa with his friend Aaron Copland, following a provocation from Gertrude Stein. In an unpublished conversation with the poet Ira Cohen—conducted in Morocco in 1965 and now held, with more of Bowles’s papers, in the rare-book and manuscript room at Columbia University—Bowles credits Stein exclusively with his decision to move to Tangier. “And so she told you … she said, ‘Go to Morocco,’ just like that?” Cohen asked. “Go to Tangier,” Bowles corrected. He relocated permanently in 1947, living fifty-two of his eighty-eight years there. He also travelled extensively in Latin America and the Far East. For a brief while, he owned and lived on a tiny island in the Indian Ocean, near Sri Lanka.
Tangier had long been a creative lodestone (Matisse travelled there to paint in 1912 and 1913), but by the nineteen-sixties it had reached a kind of oddball zenith. William S. Burroughs typed most of “Naked Lunch” in a motel room in Tangier; the Rolling Stones routinely posted up at El Minzah, an opulent hotel. Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg were fairly steady patrons of the Tangerinn, one of the city’s oldest, haziest pubs. Tennessee Williams was periodically spotted in the Petit Socco, thumbing a cigarette holder. Bowles would write and publish several novels, short stories, poems, and essays from his home in the upper Medina.
Although Bowles was something of a polymath, and flitted successfully between disciplines (in addition to writing books, he also worked as a composer, first of incidental music for the theatre and later of scores for documentary and art-house films), he’s still best remembered for “The Sheltering Sky,” from 1949, a novel beloved for its deep and echoing evocation of a certain kind of midcentury existential duress. It follows the grim travails of an American couple, Kit and Port Moresby, who, along with a friend, Tunner—Orientalists, all—depart for North Africa on an ill-plotted desert expedition. What happens to them next shakes the faith. I wonder if Bowles had been reading the Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran, a contemporary, who once asked, “Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?” In an interview with Jay McInerney for Vanity Fair, in 1985, Bowles described the message of his fiction as “Everything gets worse.”
I sometimes think Bowles was attracted to the wildness and density of Tangier as a kind of psychic penance for what the critic Edmund White once called his “dandified distance.” He was, by all accounts, a bit of an emotional recluse. Allen Ginsberg described him as “a little mechanical or remote somewhere.” In a letter to the composer Ned Rorem, written shortly after Bowles’s (platonic) wife, the writer Jane Auer, died, Bowles expresses a nearly tragic stoicism. “What I want is not tranquility, as you put it, and not happiness—merely survival,” he wrote. “Life needn’t be pleasurable or amusing; it need only continue playing its program.” He existed adjacent to others, but he was never fully of them.
Tangier pushed him closer. Bowles’s instinctive reticence was constantly challenged by a culture in which, as White wrote, “few people prized privacy and conformism was more esteemed than individuality.” Bowles already had at least some sense of what truly activated a place, provided its dynamism, its pull. “With few exceptions, landscape alone is of insufficient interest to warrant the effort it takes to see it,” he wrote in the foreword to “Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue,” a collection of travel pieces published in 1963. Mountains were mountains. Cathedrals: same. Even if Bowles resisted it, he understood that the self is elevated only in relation to another.
A romantic might go so far as to suggest that home is in fact an internal landscape, actualized via love alone: that a man finds his place only by finding his person or his people. For Bowles in the nineteen-fifties, I suspect that center was music. His people, musicians.
In 1957, Bowles addressed a panicked imploration to the Library of Congress. In March of the previous year, Morocco had regained its independence from France (soon after, Spain ceded most of its protectorate in the north), and he feared that the country’s folk art was at risk for eradication—that the modernizing forces of post-colonial cultural policy were encroaching, and fast. He described his quest as “a fight against time.”
Two years later, operating under the auspices of the Library of Congress and with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, Bowles recorded and preserved as many strains of indigenous Moroccan music as he could find. Eventually, the Library culled twenty-six of those pieces (he’d gathered at least two hundred and fifty) onto two long-playing records, and released them as a compilation titled “Music of Morocco.” Later this spring, Dust-to-Digital, a reissue label based in Atlanta, is reviving and expanding that release, packaging it in a handsome silkscreened box with liner notes by Philip Schuyler and an introduction by Lee Ranaldo, of Sonic Youth. It contains four CDs of music: two discs containing performances from the Highlands, and two discs sourced from the Lowlands.
Irresolvable questions of cultural imperialism have plagued professional folklorists for decades. They’re perhaps asked most aggressively of the white men who lugged recording machines around various backwaters, many in cahoots, in one way or another, with the Library of Congress, having appointed themselves responsible for making a material record of some of folk music’s many vernacular iterations. Should we ask those questions of Paul Bowles? By 1959, Bowles had been living in Tangier for twelve years. His work was motivated, as far as I can tell, by a deep and complicated need for this ancient, rhythmic music. On his recording trips, he was consistently being thwarted or misdirected by Moroccan bureaucrats, who found his project facile and offensive, although not in the ways that we might, in 2016, expect—the Moroccans didn’t feel as if they were being infiltrated or gawked at by an outsider, someone unschooled in the spiritual particulars of their indigenous music.
Rather, they were eager for Morocco to modernize; any Western attention paid to the country’s more “primitive” arts was a hindrance to that mission. At one point, Bowles was told that no recordings could be made in Morocco without express permission from the ministry of the interior. In his essay “The Rif, to Music,” Bowles writes of encountering a young official in Fez who said, “Why should I help you export a thing which we are trying to destroy? You are looking for tribal music. There are no more tribes. We have dissolved them. So the word means nothing. And there never was any tribal music anyway—only noise.”
Surely tribal musicians felt differently about the worth and breadth of their work, but that institutional resistance—which, in a backward way, does soften any portrayal of Bowles as a bumbling interloper, preserving a music that didn’t involve or evoke him—is significant. The Moroccan government’s disinterest in preserving a heritage it believed was a by-product of colonialism makes Bowles’s efforts seem even more private, particular, strange. It also aggravates already complex questions regarding which stories deserve telling, who deserves to tell them, and what it means when those stories are sustaining, in some essential and personal way, to their tellers.
Bowles took four recording trips around Morocco between 1959 and 1961. He was accompanied each time by his Ampex 601 reel-to-reel tape machine and two men: Mohammed Larbi Djilali, a fixer of sorts, and Christopher Wanklyn, a member of Tangier’s expat community, who was rather pithily summarized, by Bowles, as “a level-headed Canadian with a Volkswagen and all the time in the world.” The trio spent a lot of time smoking greasy, green hash—kif—pinched from Larbi’s bottomless pouch, and drinking either small cups of rosé or bottles of “piping hot Pepsi-Cola.”
Bowles had originally planned on driving his Jaguar Mark V convertible—a jowly, moneyed-looking thing that seems as if it should come with its own waxed mustache—but eventually acquiesced to travelling in Wanklyn’s Beetle, a better if hardly ideal choice for Morocco’s bouncy, unpaved roads. The weather was extreme—a hundred and forty degrees! Bowles declared in his notes, hysterically—and on at least one occasion, a sandstorm beached the Volkswagen, stranding the group in the mountains. There is a black-and-white photo of that particular breakdown—and the many local onlookers it drew—in the new release, with the terrific caption “Christopher Wanklyn’s Volkswagen attracts attention in the Anti-Atlas.”
The hash, of course, was important, an essential lubricant. In a June, 1968, letter to Cohen—in which he fretted, again, about properly defining or explaining the quality and tone of the music he’d recorded—Bowles wrote, “The nearest one of us can approach to such a subject is by the using the suggestibility supplied by kif … a self-induced trance at best, but useful for determining the hypnotic potential of a given musical element. Even so, conclusions are bound to be of a purely theoretical nature, like all measurement of subjective experience. The rest, of course, is out [of] the mouths of Moroccans.”
Bowles was intent on capturing everything (“Every major musical genre to be found within the country,” is how he explained his purview in “The Rif, to Music”), but seemed especially keen on locating pockets of old, unadulterated sound—the remote villages in the mountains and high plateaus where a Neolithic musical tradition had persisted unchanged, despite the injection of Arabic, European, and Sub-Saharan influences to North Africa. He describes that sound as “a highly percussive art with complicated juxtapositions of rhythms, limited scalar range (often of no more than three adjacent tones), and a unique manner of vocalizing.” It is, he writes, a “purely autochthonous” practice.
That’s a serviceable definition, but it does little to relay what really drew Bowles toward these performances, which is also what draws so many of us to music: the temporary dissolution of the self and all the ecstasy inherent to that moment. Moroccan music varies dramatically by region, but much of it is highly and deliberately repetitive, inducing a kind of quick hypnosis. A listener has no choice but to dissolve into it. In his notes, Bowles wrote often about this—how native music was helpful “in effacing the boundaries between individual and group consciousness.” Music, then, became a way for Bowles to submit to human fellowship. It erased whatever staunchness or fear had kept him feeling apart. That idea seems central to understanding what pushed him so fervently toward this music, why he was so intent on saving it: for a person who was perpetually disconnected, it proffered a point of crucial, heady communion.
It also seems possible that music was Bowles’s primary medium for achieving any sense of intimacy with others. He was in a loving (if chaste) marriage for thirty-five years (he and Jane both preferred the company of their own gender, sexually), but his emotional commitments never expanded much beyond it. In 1988, he told the interviewers Catherine Warnow and Regina Weinreich, “I don’t know what a social life is … My social life is restricted to those who serve me and give me meals, and those who want to interview me.”
Judging by the books he left behind, Bowles was a nihilist at heart. His work is packed with delightful indicators of a gray and brutal worldview. In his novel “Let It Come Down,” from 1952, a woman says to her son, “Once you accept the fact that life isn’t fun, you’ll be much happier.” Every once in awhile, his readers are granted the briefest glimpses of light. In “The Spider’s House,” from 1955, Bowles wrote: “The only thing that makes life worth living is the possibility of experiencing now and then a perfect moment. And perhaps even more than that, it’s having the ability to recall such moments in their totality, to contemplate them like jewels.”
I like to think he thought of this music this way—a perfect, shared moment he could recall indefinitely, turning over his mind, deploying it as needed, a kind of spiritual salve. It’s not quite as personal, maybe, as the memories most of us find ourselves clinging to—a blissful weekend with a partner, say, or a family vacation—but it seemed to function comparably, soothing him just as well.
Bowles’s field notes to these recordings will be frustrating to anyone looking for a proper ethnography, as they are often speculative and occasionally wrong (they’ve been very gracefully annotated, corrected, and expanded in the new release). Part of this feels almost faultless. Some years later, Bowles admitted to Cohen his reluctance in trying to define or unpack Morocco’s complex musical traditions. “It’s impossible because it’s inexhaustible, even if the Moroccans would talk, which they won’t, those who really know anything,” he wrote. “And inexhaustible because the more one hears and learns, the more conscious one becomes of one’s ignorance, of the vast lacunae in one’s knowledge.”
Much like Harry Smith’s “Anthology of American Folk Music”—a curious multidisc compilation produced for Folkways Records in 1952, and still a defining, rallying document for fans of American vernacular music—the original “Music of Morocco” is idiosyncratic and without a clear organizing principle. I’m not sure it’s fair to say that it doesn’t have one—merely that it’s a personal narrative, obscured and potentially inscrutable to others.
I’ll admit, sheepishly, that this is part of what I find appealing about it: “Music of Morocco” is a more revealing portrait of both Bowles and his adopted home—his sense of his place in it, how it bolstered and nourished him—than almost anything he ever wrote. It is a fleeting peek inside an otherwise-locked box.
Those revelations require some parsing, and, on occasion, a critical eye. A performance from the Berber Highlands, “Second Aqlal”—sung and played by Moqaddem Mohammed ben Salem and an ensemble of seventeen men, and recorded in Zagora, a town in the Draa River valley—is a particularly poignant example. According to Bowles, each man in the ensemble carried a deff drum, “shaped like a fairly thick sandwich,” which was “being struck by the men on either side of him, while he in turn is hitting their drums, one with each hand.” Did this really happen? It sounds unlikely if not fully incredible. Yet, if we are reading “Music of Morocco” not as a historical document but as a personal one, does it matter? That Bowles saw the performance that way—as the product of one, many-handed organism, making one, multi-faceted sound—feels too important.
Bowles did seem to recognize the musical collection as oddly essential to his legacy—a big deal. In his correspondence from 1965, he repeatedly expressed concern that he be allowed to retain some sort of control over the Library of Congress release. He appeared frantic about some “unscrupulous people” who had got hold “of copy tapes for demonstration, and gone ahead to press records from them, not withstanding the bad quality, in order to get there first, as it were.”
“I don’t want any slip-ups of any kind,” he wrote to Cohen. They had been talking about one day producing their own compilation (they finally did, in 1988). “I want to be able to check on length and sequence of selections, and to correct copy on descriptive notes. In other words, I want every chance to make as good a record as is possible.”
I think Bowles would be deeply pleased by what Schuyler and Dust-to-Digital have done with his recordings, the way they’ve now been lovingly, responsibly repackaged. The music itself is frequently staggering: an eleven-minute recording Bowles made in Goulimine, a city in the southern lowlands, is one of the more beautiful examples I’ve heard of guedra, in which one male vocalist and a women’s chorus bang together on a twenty-eight-inch drum. It sounds, to me, like the story of time itself. Listening, I feel as if I am burrowing very deep into something. I start to know what Bowles meant about certain repetitive sounds being “the culmination of beauty,” a thing capable of thrusting a person into “a non-thinking state”—that blissful, elusive nowhere.
Still, the grandest point of closeness here is with Bowles himself, so long unknown, unknowable. Attempting to get nearer to a person by getting nearer to the things he or she cherishes is usually a thankless, humiliating path. But in seeing how Bowles experienced and loved Morocco—the parts of its native culture that reassured or completed him, the ways in which he fought to protect them, how it made him less lonesome—it is possible to understand something else about the ways in which we find and refashion home, elsewhere, outside ourselves, even when we thought home was impossible, even when we thought we’d likely lost it forever. How, in a moment—in a beat—it might appear again.
