In the late 1940s, existentialism was a popular phenomenon. Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, who resisted the label and later the ideas of Sartre himself, were ascendant public intellectuals who had achieved fame for their books “Being and Nothingness” and “The Stranger.” In the aftermath of the Second World War, the image of rational humanity struggling with an inscrutable universe had a profound and relevant popular appeal. Like any philosophical movement that gains widespread currency, its academic specifics made an uneasy transition to popular culture, especially in the English-speaking world: Sartre’s cold quest for meaning was transposed into the frantic bebop lines of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, as well as a handful of bleak literary masterpieces. From a distance, it is unclear whether the intellectual and creative worlds were engaged in a new cross-fertilization, or whether their works evolved independently from the same font of post-war frisson. Regardless, the world of serious thought and the arts were energized by a new intensity, self-consciousness and spiritual austerity. The leitmotifs of freedom, alienation and rebellion were in fashion.

In literary form, existentialism often struggles to cohere as a system of thought. Camus argued that his fiction attempted to do something altogether different from Sartre’s purer “existence philosophy,” as he wrote in a 1938 review of Sartre’s “Nausea”: “A novel is nothing but philosophy expressed in images…in a good novel, the philosophy and images become one.” In the more pragmatic world of Anglo American fiction, existentialism took the abstract, interdisciplinary form of bleak settings, dark introspection and the looming promise of exotic misadventure. It effectively became a literary texture. The English-language masterpieces of the day were Malcolm Lowry’s “Under the Volcano” and Paul Bowles’ “The Sheltering Sky,” published in 1947 and 1949. Lowry’s novel is dense, Joycean, and occasionally anachronistic; more than ten years in the making, its stream of consciousness technique had nearly been outdated by the time of its publication. In contrast, Bowles’ work was astringent, hard and disciplined, written with the cold detachment of a remote aesthete. Both were popular successes that neither author repeated. Lowry died in 1957 with few other published works, but Bowles continued to generate a large body of writing encompassing several volumes of short stories, three more novels, poetry, and travel writing. Lowry’s novel stands as a single towering achievement, but Bowles’ own masterpiece is his collected oeuvre itself, uncompromising and worthy of being read in its entirety. Existentialism may have lost its mainstream currency in the following years, but Bowles remained an ardent practitioner as well as an archetypal outsider in both art and life. A successful composer who was 38 years old at the time of his first novel’s publication, Bowles abandoned New York for Tangier, Morocco in 1947, where he remained more or less permanently until his death in 1999.

The Library of America has published two volumes of Paul Bowles’ writing: The first compiles three novels, “The Sheltering Sky” (1949), “Let it Come Down” (1952), and “The Spider’s House” (1955). The second includes six volumes of short stories as well as the travel collection “Their Hands are Green and their Heads are Blue” and a final 1966 novella “Up Above the World.” A Library of America edition is a stamp of academic validation; the non-profit publisher offers definitive editions of American classics, with a stable that includes Henry James, William Faulkner, Herman Melville, as well as a series of canonical nonfiction. Bowles deserves the honor. Although he rarely wrote about Americans in their native landscape, his sensibility is profoundly linked to his native country in the way it explores individual determinism, impulses of restlessness and, often tragically, the price of cultural insularity.

In many ways, Bowles can be aligned with Henry James, another expatriate who examined the rift between nascent American values and an older European order. In James’ world, known codes provide an underlying comfort; identifiable rules, known to all parties, may be alternately followed or breached. Frictions lie between overlapping, if slightly dissimilar, cultures. Bowles’ fiction offers a darker vision: Western ideals collide with the even older and less hospitable culture of the Arab world, where conflict is often ineffable, emerging more insidiously in the form of acute unease. Proper codes of conduct are unavailable, boundaries are invisible, and a sense of risk generates a portentous atmosphere. In “the Sheltering Sky,” an American couple, Kit and Port Moresby travel to North Africa, venturing into increasing remote areas as their strained marriage disintegrates in the unforgiving environment. There is an ominous sense of regression: Values are compromised as conventional notions of civilization disappear, separating the characters and ultimately leading to disaster.

Bowles’ later novels explore similar territory. “Let it Come Down” takes its title and opening epigram from “Macbeth” and its events unfold just as ominously. Nelson Dyar, a naïve American bank clerk, arrives in Tangier, where he becomes involved in a money laundering operation. Bowles’ introduces a shifting tableau of characters, evoking a rich sense of expatriate culture, but an emotional and intellectual vacuum lies at the novel’s core; its protagonist is a cipher, unknown to the reader and himself. While the rest of Bowles’ Tangier vibrates with a colorfully picturesque chaos, the unreachable Dyar’s disorientation is heightened by hashish as he meanders towards an ill-fated conclusion.

“The Spider’s House” manages to balance perspectives between the instinctive beliefs of the Islamic world and Western ideas of “civilization,” as Bowles’ point of view alternates between a Moroccan boy and an American journalist who meet during Morocco’s fight for independence in 1954. In many ways, this is Bowles’ most successful novel, with full and satisfying characterizations, and a classical sense of restraint that avoids the sensational excesses of the first two novels. The excellent 1966 novella “Up Above the World”, is refreshingly unselfconscious, a South American noir that subjects another naïve American couple to a series of sinister misadventures in an unnamed country. Bowles plays freely with his established formula, introducing a subtle irony and a more relaxed sensibility that flirts with the conventions of crime fiction.

Disciplined and enigmatic, elegant and often pitiless, Bowles’ short stories often read like sketches for his longer narratives, eliding concrete detail in favor of a dark lyricism. In the early "Call at Corazón," a frustrated American husband abandons his unfaithful wife on their honeymoon as they make an unlikely tour of South American backwaters. Effete Western sensibilities collide again with the Arab world in “A Distant Episode,” as a professor hoping to study a Saharan dialect literally sacrifices his tongue. In "Pastor Dowe at Tecaté," a missionary’s remote assignment also marks an exile from his faith, "outside God's jurisdiction ... passed over into the other land."

Bowles’ ruthlessness will shock some readers, and many who read beyond “The Sheltering Sky” will be surprised by both the unstoppable pageant of horrors that await his characters and the abrupt, unsporting ways in which they arrive. To a more sympathetic audience, he offers the cathartic image of a contingent world dominated by its own opaque logic. As in the works of Camus or Patricia Highsmith, a writer whom Bowles admired, a weary but appealing cynicism crosses over into dry amorality; values become comfortingly relative in an indifferent cosmos. Bowles’ works offered some attraction to an emerging American counter culture: Norman Mailer praised him as the writer who let in “the death of the square...the call of the orgy, the end of civilization,” and he was a friend to Beat writers such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. If literary technique and general aesthetic sensibility were the only measure, Bowles might appear to be a fulcrum between the Lost Generation of the 20s and 30s and the Beat Generation of the following decades. A closer reading exempts him from both movements. In the end, his work reads less like a jeremiad against philistine values than the bulletins of a distant observer. From his remote perspective, the idea of culture itself has lost its meaning.

In later years, Bowles remained a cult figure, attention that he resisted. His ties to early drug experimentation, his friendship with the Beats, his continued disconnection from his American roots, the release of four film documentaries, a 1990 film of “The Sheltering Sky,” and even a fictionalized portrayal by Ian Holm in David Cronenberg’s 1997 film of Burroughs’ “Naked Lunch” added to his legend. When he died in Tangiers in 1999, his literary production had all but slowed to a halt and he had no phone, fax or connection to the outside world. His cremated remains were buried on a family plot in the patrician soil of Lakemont, New York. It is unclear whether any music was played at his funeral. Light, quaint, just short of populist, and far removed from the bleaker realms of his fiction, Bowles’ own musical compositions would have offered a final, suitably ironic grace note.

Copyright 2004 by Sten Johnson. All rights reserved.