Paul Bowles: The Cage Door is Always Open

Paul Bowles was one of the first writers I was kind of obsessed with as a young man. I first discovered him after seeing the movie The Sheltering Sky and then reading the book immediately after. The film is dull but still has interesting things in it but the book was a revelation to me. It was complex, beautiful, horrifying, and painful. It tells the story of a married couple, traversing across Northern Africa in the late 1940s and the breakdown of their marriage, illness and mental instability.

It's one of those books I re-read every few years and I still love it intensely.

I've read just about all of Bowles' other works, too: The Spider's House, Let It Come Down and, of course, his short stories (his collection The Delicate Prey is phenomenal).

His wife's novel, too, Two Serious Ladies, is another really amazing novel that I've read and re-read several times over the years. It has a different kind of complexity to Paul Bowles: the style and tone are almost bizarre and she has a sense of humour in a way that is not immediately accessible in her husband's work.

So when I saw that Festival Letteratura was playing this documentary, Paul Bowles: The Cage Door is Always Open, I was first in line.

The documentary got tepidly positive reviews though with many qualifications. In one way that mattered almost not at all since I tend to want to make up my own mind about a piece of art. But I went in skeptical...

The film is worth seeing, especially if one is interested in Paul Bowles' work, in Jane Bowles' work, or in the host of other writers that make appearances: William Burroughs, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, Jack Kerouac, among many others.

Born in New York, Bowles traveled Europe in the 1920s and 30s (he was a great darling of Gertrude Stein's set in Paris), then returned to the US, married Jane, and spent much of the war there and in Mexico. He then returned to Tangiers in Morocco where he lived the rest of his life, holding court there with some of the most famous writers and personalities of his day.

Gore Vidal has some great one-liners: that alone is worth seeing

The film is highly biographical and focuses as much on Bowles' music as his writing (he was a prolific composer before he turned to fiction). I wish there'd been more about his writing, in fact. The only work which was really explored in detail was The Sheltering Sky which is, no doubt, his best work. But it would have been nice to have more about his development as an artist, as a writer. There is a bit about Jane Bowles' work, as well, though the film is very much about him (she wrote very little and died in mental asylum in Spain in the early 1970s). We also learn about his very valiant attempts at recording Moroccan tribal music and writing down oral histories and tales of Moroccan rural life.

Critics said that the film lacked a unified voice and that there wasn't a strong enough perspective to hold it all together. But one thing that emerged for me was just how messed up Bowles, and particularly Jane Bowles, was. The drinking, the drugs, the alienation from society and oneself.

Lots of talking heads interspersed with crazy Bowles-inspired animations that are visually interesting (though border on irritating at times).

But I love that the filmmaker used so much of Bowles' music in the film.

Festival Letteratura in Mantova, Italy

So I'm at the Mantova Letteratura Festival the rest of this week. They very kindly invited me and I am very much looking forward to seeing a number of amazing events that they have on their roster.

Mantova is a smallish city about two hours north of Bologna and the Festival takes over the entire centre of town with five days of events, hearing from writers and artists from all over the world.

Some things I am looking forward to:

Mantova, Italy: 

Paul Bowles: The Cage Door is Always Open is a 2012 movie about the life and career of Paul Bowles. Both Bowles and his wife (Jane Bowles) were writers I was crazy about when I was in my 20s and 30s (still re-read them both occasionally) and the film charts their relationship and how they journeyed to Northern Africa. It didn't get rave reviews but being such a fan of both of these writers works, I will be there without any hesitation.

Frank Zappa concert! (link is in Italian)

Another film is at the top of my list, Regarding Susan Sontag. I think I may have seen half of this documentary at a friend's place earlier this year. It was playing in the background but the entire room was dead to me as I scooched in close to pay attention to nothing else. A few people asserted that the film was a bit scandalous and less focused on her work than it might have been but I didn't notice that at all (and, again, I only saw half of the film).

Some other writers I am looking forward to seeing: Andre Dubus III, Kazuo Ishiguro, Massimo Carlotto, Joseph O'Connor, and others.

To me, one of the best things about my work is being able to travel to other Festivals, not only to see writers I know and whose work I admire, but to see new writers, to see other ways of organizing events, get ideas and see how different Festivals put together their programmes.

Mantova's Festival is a big one and something I've been looking forward to for some time.

Jane Bowles

She didn't write much in her short and troubled life, but what she did write still seems fresh and fascinating nearly 70 years after it was published. Married to Paul Bowles (another one of my favorite writers), they had and at times distant, loving, drinking and very tumultuous relationship.

Jane and Paul Bowles

After publishing her most famous (one of her only published works, in fact), Two Serious Ladies in 1943, she and Paul Bowles traveled the world: Sri Lanka, Latin America, France and finally, Tangiers. At the age of 40, she suffered a serious stroke which left her incapacitated and she was institutionalized for the next 15 years. She passed away at the same institution in 1973, aged just 56. Her husband continued living in Tangier until his death in 1999 (aged 90).

Her most famous work has a memorable and solid opening three paragraphs:

     Christina Goering's father was an American industrialist of German parentage and her mother was a New York lady of a very distinguished family. Christina spent the first half of her life in a very beautiful house (not more than an hour from the city) which she had inherited from her mother. It was in this house that she had been brought up as a child with her sister Sophie.
     As a child, Christina had been very much disliked by other children. She had never suffered particularly because of this, having led, even at a very early age, an active inner life that curtailed her observation of whatever went on around her, to such a degree that she never picked up the mannerisms then in vogue, and at the age of ten was called old-fashioned by other little girls. Even then she wore the look of certain fanatics who think of themselves as leaders without once having gained the respect of a single human being.
     Christina was troubled horribly by ideas which never would have occurred to her companions, and at the same time took for granted a position in society which any other child would have found unbearable. Every now and then a schoolmate would take pity on her and try to spend some time with her, but far from being grateful for this, Christina would instead try her best to convert her new friend to the cult of whatever she believed in at the time.

What strikes me about this opening passage (I've read these three paragraphs probably fifty times in my life) is the tone and playful use of language which is ironically old-fashioned, as if the writer herself is mimicking how Christina, her character, might have spoken. Yet it's also deadly serious, as well, and Bowles is very deliberate in her use of this tone and its effect on her reader. But more than all that: one just gets such a strong sense of Bowles' protagonist from this opening passage.