An Invisible Spectator: A Biography of Paul Bowles

by Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno

This biography of self-exiled composer/novelist Paul Bowles explores his tormented childhod, his marriage to novelist Jane Bowles, and his acknowledged role as the spiritual father of the Beat movement and the eminence grise of the American expatriate community in Tangiers

Genres: Biography, Biography Memoir, Nonfiction, Literature

501 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1989

Reviews

[Edita · Rating 5 out of 5]

The only effort worth making is the one it takes to learn the geography of one’s own nature. But there is seldom enough energy for that.
One must accept one’s own limitations as one accepts life and death, pain and pleasure. Only then can these natural defects be utilized to their fullest extent. Resistance cripples.

[Julia Rossina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Since I was not satisfied with Paul Bowels' autobiography, when I finished it in early March, I immediately embarked on his biography, An Invisible Spectator. The book was written while Bowles was still alive. Christopher Sawyer-Lausanno had met him many times and corresponded with him over the years. In my opinion, it really complements the author's version well, analyzes and explains a lot of things about his hidden character, so I found it more interesting and enjoyed it.

«The only effort worth making is the one it takes to learn the geography of one's own nature. But there is seldom enough energy for that.

One must accept one's own limitations as one accepts life and death, pain and pleasure. Only then can these natural defects be utilized to their fullest extend. Resistance cripples.

Life is [what] I want, which in turn is beautiful and good. The less complex the desires, the more likely they are of attainment. Any philosophical or religious system which can instill this longing is justified, but not if doing so involves any sort of rejection.

But striving with every facet of imagination to conceive of chaos, one manages only to explore a little more carefully the terrain of order.

To develop one's sensual characteristics, no matter how subtly, leaves one at the mercy of the physical world and its increasingly destructive onslaught. It takes an exceedingly insensitive person today to be able to continue being an artist.»

***

"I believe unhappiness should be studied very carefully; this is certainly no time for anyone to pretend to be happy, or to put his unhappiness away in the dark. (And anyone who is not unhappy now must be a monster, a saint or an idiot.) You must watch your universe as it cracks above your head."

[Vel · Rating 4 out of 5]

v good companion to his autobiography

[Eric Steere · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sawyer-laucanno 's is the second biography I have read on twentieth century cult literary figure, composer, and permanent ex-pat Paul Bowles. This lengthy treatment of Bowles' personality and literary contributions focuses, in a chronologically determined approach, on the literary and artistic development and output of this famously reticent adventurer and later recluse. With An Invisible Spectator, we are granted access to an impressive volume and selection of correspondence, interviews and collaborations. The result is a full account of Bowles' life and the development of his craft. Largely because Bowles often retreated from the phenemonoligical universe through a combination of his solitude and kif (Moroccan hashish) he engaged with his psychologically unsettling fictive worlds and art at the expense of living

. With the temporal overlap of my two favorite twentieth-century American writers, Bowles and Capote, the stunning worlds apart. Indulgent and thirsty public persona of the latter to the reclusive austerity of Bowles, richness and tender color of Capote against the sparing razor of Paul's traumatic prose. The NY based hedonist and the American ex-pat non plus ultra, who vowed never to return to New York and spent his last 37 years in Tangiers, occasionally receiving visitors on the Marrakech Express with ambivalence.

Bowles autobiography Without Stopping is as personally vacant as his fiction; he is impenetrable by accounting for his own life. The other biography of which I am acquainted is the much more personal and conservative gonzoish record by Millicent Dillon, who, looking like Jane Bowles (Paul's late wife) , enters the fray in her own more personal encounters with Bowles. Sawyer-Laucanno is impressive in his sheer comprehensive definition his productions and works, but leaves Paul behind. Instead Sawyer-Laucanno provides a narrative of "the quintessential artist, sacrificing life for art" and his experiential encounters transforming lived experience with art.

He also rightfully attributes the marginalization of Paul Bowles' work to his own particular post colonial and peripheral perspectives, subjects, and locations. He wasn't with the New York crowd, but towards of the end of his life was increasingly involved with translations of Arabic stories and texts. Though long, this book is testament, especially in its deficiencies, to the high seriousness that Bowles placed in his art and the sharp and discerning character behind it.

[aya · Rating 3 out of 5]

it must be incredibly difficult to write a biography about someone so famously reticent and repressed, emotion-wise. in some ways, it makes this biography difficult to read, because it makes it seem as if the author is glossing over the major emotional events in Bowles' life and instead getting bogged down in minutiae. it also feels as if the biography may be colored by the fact that bowles was still alive when he wrote it. whether it was these issues or perhaps the writing just wasn't vivid, i never felt like i was in bowles' world and was coming to understand him.
still, bowles lead a fascinating enough life to make up for much of the distance that is kept between him and the reader. it is a good biography to learn about the events in his life, etc. but not as much to learn about the man himself.

[R.J. Gilmour · Rating 4 out of 5]

Writing about such things is a way of keeping the evil outside, away from me.
Paul Bowles, An Invisible Spectator (London: Paladin/Grafton, 1989), 37.

There will come a day of reckoning...
All this pleasure will have to be paid for, and it will be terrible.
Paul Bowles, An Invisible Spectator (London: Paladin/Grafton, 1989), 60.

Like any romantic, I had always been vaguely certain that sometime during my life I should come into a magic place which in disclosing its secrets would give me wisdom and ecstasy-perhaps even death.
Paul Bowles, An Invisible Spectator (London: Paladin/Grafton, 1989), 119.

You must watch the universe as it cracks over your head.
Paul Bowles, An Invisible Spectator (London: Paladin/Grafton, 1989), 299.

He was a savage fanatic, a sentimental cynic, hedonist in his ascetiscism...
Paul Bowles, An Invisible Spectator (London: Paladin/Grafton, 1989), 321.

[Carol Masciola · Rating 5 out of 5]

Definitive and beautifully written bio of composer and novelist Paul Bowles, from his beginnings as the only son of a mean-spirited dentist and a weak mother in New York state, to his sudden success with his first novel, The Sheltering Sky. He was unusually brilliant and versatile and macabre. A lot in this book about his unusual relationship with his wife Jane, who was also a writer, albeit of scant output. They were both gay and rarely lived together, and she died young of a stroke brought on by alcoholism. Bowles consorted with all sorts of cultural notables, from musical mentor Aaron Copeland to Gertrude Stein to Tennessee Williams to Allen Ginsberg and the Beat writers. The book covers his travels all over the world and his long residence in Morocco, where he died in 1999.