An invitation from Paul Bowles in Tangier, 1970s: "encouraging to even the most offhand inquiry"

Unlikely as it seems, the author of The Sheltering Sky and the author of Huckleberry Finn share memories of summers spent in the small town of Elmira, New York.

The upstate town where Samuel Clemens spent his summers after marrying Jervis Langdon's daughter Olivia (and where he wrote much of Huckleberry Finn) is also the home of Bowles's paternal grandparents. Bowles spent several young summers there, usually en route to visit other family living in Glenora, near the Finger Lakes. Twain, after a lifetime of cigars and comment, was buried in Elmira's Woodlawn Cemetery next to Olivia in his hometown wife's family plot.

Much has been written about Bowles the irascible and prickly author, whose public persona was a defense of his own personal need for privacy. Yet he could be welcoming and encouraging to even the most offhand inquiry. Here is an excerpt from David Espey's piece on meeting Bowles in Tangier in the 1970s, after the Peace Corps volunteer wrote the author about the shared experience of days spent in Elmira. To his surprise Bowles sent Espey back a warm invitation to visit him in Tangier.

... But my memories of Bowles go back even further, to the early 1960s, when I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in the first project to Morocco. At that time, I and my fellow Volunteers were reading with fascination a book about a poor, illiterate Moroccan named Driss ben Hamed Charhadi, an oral autobiography entitled A Life Full of Holes.

In the mid-1970s I went back to the country as a Fulbright lecturer at the national university, Mohammed V, in Rabat. Before I left for Morocco, I made a visit to the Humanities Research Center to read the archives of Bowles and his wife Jane, also a writer of note. What intrigued me in Bowles’s autobiography was his memory of visiting his grandparents in Elmira, N. Y. — which happened to be my hometown and the only world I knew before I went off to Morocco with the Peace Corps. From his description, his grandparents’ house was on Church Street, just a few blocks from where I lived. I wrote to Bowles, mentioned that we had Elmira and Morocco in common, and asked if I could call on him in Tangier. He wrote back a warm letter of invitation, with the comment that he still visited the streets of Elmira, but only in his dreams. ...

We began to talk of Morocco, and he seemed pleased that I knew some Moroccan Arabic. (I had been chatting with his housemaid in the dialect when he came in.) I had read somewhere that The Sheltering Sky was now being used in Peace Corps training for Morocco, and Bowles was incredulous. “What can fiction about ignorant expatriates in the 1940s, set in French Algeria, help in training community development workers?” He agreed that one of his books made from the tapes of Moroccan storytellers might offer more to Volunteers in training.

By the time I met him, Bowles was writing little of his own fiction, and his main literary efforts were translations of Moroccan storytellers — Tangier residents like Mohamed Choukri and Mohamed Mrabet, both of whom I later met. Bowles was fascinated with those parts of Moroccan society which have been little affected by western civilization. In the 1950s, he traveled to remote parts of Morocco to record native Berber music which is slowly dying out, and he deplored the effects of radio and popular music on traditional Moroccan culture.

In his fiction about North Africa, he has written of characters moved by such music to feats of self-mutilation. Thus he has been viewed by some as an enemy of development, a kind of primitivist. My Moroccan colleagues at the university, young professors who had been trained in the U.S. or the U.K., didn’t think much of Bowles. One of them remarked, “What would you think of a Moroccan who lived in the U.S. and presumed to understand American culture because he had spent time with the Apaches?” ...

While it's an interesting literary parlor game to speculate on what the young Bowles would have said to an amused Sam Clemens, it's also interesting that both writers wrote about journeys that twist expectations: Huck Finn and Nigger Jim on the Mississippi, like the traveling couple Port and Kit in the Sahara of Morocco, become entangled in a larger culture they discover they really know precious little about.

"Slivers of light in the darkness": Art Spiegelman meets Lynd Ward, 1971

The Paris Review features a short piece on graphic artist Lynd Ward written by Art Spiegelman, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic memoir Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. The 1971 meeting in upstate New York between scruffy young fan and established artist, as often happens, doesn't turn out as hoped but it did help spark Spiegelman's own graphic career. This fond memory is excerpted from his introduction to Lynd Ward: Six Novels in Woodcuts, a two-volume set published by The Library of America on October 14, 2010.

... It seems natural now to think of Lynd Ward as one of America’s most distinguished and accomplished graphic novelists. He is, in fact, one of only a small handful of artists anywhere who ever made a “graphic novel” until the day before yesterday. The ungainly neologism seems to have stuck since Will Eisner, creator of the voraciously inventive Spirit comic book of the 1940s, first used it on the cover of a 1978 collection of his seriously intended comics stories for adults, A Contract With God. It was a way to distance himself from the popular prejudices against the medium, and he often cited Ward’s 1930s woodcut novels as an inspiration for his work and for the euphemism. But Ward’s roots were not in comics, though his work is part of the same large family tree, belonging somewhere among the less worm-ridden branches of printmaking and illustration.

... In 1971, I briefly met Lynd Ward at the opening of a small Binghamton, New York, gallery show of his prints. I was a twenty-two-year-old cartoonist and told him how much I admired his woodcut novels. As I recall, I was by far the youngest and scruffiest person at the opening (he was just a few years older than I am now), and he expressed surprise that I even knew the books. I asked what newspaper comics had been important to him, and he explained that he hadn’t been allowed to read them as a child. When pressed, he expressed appreciation for Hal Foster’sPrince Valiant, which he discovered as an adult.

I didn’t share his enthusiasm—I thought Foster’s work, with its captions positioned safely beneath each of the stately illustrations on his Sunday pages, was barely comics at all —but we went on to find common ground in our mutual esteem for the great old socialist cartoonist, Art Young, before he turned back to talking to his grown-up friends.

... When walking through that Binghamton gallery show back in 1971, I regretted that no original prints from Ward’s woodcut novels were part of the exhibit, but I remember slowing down to notice that a number of the prints on display depicted trees and forests. I thought about the poetry of patiently carving into a dead tree to make a print on paper that commemorated the once-living thing. One beautifully structured print stayed with me (I later found it again, reproduced in Storyteller Without Words): a panoramic treescape of a young man in shadows, groping and climbing through the dense neuronal wickerwork of dappled trunks and branches, carefully exploring and working his way through the maze of marks that surround him.

I’ve recently been told that it was intended to be a picture of the nature writer, John Burroughs, but I’d thought of it as a moving self-portrait of the artist embedded in the wood, seeking slivers of light in the darkness and carving out a new medium. The print was called “The Pathfinder.” ...

(Art Spiegelman's work also includes the startling Shadow of No Towers, a graphic novel about September 11, 2001. His most recent book of comics is Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!. Art by Lynd Ward reproduced from the Paris Review.)

"Rub Out the Words:" letters from Burroughs: "This place is sick, sick, sick. And disgusting."

Granta has published a selection of William Burroughs' letters online, presented with commentary by James Grauerholz and from the book edited by Bill Morgan. The Granta excerpts show WSB in contention with his family (to his society-member mother: "A rundown on some of the good burghers of Palm Beach would quite eclipse the Beatniks") and his contemporaries (to Paul Bowles: "Staying in Leary’s house. Enough food to feed a regiment left out to spoil in the huge kitchen by Leary’s over-fed, undisciplined children.")

The letters run from 1959, when Burroughs was living in Paris, to New York in 1974. The Granta excerpts zero in on WSB's kaleidoscope of drug experiences and their various scenes, some with awe, others with a snort of disapproval ("Unused TV sets, cameras, typewriters, toys, books, magazines, furniture, stacked to the ceiling. A nightmare of stupid surfeit. The place is sick sick sick. And disgusting," he complains in 1961 about Leary's house to Bowles in Tangier. "Like a good European, I am stashing away all the $ I can lay hands to with one thought in mind. Walk don't run to the nearest exit.")

Such cantankerous, back-biting behavior became a hallmark of Burroughs' image early on, so much so that in the letters it is difficult to separate the writer from his cranky persona. It was a trick of his craft he was good at, and he seemingly practiced it virtually non-stop until it became his actual voice. Referencing a 1959 article in Life magazine about the Beats to his disapproving mother, his style reaches some kind of rococo,demi-monde apogee of self-promotion: "In order to earn my reputation I may have to start drinking my tea from a skull since this is the only vice remaining to me ... I hope I am not ludicrously miscast as The Wickedest Man Alive, a title vacated by the late Aleister Crowley." ...

Presumably, Burroughs Sr. still sent 45-year-old WSB the $200-a-month allowance to practice his tea-drinking-from-a-skull vices. It was quite a bargain for Bill: the elder Burroughses were taking care of WSB's son Bill, Jr., after their son's 1951 William Tell party trick killed his wife Joan.

Here's an excerpt from the Granta selection. From the post-script it appears he'd patched up relations with his mother Laura and his then-ailing father. The duty of a family visit: "Of course," he writes, "I have to stay clean in Cambridge."

William S. Burroughs [New York]

to Brion Gysin [Paris]


pre-September 28, 1961


General Delivery
Newton, Mass.
USA

Dear Brion:


The scene here is really frantic. Leary has gone berserk. He is giving mushrooms to hat check girls, cab drivers, waiters, in fact anybody who will stand still for it. However Gerald Heard and your correspondent have taken a firm stand. We both refuse to take any more mushrooms under any circumstances. Heard is certainly the most intelligent and well intentioned person connected with this deal. He gave a great talk at the symposium about LSD and paranoid sensations. The last barrier: PANIC! To God Pan. I managed to do all right too, fortified by two joints and the whole symposium came off very well.

Burroughs, 1959

Michael [Portman] wants to come here now and I have written to dissuade him. Let me explain that I really put in a lot of overtime on that boy and thought I had managed to separate him from his deplorable connections. Then something happened and there he was with a cold sore and I lost my patient and my patience as well. I'm not complaining but I have been under considerable pressure trying to sort out and assess hundreds of conflicting reports and demands pleasing no one of course so maybe I goofed. In any case he is now in an impossible condition. Imagine having Eileen Garrett, Mary Cooke, Old Lady Luce in the same room with you. It is absolutely intolerable and I don't propose to tolerate it.

Otherwise the situation here is not too bad. At least I have room to work and there is much to be said for American conveniences. I can get good food out of the ice box and take a bath and wear clean clothes at least. Seems to be plenty of pot around NY and nobody worries about the heat. Its like they all have the fix in. Of course I have to keep clean in Cambridge. Flying back on Sunday. Please write what your plans are. I wish you could arrange to come here. Like I say NY is really a great scene and a goodly crowd is there. And more expected momentarily. Please write.


Love,
Bill


P.S. Very pleasant visit with the family.

Rub Out The Words: The Letters of William S. Burroughs 1959-1974, edited by Bill Morgan, will be published in the U.S. by Ecco Press, and in the UK by Penguin.

Matt Hart tonight at Word of Mouth, Athens

Matt Hart

"Twisted in bed there are eyes outside"
(Matt Hart)



Twisted in bed there are eyes outside. I need
        a diet. I need a blasting into the wallpaper,
   a fasting into the basement, storm sirens blaring
        for the whoosh overhead. O water buffalo, come

to quench my first/last light my heaven/my earth,
        my return to the baby in her do not disturb again,
   whatever am I thinking -- sleeping through the non-place
        places and the all too many mopey moments

I'm ashamed to remember, much less speak of
        my life pasted into the shadows where I'm weeping
   concentric. Meanwhile, outside/inside the waves
        pound against my front door. They have some

routine questions to throw up in my face the dog
        or the neighbor walking his stick saying there there
   you poor piece of sapling when daddy gets you home
        he'll break you in tutu. Being drinking,

none of this is my biggest problematic, rather a man
        on the table drowning/in cardiac arrest right in front
   of me. So me, and another man working with me,
        watch him through the night and into the next

next night. We give him swimming lessons to keep him
        alive. We show him the ropes/betting against him.
   Somehow he keeps pounding his chest against the skylight-
        alright, making his last best stand beneath

the sing-song whoosh/waves. Sometimes the touch out
        on a limb is too much irrevocable, so one begins
   aflutter and ends aghast in a corner, fanning the flames
        of an invisible forest. Cool black air and I'm in

the wrong house again. I wade through the water coming
        out of my mouth, put the key in the lock, and twist it
   to make it luck. Everything's just as I've forgotten it
        completely. I look in the mirror, and this is television. 



Tonight's Word of Mouth reading features Matt Hart from Cincinnati, along with an open-mic gathering of May Day poets and other literary provocateurs. The wordslinging begins at 8 pm at The Globe, but the springtime cocktail-slinging will undoubtedly be well underway. One reviewer has written that Hart's poetry "recalls the work of other bravely errant iterants: Teds Berrigan and Greenwald; Lyn Hejinian; and Swinburne (if he got lost in Cincinnati in the 00s)."

Matt Hart is the author of the poetry collections Who’s Who Vivid (Slope Editions, 2006) and Wolf Face (H_NGM_N BKS, 2010), as well as several chapbooks, including The Hours (Cinematheque Press, 2010) and Late Makeup Years and Decline (1979-1983) (Hell Yes! Press, 2010), which he wrote in collaboration with Dobby Gibson. A third full-length collection, Light-Headed, was published by BlazeVOX in spring 2011. A co-founder and the editor-in-chief of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking & Light Industrial Safety, he teaches at the Art Academy of Cincinnati.

National Poetry Month: Naomi Shihab Nye

"Famous"
(Naomi Shihab Nye)

The river is famous to the fish.

The loud voice is famous to silence,   
which knew it would inherit the earth   
before anybody said so.   

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds   
watching him from the birdhouse.   

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.   

The idea you carry close to your bosom   
is famous to your bosom.   

The boot is famous to the earth,   
more famous than the dress shoe,   
which is famous only to floors.

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it   
and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.   

I want to be famous to shuffling men   
who smile while crossing streets,   
sticky children in grocery lines,   
famous as the one who smiled back.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,   
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,   
but because it never forgot what it could do.

"Famous" by Naomi Shihab Nye appears online at Poets.org. Nye is the author of numerous books of poems including You and Yours (BOA Editions, 2005), which received the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award; 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (Greenwillow Books, 2002), a collection of new and selected poems about the Middle East; Fuel (1998); Red Suitcase (1994); and Hugging the Jukebox (Far Corner Books, 1982). She was born in 1952 in St. Louis, Missouri, to a Palestinian father and an American mother. During her high school years, she lived in Ramallah in Palestine, the Old City in Jerusalem, and San Antonio, Texas, where she later received her B.A. in English and world religions from Trinity University.

National Poetry Month: Ahmed Abdel Mu’ti Hijazi

"A Round of Return"

Ahmed Abdel Mu’ti Hijazi

When the body of the martyr rests in

the ground of his homeland, the martial

music of "A Round of Return" plays.

As if a voice of some kind were calling

So the loft of pigeons returned from beyond the horizon

They circle once under the setting sun

then fly off

As if a voice of some kind were calling

The earth takes off its scorched blouse

Shadows suddenly turn green, and shoots sprout,

their fragrant vapors in the heart of the heat

As if a voice of some kind were calling

The imprisoned wind rises

pushing against wheat fields, songs, flocks of sheep . . .

As if a voice of some kind were calling

So the flag fluttered and loneliness and sorrow, longing and tranquility

rained down upon the school balcony where all sound

had died out, the courtyard now deserted,

the green trees inlaid with unripe birds

As if a voice of some kind were calling

So we disappear for a while and the landmarks rise up

We are astonished by our love for this city

and in secret have discovered buried artifacts

among its crouching buildings 5

and that it has a woman, one who swaggers in her nightdress,

and a cat that meows on the stairs . . .

As if a voice of some kind were calling

So we answer: Yes

We feel the bite of longing and pain

and memory pulsates with the names of countries

and comrades and seasons

As if a voice of some kind were calling

Men crowd at the doors of the villages

in clouds of dust and twilight

Drops of sweat and ablution fall from their foreheads

and the night surges with the sounds of beasts

As if a voice of some kind were calling

Weddings and funerals pour forth

As if a voice of some kind were calling

And so we answer: O My country! O My country! O My country!

"A Round of Return" appears online in the Spring 2011 edition of Big Bridge magazine as part of the chapbookAs if a Voice Were Calling, by Ahmed Abdel Mu’ti Hijazi, and translated by Rick London. From London's introduction: "Hijazi was born in June of 1935 in Tala, a province of Monoufia in the western delta of Egypt. He moved to France in 1955 to pursue graduate studies at the Sorbonne. Upon returning to Egypt a year later, he worked as a contributing editor of the magazine Sabah El-Keir, before becoming editorial director of the cultural and literary journal Rose al-Yusuf in Cairo. Early in his career, the controversy around Hijazi’s poetry led several times to his arrest and to restrictions on his travel. He persevered in advancing his unique and uncompromising vision and today he is a permanent member of the Egyptian High Council for Culture, and director of House of Poetry, one of Cairo’s most prominent literary venues."

National Poetry Month: John Shade

John Shade

Title Unknown

(John Shade)

... My best time is the morning; my preferred

Season, midsummer. I once overheard

Myself awakening while half of me

Still slept in bed. I tore my spirit free,

And caught up with myself--upon the lawn

Where clover leaves cupped the topaz of the dawn,

And where Shade stood in nightshirt and one shoe.

And then I realized that this half too

Was fast asleep; both laughed and I awoke

Safe in my bed as day its eggshell broke,

And robins walked and stopped, and on the damp

Gemmed turf a brown shoe lay! My secret stamp,

The Shade impress, the mystery inborn.

Mirages, miracles, midsummer morn.

Since my biographer may be too staid

Or know too little to affirm that Shade

Shaved in his bath, here goes:

                               "He'd fixed a sort

Of hinge-and-screw affair, a steel support

Running across the tub to hold in place

The shaving mirror right before his face

And with his toe renewing tap-warmth, he'd 

Sit like a king there, and like Marat bleed."

The more I weigh, the less secure my skin;

In places it's ridiculously thin;

Thus near the mouth: the space between its wick

And my grimace, invited the wicked nick.

Or this dewlap: some day I must set free

The Newport Frill inveterate in me.

My Adam's apple is a prickly pear:

Now I shall speak of evil and despair

As none has spoken. Five, six, seven, eight,

Nine strokes are not enough. Ten. I palpate

Through strawberry-and-cream the gory mess

And find unchanged that patch of prickliness.

I have my doubts about the one-armed bloke

Who in commercials with one gliding stroke

Clears a smooth path of flesh from ear to chin,

Then wipes his faces and fondly tries his skin.

I'm in the class of fussy bimanists.

As a discreet ephebe in tights assists

A female in an acrobatic dance,

My left hand help, and holds, and shifts its stance.

Now I shall speak...Better than any soap

Is the sensation for which poets hope

When inspiration and its icy blaze,

The sudden image, the immediate phrase

Over the skin a triple ripple send

Making the little hairs all stand on end

As in the enlarged animated scheme

Of whiskers mowed when held up by Our Cream.

Now I shall speak of evil as none has

Spoken before. I loathe such things as jazz;

The white-hosed moron torturing a black

Bull, rayed with red; abstractist bric-a-brac;

Primitivist folk-masks; progressive schools;

Music in supermarkets; swimming pools;

Brutes, bores, class-conscious Philistines, Freud, Marx

Fake thinkers, puffed-up poets, frauds and sharks.

And while the safety blade with scrap and screak

Travels across the country of my cheek,

Cars on the highway pass, and up the steep

Incline big trucks around my jawbone creep,

And now a silent liner docks, and now

Sunglassers tour Beirut, and now I plough

Old Zembla's fields where my gray stubble grows,

And slaves make hay between my mouth and nose.

Man's life as commentary to abstruse

Unfinished poem. Note for further use. . . . ."

This curious poem has a byzantine history. Poet John Shade lived in the Appalachian college town of New Wye. His fame is sufficient for critics to often mention him in the same breath (just "one oozy footprint behind") as his fellow poet Robert Frost, an association which Shade dId not entirely enjoy, perhaps because Frost is always mentioned first. Shade was married to his teenage sweetheart, Sybil. Their only child, a daughter named Hazel, apparently committed suicide. Shade's own dates of birth and death remain a mystery to this day but it is assumed he lived long enough to have "fields where my gray stubble grows."

Though he was once a popular poet, Shade's work—The Sacred Tree, The Swing — has fallen out of fashion as well as print. The longest sample is Shade's untitled 999-line work excerpted above, rendered in heroic couplets (rhyming pairs of lines in iambic pentameter). Shade's poem describes his life, his obsession with the senses, and his boyhood-to-maturity preoccupation with death. The work is notable for its description of a near-death experience (Shade treats it with a mixture of skepticism and reverence), and for the "faint hope" of an afterlife which it provides. 

Divided into four cantos, the work remains available only because an obscure Russian novelist made an English translation from the only Russian-language copy he could find. Since the book was missing a title page (it had been ripped from the binding) the unsure and clumsy translator gave the poem the nonsensical title Pale Fire.  It was published in 1962, although the publishing date may prove to be as untrustworthy as the translator himself.