"Desultory Correspondence" :Paul Bowles recalls Gertrude Stein

 

Desultory Correspondence / Sporadische Korrespondenz is an intriguing fifty-page interview by Swiss author Florian Vetsch with the American writer and composer Paul Bowles about Gertrude Stein (1874-1946). 

The interview was conducted primarily by an exchange of letters in the mid-1990s, at the time the composer, poet and novelist who was living in Morocco was one of the last living members of Stein's Paris circle. "Freddy" Bowles's first young encounter, at age 20 in 1930, with Stein and Alice B. Toklas in their Paris apartment, was not one that would seem auspicious: Bowles was directed to take cold-water baths and to walk Basket ("that ghastly dog") in the garden. "We must lance Freddy," one of Stein's comments, suggests that Stein was trying to cure him of some apparently distasteful romantic notions.

Bowles talks about aesthetic issues, conflicts between his early poetic attempts with Stein's dislike of Surrealism, and also about his various encounters with Stein in Paris and in Bilignin in the south of France. He describes the group of artists and writers that formed the core of a more modern, and less romantic, movement between the World Wars. 

In a brief excerpt below, Bowles comments about Stein's criticism and her influence on twentieth-century literature. In particular, he takes exception to Ernest Hemingway's eventual opinion of Stein as a "charlatan," and how her suggestions helped Hemingway to "just write what you see." 

Q: How did Gertrude Stein criticize your early poetry?

BOWLES: Oh, she told me it wasn't realistic. She told me it was false. But, of course, she was very, very much against surrealism, entirely. Surrealism, of course, uses so many symbols; one thing means something else, you know. And she didn't like that idea. She pulled what I said to pieces. She took, I remember, the first stanza of mine that was published in transition. It began "When in between the rows of corn / the heated beetle pants."

Q: That's from your poem "Spire Song" (1927)

BOWLES: Yeah, right. She said, "it's false. Beetles don't pant." And I thought it doesn't matter. I know some lies aren't important. Because I don't mean that beetles "h-h-h," doing that, you know. Absurd! But that's what it meant to her. And that's when she looked down at that ghastly dog and said, 'Basket pants, don't you?' And he went, "h-h-h." And then she said "but beetles don't pant!" Well, all right. 

Then I remember there was something about "purple clouds forget to sail." She said, "it's so false, false. No cloud was ever purple. No cloud was ever conscious. No cloud remembered anything." That sort of thing. Of course, I mean, if you make it completely realistic there won't be any poetry at all; I mean, not if it is surrealist. And then there was this young poet living in Paris, an American. And she brought him up, and she said "now this fellow is a very bad poet." And then she said, "but you're not a poet all all."

Then about a week later she said, "have you gone and corrected that poem?" ... 

And I said, "no, I haven't. In the first place it's all published." She said "I know it's published but you could still correct it, I told you you are not a poet. A poet would have gone up and corrected his poetry, and you didn't do anything. You just went out for a walk. I knew you weren't a poet." So of course I believed her finally, and realized what I had written was no good. I didn't write any more, I stopped writing. Oh, I was a composer of music, but I didn't write further poetry then. ...

Q: But later on you wrote poetry.

BOWLES: Much much later, yes. After having written novels and a lot of prose stories. It was a different approach. ...

Q: Was she very imperious?

BOWLES: If she gave orders? Oh very.

Q: Hemingway said somewhere that she reminded him of a Roman Caesar.

BOWLES: Well, yes she did look somewhat like a Roman emperor. He didn't like her it seems. Finally, he didn't. They didn't remain friends. And he wrote very nasty things about her in Movable Feast. Yeah, I think he should have remained loyal to her. After all she helped him a great deal when he was young. After he became famous, he decided she was no good, that she was a charlatan. Well he was wrong, he had no reason to think that, certainly no reason to write it in a book. ...

Q: What was her influence on modern literature?

BOWLES: Well, it was good. I think it simplified things a lot. But it was particularly through Hemingway. She used to send him out every morning and say "write, and bring me back whatever you wrote. And write exactly what you see just as you see it. Don't tell whether you like it or don't like it, how you feel. Just write what you see."

It was a kind of reporting. That was very healthy I think. Because it was just the opposite, really, of his first method. Because at first he didn't write what he saw, he only wrote what he remembered, which is something else. It was filtered through his own memory. Therefore it was overwritten. 

And that's what she was trying to get Hemingway to do away with: "Cut out words. Cut out everything except what you saw, what happened." I think it had an effect on Hemingway. And Hemingway's style had a lot to do with other American writers who followed him. Largely through Hemingway her influence worked for Americans, who admired his style.

Q: Have you ever met Sherwood Anderson?

BOWLES: I never met him. But Gertrude Stein influenced him a lot. And he was the first to say so.

Bowles, very early on, comments about Stein's politics as an American expatriate during the war, which involved support for the Nazi-backed Vichy regime. Her friendship with Bernard Faÿ, a French supporter of Hitler and Franco, seems to have surely helped save Stein's artworks (and probably her life) in wartime France. "Gertrude always spoke of him with deep respect," Bowles comments. "Strange that she didn't criticize him, being Jewish herself. And I knew he was anti-Semitic," he remembers.

Further comment from Barbara Will of Dartmouth College and material from Janet Malcolm's Two Lives about Stein's wartime politics is recently posted at the site Surviving Transition under the heading "The Strange Politics of Gertrude Stein."

 

Ultimately, reading Bowles's recollections, it becomes clear that It wasn't easy to formulate an artistic avant-garde even in Paris of the 1930s: at one point Bowles returned to his Paris apartment to find his collection of Jean Arp's "constructions" taken to the basement by his landlady. Alarmed, Bowles took the damaged pieces to a museum director, who arranged to have Arp himself restore the art.  Desultory Correspondence / Sporadische Korrespondenz was published by Memory Cage (Switzerland) in a combined English-German version in 1997 and is unfortunately out of print at the current time. 

Ginsberg on Auden: "he was uncomfortable, like pinned wriggling to the wall"

W.H. Auden was born on this day, 1907. The Allen Ginsberg Project previously posted Ginsberg's memories of W.H. Auden and reading them is a reminder, again, of how Ginsberg attempted to be friends with everyone -- even when the "funny but fussy" Auden told him Ginsberg would "embarrass me" by singing during his visit.

Ginsberg's observations (of which this is only an extract) show him always ready to show off something new he'd learned or written. The description of Auden appearing "pinned wiggling to the wall" while Ginsberg sang mantras in Auden's presence is a literary cameo of the generational shift that was accelerating in the 1960s. 

This essay appears in the Ginsberg collection Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952-1995   and was originally published in The Drummer, 1974.

...Auden was very funny, sort of generous but fussy. In the 'sixties, I used to go visit him every year or two, have tea. Soon after I came back from India, I went to see him with a harmonium and started singing Hare Krishna and various mantras and he sat and listened, but he was uncomfortable, like pinned wriggling to the wall, and having to be polite and really mind-wandering and not really interested in my great display of knowledge, because I was laying this trip on him.

The next time I went to see him I brought my harmonium wanting to sing some Blake songs. He said "Oh no no no no, I just can't stand people singing to me like that, makes me terribly embarrassed. I can't sit here and have people singing. I'm quiet and prefer to listen to them in a concert hall, or on a record. Don't sing, have some tea, have some tea, please, you'll embarrass me".

I think he got a little bit silly. When he was last in New York he was doing some work with a cartoonist making some funny little poems. So instead of my singing to him, he wanted me to look at those. I was full of big serious mantras and Blake and spiritual trippiness and he wanted me to look at all those little household domestic verses about how silly and comfy the Victorians were. Summer 1973 in London, we all read together - Basil Bunting and Auden and myself and (Hugh) MacDiarmid at Queen Elizabeth Hall and he read some really great poems saying farewell to his body, farewell to his eyes, to his senses one by one, evaluating them and putting them in place, dissociating himself from permanent identification with his senses, and preparing his soul to meet his ultimate empty nature God. So there was an individualistic, solitary complete objectivity that he arrived at.

Apparently, he was very domestic but his apartment was a complete mess, there were papers all over, books piled up on end tables and shelves, just like a real artist's.

I had a couple of funny run-ins with him different times, and always had a very uneasy time with him. I always felt like a fool, trying to lay a trip on him culture-political or otherwise. Once we had a big happy agreement about marijuana should be legalized. He said, "Liquor is much worse, quite right, quite right. I do think...end all this fuss".

He must have been lonely because he said he was afraid he'd drop dead in his apartment and have a heart-attack and nobody would find him. Quite true because he did have a final heart attack a year later. I don't know if he encouraged local friendliness or not, but every time I called him up, he'd make a date for about a week later, and he'd be there and be expecting me and have tea ready."

Bob Dylan, born May 24 1941

From Chronicles Vol 1:

On the corner I put the dime in the slot and dialed the operator for long distance, called collect and the call went right through. I wanted everyone to know I was all right. My mother would usually give me the latest run of the mill stuff. My father had his own way of looking at things. To him life was hard work. He’d come from a generation of different values, heroes and music, and wasn’t so sure that the truth would set anybody free. He was pragmatic and always had a word of cryptic advice. “Remember, Robert, in life anything can happen. Even if you don’t have all the things you want, be grateful for the things you don’t have that you don’t want.” My education was important to him. He would have wanted me to become a mechanical engineer. But in school, I had to struggle to get even decent grades. I was not a natural student. My mom, bless her, who had always stood up for me and was firmly on my side in just about anything and everything, was more concerned about “a lot of monkey business out there in the world,” and would add, “Bobby, don’t forget you have relatives in New Jersey.” I’d already been to Jersey but not to visit relatives.

Lou snapped the big tape machine off after listening hard to one of my original songs. “Woody Guthrie, eh? That’s interesting. What made you want to write a song about him? I used to see him and his partner, Leadbelly-they used to play at the Garment Workers Hall over on Lexington Avenue. You ever heard ‘You Can’t Scare Me, I’m Sticking to the Union’?” Sure I’d heard it.

“Whatever happened to him, anyway?”

“Oh, he’s over in Jersey. He’s in the hospital there.”

Lou chomped away. “Nothing serious I hope. What other songs do you have? Let’s put ‘em all down.”

Reynolds Price: "Clear Pictures," and the dark nights of November

November: the days darken, nights get longer, cold clouds gather. Beyond the warmth and brightness that is Thanksgiving -- the beginnings of a season of sanctioned overindulgence, such an American holiday -- even Louisa May Alcott soured against the cold and dark, writing "November is the most disagreeable month in the entire year."         

I expect what old and dour Nathaniel Hawthorne might have written about a brittle New England autumn, but such harsh words from the author of Little Women are a surprise. The most optimistic of us are bound to be flattened by a nighttime's darkening before 6 o'clock, even with the prospect of a dressed twenty-pound turkey on the dining-room table as a leavening agent to our gloom.

What to read in a month like November? I tried settling in with some of the things I had been promising to read (and putting off reading) since summertime when flies were buzzing at the screen door. No luck with such good intentions; old books, new books -- nothing stuck. November, it turns out, is a tough read. Should I really open Gustave Flaubert's November this month? The title alone puts me off. I still haven't found the right time of year for it, after I found this copy for a quarter at the library two years ago. I haven't tried January yet, though. Eh -- maybe I'll find it's a springtime novel.

There is Reynolds Price, however. Years ago I discovered Clear Pictures, his memoir of a North Carolina boyhood in the 1940s. Wit, sharp detail, youth observed as translucent as if it happened yesterday, and memories plucked up from the stream as by a hawk. Here he is describing his father's "welcome scourge" of practical jokes:

"From cradle to grave, Will's practical jokes were the welcome scourge of his friends, kin and in-laws. In that less analytical time, nobody asked if a concealed hostility was at work in his impenetrable disguises, ruses, forged letters and convincing crank-phonecalls. If there was veiled anger in his motive, then it seems realistic to see also what an imaginative and entertaining way he found to vent it -- our own home-theater, complete with regular catharsis. No one was ever so much as bruised; and no one ever expressed resentment, neither on the spot nor in after years. Those were tougher spirits in general then, not trained to expect kid gloves, day or night.

... Everyone was skittishly resigned to a turn as the object of one of Will's long-planned hoaxes. What removed all whiff of cruelty was his clear intention to amuse and everyone's delighted response, even the victims', and the fact that the victims promptly began to plot a turnabout, if he or she had the wits to catch Will unawares. In that crew of expert comedians, some did." 

"Those were tougher spirits then": whatever nostalgia remains for mid-twentieth-century America from a childhood in the South, Price is bluntly honest about its bleaker aspects: there was war, poverty, deprivation. There's also surprise in the black humor of an early holiday memory: I can also see our black terrier, dead under the tree on a Christmas morning (the only explanation I ever heard was that Will dropped a laxative pill the night before and was unable to find it; but the dog succeeded, ate it, lay down to rest in the tree's cotton snow and died in the midst of my Santa Claus)."


Price died in 2011 at age 77. For many years he taught at Duke University after being diagnosed with spinal cancer in 1984, and wrote continuously; he's another in the lengthening line of "regional writers" who have made prolific writing careers, although he was careful about placing too much emphasis on being a Southern writer: as he told one interviewer, "I think we Southerners have talked a fair amount of malarkey about the mystique of being Southern." Still, he's been in some good company; Eudora Welty helped get his first books published. 

Like many writers, he made a public career without much public ado -- an observation he would find dryly humorous if it weren't for the literary accolades his work has received. Clear Pictures was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1989; in 1986 his novel Kate Vaiden won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and there have been many others.

Reynolds Price

Price had a wry sense of writing's place in American culture, or the very lack of one. In Feasting the Heart, his 2000 book of essays for National Public Radio, he wrote about the growing number of British adaptations of English novels on American television and the movies, while noting our country's own "baffling neglect ... of the waiting riches of American literature." From his essay "Native Orphans":

"Look down the American fiction and drama shelves of your nearest library; locate the absolute first-class titles from James Fennimore Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, Mark Twain, onthrough Willa Cather, Eugene O'Neill, Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald to Tennessee Williams, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison, and their live-and-kicking peers. Search your memory for a single example of a first-class film adapted from any classic American novel or play -- a first-class film, now ...

My own recent search turns up only three such unassailable achievements -- Sidney Lumet's version of O'Neill'sLong Day's Journey Into Night (1962), John Ford's version of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1940), and Michael Mann's recent version of Cooper's Last of the Mohicans (1992). Period.

Oh, I may have forgot a contender or two ... I'm well aware of the many dozens of films made from lesser novels -- films likeGone With the Wind and The Big Sleep -- but I don't expect to hear a chorus of reminders of the brilliance I've neglected to mention."

He goes on to a list of intriguing contemporary possibilities, from Robert Stone's "parable of American havoc overseas," A Flag for Sunrise, to William Kennedy's Albany novels, "onward through a multitude of stories for the next millennium." These films will not be made, at least not by Americans. What causes this neglect? For Price, it's a familiar and disheartening litany that includes minuscule arts budgets slashed ever further in every legislative session, school systems without the arts, a failure of nerve in the face of popular culture. He -- and we -- wait.


Meanwhile, Clear Pictures remains on the bedside table, good enough as autumn reading to keep me awake propped up in bed until at least 10 at night -- a respectable enough hour to call it a day in mid-November, even if that's an hour considered too early in summer. Since I first read Clear Pictures ten years ago I've discovered Price's other writing, a prolific output of novels, short stories and essays, as well as his clear-eyed Biblical scholarship: there's an over-abundance of Price's 23 novels and collections, going back to 1962. That is certainly something to look forward to during fall's dark and stormy nights.

From "Yossarian Slept Here," a memoir by Erica Heller: "Should I hire jugglers?"

"Joe who?" my mother asked without guile from her hospital bed. She'd just read a card that had been tucked into a glorious bouquet of freshly delivered flowers.

"Joe Heller," I told her. I was flabbergasted that she didn't know or couldn't guess, but then we were in Sloan-Kettering. It was 1995, she was dying, and although my parents had been married for thirty-eight years, they had had a particularly acrimonious divorce twelve years before and had not spoken since. So perhaps the fact that she was scouring her brain for non-Hellerian Joes she might know was not really all that startling. I reached over for the card and read aloud: "My darling Shirley," it began, "I am so sorry. Joe." I handed it back to her.

When I told her who'd sent the flowers, she spoke slowly and without rancor. "Well, he is a sorry soul," she pronounced wearily, crumpling up the card and dropping it into the yellow plastic trash bin on the floor beside her bed. "But he sent you flowers," I pushed, somehow hoping for more. "They're from Dad. Don't you think they're nice?" I pestered, leading the witness. She stared at me, unruffled and unimpressed. "I get it. I understand," she said. "But really, how wildly would you like me to celebrate this? Should I hire jugglers?" Then she muttered something that I made her repeat twice because it was said so faintly, she closed her eyes and we never spoke of the flowers or of my father again.

By then my mother was bald and terribly frail. After her initial diagnosis a year and a half earlier, I'd moved back in with her at the Apthorp, the apartment building where I'd grown up, decamping from the Upper East Side to properly care for her for as long as was needed.


From the day I moved back in, whether my mother was home or, as she was with increasing frequency, in the hospital, my father was too stubborn and too shaken by the gravity of her illness to call or speak to her. Instead, he called me. Night after night he inquired about her with an array of questions that never varied: Had she eaten? Had she gotten fresh air that day? Was she able to sleep? What were the doctors saying? Had she taken all of her medications and had I remembered to give her all of her vitamins? What was her mood? Every night I answered him, increasingly baffled by his persistent interest and concern, but not, I suspect, as baffled as he himself may have been.

As my mother got sicker, had brain surgery, lung surgery, chemo, and radiation, I could hear how much more difficult it was for him to keep the fear from creeping into his voice. He knew we were going to lose her. It was only a question of when. Officially, they had lost each other many years before, of course, but it was obvious how deeply he was tied to her. They were still uncannily connected.

Even after years of silence, the truth remained that there'd never been anyone who'd known or understood each of them better than the other. There never would be. With Mom's death, this aspect of my father's life would be obliterated, and I sensed that fact very strongly during that time. To me, it could easily be seen lurking just beneath the surface—a surface customarily guarded and closed and, for the most part, ineluctably indecipherable.

Heller (center) in Corsica, 1944

When my father called me those nights he was not the blustery, famous author; the gruff, arrogant big shot; the smug, cocky fellow who sometimes showed up to friends' cocktail parties for the sheer fun of insulting them. He wasn't the caustic, clever master of the verbal arabesque who for years had answered the question "How come you've never written a book as good as Catch-22?" with the sly, Talmudic response to put any other to shame: "Who has?" he'd ask, genuinely wanting to know. He was not bombastic or self-satisfied during those nightly calls. He was only sad. He just wanted to talk, and I let him.

Then, about a month before my mother died, when she had gone into Sloan-Kettering for what seemed as if it might be the last time, one night when Dad called I was simply too exhausted to hold everything back that I'd been wanting to say to him ever since she'd first been diagnosed. I had never found the courage or the proper words to use with him before.

I blurted out that he simply had to communicate with her again now, or he would never forgive himself. "How will you live with yourself if you don't? How will you sleep at night?" I asked in an uncustomarily loud tone. He listened silently, and I could picture him sitting in his lemon-yellow study out in East Hampton where he lived, seething at the very notion of being scolded by his daughter. "Call. Write to her. Send flowers. Do something. There isn't much time left, and if you don't, I think you'll always be sorry," I fumbled, suddenly aware of and horrified by my own stridence. Now, understandably, there was angry silence. When Dad finally spoke, he was petulant, childlike. "I don't need you to tell me what to do," he growled, hanging up before I could respond.

It was the very next day when, sitting in my mother's hospital room, there had been a knock at the door, and an orderly had entered with the exquisite bouquet of flowers for Mom. From Dad.

When I arrived home that night the phone was already ringing. He wanted to know if she'd gotten the flowers and if so, had she liked them. I assured him that they'd arrived and had been magnificent. "Well, what did she say?" he asked with some urgency, and then it was my turn to be silent.

Yossarian Slept Here: When Joseph Heller Was Dad, The Apthorp Was Home, and Life Was a Catch-22 by Erica Heller is published by Simon & Schuster. Photo from the Wall Street Journal by Everett B. Thomas and courtesy Dan Setzer.

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.

"Desultory Correspondence": Paul Bowles discusses Gertrude Stein

Desultory Correspondence / Sporadische Korrespondenz is an intriguing fifty-page interview by Swiss author Florian Vetsch with the American writer and composer Paul Bowles about Gertrude Stein (1874-1946). 

The interview was conducted primarily by an exchange of letters in the mid-1990s, at the time the composer, poet and novelist who was living in Morocco was one of the last living members of Stein's Paris circle. "Freddy" Bowles's first young encounter, at age 20 in 1930, with Stein and Alice B. Toklas in their Paris apartment was not one that would seem auspicious: Bowles was directed to take cold-water baths and to walk Basket ("that ghastly dog") in the garden. "We must lance Freddy," one of Stein's comments, suggests that Stein was trying to cure him of some apparently distasteful romantic notions.

Bowles talks about aesthetic issues, conflicts between his early poetic attempts with Stein's dislike of Surrealism, and also about his various encounters with Stein in Paris and in Bilignin in the south of France. He describes the group of artists and writers that formed the core of a more modern, and less romantic, movement between the World Wars. 

In a brief excerpt below, Bowles comments about Stein's criticism and her influence on twentieth-century literature. In particular, he takes exception to Ernest Hemingway's eventual opinion of Stein as a "charlatan," and how her suggestions helped Hemingway to "just write what you see." 

Q: How did Gertrude Stein criticize your early poetry?

BOWLES: Oh, she told me it wasn't realistic. She told me it was false. But, or course, she was very, very much against surrealism, entirely. Surrealism, of course, uses so many symbols; one thing means something else, you know. And she didn't like that idea. She pulled what I said to pieces. She took, I remember, the first stanza of mine that was published in transition. It began "When in between the rows of corn / the heated beetle pants."

Q: That's from your poem "Spire Song" (1927)

BOWLES: Yeah, right. She said, "it's false. Beetles don't pant." And I thought it doesn't matter. I know some lies aren't important. Because I don't mean that beetles "h-h-h," doing that, you know. Absurd! But that's what it meant to her. And that's when she looked down at that ghastly dog and said, 'Basket pants, don't you?' And he went, "h-h-h." And then she said "but beetles don't pant!" Well, all right. 

Then I remember there was something about "purple clouds forget to sail." She said, "it's so false, false. No cloud was ever purple. No cloud was ever conscious. No cloud remembered anything." That sort of thing. Of course, I mean, if you make it completely realistic there won't be any poetry at all; I mean, not if it is surrealist. And then there was this young poet living in Paris, an American. And she brought him up, and she said "now this fellow is a very bad poet." And then she said, "but you're not a poet all all."

Then about a week later she said, "have you gone and corrected that poem?" ... 

And I said, "no, I haven't. In the first place it's all published." She said "I know it's published but you could still correct it, I told you you are not a poet. A poet would have gone up and corrected his poetry, and you didn't do anything. You just went out for a walk. I knew you weren't a poet." So of course I believed her finally, and realized what I had written was no good. I didn't write any more, I stopped writing. Oh, I was a composer of music, but I didn't write further poetry then. ...

Q: But later on you wrote poetry.

BOWLES: Much much later, yes. After having written novels and a lot of prose stories. It was a different approach. ...

Q: Was she very imperious?

BOWLES: If she gave orders? Oh very.

Q: Hemingway said somewhere that she reminded him of a Roman Caesar.

BOWLES: Well, yes she did look somewhat like a Roman emperor. He didn't like her it seems. Finally, he didn't. They didn't remain friends. And he wrote very nasty things about her in Movable Feast. Yeah, I think he should have remained loyal to her. After all she helped him a great deal when he was young. After he became famous, he decided she was no good, that she was a charlatan. Well he was wrong, he had no reason to think that, certainly no reason to write it in a book. ...

Q: What was her influence on modern literature?

BOWLES: Well, it was good. I think it simplified things a lot. But it was particularly through Hemingway. She used to send him out every morning and say "write, and bring me back whatever you wrote. And write exactly what you see just as you see it. Don't tell whether you like it or don't like it, how you feel. Just write what you see."

It was a kind of reporting. That was very healthy I think. Because it was just the opposite, really, of his first method. Because at first he didn't write what he saw, he only wrote what he remembered, which is something else. It was filtered through his own memory. Therefore it was overwritten. 

And that's what she was trying to get Hemingway to do away with: "Cut out words. Cut out everything except what you saw, what happened." I think it had an effect on Hemingway. And Hemingway's style had a lot to do with other American writers who followed him. Largely through Hemingway her influence worked for Americans, who admired his style.

Q: Have you ever met Sherwood Anderson?

BOWLES: I never met him. But Gertrude Stein influenced him a lot. And he was the first to say so.

Bowles, very early on, comments about Stein's politics as an American expatriate during the war, which involved support for the Nazi-backed Vichy regime. Her friendship with Bernard Faÿ, a French supporter of Hitler and Franco, seems to have surely helped save Stein's artworks (and probably her life) in wartime France. "Gertrude always spoke of him with deep respect," Bowles comments. "Strange that she didn't criticize him, being Jewish herself. And I knew he was anti-Semitic," he remembers. 

Further comment from Barbara Will of Dartmouth College and material from Janet Malcolm's Two Lives about Stein's wartime politics is  posted at the site Surviving Transition under the heading "The Strange Politics of Gertrude Stein."

Ultimately, reading Bowles's recollections, it becomes clear that It wasn't easy to formulate an artistic avant-garde even in Paris of the 1930s: at one point Bowles returned to his Paris apartment to find his collection of Jean Arp's "constructions" taken to the basement by his landlady. Alarmed, Bowles took the damaged pieces to a museum director, who arranged to have Arp himself restore the art.  Desultory Correspondence / Sporadische Korrespondenz was published by Memory Cage (Switzerland) in a combined English-German version in 1997 and is unfortunately out of print at the current time.

Ginsberg on Auden: "I think he got a little bit silly"

The Allen Ginsberg Project recently posted Ginsberg's memories of W.H. Auden on the anniversary of Auden's death in 1973. Reading them is a reminder, again, of how Ginsberg attempted to be friends with everyone -- even when the "funny but fussy" Auden told him Ginsberg would "embarrass me" by singing during his visit.

Ginsberg's observations (of which this is only an extract) show him always ready to show off something new he'd learned or written. The description of Auden appearing "pinned wiggling to the wall" while Ginsberg sang mantras in Auden's presence is a literary cameo of the generational shift that was accelerating in the 1960s. 

This essay appears in the Ginsberg collection Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952-1995   and was originally published in The Drummer, 1974.

...Auden was very funny, sort of generous but fussy. In the 'sixties, I used to go visit him every year or two, have tea. Soon after I came back from India, I went to see him with a harmonium and started singing Hare Krishna and various mantras and he sat and listened, but he was uncomfortable, like pinned wriggling to the wall, and having to be polite and really mind-wandering and not really interested in my great display of knowledge, because I was laying this trip on him.

The next time I went to see him I brought my harmonium wanting to sing some Blake songs. He said "Oh no no no no, I just can't stand people singing to me like that, makes me terribly embarrassed. I can't sit here and have people singing. I'm quiet and prefer to listen to them in a concert hall, or on a record. Don't sing, have some tea, have some tea, please, you'll embarrass me".

I think he got a little bit silly. When he was last in New York he was doing some work with a cartoonist making some funny little poems. So instead of my singing to him, he wanted me to look at those. I was full of big serious mantras and Blake and spiritual trippiness and he wanted me to look at all those little household domestic verses about how silly and comfy the Victorians were. Summer 1973 in London, we all read together - Basil Bunting and Auden and myself and (Hugh) MacDiarmid at Queen Elizabeth Hall and he read some really great poems saying farewell to his body, farewell to his eyes, to his senses one by one, evaluating them and putting them in place, dissociating himself from permanent identification with his senses, and preparing his soul to meet his ultimate empty nature God. So there was an individualistic, solitary complete objectivity that he arrived at.

Apparently, he was very domestic but his apartment was a complete mess, there were papers all over, books piled up on end tables and shelves, just like a real artist's.

I had a couple of funny run-ins with him different times, and always had a very uneasy time with him. I always felt like a fool, trying to lay a trip on him culture-political or otherwise. Once we had a big happy agreement about marijuana should be legalized. He said, "Liquor is much worse, quite right, quite right. I do think...end all this fuss".

He must have been lonely because he said he was afraid he'd drop dead in his apartment and have a heart-attack and nobody would find him. Quite true because he did have a final heart attack a year later. I don't know if he encouraged local friendliness or not, but every time I called him up, he'd make a date for about a week later, and he'd be there and be expecting me and have tea ready."

Paul Bowles in the 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.