The Pillars of Hercules

“Living here, among Muslims, I suppose I’ve become more patient and fatalistic,” Bowles said. “You have no control over things, so what can you do? Muslims live their faith, they are seldom hypocrites. But hypocrisy is part of Christianity.”

“What is it about Tangier that attracts so many foreigners?”

He shrugged. The question did not provoke him. He had perhaps heard it ten thousand times. He said, “They don’t stay. The Beats came here twice, first in ’57, and then in ’61. Orlovsky, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg.”

“And William Burroughs?” I said, prompting him.

“Burroughs was here,” Bowles said. “For a long time he didn’t know where he was. Then he was writing Naked Lunch. He’d finish a sheet of foolscap and drop it on the floor. Allen gathered them and put them in order.”

It was well known that Bowles kept his distance from the Beats. These people were simply passing through. But Bowles was a respectable exile—superficially, at least. He was married, for one thing. Jane Bowles was another famous figure of Tangier. Her novel Two Serious Ladies was one of the strangest books I had ever read; accomplished, but odd. They kept an alligator as a pet. They had no children. Jane was frankly lesbian and towards the end of her life had been confined to a wheelchair. Daniel Farson wrote in his biography of Francis Bacon, “She drank; he preferred drugs like majoun. She called herself, with self-lacerating cruelty, ‘Crippie the Kike dyke.’ ” Bacon said Jane “died in a madhouse in Málaga, it must have been the worst thing in the world. Looked after by nuns, can you imagine anything more horrible?”

“Sex, for Bowles, appears to have been an embarrassment rather than a relief or a consummation of more delicate feelings,” the poet Iain Finlayson was quoted as saying in Farson’s book. “His fondness for young men can perhaps be better viewed as somewhat pedagogic and paternal.”

But that was obviously the past—and probably the distant past. He seemed to me a man who masked all his feelings; he had a glittering eye, but a cold gaze. He seemed at once preoccupied, knowledgeable, worldly, remote, detached, vain, skeptical, eccentric, self-sufficient, indestructible, egomaniacal, and hospitable to praise. He was like almost every other writer I had known in my life.

Talking about the Beats, Bowles mentioned Allen Ginsberg. “Ginsberg is a rabbi manqué,” he said. “He looks like a professor of chemistry. I read Howl. I didn’t love it. I read Kaddish, his next, and liked it more.”

“What about Naked Lunch?”

“Burroughs had a sense of humor,” Bowles said. “No jokes in the others.”

“What do you read for pleasure?”

“Recently I reread Victory. It is very sinister when those three men show up. And Passage to India. I reread that. I didn’t like it as much as the first time.”

“You said a moment ago that you had a place in Sri Lanka,” I said.

“It was an island,” Bowles said. “I loved it. I happened to be visiting the Duke of Pembroke at Wilton—”

“David Herbert’s father,” I said.

“Yes, and I met Sybil Colfax. I told them I wanted to go somewhere warm. They suggested Ceylon. It was an awful trip on a Polish ship. I went to Colombo and then down to Galle and then on to this island. It was small, not more than an acre, but covered with wonderful plants that a Frenchman had brought from all over the world. When the island was put up for sale I wired my bank and bought it.”

And now in this small hot room, with the shades drawn, he was on another island. No living space could have been smaller than this back room where he obviously lived and worked; he ate here, he wrote here, he slept here. His books, his music, his medicine. His world had shrunk to these walls. But that was merely the way it seemed. It was another illusion. His world was within his mind, and his imagination was vast.

I said I ought to be going. He said, “You’re welcome to stay,” and opened a flat tobacco can and took out a hand-rolled cigarette and offered me one.

“Go on. It’s a kif cigarette,” he said. Kif was marijuana, majoun was hashish jam. He added, “I always have my tea at four. And look, it’s almost five-thirty.”

We puffed away, Bowles and I, and now I recognized one of the odors in the room that earlier I had not been able to put a name to. We smoked in silence for a while, and then my scalp tightened and a glow came on in my brain and behind my eyes.

“I take it for health effect,” Bowles said. “They should legalize it, of course.”

“Of course,” I said. “I was going to bring you a bottle of wine.”

“I don’t drink. Next time bring me chocolates.”