Paul Bowles finds his way back to fiction

Like many future writers, Paul Bowles wrote a lot of juvenilia. Every day at the age of eight he produced a four-page newspaper in pencil and crayon, and made entries in the diaries of “several imaginary characters.” There were two volumes, he writes “about a woman named Bluey Laber Dozlen, who sails from an unidentified European country to Wen Kroy, where she immediately finds a huge sum of money and buys herself a self-steering automobile.”

But Bowles’ early career was devoted to his career as a musical composer. By the time we reach page 259 of his autobiography, World War II is coming to an end, Bowles is in his mid-thirties, and he and his wife are living in New York City.

It was a confused and somewhat disorderly period, yet it was a productive one for both of us. During it I wrote a great deal of music, including the scores for seven shows, and Jane wrote her play In the Summer House. And it was then that I suddenly found my way back into writing fiction, a territory I had considered forever shut to me....

I had been reading some ethnographic books with texts from the Arapesh or from the Tarahumara given in word-for-word translation. Little by little the desire came to me to invent my own myths, adopting the point of view of the primitive mind. The only way I could devise for simulating that state was the old Surrealist method of abandoning conscious control and writing whatever words came from the pen. First, animal legends resulted from the experiments and then tales of animals disguised as “basic human” beings. One rainy Sunday I awoke late, put a thermos of coffee by my bedside, and began to write another of these myths. No one disturbed me, and I wrote on until I had finished it. I read it over, called it “The Scorpion,” and decided that it could be shown to others. When View published it, I received compliments and went on inventing myths. The subject matter of the myths soon turned from “primitive” to contemporary, but the objectives and behavior of the protagonists remained the same as in the beast legends. It was through this unexpected little gate that I crept back into the land of fiction writing. Long ago I had decided that the world was too complex for me ever to be able to write fiction; since I failed to understand life, I would not be able to find points of reference which the hypothetical reader might have in common with me. When Partisan Review accepted “A Distant Episode,” even though I had already sold two or three other tales to Harper’s Bazaar, I was triumphant: it meant that I would be able to go on writing fiction.