Without Stopping

As I suspected, Paul Bowles’ autobiography Without Stopping is considerably more insightful and revealing than the “Without Telling” quip would lead you to think.

Especially when describing his childhood, which he does at some length, Bowles lays bare the family dynamics that went to create his famously mysterious and evasive personality. Bowles learned early to detach himself from parental punishment, to disguise the things he took pleasure in (lest they be forbidden), and to pretend that he himself did not exist.

Bowles is not forthcoming about his adult sexuality, but he describes being seduced as a young man by both men and women, and finding it equally uninspiring. There are enough passages like this one to keep a psychoanalyst absorbed for some time.

Although I knew enough Freud to believe that the sex urge was an important mainspring of life, it still seemed to me that any conscious manifestation of sex was necessarily ludicrous. Defecation and copulation were two activities which made a human being totally ridiculous. At least the former could be conducted in private, but the latter by definition demanded a partner. I discovered, though, that whenever I ventured this opinion, people took it as a joke.