In Touch: The Letters of Paul Bowles

by Paul Bowles, Jeffrey Miller, Jeffrey Miller (Editor)

Overview

This extraordinary collection of correspondence by Paul Bowles spans eight decades and provides an evolving portrait of an artist renowned for his privacy. From his earliest extant letter, written at the age of four, to his precocious effusions to Aaron Copeland and to Gertrude Stein; from his meditations on mescaline as relayed to Ned Rorem, to his intensely moving letters to Jane Bowles during her illness, In Touch fills in the lacunae left by previous biographers and offers a rare look at the many aspects of Bowles's brilliant career—as composer, novelist, short-story master, travel writer, translator, ethnographer, and literary critic.

Here is Bowles on the genesis of his first novel, The Sheltering Sky; on his distaste for Western melodies and his dogged attempts to record indigenous Moroccan music; on the Beats, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Tennessee Williams; on the nature and craft of writing; on Bernardo Bertolucci, David Byrne, and Sting; on the decline of American and the challenges of living in North Africa. Gossipy, reflective, enlightening, and always entertaining, In Touch stands as an epistolary autobiography of one of the legendary writers of our time, and a unique chronicle of the twentieth-century avant-garde.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374524593
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	10/30/1995
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	604
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

PAUL BOWLES is Professor of Economics and International Studies, University of Northern British Columbia, Canada. He is also affiliated with universities in Australia, China and Mexico. He has published in the areas of globalization, regionalism, development and the political economy of China's reforms.

Jeffrey Miller is the publisher of Cadmus Editions in Tiburon, California, and is the author of Paul Bowles: A Descriptive Bibliography, and editor of In Touch: The Letters of Paul Bowles. He has been collecting the Bowles' letters for nearly twenty years.

Jeffrey Miller is the publisher of Cadmus Editions in Tiburon, California, and is the author of Paul Bowles: A Descriptive Bibliography, and editor of In Touch: The Letters of Paul Bowles. He has been collecting the Bowles' letters for nearly twenty years.

Editorial Reviews

[Bowles' letters] are full of dazzling descriptions of faraway places. . . . [The collection] is a fascinating, tonic history of the counterculture.” —Kirkus Reviews

“It's the beauty of Bowles' writing that makes In Touch especially engaging.” —Entertainment Weekly

From the Publisher

[Jeffrey Miller] has done a superb job.
—The Chicago Tribune

Alexander Pheroux

"Places have always been more important to me than people," Bowles (b. 1910) confesses in one of more than 400 letters collected here by Miller. Spanning more than seven decades, the letters offer no intimate revelations and little celebrity gossip—but they're full of dazzling descriptions of faraway places. "At Asni the trees are full of peacocks that scream murder. The road swarms with children who hand us amethysts till we have nowhere to put them." With campy wit, Bowles compares the exotic to the homegrown mundane: In a Saharan oasis, the coarse grass "looks like the stuff they put in Woolworth's windows on the floor of the display cases at Easter time"; in a Berber village, "the streets and walls look as if someone had poured tons of white cake- icing over them." It's not surprising, then, that Bowles-the- writer's letters add up to a book that one would rather quote than discuss. What is surprising is the strength of Bowles-the- composer's devotion to Berber music and Bowles-the-husband's devotion to his wife through long years of illness. Descended from New England Puritans, Bowles read Poe at age six and took off from there. In the 30's, he was close to Gertrude Stein and Aaron Copland. In the 50's, he befriended Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and Gore Vidal. In his pursuit of sexual adventure and his reliance on the drug kif, he was way ahead of the pack—led by Ginsberg and Burroughs—that hit Tangier in the 60's. More recently, Ph.D. candidates have elicited from him pithy statements on writing (on the hermetic absorption needed to complete a novel: "Don't let the air in; it kills the fetus"). About a quarter of the collection is deadwood—chat about agents, contracts, fees—but read in one sitting, it's a fascinating, tonic history of the counterculture in what was for a time the American century. (Photographs)

Kirkus Reviews