Paul Bowles: American Composer and Novelist of Morocco
Paul Bowles (December 30, 1910 – November 18, 1999) was an American composer, author, and translator. He achieved critical and popular success with his first novel The Sheltering Sky (1949) and became closely associated with Tangier, Morocco, where he settled in 1947 and lived for 52 years.
Early Life and Education
Bowles was born in Jamaica, Queens, New York City, the only child of Rena (née Winnewisser) and Claude Dietz Bowles, a dentist. His childhood was materially comfortable but emotionally cold; his father was domineering and opposed to play or entertainment. His mother provided warmth, reading Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe to him—influences that shaped his later desire to write stories. Bowles could read at age 3 and was writing stories by age 4, composing surrealistic poetry and music in his youth.
At age 11, he purchased Arthur Waley’s A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems. By 17, his poem “Spire Song” was accepted for publication in the Paris-based literary journal transition, which published modernist writers including Djuna Barnes, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. His musical education began when his father bought a phonograph and classical records; at 15, a performance of Stravinsky’s The Firebird at Carnegie Hall profoundly affected him. He attended Jamaica High School in Queens and entered the University of Virginia in 1928.
In April 1929, Bowles dropped out of the University of Virginia and sailed to Paris with a one-way ticket. He worked for the Paris Herald Tribune and developed a friendship with Romanian poet Tristan Tzara. Returning to New York, he worked at Duttons Bookshop in Manhattan. At his parents’ insistence, he briefly returned to the University of Virginia but left after one semester to return to Paris with Aaron Copland, with whom he studied composition in New York. Copland became both lover and mentor; Bowles later described him as “other than Jane the most important person in my life.”
Career and Achievements
In autumn 1930, Bowles began his first musical composition, the Sonata for Oboe and Clarinet, completed in 1931 and premiered at the Aeolian Hall in New York on December 16, 1931. The concert, which also included work by Copland and Virgil Thomson, was poorly received by New York critics. An earlier composition, an adaptation of vocal pieces by Kurt Schwitters for piano, was completed in Berlin.
In Paris, Bowles became part of Gertrude Stein’s literary and artistic circle. On her advice, he made his first visit to Tangier with Aaron Copland in summer 1931, taking a house on the mountain above Tangier Bay. From Tangier he traveled to Berlin, where he met British writers Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood. The following year, he traveled through other parts of Morocco, the Sahara, Algeria, and Tunisia. In 1937, Bowles returned to New York and over the next decade established a solid reputation as a composer, collaborating with Orson Welles, Tennessee Williams, and others on music for stage productions and orchestral pieces.
In 1938, Bowles married Jane Auer, an author and playwright. Their marriage was unconventional; both had intimate relationships with people of their own sex, but they maintained close personal ties with each other. Bowles achieved critical and popular success with his first novel The Sheltering Sky (1949), set in French North Africa, a region he had first visited in 1931.
In 1947, Bowles settled in Tangier, then part of the Tangier International Zone; his wife Jane followed in 1948. Except for winters spent in Ceylon during the early 1950s, Tangier remained his home for the remainder of his life. He came to symbolize American immigrants in the city.
Notable Events and Milestones
Bowles’s poem “Spire Song” was published in transition when he was 17. His Sonata for Oboe and Clarinet premiered on December 16, 1931, at the Aeolian Hall in New York. His first visit to Tangier occurred in summer 1931 with Aaron Copland. He married Jane Auer in 1938. The Sheltering Sky, his debut novel, was published in 1949 and brought him critical and popular recognition. His settlement in Tangier in 1947 marked the beginning of his 52-year residence in the city, where he lived until his death in 1999.
Additional Resources
Readers seeking more detailed information about Paul Bowles’s life, compositions, literary works, and translations can consult his autobiography Without Stopping and biographical entries in Wikipedia and other literary archives. His extensive body of work—spanning music, fiction, and translation—continues to be studied and celebrated by scholars and artists.
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