The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles

When Paul Bowles and his wife moved to Tangiers, the blue-eyed and tranquil city on the Mediterranean coast of then French-ruled Morocco, they were both in their 30s. Not long after they moved, they decided to stay, never to return to New York. Two years later, Paul Bowles issued what would become his magnum opus, a work reminiscent of the choices he made when he was in his 30s.

Sheltering Sky (1949) is a story about two Americans who escape from a life tied to expectations. Port and Kit are a married couple who will set off to reconcile an ailing love in the pale shadow of an unforgiving desert. These are Bowles’ two young travelers who will succumb to the siren-song of a distant adventure for its promise of renewal and rebirth:

Before I was twenty, I used to think that life was a thing that kept gaining impetus. It would get richer and deeper each year. You kept learning more, getting wiser, having more insight, going further into the truth… Now you know it’s not like that. It’s more like smoking a cigarette. The first few puffs taste wonderful, and then you begin taking it for granted. Suddenly you realize it’s nearly burned down to the end. And then you’re conscious of the bitter taste.

Like Port and Kit — the author Paul and his wife Jane were two independent, self-guided individuals whose lives overlapped. Married, but intimate with partners of the same-sex, they lived side-by-side. They too had extricated themselves from America and traveled through Africa to boil down life to its bare essentials:

How many times his friends, envying him his life, had said to him: “Your life is so simple.” “Your life seems always to go in a straight line.” Whenever they had said the words he heard in them an implicit reproach. He felt that what they really meant to say was: “You have chosen the easiest terrain.” But if they elected to place obstacles in their own way — encumbering themselves with every sort of unnecessary allegiance — that was no reason why they should object to his having simplified.

Port and Kit are the two entirely unassuming and strangely naive characters Bowles will drive deep into the Sahara to wager a bet with nature: can they be reconciled amid that terrible heat?

Departing from Tangier, Port and Kit are still laden with the trappings of the America they have left behind — hand bags and travel chests, mosquito nests and bug repellent — and comically, they lug their luggage with them everywhere they go. Kit unpacks her things and sets them up in her room, just to feel as if she had arrived. Had Port led their adventure today, they’d be the ones outfitted with 80 liter backpacks and Lonely Planet guides for Morocco, Algeria and the Sahara, because you never know when you’ll need a hotel recommendation in the desert.

That question familiar to travelers — do we stay or do we go? — Port and Kit split. Port says yes when Kit says no. Had Port said no, Kit would have said yes. They are accustomed to disagreeing about trivial matters and agreeing about profound ones.

The trip is not without consequence. Port succumbs to diptheria. Kit has a mental breakdown and finds herself the subdued wife of an Arab desert herder. The nomad’s three other wives aren’t jealous, nor would they be, Bowles writes, even if they found out that this new arrival disguised to look like a man is the soon-to-be fourth wife. The cultural customs in the Sahara are different from what she might expect, had she ever expected to end up the wife of a nomadic herder.

In what is the book’s well-troweled and concrete moment, Port describes death as piercing the fine fabric of the sheltering sky. Few would say the sky protects. There is of course the snow, rain and sleet. Arguably, the blue orb above does little to block that oppressive, penetrating Sahara sun. The sky is anything but impermeable, opaque and hard-tack. Why then does Bowles use that word? In describing the sky as shelter, Bowles is alluding to the a-materialist philosophy. To Bowles, and like-minded men, the less you have, the more nature becomes. The sky is shelter abent a roof. Only a man with a sympathetic view of humanity would describe the sky this way.

Donald Miller, in his book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, writes about a family who can’t afford a house along a lake, so they buy the lakefront, and for two years, live happily in tents along the shore. To these happy-go-lucky few, the sky has the quality of protectress. Hemingway, for all his love of Africa, was happy to shelter beneath a canvas tent so to speak; his sympathies never extended to the natives.

If Paul Bowles chose to excise what he thought was excess — the cars, the babies — he did also with the kind of possessions coveted by creative types: book contracts, literary awards, and close relationships. Bowles lived far away from the New York literary society of his upbringing. (He trained with Aaron Copland and produced a great deal of music). After fifty years, he had written only four novels, all of them by 1966, and not one after the death of his wife in 1973.

The other American who garnered a reputation as a travel writer, Paul Theroux, described Bowles in a 2010 interview with The Atlantic as a man who was able to live and write (and smoke dope) only because he wrote for Holiday, the great old travel magazine. Bowles maintained a permanent address, the de-facto gathering spot for itinerant writers and playwrights, and later in life, strangers who wanted to interview him.

*Process* gives Sheltering Sky 7.5 out of 10. There are characters whose treatment could have been rounded out. Tunner, Port’s tag-along friend from New York, could have had a more central role. Port’s life-to-death journey through the Sahara might could have been described through the eyes of a man who knows Port’s history. Tunner has a filial attachment to the protagonist. It’s a shame Port has to die alone. His friend could have guided him through the fine fabric of the sheltering sky.

Tragically, those who take possession of things lightly can mistakenly do the same with friends. Since Tunner is the one most attached to their friendship, he alone will grieve the loss of the American couple who naively set out to let the desert teach them about human belonging.

Poland’s Tragedy – 96

On the occasion of the terrible tragedy,
I offer this poem to the memory of the victims.

96

The Vistula flows backward today
From the shoreline of Gdansk
To the watershed of the Carpathian
Even her banks are weeping

For sorrow is a flooded field
For whom springtime will not come
The early shoots of rye retreat
Beneath the rising waters

Justice is the asking question
The why? The how? Why us?
In the mouths of half-mast fathers
And mothers with bleary eyes

Red & White today black-banded
What’s lofty rises half its height
Though unified in sorrow stand
Her mass of grieving mourners

Too early for the words to mean
But spring-time seems to say
Should ninety-six have to perish
May death bridge old divides

Be comforted, Polska, to know
The Eagle is not alone, nor will be
For as She stands for freedom
For freedom stands the world

***

Article on Lech Kaczynski from The Economist
Article I co-authored with Wojciech Kosc for Transitions Online
(Contact me for full text)

John Steinbeck – The Master

The first time I drove through California and laid my eyes on the Pacific Ocean, I had one destination–Monterrey Bay–the oceanside harbor and once-upon-a-time canning district immortalized by John Steinbeck.

Cannery Row (1945) is the story of a wayward,  wine-drinking vagabond, who takes up residence in the discarded hulk of a boiler, and the generous, learned Doctor, who attends to the sick in their homes. Steinbeck’s descriptions of the old wharf town left an indelible impression. At 20, I vowed that I’d go one day to California and hunt down Steinbeck’s old haunts. I’d be the casual traveler in his novel.

Standing on the doorstep five years later, I knocked on the door of Steinbeck’s old tenement house. The door was locked, but a kind woman saw me looking into the window, so she invited me inside. We spoke at length about Monterrey Bay and how the place had informed his social sensibilities.  She gave me a copy of his letters — Journal of a Novel: East of Eden (1969). I promised I’d study his work.

John Steinbeck’s literary success wasn’t a given He was born to middle class German and Irish ancestry, on the Pacific Coast, some distance removed from the agricultural valley that pinned the place setting in Grapes of Wrath (1939) and Of Mice and Men (1937). During the summers he’d till earth and plow fields and pick tomatoes, before enrolling in Stanford which he left without a degree. He moved to New York to make it there in literary society. He came back empty-handed.

Steinbeck was a war reporter–in both WWII and Vietnam. By the time of the conflict on the Vietnamese peninsula his political viewes had changed. Some say he turned his back on social liberal principles. To my mind, they had evolved to see the excesses of communism as a great threat to liberty. For supporting the war, he was known as a hawk to his contemporaries. Late in middle age, he traveled across America with his poodle named Charley. Some said he was setting out to dicover America. He wasn’t. He was going to tell it goodbye. For a life-long smoker, A stroke at 59 had heightened his sense of mortality. He’d write East of Eden (1952) for his sons, so they’d know where they come from and what they had meant to him.

A Master is in for the long haul — he published screen plays and novels at length during a publishing history of fifty years. To seek perspectives external to America, he traveled abroad to Mexico and the Soviet Union. About the latter he wrote A Russian Journal (1948). When he accepted the Nobel Prize he’d say, “I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man, has no dedication nor any membership in literature.” This faith in mankind’s perpetual self-improvement is a virtue of a Master.

The controversy he stoked with businessmen and bankers over the publication of Grapes of Wrath was more than compensated by the equality of assignment he gave to each in his society:

Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, ‘whores, pimps, gamblers and sons of bitches,’ by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, ‘Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,’ and he would have meant the same thing.