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.

Michael Ondaajte – The Master

Michael Ondaajte was working on a film in Tunisia, alongside producer Saul Zaentz. The script called for a widened section of asphalt road, which the locals suggested they endow with a name. Recalling that once-in-a-lifetime and magnanimous offer, the Sri Lankan born Canadian author remembers,

I wanted the Ondaatje Road: the road that leads nowhere.

Telling for an author who confesses to begin a book with no sure sense of where it’s headed. In Ondaajte’s hands, a novel is more like a child’s kaleidescope than a traveling caravan. Both brim with detail and are perpetually in motion. Both are candied invitations for the curious to have a look inside. But only one leads anywhere. The other will only be rotated, and no two observers will agree on what has come into focus.

Ondaajte is a poet. Among his thirteen books of poetry, many were published prior to his debut novel In the Skin of a Lion (1987). Ondaajte is one of the few writers I can read mid-paragraph and be in no hurry for context. Master of writing as a plastic art, done by hand, *Process* gives him 8 out of 10.

Ondaajte’s work rests upon a childhood of intrigue in Sri Lanka, formerly a British colony. Ondaajte tells the story of the day his Father held up a train with his pistol, and demanded the conductor go back and forth just to please his whim. One can imagine the young poet, clinging to his bookbag, legs not reaching the floor, catching the stares of Sri-Lankans of a darker skin and bleaker prospects. That his father carried a pistol at all, and that he was so brazen as to delay a passenger train, says something about the place the family occupied in Sri-Lankan society:

The brushing of teeth, since he was a child, has always been for him an outdoor activity.

Such is the observation one would settle on through the window of a train, and carry with them as in their bookbag. The young Michael continued his schooling in England, and later settled in Canada among Toronto’s literati, far from a war-torn homeland.

He co-founded Brick, a magazine, and moved in and out of academia, ostensibly to support a family, and likely for the human contact by which a poet thrives. His is a rich, aesthetic and private interior life. As a poet is only at home in his native tongue, Ondaajte doesn’t so much write as he word-paints with English, a sensuous panoply derived from the minutiae of human observation. His African wonderpiece stands out.

The English Patient (1992) — according to Ondaajte — had its genesis in the lone image of a man falling out of the sky in the Sahara. Why did the plane crash? What happened to the pilot? All those things had to be uncovered or unearthed.

I fell burning into the desert. The leather helmet on my head in flames. They strapped me onto a cradle, a carass boat. I had broken the spareness of the desert.

Ondaajte is like his major character Caravaggio, a thief whose namesake is a nod to the Renaissance painter of muscled and earth-bound men. Look into Carravaggio’s paintings and you’ll find Ondjaate’s aesthetic — raw, untrammeled, passionate, dependent on human frailty — a curled toe, a lost finger, the inconsolate wale of a grief-stricken mother.

I picture Ondaajte as I picture Carravaggio — sitting in the penumbra of setting sun, alone beneath a plane tree, turning over a sprig of a rapeseed in a bruised palm. As the thief knows, the search is a risky one. Narrative may fall flat if it’s not determined in advance. Caravaggio loses his fingers when he’s caught stealing back a snapshot someone took of him. Ondaajte is on a search too, so it comes as no surprise that he lived in the Bellagio, along Lake Cuomo, not distant from the fictitious setting inThe English Patient. In all likelihood, he turned back flower heads.

Anil’s Ghost (2000) returns Ondaajte to his native homeland. The title character is a forensic pathologist. It’s her job to identify decaying corpses, while not losing her own identity amid traps of corruption, deceipt and death. As in the book, Sri-Lanka has been embroiled in a bloody, protracted civil war. His most recent work, Divisadero (2007), struggles to offer a premise, much less a central, unifying narrative.

Since the publication of The English Patient, Ondaajte’s novels show progressive signs of uncertainty. He seems to have given up on the novel as a valid genre for his search. It seems pure narrative is just not important to him. His first love, as a poet, has been language. But Ondaajte should know better. It’s the sensuous, erotic, and ephemeral experience a reader pines for — words are mere tools in the creation.

Mr. Ondaajte, I tip my hat to you, having first read you along a lone road in Catalonia, in a misted valley in Provence, and bedded in the Tuscan hill country. I carried your work in my saddle bags. Like Herodotus, I was a young traveler with a few pages of parchment. That  summer I lay at the side of a woman who would one day be my wife. I read you to her, before I won her to me. You were our haunted villa.

Works in Process

My first novel is an historical epic about a research scientist who comes face to face with the victim of his atomic creation. THE GEISHA’S DAUGHTER (unpublished MS) is set in the calendar year following World War II. A story about suffering, I traveled to research the novel in Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Los Alamos and Southern France–all place settings in the story. Six months living in an artist’s residence in Argentina allowed me to finish.

The main duty of the novelist is to write another one. Is that right?

10 Masters of the Novel

If an amateur photographer worries about equipment, a professional about budget, and a master about light–it could be said of novelists–that an amateur frets about fame, professional about book sales, and a master with the search for truth.

*Process* begins a series on “10 Masters of the Novel,” to shed a glimmer of light on that delicious quandary–What makes a master? A good writer may be adept, specific, intelligent, rich, lyrical, pared back, transparent, acessible and so on. But this is the writing. What about the writer? Masters have what aspects of character in common? A Master perseveres, measures time in decades and progress in terms of moral development. In reviewing the Top Ten Masters of the Novel, these attributes seem to be among them all:

1. originality

2. humility

3. courage

ORIGINALITY - call it reason, insight or experience. It’s the capacity to say things new. Think of Leo Tolstoy’s capacity for observing human nature, or Ernest Hemingway’s capacity for observational detail. Some writers synthesize information–Alexis de Toqueville in Democracy in America or Thomas Mann in his novels of intellectual adventure such as The Magic Mountain. Masters seeks new angles, a bold style or curiosity in form. But there are limits to newness. The Masters pay heed to their predecessors, which leads to the next attribute of their character.

HUMILITY - modesty, moderation or self-control. The perennial novelist is a hard drinking, womanizer, or in the case of female writers, a passionate feminist. Is that correct? According to Flaubert’s admonition: “Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work,” a Master is concerned first with his own character to imbue his work with moral authority.  The masters eschews publicity and embrace independence. They give due to their predecessors and praise their contemporaries. They don’t retreat from society like JD Salinger but are rather like David Eggers, who turned quick fame into a literary society and published the work of other young writers. The Masters heed Cicero’s advice to be “a good man yourself and then seek others like you.”  The master has a gentle humility and a quiet self-deprecation, especially in old age, like the loquacious Samuel Clemens. Humility makes a small man great, which leads to number the next attribute of character.

COURAGE - the masters take risks and they fail often. In contrast to painters whose entire corpus could be surveyed in ten minutes from a large coffee table book, very little of what a writer produces will ever be read. Think of your favorite writer. What percentage have you seen? Think of all the notes, letters, corrections, drafts, and so on a writer puts to paper. Since so little will ever be read, Masters must persevere and press forward. Some are attacked, or killed for their ideas. The moral fiber of the Argentinian Rudolpho Walsh, or the publishing consistency of a young William Styron, or the raw unadulterated struggle of Mikhail Bulgakov, who wrote Master and Margarita from memory after it burned, these are what the Masters have in common

“Top Ten Masters of the Novel” will be released once a month. When complete they will be collected on one page. They are selected in advance, so honorable mention can go to James Joyce, for linguistic invention, Umberto Eco for fiction as a platform for sholastic discussion, and Willie Collins for writing novels that freely cross genre.  The list is my own and reflects a preference for writers who 1. like to travel 2. identify as journalists 3. seek the truth 4. are quite singular and 5. who span language and culture.

IN DESCENDING RANK ORDER:

About *Process*

*Process* gets its name from Franz Kafka’s novel Der Prozeß. In tribute to the Czech Jew who died at 40, I named the site for his main character Joseph K, who in Der Prozeß, enters a labrynth of suspicion and intrigue on his 30th birthday. This site was born on my 30th birthday. It will last ten years and I’ll retire it when I’m 40.

The desire to tell stories is rooted in human blood. For thousands of years the author’s tools were a speaking voice and a gathering flame. Later he’d scratch vellum, the hide of a sheep or goat. In a tiniest window of he has tied his aperture to the tips of his fingers and pecked word-for-word on the end of forged metal. As for me…

The Allegheny is my river

The Susquehanna is my valley

I am an Appalachian story teller

Story transcends time. It arrives in a thousands forms. But the process remains the same. A good novel is characterization, plotting and details. The finer the text the more time it takes to create. A writer wiser than me once said,

“I didn’t have time to write a short story, so I wrote a long one instead.”

If we enjoy a novel it’s because we connect. A novel only about ideas will bore; a novel whose plotting neglects sub-text remains at the surface, like oil on the sea. Good writing is specific, empathetic and inventive. The story teller is waving a wand over his reader’s head. The traces of pixie dust are ever-present.

*Process* is my gift to my readers, be they few or many. Inside you will find my approach to novel writing. It’s not unique, but it is personal. Should you find the site of interest, I shall be rewarded for my labor, the uncounted hours.

MUSES contain sources that inspire me.

COMMENTARY is my observations of the world.

AUTHOR is dedicated to describing me.

BOOKS are the end result of my labor.