THE TIME OF FRIENDSHIP by Paul Bowles. 215 pages. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. $4.95.
The pieces that make up Paul Bowles’s first collection of stories in 17 years read like obituaries of the soul. His characters, robbed of purpose, their spirits rubbed flat, move zombielike through exquisitely desolate landscapes —Moroccan ghettos, Algerian deserts, New York subway tunnels. Displaced in the present, they have vague pasts and menacing futures; sighing despair, they search for something unnameable.
Perhaps their quest is for what they find: hostility, hallucination, more intense dislocation, the last retreat of death—Bowles doesn’t say. After several novels, books of stories and essays, he is still the inscrutable artist. He fixes his characters in his own hopeless wastelands and in the reader’s shocked consciousness. His warped people are beyond help because they will not help themselves. They have surrendered, and Bowles, the devil’s advocate, grinds them further into defeat. He is American fiction’s leading specialist in melancholy and insensate violence.
Dark Encounters. This book’s title, The Time of Friendship, is of course ironic, masking profound misanthropy. Every tale he tells leads to a dark encounter, the collapse of friendship, the failure of understanding. In the title story, a Swiss schoolmistress in Algeria befriends a Moslem youth and tries her civilizing Christianity on him; he destroys her Christmas creche and tricks her into helping him join the F.L.N. In The Hours After Noon, a genteel French lecher, visiting an archaeological camp, gestures toward a Moroccan girl and ends up behind a boulder with a wire around his neck. In The Garden, a wife puts a potion in her husband’s food because she thinks he has been hiding treasure in the garden; when the poison fails to work, the whole town combines to finish him off with hoes and sickles.
At his best, Bowles has no peer in his sullen art, and he offers here two superb stories of despair that prove it. One, The Frozen Fields, shows how a father’s hostility slowly corrodes the brain of a small boy. The other, Tapia-ma, follows an American photographer to the end of his skid. It is a masterwork on the psychology of the dropout, an exemplary model of existentialism in the service of fiction. Utterly bored, the photographer drifts through Latin America and slips into drunkenness at a sinister plantation bar. Unconsciously, he falls victim to conspiracy, accident, destruction. “What is freedom in the last analysis,” he says to himself, “other than the state of being totally, instead of only partially, subject to the tyranny of chance?” The photographer becomes Bowles’s modern antihero, participating in “an invisible spectacle whose painful logic he followed with the entire fiber of his being, without, however, once being given a clear vision of what agonizing destinies were at stake.”
Love & Art. For his terrifying, black penetration of the heart, Paul Bowles commands cold admiration. Living in Africa, corresponding with America in a kind of code, he uses the same metaphors of loneliness and abandon that signaled his leap from music to the novel with The Sheltering Sky in 1949. His work is art, a minor art, mirroring a part truth—that man is alone. The other part of the truth is that man has the power to break out of his loneliness through two forces: love and art. Bowles knows the second, not the first.
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