Paul Bowles, Azamur, and Peter Elcius: An Open Letter to the Late Pierre Joris

 

16th century Azemmour / Azamur / Azaamurum

Section I: Bowles and Me in Tangier

I finished my dissertation on Paul Bowles in May of 1976 at the University of Kansas and by September I had taken up an assistant professorship at the University of Constantine in Algeria, where I was a colleague and a friend of Pierre Joris. It was not my first experience as a nomad, for I had served as a combat soldier in the Teenage Wasteland of Vietnam in 1968-1969, but it was my second. I wanted a personal acquaintance with the North Africa I’d experienced through the works of Bowles and Albert Camus. Tragically, the latter had died in a car wreck in 1960, but I felt he had an afterlife in Bowles’s fiction, especially in the novels of existential angst like The Sheltering Sky set  and the masterful stories of The Delicate Prey, most set in Algeria and Morocco.

When I began my study of Bowles he was known more for his music than his prose, though the The Delicate Prey and The Sheltering Sky were well reviewed in The New York Times. I thought I’d be producing the first book-length study of him, but Lawrence Stuart beat me to the punch by a few months. In the meantime, I’d started a correspondence with Bowles that lasted nearly up to the time of his death. He was a warm and genial correspondent, just as he was in person when I first met him in Tangiers in 1976. Bowles had little ego (he claimed flatly to have none) but I like to think he saw in me a small step toward something useful--building his reputation as a writer--and I like to think he was right, however small the step. 

The first large step in the rise of Bowles’s reputation, however, had already come through the unsolicited boost given by the presence of Beat writers like Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, with the presence of Eric Mottram’s books on those writers hovering in the background. More important yet was Dame Rumor, operating in the shifting field of pop culture to spread the word that around Bowles in Tangier was a paradise of drugs and sexually compliant young boys. By the early 60s, Tangier had become a Mecca for the Beats and their gay-lifestyle acolytes. 

My humble self made one among this shuffling throng from time to time, though my only credential was scholarship and my only desire was for the academic recognition that my work on Bowles could provide me. After 1977, my home base was Madrid, where I eked out a living teaching English conversation among a happy and welcoming population of madrileños  just freed from the long tyranny of Franco. I had no money but somehow I managed to take a train to Malaga and ferry across to Tangier where I’d stay in a cheap hotel deep in the medina and visit Bowles.

As a memorandum of these years, I wish I’d kept Bowles’s letters, but they have gone the way of all data left too long on the hard disk. Except, that is for Jeffrey Miller’s collection called In Touch: The Letters of Paul Bowles (1994). Prof. Miller reports that he is a collector and has been collecting Bowles’s letters for twenty years, so I can think of them as safe in archive heaven. (This expectation was deflated just a few days ago when I had a letter from Prof. Miller reporting on his ill health and explaining that he too had no access to his collection of letters.) Bowles had a liking for the things I wrote, though modesty should prevent me saying so, and this appears even in the last of the letters I kept from him (1985) in which he compliments me on the “usual perspicacity” of my reading of Midnight Mass.

Section II: Azamor / Azemmour in history

Came then a day not long ago when I was leafing through Bowles’s Points in Time (1982) and saw the word Azamur, a vocable of potent magic in my shaky universe, one that I associate with ancient cities to the north like Byblos and the transmission of the alphabet from the Phoenicians to the Greeks. The association is due to age more than proximity. Bowles gives a brief exposition, quoting an unnamed source which seems to date from the reign of Emanuel the Fortunate (1469 – 1521) and thus the older spelling Azamur for Azamur (later Azemmour): “no Christian was permitted to ride into the city on horseback, or Jew enter it except barefooted (as in Fez and other cities to this day.” I also have a more particular association, and thereby hangs my tale, complete with the picture at the top of this essay of no known provenience except the World Wide Web and a detailed narrative about a Franciscan missionary named Pedro Elcius who was martyred in Azemmour in 1580 in the usual bloody fashion perfected by Moroccans, who hated all Nazarenes as the devil’s emissaries.  

The story of Pedro Elcius is sufficiently hidden to delight the heart of the most precise obscurantist. Google Scholar searches find nothing but references to an essay that I wrote fifteen years ago, so let that be our starting point. The principal reason for his obscurity, I think is that the copy of the ms. preserved at the National Archives is kept in Chester, four-hundred feet down in the old salt-mine which provides a deep-storage facility. Initially it was confiscated by the Elizabethan Regime, and didn’t see light again until the advent of Richard Simpson in the late 19th century. There is, however, another copy in the Jesuit Archives of London, though I have never seen it. My guess is that the two manuscript traditions don’t agree, not for just the usual reasons but also because the one gives Elcius’s narrative in English and the other in Latin.  From a separate inquiry dated July 2025, the Jesuit Archives of London reports: “There is no index card for P. Elcius which indicates that we do not hold any records relating to him.”

Here’s Elcius’s story as told in the English translation of 1580, except that it would surely be gratuitous to cite all the blood that was shed in the butchery that took place within “ffouer myles of Azamor.” In a word, the deeper the Moroccan knives cut tinto Elcius the more his flow of words increased, which is surely odd  because one of the first thing the they did was to cut off his tongue. When he still wouldn’t stop preaching, they drove a  great “nayle” through his head, but nothing quieted Elcius until another nail was driven through his throat and into a gate, where he was left to hang like a newly crucified Jesus until he expired. And further the deponent saith not. (As providence would have it, however, a Brother Ignatius continued the harangue but I will spare the reader.)

The basic point is indisputable: martyrdom inspires words, first from the martyrs themselves and then from their adherents

The Elcius narrative locates the martyrdom at Azamor, on the west coast of Morocco, once part of the Portuguese sea-route to India. The reader will recognize it from Marlowe’s Tamberlaine II: "From Azamor to Tunis near the sea / Is Barbary unpeopled for thy sake." Wiki provides a few dates: The battle of Azemmour in 1513 resulted in the conquest of the city, which was named Azamor by the Portuguese. Under that empire, it existed in colonial status from 1580-1663. Its current name is now Azemmour. 

Apart from Tamberlaine and the factoid crumbs I have gathered, I turn to the French sources, which certainly ruled Morocco long enough to know what was going on, but for the most part all I find to my purpose is highly generalized prose, such as this from Itinéraire Culturel des Almoravides et des Almohades, 2ème édition mai 2003: 

Au nord d'El-Jadida, Azemmour est l'une des plus anciennes et des plus pittoresques cités sur la façade atlantique. Située sur la rive gauche de l'Oum er-Rabi', à deux kilomètres de l'embouchure, elle offre au premier abord un imprenable spectacle panoramique où se combinent à merveille la rivière, l'océan et une forte charge historique aisément perceptible à travers sa muraille, ses tours, ses minarets et ses maisonnettes fébrilement agglutinées sur la dernière falaise surplombant l'oued. Dans son habituelle langue imagée, Ibn al-Khatib, au milieu du XIVème siècle, écrit à son propos: "C'est la fiancée du printemps et de l'automne... Son phare et ses tours de guet, tels des astres brillants, observent sa vallée..."

A l'époque almohade, Azemmour constituait la première grande halte sur la route occidentale, à mi-chemin entre Marrakech et Rabat. Sa rivière, ligne de démarcation entre le nord et le sud du pays, fut un objectif stratégique dont la domination ouvrait la voie à la conquête de la capitale. 

Al-Murtada, l'avant dernier calife almohade, y fut exécuté par un rival en 1266, à la suite d'un combat qui précipita la chute de l'empire. Entre temps, Azemmour a entretenu par la voie maritime des relations commerciales régulières avec al-Andalus, notamment avec Malaga, et le saint patron de la cité, Moulay Bouchaïb étendait au XIIème siècle sa protection à ce commerce. Convoitée par les portugais, il a fallu une armada de 500 vaisseaux commandée par le Duc de Bragance pour en venir à bout en 1513. Elle fut évacuée en 1541. Pendant cette occupation, l'alose, abondante alors dans l'Oum er-Rabi', paya les frais de l'occupation lusitanienne puisque le tribut exigé était de 10.000 pièces par an. De cette phase de son histoire, Azemmour a gardé des souvenirs: des bastions, des lambeaux de ruines dans un style gothique agonisant, un original décor des portes des maisons et une très curieuse tradition de broderie, unique en son

genre au Maroc, où des animaux stylisés, dragons, lions, cigognes, sont affronté. 

That offers fine detail but it doesn’t give the chronology with any precision and doesn’t approach the year 1580. Oddly enough more help is provided by a tourist brochure put out by a society that focuses on the Jewish history of Azemmour: 

The Historical Tapestry of Azemmour: From Phoenician Trading Post to Portuguese Stronghold

Azemmour's history stretches back to antiquity, with evidence of Phoenician settlements dating to the 7th century BCE. The town's strategic location on the Oum Er-Rbia river made it a coveted prize for various powers:

•   11th century: Became part of the Almoravid dynasty
•   1486: Portuguese influence begins with a trading agreement
•   1513: Conquest by the Duke of Braganza with 500 ships and 15,000 troops
•   1541: Portuguese withdrawal, leaving behind significant architectural influences

The Jewish Golden Age in Azemmour

The 15th and 16th centuries marked a flourishing period for Azemmour's Jewish community:

•   2,500 Jews resided in Azemmour by the 15th century. Occupations ranged from fishermen and craftsmen to wealthy merchants

1496: Exiles from Portugal found refuge in Azemmour; 1514: Special privileges granted to Jews by Portuguese authorities. Rabbi Joseph Adibe appointed with wide- ranging powers

The first sentence below the heading reminds us that Azemmour is roughly as old as Biblos and its sister Phoenician cities--not rose-red like Petra but still “half as old as time”--and gives us a terminus ab quo. 

 Section III. Estavanico

So much has been written about Estavanico and his career as a nomad explorer that there is no point in my offering anything more than a review (in part, a cento of material from three Wiki articles.) Little is known about Estavanico’s background but contemporary accounts described him as a "negro alárabe" or "Arabic-speaking black man" native to Azemmour. In 1522, he was sold as a slave to the Spanish nobleman Andrés Dorantes de Carranza in the Portuguese-controlled Azemmour, about 47 miles west of Casablanca. Starting in 1528 he participated in the Narváez expedition, which set out from Cuba under the leadership of Pánfilo de Narváez to explore and colonize Spanish Florida. [Wiki offers a whole separate article on the  Narváez expedition.] It is unclear whether Estavanico was raised Muslim but Spain did not allow non-Catholics to travel to New Spain, so he would have been baptized as a Catholic in order to join the expedition. His Christian name Estevan, a Spanish form of "Stephen," supports this.

In 1534 the four survivors of the Narváez expedition escaped into the American interior and became medicine men. The four men, Cabeza de Vaca, Andrés Dorantes de Carranza, Alonso del Castillo Maldonado and Estevan, escaped captivity and traveled west into present-day Texas Southwestern US, and Northern Mexico. They were the first Europeans and African to enter the American West. 

Here, with the last two words, the western theme arises in surprising anticipation of the next section of the present essay, which will deal with Pierre Joris, whose own multi-lingual education began with him “scouring Karl May’s travel and adventure novels, copying out the MescaleroApache, Sioux, Comanche, Arab, Persian, Russian Spanish, American language microliths embedded in [his] 72 volumes.” Here it seems to me we have need for a nomadics of reception to deal with May’s treatment of his varied reading as well as Joris’s response to it, but the reader will have to excuse me. The matter is too abstract for me. I would rather conclude by adding another reader to the long, long list of those who made May such a popular writer all over Germany and for so long. Albert Einstein is said to have enjoyed May's books and to have commented, "My whole adolescence stood under his sign. Indeed, even today, he has been dear to me in many a desperate hour..."[21]

A final remark about Estevan will place him as well firmly in the western part of the United States, for Wiki tells us that the far west was where he died. For this, however, we have only rumors. 

1. When Estevanico was within a day's journey of Cíbola, he sent a messenger ahead to announce his arrival. When informed of Estevanico's impending visit, the chief of the first village angrily ordered the messenger to leave and threatened to kill anyone who came back. Estevanico seemed unconcerned by these threats and proceeded to Cíbola. When the party arrived, the villagers took their trade goods and held them overnight without food or water. One of the Indians who had been with Estevanico's party managed to escape and hide nearby. The next morning he saw the men of Cíbola chasing Estevanico and shooting arrows at him. He did not see what happened to the African, but others in his party were killed. No one knew for certain the fate of Estevanico but they assumed he was dead.

2. A year later, a much larger Spanish expedition led by Francisco Vázquez de Coronado reached the pueblo where Estevanico was reported killed. In August 1540, he wrote to the viceroy that "the death of the negro is perfectly certain because many of the things which he wore have been found." He also wrote that the inhabitants of the Zuni pueblo where he died had killed Estevanico because he was a "bad man" who killed and assaulted their women

3. Pedro de Castañeda de Nájera, a chronicler of the Coronado expedition, wrote that the men of Cibola killed Estevanico because they were offended when he asked them for turquoise and women. Hernando Alarcon, also a member of the expedition, was told that when Estevanico bragged that he had numerous armed followers nearby, the chiefs of Cibola killed him before he could reveal their location to his followers. Sancho Dorantes de Carranza, the grandson of Andrés Dorantes de Carranza, wrote that Estevanico was "shot through with arrows like a Saint Sebastian.”

3. Some scholars have suggested that Estevanico, who wore owl feathers and carried a medicine-man's gourd, may have been seen by the Zuni as impersonating a medicine man, which they punished by death. Others theorize that he may have resembled an evil sorcerer who existed in the Zuni religion, the "Chakwaina" kachina." Juan Francisco Maura suggested in 2002 that the Zuni did not kill Estevanico, but rather he and his friends remained among the A:shiwi who probably helped him fake his death so he could regain his freedom. Some folklore legends say that the Kachina figure, Chakwaina, is based on Azemmouri.

4. Chakwaina is a kachina, or spirit, which appears in Hopi, Zuni, and Keresan ceremonies, but does not appear in Tewa ceremonies. Although imagery of the kachina is varied, it is usually depicted as an ogre, with ferocious teeth and a black goatee and black mask with yellow eyes. Its spread throughout Pueblo culture is often associated with the Asa clan. This association links him with the world of the Oklahoma-born crime writer Tony Hillerman featuring Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee. 

Kachina. On the bottom right is Chakawina.

These four versions of Estevanico’s death agree in placing him in what would become the old west. In the eastern United States, especially in the early 19th century, to “die in the west” was the dream of many a man. 

Then enter, boys; cheerly, boys, enter and rest;

You know how we live, boys, and die in the West!

--George Pope Morris (1802-1864), "Life in the West"

 Section IV: Pierre Joris

Dear Pierre, where ever your freed spirit now wanders, your A Nomadic Poetics ends with this paragraph, which I like for the way it offers a striking definition of the terms of  your title:

As I have written elsewhere: Philosophy is the enemy of the nomad because as Novalis knew, philosophy is only a sort of home sickness, a need to feel everywhere at home. Poetry is the opposite: a desire to feel everywhere estranged, in touch with or at least reaching for the other, out of house & home. In a tent, maybe--thus the basic push of poetry is nomadic.”

Though I will quarrel with you before reaching the end of this essay, I certainly like this definition. The nomadic push of poetry recalls the river run of Finnegan’s Wake: A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to where we began. We go east to reach the furthest west, and west to reach the furthest east,, all the while chanting what Thoreau said best: “In wildness is the preservation of the world.”

I have total admiration for the brilliance of your work and its notion of nomadics, but in this encomium I presume to have permission to tell the truth as I see it. You as a child of the metropolis, from your birth in Strasbourg, your childhood in Luxembourg, then through Constantine, Paris, and New York City, and while Constantine may have brought you into proximity with the desert Constantine was no village--it was the third largest city in the country apart from Algiers and Oran--whereas I, on the other hand, follow in the footsteps of America’s greatest writers, who are products of the colonial experience of the wilderness. None of them ever forgets that the New World which they first encountered was a howling wilderness, and my birth and upbringing in Oklahoma, one of the last of the states to join the Union, has caused me to never lose sight of the fact that wilderness is cognate with wildness. 

This fact of North American life is born out by its classic writers, and in the days when Americanists still studied Harry Levin and F. O. Matthiessen, who wrote about “the power of blackness” (a phrase coined by Herman Melville, as we’ll see momentarily), but we don’t have to wait for Matthiessen’s 1850s to understand the phenomenon. The lawlessness and violence which contemporary observers (most famously, Mark Twain) revisionist historians (Richard Maxwell Brown et al.), novelists (Cormac McCarthy et al.), and film makers and actors (Clint Eastwood et al.) have described was already clearly represented in Hector St. John de Crèvecœur classic account of 1782, “What Is an American?” There he describes what the frontier does to “civilized” men, as he observed it in his years on a farm in Orange County, New York. Paul Bowles, born to a dentist in Queens in 1910 and as a child listening to his mother reading bed time stories from Edgar Allen Poet and Nathaniel Hawthorne, fits neatly into this list.  

Graduate students of the 1950s and 1960s learned to see it in the very earliest of American writers like Cotton Mather and his brethren who burned witches. They learned to think of witchcraft as a social construct, but the nineteen women burned at the stake during the Salem witch trials of 1692-1693 perished in real fires, not socially constructed or virtual ones. Famously, the very memory of his great great grandfather John Hathorne’s role as a judge at the Salem trials was enough to throw a dark cloud over the life and writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne, a cloud so dark it was commented on in a passage by his greatest admirer, his Berkshire neighbor Herman Melville, who coined the phrase “the power of blackness” to signify it. For Melville the power of Hawthorne’s writing came from his willingness to look history in the eye and tell the truth about it in right thinking piety of the United States in the 1840s. Melville proclaimed this in  his masterful review “Hawthorne and His Mosses”in 1850, as he was about to begin Moby-Dick, and he would later write to Sophia Hawthorne that the book had been broiled in the fires of hell, a fact which no literary critic was ever needed to support.

I don’t think that Melville anywhere cites this passage, but it deserves a place here if for no other reason that its earliness. In 1782 Crèvecœur published Letters from an American Farmer, in which asks the question, “What is this American, this new made man?” In general terms, he answers the question by saying, “That new mode of life brings along with it a new set of manners,” and these in turn “produce a strange sort of lawless profligacy.” In particular terms, there is a single well developed image which from its shock value we judge that the gentleman farmer-writer saw with his own eyes:

 I perceived a negro, suspended in the cage, and left there to expire! I shudder when I recollect that the birds had already picked out his eyes, his cheek bones were bare; his arms had been attacked in several places, and his body seemed covered with a multitude

of wounds. From the edges of the hollow sockets and from the lacerations with which he was disfigured, the blood slowly dropped, and tinged the ground beneath. No sooner were the birds flown, than swarms of insects covered the whole body of this unfortunate wretch, eager to feed on his mangled flesh and to drink his blood. I found myself suddenly arrested by the power of affright and terror; my nerves were convulsed; I trembled, I stood motionless, involuntarily contemplating the fate of this negro, in all its dismal latitude. The living spectre, though deprived of his eyes, could still distinctly hear, and in his uncouth dialect begged me to give him some water to allay his thirst.

This description of the torture of  a slave was the centerpiece for Marius Bewley in his 1959 The Eccentric Design: Form in the Classic American Novel--a book which focuses on the stark violence which characterizes “classic” American fiction. Since like most graduate students I didn’t read Crèvecœur carefully, I believe I first came across this passage when I read Bewley, who as a British critic of the Scrutiny school, must have registered this passage with a shock of surprise. 

In the common way that serious graduate students of literature build up their own lists of great critics, mine used to start with Emerson, highlighting one paragraph in “Society and Solitude”: 

Such is the tragic necessity which strict science finds underneath our domestic and neighborly life, irresistibly driving each adult soul as with whips into the desert, and making our warm covenants sentimental and momentary. We must infer that the

ends of thought were peremptory, if they were to be secured at such ruinous cost. They are deeper than can be told, and belong to the immensities and eternities. They reach down to that depth where society itself originates and disappears; where the question

is, Which is first, man or men? where the individual is lost in his source.

I must have added Bewley to my own list, which began then and still does with D. H. Lawrence’s 1923 Studies in Classic American Literature whose climactic phrase comes at the end of his essay on Cooper’s Natty Bumpo, which I will cite below

Now as I reach an end to this open letter, it occurs to me that the difference between us is the difference between your city mouse and my country mouse. In this variant of the fable, the city mouse travels and the country mouse stays near to home, though in my variant the country mouse ends up in Japan and stays there forty years.

A Short Cento on Bowles

The quotations preceded by a three-digit number are from my“Paul Bowles and The Delicate Prey: The Psychology of Predation” (1981), while those preceded by a two-digit number are from Paul Bowles: The Inner Geography (1985), both elaborated from my 1976 dissertation.

620 The story in which the fable of the internalized animal principle first takes its significant form. «The Scorpion», resulted from a creative insight which appears to have been seminal in Bowles's development as a writer of fiction. Its publication in View in 1945 marked his first mature story and the first fiction he had published since 1930, when a short extract from an abortive novel appeared.

621 Although Bowles began writing stories in early childhood, by the end of his

adolescence he had stopped because he believed that he "failed to understand

life"; he was not "able to find points of reference" which he might have in

common with "the hypothetical reader" (WS, 262). The actual reader of Without

Stopping may rather judge this declared incomprehension of other people to be

the result of the acutely oppressive family in which he matured, one in which

"Children were treacherous and grown-ups inscrutable", as he observes, and he

was himself treated as a "captured animal of uncertain reactions", the perpetual

object of parental distrust (WS, 38, 26, 61).

624 The circular valley is inhabited by the Atlájala, a spirit of indifferent malignity devoted to the enjoyment of pure sensation, gliding in and out of plants, animals, and men alike: knowing for a period what it feels like to be each, it is sentience incarnate. In its active and predatory phase. especially in the story's murderous ending, when it finds itself at home in the consciousness of a woman, the Atlájala is a pure type of the animal principle.

632-33 Bowles's general point of view in The Delicate Prey seems little different from that of Freud, who himself devoted a lifetime to studying the contortions of the

animal principle under the duress of civilization. In Civilization and Its Discontents

Freud suggests that "the life of present-day civilized people leaves no room for the

simple natural love of two human beings" (21). In The Delicate Prey Bowles

describes the family, understood as the basic unit of the community in its

acculturating functions, as precisely the nexus in which love as a possibility is

eradicated through the internalization of violence, a violence characteristically

imaged as animal predation. Violence in Bowles's work, like the violence in much

American fiction, acts as "a surgeon's probe that explores a moral question

outside the consciousness of any of the characters" (2). Bowles's stories dramatize

the dynamics of that "outrageous violation" of himself which, according to R. D.

Laing, Western man has had to commit in order to achieve his "capacity to live in

relative adjustment to a civilization apparently driven to its own destruction" (23).

33-34 As an obsessionist Bowles is the heir of a traditionally American aesthetic, one attuned to the problem of giving a coherent aesthetic form to conflicts of an intensely personal nature, and one that is founded on the antinomies of experience as known in the artist's isolation rather than on the self-validations of a supportive social context. "Like most writers whose fiction touches upon a profound personal problem," writes a critic about Stephen Crane, and he could be writing of Bowles, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, or James, as well, “Crane tells the same story again and again." "There was really only one subject available to the nineteenth-century American novelist," Marius Bewley asserts: "his own unhappy plight. And the essence of that plight was his isolation." All of these writers have in common a recurrent theme, "the horror of the imprisoned or isolated identity. " Putting Bowles in this tradition, and studying such representative characters as Port Moresby of The Sheltering Sky and Nelson Dyar of Let It Come Down, permits a phenomenological description of the kind of contradictory American experience of which Bewley speaks: the split between "the abstract idea and the concrete fact," between self and experience. Bewley in this respect reflects an established critical tradition which includes, each in his own terms, F. 0. Matthiessen, Lionel Trilling, Richard Chase, and Leslie Fiedler, to name the greater lights. To the historical view of the critics R. D. Laing adds the existential insights of his phenomenological psychiatry, helping to clarify the function of isolation for the individual recoiled from experience and to explore those inner divisions at once cause and consequence of the human abuse of human beings.

65-66 In spite of his disavowal of belief in his own experience, Bowles learned, like Emerson's American scholar, "that the deeper he dives into his privatest, secretest presentiment, to his wonder he finds this is the most acceptable, most public, and universally true."? The writer makes up for social deprivations by "driving a shaft into the primitive strata of his mind, as Henry A. Murray asserts of Melville. Lionel Trilling believes that "American writers of genius have not turned their minds to society. Poe and Melville were quite apart from it; the reality they sought was only tangential to society. In turning his back on manners and society as such, Marius Bewley continues Trilling's argument, the American writer "confronts his own emotional and spiritual needs which his art becomes the means of comprehending and analysing."

"The Scorpion" reveals Bowles' deliberate attempt to turn the social disadvantage he perceives in himself to artistic use by a calculated plumbing of the primitive strata of his mind.

What these flowers of evil mark was neatly stated Terence Martin in a book on Hawthorne: “the brotherhood of man under the fatherhood of the devil,” but the point about the nature of the American, “this new made man,” is best made by D. H. Lawrence in his 1923 Studies in Classic American Literature, a book whose tongue-in-cheek title mocks the very “unamerican” truths Lawrence tells, particularly in  in his discussion of The Deerslayer, last of the Leatherstocking Tales, 1841. "But you have there the myth of the essential white America. All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the flourishing into lust, is sort of a by-play.The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never melted." 

I’ll not mock that assertion with a footnote, but I will leave it in bold type. Over the years it has seared itself in my memory so that I don’t need to look it up. Put it in your pipe and smoke it the next time you are doing social media, all of you Nomad Poetics types. Then if you still wish you can pack up your tents and hit the trail sketched in Pierre’s book. Bearing in mind that pilgrims are the delicate prey,  you had best go armed, something none of the nomads in Bowles’ characteristic stories thought to do. They met violent ends.

In conclusion, a final word for an essay that has already gone on too long. Like every other poetics, Joris’s A Nomad Poetics comprehends a philosophy, and at the base of that philosophy--as thinkers from Hegel to Foucault have assured us-- is the life story of the poet-philosopher. I enjoyed Pierre’s autobiography as it emerges in fragments in A Nomad Poetics and thought the tale of how he was born and grew up “between languages” was the best part of the book. 

If I were ever to write something similar (and I won’t / perhaps already have) I would cite the moment in my sophomore year in 1965 when I gave up my initial math major and turned to literature--the moment when I read Camus’s The Stranger. The curious thing about that novel is that it is usually read as a parable of alienation, yet for me it had the opposite effect. It joined me to the world by a recognition of the absurd. As Camus says elsewhere, “A world which can be explained, even through bad reasoning, is a familiar one. On the other hand, in a world suddenly devoid of illusion and light, man feels like a stranger.” That strangeness is the absurd. It provided me with a demonic fatherhood in which I first understood the brotherhood of man.

I loved the ending: Pour que tout soit consommé, pour que je me sente moins seul, il me restait à souhaiter qu'il y ait beaucoup de spectateurs le jour de mon exécution et qu'ils m'accueillent avec des cris de haine. Translators have  not agreed how to translate the final phrase. I still prefer the the first translation that I read which provided “howls of execration.”

It was that phrase that took me to Algeria in 1976. 

But that’s not the note on which I wish to end this open letter which tries to keep its eye on Bowles and Joris.  I prefer a few lines from a poem Bowles wrote at the age of 17 and which we have easily available today because Pierre quotes it in his short piece celebrating Bowles’s posthumous 100th birthday. For me, this is not a good poem, not even for a seventeeen-year-old. It’s too soft to even suggest the writer Bowles will become--except for the last two lines with their suggestion of  mektoub, a destiny for which he has yet no name.

Let anything except what is coming come

That is the way I always have felt

Sources

Print

Bewley, Marius. The Eccentric Design: Form in the Classic American Novel. New York: Columbia UP, 1959. 

Bowles, Paul. Collected Stories & Later Writings. New York, NY: The Library of America, 2002/

_____.  Points in Time. London: Peter Owen, 1982); reprinted New York: Harper Perennial Edition, 2006.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. New York: Modern Library, 1968.

Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1961.

Joris, Pierre. A Nomad Poetics: Essays. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 2003.

Martin, Terence. Nathaniel Hawthorne. New York: Twayne, 1965.

Pounds, Wayne. Paul Bowles: The Inner Geography. New York: Peter Lang, 1985. 

_____.“Paul Bowles and the Psychology of Predation.” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire, vol. 59, (1981) 620-33. For the online version, see below.

Stuart, Lawrence D. Paul Bowles : The Illumination of North Africa. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press. 1974.

Digital

Bryson, Alan, and Steven W. May. “Verse Libel In Renaissance England And Scotland.” https://vdoc.pub/documents/verse-libel-in-renaissance-england-and-scotland-1m4h0vsi6a0o. Consulted Jul. 2025.

Dockelbergh, Peter. Cartographies of the In-Between. Prague: Litteraria Pragensia Books, 2011.  https://dokumen.pub/pierre-joris-cartographies-of-the-in-between-8073083701-9788073083700.html. Consulted Jul. 2025. 

Estavanico. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estevanico. Accessed Jul. 2025. 

Itinéraire Culturel des Almoravides et des Almohades 2ème édition mai 2003 https://books.google.fr/books id=vKiW0HDhAcoC&pg=PA123&dq=azemmour&hl=fr&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=azemmour&f=true. Consulted Jul. 2005.

Joris, Pierre, “Paul Bowles @ 100.” https://pierrejoris.com/blog/paul-bowles-100/?unapproved=576375&moderation-hash=81ad64194422c15dcbfd9f9848ba5140#comment-576375. Accessed Jul. 2025.

Pounds, Wayne. “Paul Bowles and the Psychology of Predation.” https://www.persee.fr/doc/rbph_0035-0818_1981_num_59_3_3340?fbclid=IwAR1MxbjvI6ji2bcWQbkl1VQwXpUZbIRth9JsU-icJ53YgISmExJWxpoQRo4. Accessed Jul. 2025.

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