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I’ve been putting my memory to work to find a vulgar root for his need to mask all things, including his dislike of his native land not too much different from that of our own American master Henry James.

Once, while Paul and I were waiting to cross Fifth Avenue, I started to go against the light. “Don’t!” he said. Since there was no traffic, I asked him why not risk it? “Because my mother did when I was a child. She simply held up her hand and said, ‘Nonsense,
we
have the right of way.’ I stayed on the curb and she walked into the Fifth Avenue bus. She was lucky not to be killed.” Paul never forgot that utterly mistaken concept: “
We
have the right of way.”

Then there was his final break with the United States. He had entertained a youth at a hotel. The young man wanted money. Paul said no. The youth departed, to be replaced by two plainclothesmen. Since Paul did not have the cash they asked for, he made a date to see them the next day. By the time they returned, if they did, Paul was on the high seas. There are more details to the story but I have forgotten them. The essential point is that the criminalizing of drugs and sex is very much a sign of that malign primitivism which has always reigned in Freedom’s Land. For Bowles, Morocco was freedom, particularly as he penetrated the high Atlas and the Sahara desert, recording music that he was certain could be traced back to Roman times, while noting down stories that go back to the early days of our race which gave us Puritan New England that also gave birth to that original mind, masked or not, of Paul Bowles whose imagination responded with civilized hatred to the sort of primitive laws the two New York plainclothesmen were eager to exploit.

Despite my own troubles with my English publisher John Lehmann or, rather, his real and sometimes imagined troubles with British censorship, I got him to take Paul’s
The Sheltering Sky
which had been rejected in the United States on the absurd ground that it was not a novel. Lehmann did well by the book and later with Paul’s short stories. But Lehmann was too literary an English publisher to survive the deepening twilight of the Gutenberg age, in which only a few small American presses were thriving in the dusk. One was Black Swallow Press. In 1979, they wanted to collect in one volume Paul’s stories. Paul wanted no introduction. But the publisher did. Paul was averse to the sort of academic who might latch on to such a project; then he said that he wanted me to do it…“Having respect for Vidal’s critical mind I chose him rather than taking a chance on someone the publisher might find.” I was delighted. There is nothing like having to do a critical piece not only to concentrate the mind on a subject as complex as Bowles but to work out what it is that most draws one to a given writer’s work. With Tennessee’s stories it was a tone of voice the like of which had not been heard since Mark Twain. Each was a comic genius within a dark universe that the innocent persist in calling home sweet home. Bowles proved to be something of an inhuman observer like one of those vividly colored parakeets he doted on. Or, perhaps, the spirit of one. I enjoyed all of the stories except a few at the end where he notes that he had written them on kif. I thought them not as compelling as “Pages from Cold Point” and “The Delicate Prey.” He disagreed. Over the years he’d bring this up. After all, he’d say, everything he ever wrote had been written on kif, et cetera. He was also touchy about any hint that he had been influenced by the Marquis de Sade because he had found him boring; in fact, he said, he’d never really read him. I reminded him of that afternoon in Paris when he paid a lot of money to buy the Pléiade edition of Sade.

In due course Paul scrapped the collected edition and allowed his stories to fall back into their original small editions on the ground that a number of special volumes were more remunerative than a single large one.

Both Paul and Jane, together and separately, had, according to that polymath Virgil Thomson, dowsing rods for money. Libby Holman, the blues singer who may have killed her tobacco-heir husband, financed the Bowleses for years. It seems she had paid courtesy calls on Jane as well as developing a passion for Paul’s Arab lover from Tangier. But, by and large, the principals in our curious world steered clear of each other. Paul told me that Jane had been the first to abandon their conjugal duties. She told others that he had given up first. Once in New York when Tennessee and I had been prowling together one summer night, without success, he said, “Well, I guess that just leaves the two of us.” To which he claims I replied, “Don’t be macabre.” Donald Windham, his handsome collaborator on
You Touched Me
, when the Bird, in a similar situation, suggested that the two of them…Windham says he said, “I deplore your taste.” Where the British—at least Bloomsbury—never ceased to have affairs with friends, colleagues, relatives, Americans of the same sort try to separate, wisely I think, sex and friendship.

Paul’s last days were filled with various illnesses, the usual fate. But there was a successful concert of his music in New York. There were still twilight Gutenberg ceremonies where his crystalline prose shone as though darkness did not exist. There was a conversation with his biographer about the great influences on his life and career, and he mentioned Gertrude Stein, Aaron Copland (of course, he added), Gore Vidal, and Tennessee Williams. He died November 18, 1999, missing the first years of the twenty-first century and the last years of the American Republic, which his ancestor Samuel Bowles had cared so much about.

TWENTY-TWO

I left myself at the end of my first memoir,
Palimpsest
, in the year 1964, when I was thirty-nine. It is now April 2005. I am in Los Angeles and at the beginning of May I shall have a cataract removed from my left eye. Everything they say about age proves to be true. For years I read to my blind grandfather and even led him onto the floor of the Senate. I also remember practicing being blind, eyes shut and walking, with arms outstretched. In World War Two, when we learned of the discovery of radar, my grandfather said, “Every blind man learns from personal experience about radar. As you walk toward a wall, say, you can feel the sound start to bounce off the wall, the principle on which radar is based.” Although he was not given to self-pity he did complain how slow reading was for him, being unable to glance through a book and determine what, if anything, was worth reading in it. He also had his own special marginal symbols for important passages. If there was something he might want to quote in a speech he would say “Q,” which one would write in the margin next to the passage to be remembered. In old age he lacked the phenomenal aural memory of his youth when he used to bemuse the Senate with long lists of statistics that he had memorized, all the time holding a text in his hand which he pretended to read.

“I now grow forgetful,” wrote Montaigne in old age. “Names refuse to come when bidden.” It is encouraging to know that Montaigne who had read and reread everything worried about loss of memory, too. He was also fascinated by the process of memory: after all, he was the first great memoirist of life not only as lived by himself but as reported by others and written down.

“Off I go,” Montaigne writes, “rummaging about in books for sayings which please me—not so as to store them up (for I have no storehouses) but so as to carry them back to the book, where they are no more mine than they were in their original place. We only know, I believe, what we know now: ‘knowing’ no more consists in what we once knew than in what we shall know in the future…”

It has been my experience that writers, myself included, often forget what they have written since the act of writing is simply a letting go of a piece of one’s own mind, and so there is a kind of mental erasure as it finds its place on a page in order to leap to another consciousness like a mutant viral strain. I have just recorded Jane Bowles’s uncharacteristic behavior as jealous wife only to recall that I had already quoted her letters to Paul in
Palimpsest
.

TWENTY-THREE

I have now had a researcher prepare an outline of what I was writing and sometimes doing over the last forty years. Immediately after my return to the novel with
Julian
, somewhat perversely I took on a great deal of film work. One project was at the request of Ray Stark, a Hollywood producer, who found himself burdened with an unmakable screenplay of a best-selling book about the Nazi occupation of Paris. René Clément, a much admired French director—not least, as it proved, by himself and his formidable wife. He told me once that he had perfect taste. Howard and I holed up in a flat under the eaves of the Hotel Plaza-Athénée where Billy, our black spaniel, had distinguished himself by relieving himself on the carpet in the lobby as we were checking in. But the French tolerance of pets is their most distinguishing
amiable
characteristic.

The making of
Is Paris Burning?
was, as so often happens, far more interesting than the finished product. The previous writer, an American Francophile, had all the underground French freedom fighters constantly shouting
Vive la France!
He must have worked at Warner Brothers where films set in France were popular and the actors were either French or spoke their American English dialogue with heavy French accents. The fact that a script written in English to represent French speech could also contain many French phrases bothered no one. I would try to explain that the English spoken by the actors playing Frenchmen was, in context, French, and to clutter it up with numerous
zut alors
did not make the whole thing seem more French but simply confusing. My metaphysical arguments seldom won the day.

In Los Angeles Ray Stark had hired a young would-be filmmaker, a graduate of film school, Francis Ford Coppola, who could write an entire screenplay in a day or two. He was just what Ray had been looking for. Ray would give Francis a book like Carson’s
Reflections in a Golden Eye
. Then, while Francis was working on the script, Ray would be persuading Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando to play the leads. When they finally asked to see a script, Ray would give them Francis’s handiwork with the explanation: “This is only a rough draft. Tennessee will be doing the final script.” Ray was a great salesman and, of course, Tennessee never did do a final draft nor, sadly, did Francis. Ray was also not particularly grateful for how well Francis was serving him. As soon as I got to Paris, I sat down with Francis to go over my predecessor’s script. There were a lot of “voilàs” and “Gallic shrugs” with strains of the
Marseillaise
on the soundtrack. I found Francis to be encyclopedic on anything that had to do with filmmaking. He was truly post-Gutenberg. Film was where
it
—all of it—was at. For him the written culture had passed into night, making him the first member of the total-film generation that I was ever to meet. Then I got a call from Ray: “Now that you’re here I can let Francis go.” I saw myself writing endless exterior shots: “
Long Shot
: German tank turns into Place de la Concorde—
Day
.” I said, “No. I need him. He’s done a lot of the exterior stuff already. I need him for that.” On the personal side, Francis was in Paris with a young wife and baby. Reluctantly, Ray kept him on. Recently, Francis told me that I had turned him onto wine which, in turn, led to his becoming one of the leading winemakers in the United States. I asked him how I’d made this contribution. “Remember when we’d go out to lunch and you’d have a glass of wine and so would I though I didn’t particularly like it at first? I associated wine with the older guys in the family who always drank red wine out of these Gallo jugs. I thought it was strictly for Italians hung up on the old country. Then you started talking about French wine and I was hooked.” The reader who finds moviemaking interesting will note at this point that the director René Clément has not yet made an appearance. I’m sure he did in life but movies in those days were strictly controlled by the producer while the director, with a few exceptions, was simply a technician under the producer’s guidance.

That season, Paris was particularly interesting for me due to the presence of Orson Welles who was acting-directing
Chimes at Midnight
at the Boulogne studio; he also played the part of the Swedish consul in
Is Paris Burning?
, a man who did his best to save a number of Jews from the Gestapo as Hitler’s Third Reich was tumbling down. Hitler had determined that should his armies leave France, Paris must be burned to the ground. A good German and numerous brave and good French Gaullists and Communists prevented the burning. Orson was suitably cynical about our project but he was, as always, broke as well as deep into the role of Falstaff in
Chimes at Midnight
. After one lunch and six bottles of wine, we went back to the studio where Orson had been dubbing himself. On the screen was a picture of him, with lips moving. As he entered, he turned to a microphone and became Falstaff, not missing a beat. Considering what he ate and drank, it is amazing that he lived to be seventy. When he laughed, which was often, his face, starting at the lower lip, would turn scarlet while sweat formed on his brow like a sudden spring rain.

Orson Welles after lunch in
Is Paris Burning?
He was also moonlighting in the Bois de Boulogne acting in and directing
Chimes at Midnight
. Rudy Vallee, songster of yesteryear, kept sending each of us updates of his memoirs, which we used to study over lunch, particularly the trauma of the grapefruit someone hurled at him when he was onstage playing his horn; had it hit the horn, he keened, that golden voice would have been forever stilled.

Orson was fascinated by politics. He had helped President Roosevelt with speeches. FDR thought him a born politician. But he was dissuaded from running for the Senate by “well-wishers” who said he could never make it because he was an actor and divorced. “Now look!” he boomed at his favorite Hollywood restaurant. “Look at Ronald Reagan! An actor and divorced!” Could an actor, I wondered, make a good president after a lifetime of being directed by others? Orson was ready for that one: “Suppose he’d been a director, too? But, even so, I’d trust Gregory Peck as president, if not as Captain Ahab.”

Ray had a German co-producer whose task was to please, politically, the French Communist Party and the party of de Gaulle. Chaban-Delmas, a Gaullist politician, wanted to know who would play him. When told the beautiful Alain Delon, he was delighted. “Why, he looks exactly like me in the war.” There were also a dozen or so American stars who played the victorious American army that arrived to secure Paris not quite ahead of the Free French troops who were incredibly bold to a man under Clément’s rather nervous direction, nervous because of the political rivalries still going on. The German co-producer waited until Ray and I were gone. He then threw out most of our dialogue for the French characters and allowed the Gaullists and the Communists to supply their own dialogue, mostly great stunning clichés to demonstrate their overwhelming love of
La France
and
la gloire
. The result was purest chloroform. The picture ran for nearly three hours and at the gala American premiere the principal star in the audience was former vice president Richard Nixon, the only time I ever felt compassion for him. I had insisted that Francis get screen credit as a scriptwriter—his first. I then tried to get my name taken off the film but the lawyers worked too slowly and so my name remains. Later, when the film was shortened for television, some of it was not, visually, too bad.
Vive la France!
I also forced Ray to read a script that Francis had written. Gloomily, he read
You’re a Big Boy Now
and then—gloomily?—he made it as a successful film, and so a great film career began.

Francis thought entirely in movie terms. To him, when we met on
Is Paris Burning?
, he was the young Budd Schulberg, while I was the washed-up golden-boy novelist of yesteryear, Scott Fitzgerald. The fact that several recent novels of mine were doing well went unnoticed. Twenty years later we met on a TV program. Francis was stout with a full white beard; he stared at me, bewildered. “Didn’t you used to be older than me?” he asked. “That was just the movie version,” I said. He gave me a bottle of wine from his vineyard.

After
Julian
1964,
Washington, D.C.
1967,
Myra Breckinridge
1968, and on to now, I was once again a novelist-essayist-pamphleteer.

Washington, D.C.
was the next to last novel, chronologically, in what publishers like to call my “American Chronicles,” carefully avoiding my own title for the series,
Narratives of Empire
. I had been taken to task by
Time
magazine in a review of my first book of essays,
Rocking the Boat
. In order to show what a bad person I was,
Time
wrote that I had dared to refer to our minatory global presence as “an empire” which of course it could
not
be as we were, in the Luce publications, Christian goodness incarnate. It seems I had, once again, said the unsayable too soon. I was subversive.

But not entirely alone: today the only subversive programming on American television is C-SPAN. One would like to say it is because they try to take books seriously. But it is not book chat where C-SPAN is at its best; rather, for those of us fascinated by politics, congressional hearings as shown by C-SPAN in exquisitely boring detail are to me the only exciting and useful American television on offer. To watch senators and representatives fairly up close in Congress assembled affords us the only living look we will ever have of a government that is more and more secretive and remote not to mention repressive. Only the slowest among us—and I am one—are able to process yards of absolute boredom and feel revivified. Of course I was brought up in the District of Columbia when the Capitol was an almost lively place in my childhood. Also, D.C. was the domestic source of most secondhand news, as filtered through the print media. Now, with C-SPAN, we observe Senator Robert Byrd in eruption when faced with yet another usurpation of our liberties by an executive branch entirely geared for perpetual war and kept in office by one corrupted election after another bought and paid for by such masters of in-your-face corruption as Representative DeLay, who once dared We the People to try and bring him to justice, which he thought we could not do since he and his fellow operatives had control of the election machinery electronic as well as humanoid. Finally someone at C-SPAN had the bright idea of covering, from time to time, the British House of Commons at question time when the prime minister and his opponents are forced to answer questions of high policy, often impaling themselves on their own quibbling, though seldom on lies. This is democracy in action, something we have never actually experienced and may now never know.

Years ago the critic Dwight Macdonald noted that any letter to the
Times
of London (and Brits are addicted to substantive letter-writing) is sure to be better written than any editorial in
The New York Times
. At first hand, I can also attest that our own congressional voices fifty years ago were light-years superior to those today or to the halting subliterate style of our governing junta. Also, not only were the three recent British party heads (Blair, Howard, and Kennedy) more knowledgeable than their American counterparts, they were also quite able to deal with
a live BBC audience
whose average age seemed thirty or so while the twenty-somethings on hand were formidable, too. Blair got it not only from his rivals for the premiership but from a young man who wanted some action by government against bullying in schools. This is a real subject that Americans are taught to think of as character building for serial killers and inspirational for heavily armed children eager to thin their own ranks.

A young woman wondered why, under national health (utopian compared to our insurance/pharmaceutical anti-health services), it took forty-eight hours for a G.P. to grant her an appointment. Blair’s unfamiliarity with this flaw in the health system got him booed by others with the same complaint. To compare their audience of informed average citizens—quaintly called subjects, thanks to the ubiquitous presence of the phantom crown—was jarring to anyone foolish enough to believe that the U.S. is at all democratic in anything except the furious imprisoning of the innocent, the joyous electing of the guilty.