Conversations with Paul Bowles

by Gena Dagel Caponi (Editor)

Overview

Paul Bowles says: Each man's life has the quality he gives it, but you can't say that life itself has any qualities. If we suffer, it's because we haven't learned how not to. The man who wrote the books didn't exist. No Writer exists. He exists in his books, and that's all. I write unconsciously, without knowing what I am writing.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780878056507
Publisher:	University Press of Mississippi
Publication date:	11/01/1993
Series:	Literary Conversations Series
Pages:	286
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Gena Dagel Caponi, a lecturer in American studies at the University of Texas at San Antonio, is also the author of Paul Bowles: Romantic Savage.

Read an Excerpt

Halpern: One thing that particularly interests many who meet you is the great discrepancy between what you are like as a person and the kind of books you write.

Bowles:Why is it that Americans expect an artist's work to be a clear reflection of his life? They never seem to want to believe that the two can be independent of each other and go their separate ways. Even when there's a definite connection between -the work and the life, the pattern they form may be in either parallel or contrary motion. If you want to call my state schizophrenic, that's all right with me. Say my personality has two facets. One is always turned in one direction, toward my own Mecca; that's my work. The other looks in a different direction and sees a different landscape. I think that's a common state of affairs.

Editorial Reviews

"Interest in the work of Paul Bowles and in the man himself does not appear to be appreciably declining. Caponi undertakes one further attempt to satiate readers' appetite with a collection of interviews dating from the early 1950s to 1990. The redundant aspect of repeated interviews with the same subject is tempered by Bowles' capacity over the years to give distinctively different responses to similar questions. His great regard for language crops up again and again, along with fascinating insights into such facets of Moroccan culture as dance cults and magic spirits. Perhaps Bowles' mesmerizing conversational dexterity is the one constant here."

—Alice Joyce, Booklist

From the Publisher