738
PARTISANREVIEW
and social structures such as walls, families, and networks of acquaintances
which enclose us and from which we seek to escape, drawing upon the
theories of Gaston Bachelard, who emphasizes "the human need to come
back to an imaginative sense of the primal house" and yet also "insists on
the house's fragility." By concentrating on the metaphorical
in
Bowles,
Patteson is able at once to preserve the integrity of the works and point
to their deeper philosophical and psychological content.
Story-telling itself, Patteson reminds us, is one of the ways by which
we construct and maintain structures in an attempt to ward off the
terror of disorder. In his chapter entitled "The Shapes of Bowles'
Fictions" Patteson carefully examines and draws meaning from the
various narrative patterns in Bowles's work. The conclusion he comes to,
consistent with Bowles's statements, is that the whole idea of "safety" is
merely a powerful illusion we dangerously live by.
While Bowles aficionados would no doubt be inclined to welcome
the attention a biography brings to the artist, they might have wished to
wait longer for a fuller, more considered treatment of the subject than
that given in Christopher
Sawyer-Lau~anno's
An Invisible Spectator: A
Biography of Paul Bowles.
Major deficiencies and errors in the biography
might stem from Bowles's uncooperative stance. "I hope no biography
will be written during my lifetime," Bowles wrote to his then would-be
biographer, and he has insisted upon calling the work "unassisted" and
"synthetic."
Our disappointment with
Sawyer-Lau~anno's
biography springs
from the impression that so many opportunities have been missed. So
many intriguing questions remain in our mind as we put down the book.
What have been the major forces which have kept Bowles on the move?
What narrative and thematic threads hold the life together? What effects
have his various personal encounters had on his artistic development?
What choices and sacrifices has he made with artistic goals in mind?
Where does Bowles and his work fit into the twentieth century?
The biography often seems to be little more than a rewriting of
Bowles's autobiography,
Without Stopping,
which some of the author's
friends have facetiously referred to as
Without Telling.
One can read the
autobiography and the biography side by side, as I did, and feel that the
primary difference between them is that the new biography is devoid of
wit and stylistically inferior. Without Bowles's autobiography, Sawyer–
Lau~anno
would have been at a complete loss.
There are a few things which can be said for
Sawyer-Lau~anno's
biography. He does, toward the beginning of the book, try to shed
some light on Bowles's youthful literary influences, pointing specifically
to Arthur Machen, Gide, Poe, and Surrealists such as Breton. The
biography also contains a number of previously unpublished letters from
