What Would Lynne Tillman Do? Read online

  Paul Bowles never mentioned Kathy Acker’s quote. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Some years before I’d mailed him a story in which I’d quoted a line from his autobiography, Without Stopping. He wrote a long letter about it and questioned me on an interesting point of grammar. He never mentioned my tribute to him. His reserve, discretion or secretiveness was impressive, intimidating, or disturbing.

  It’s unsettling and strange rendering this account and calling up faulty memory to describe my pilgrimage, if that’s what it was, to him and the spirit of Jane Bowles. I was as close to her as I’d ever be. Her presence was almost palpable—I wanted her to be there—and always evanescent, like life itself. Even stranger was the sensation I had when I was with Paul. Sometimes I felt I was his daughter, as if that quote had created a symbolic link between us, even a blood tie, in an extraordinary demonstration of the power of fiction. It was a feeling, too, that I got, after my father died, around older men I liked who were difficult to know, the way my father was. I admired Bowles’s writing, its inscrutability, lack of apology and explanation, its dark humor, reserve, mystery. He had all of this, too. I didn’t know him, I liked him, I didn’t know what he thought of me. We laughed together, and I can like or feel familiar around anyone who’s funny.

  I gave up the film, returned one of the grants, was allowed to keep the other and use it toward writing the novel I’d mentioned to Bowles. It was called Motion Sickness, which now seems an appropriate title for the experience of writing this weird history of failure and desire. Two Serious Ladies has still not been made into a film.

  After visiting Bowles, I began my letters “Dear Paul B.” I sent him and Buffie copies of the photographs we’d taken, and he wrote a postcard thanking me. It ended, “Your visit to Tangier was very short, unfortunately. Another time, perhaps?” I haven’t returned, but I did fly to Atlanta in 1995 to visit him when he came to the States for an operation. It was his first visit since 1968. I also saw him briefly at Lincoln Center for a concert of his music. These last years he’s been ill and doesn’t answer most letters. I treasure the ones I have.

  —August 1999

  Paul Bowles died on November 18, 1999, at the age of 88.

  Adieu, American Abroad

  A young American was intent on becoming a writer, and in the spirit of the Lost Generation and earlier American writers, believed that living in Europe, or out of America, as expatriate or alien, was what she needed to free herself or lose herself, and write.

  In 1972, I was living in Amsterdam, and decided to edit an anthology of American writers abroad. Paul Bowles reigned as the preeminent American abroad. I told my Dutch publisher that his presence in the book was essential, and assured him that Bowles would definitely be in it. All bravado. I was a complete unknown. Anxiously, I wrote a letter to Paul Bowles, requesting his important participation. Shockingly fast, he wrote back, Yes.

  I can’t remember what Bowles first sent me. But soon the book’s publication was delayed, and whatever piece it was, he had given it to someone else. I quickly and humbly asked for another piece; he amiably sent one along. I really didn’t know what I was demanding of such a distinguished, sought-after writer. I knew nothing, I was a kid, and all my ideas about being an editor came from reading literary histories and writers’ biographies. I had requested unpublished material from everyone. The long delays continued, and every piece Bowles sent me was eventually published somewhere else.

  By the third or fourth delay, and subsequent go-rounds with Bowles and a few other writers, I had returned to America, a prodigal daughter home, because, for one thing, hearing English spoken by Dutch and English people didn’t foster my American writing. By now, the correspondence between Bowles and me had grown friendly: we wrote anecdotes to each other, even reported a few dreams, and discussed much more than the putative anthology.

  After the first publisher reneged—the novelty division was dissolved—a second publisher came forward to save the book, a friend with a small Dutch press who promised to bring the anthology out, fast. He didn’t. I’m not sure how much time passed, but once again I needed to ask Bowles for new writing. Now he had no unpublished work at all, nothing to give; he was very sorry. Desperate, I wrote: Don’t you have anything? I don’t care what it is. Bowles kindly mailed a few poems he’d written in the early 1930s, noting that they weren’t very good, but I could use them if I wanted. He didn’t have anything else. Again, he was very sorry.

  It never occurred to me that he might have been, with excellent reason, courteously bailing out of my long-sinking enterprise. But I was young, naive, hopeful, and these traits, mixed with others, allowed me not only to ignore that possibility but also to agree with his negative assessment of his poems. Yes, they’re not very good, I wrote him. Of course I’ll publish them anyway. You must be in the anthology. But, I pleaded, don’t you have anything else? How about letters you wrote home from Europe?

  Not long after, an airmail letter arrived, on onionskin as ever, but thicker than the one page he usually sent. He, or a helper, had typed copies of two letters he had written his mother on his very first trip to Europe. He had traveled there with composer Aaron Copland; Copland had been his music teacher, then a close friend. In one letter Bowles tells the hilarious tale of their sailing to Tangier. The second was written after he and Copland had settled in Tangier, about their travails with their piano, and also about Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, who were their friends. Use the letters if you want, Bowles wrote. I read them over and over, delighted with each line, and also by glimpsing his intimate and sympathetic relationship with his mother; I knew he despised his father. (In his autobiography, Bowles admitted to wanting to kill him.) Now it was worth it, every delay, everything—the letters were jewels.

  Over those years, the anthology had gone through many transformations. Mostly I added people: it was hard for me to say no to friends, even those who weren’t writers. When the second Dutch publisher stopped answering my letters, I finally gave up, though the book had been designed, typeset, and was actually on boards. I knew it would never be published. Curiously, I took this failure in stride, seven or eight years of work and waiting, making promises and breaking them. By then I was doing other things, living in New York and writing. Maybe more significant, the anthology had come to feel unnecessary to me, a leftover from an existence I no longer had or wanted. I’d done it, and was done with my romance of the American abroad—along with the rest of the world. Being in Europe had helped me unlearn some of what I’d been taught or unconsciously believed. Any writer knows that what’s left out is as essential, if not more so, than what’s there. Unlearning works that way. I unlearned the model of being an editor like Ezra Pound with T.S. Eliot, the unconscious belief that America was the center of the world, and that honesty meant saying what I thought and always being direct. (The Dutch and the English, former competitors for world dominance, taught me the wisdom of waiting as well as withholding.) As to new lessons: I learned I could be miserable anywhere in the world. I learned I really was an American.

  Bowles and I continued corresponding, hardly ever mentioning the ill-fated anthology. He had suffered much worse fates than the ups and downs of publication, of course, specifically, the slow, sad decline of Jane Bowles and her death in 1972. In some ways I think he was forever amused by something invisible buzzing around him, and that something kept him going. Maybe he was amused just to be alive.

  I wanted to meet him and visited Tangier in 1987. There was another motive: I’d written a script and hoped to direct a film of Jane Bowles’ novel, Two Serious Ladies, but even if there wasn’t that desire and wish for his blessing, I would have traveled to Morocco to meet him one day.

  Meeting him wasn’t anticlimactic, because I’d heard one couldn’t really know him. I don’t think I had unusual expectations, but I felt anxious, so maybe I did. In a way I believed I knew him from his letters, a writer writing; and in the flesh, he was the person who wrote those funny, smart, ironic le
tters. He spoke like his letters. His apartment was kept dark, shades drawn; Mohammed Mrabet stood in the shadows, appearing only to serve tea, and Paul’s writing could be exquisitely cruel and dark. But he had a sunny smile and liked to tell stories and laugh.

  I saw Bowles twice more. First, in Atlanta, Georgia, in the spring of 1994, when he traveled there for a heart operation. A number of us, devotees, acolytes, friends, acquaintances, writers, artists—I didn’t know what scale he weighed me on or how to measure myself—flew down for a party in his honor. I shared a hotel room with Cherie Nutting, a photographer and the manager of her Moroccan husband’s joujouka band. (They later divorced but she still manages the band.) She and Paul were close, like father and daughter, I imagined; they spent a lot of time together in Tangier.

  Thirty or forty people gathered in Atlanta at the home of Virginia Spencer Carr. Carr was writing Bowles’ biography (it was published in 2004), and had also arranged for Paul’s heart operation. The party was on a Saturday night, some days before it. All night Paul sat in a comfortable club chair, and people came by to greet and talk to him. They sat on the floor, pulled up a chair, or stood above him. He seemed tired and fragile, but he was gracious and pleasant to everyone, looking at us from under hooded eyes. He was probably overwhelmed by the fuss, with these people he knew well, or barely, around him all at once. The last time he’d been to the States, he told me, was 1968.

  Paul usually fretted about the mail’s getting through from Morocco. He often wrote that he was paranoid about it. He would double-check that I’d received something he mailed. Now he asked, “Did you get the postcard I sent about Cast in Doubt?” This was the morning after the party, or the early evening before it; we were in front of Virgina Carr’s house. I remember it was light out, a late or early sunlight. “No, I didn’t get it,” I said. (Cast in Doubt was my third novel.) “Oh, too bad,” he said. Then he said something I heard but also didn’t quite hear, his words at the edge of audibility. A slim, handsome Moroccan man pushing his wheelchair—not Mohammed Mrabet, happily—pushed him on, while Paul continued talking. I think he said he liked it, and something else, or I hope he said that, but I didn’t feel I could ask him again, as if that would be craven. Now I’m sorry I didn’t.

  The operation was a success. It gave Paul five more years. I still wonder why I flew down to say hello or even goodbye to Paul. In retrospect I find my behavior mysterious. I did feel an emotional or literary attachment to him, a man who was detached and puzzling, but more significant to me as a younger writer, I had read his books, admired them and we had formed some kind of relationship. My greater attachment was to Jane Bowles, and he also represented her to me.

  The third and last time I saw Paul was in 1995; he was in New York for a concert of his music at Lincoln Center. He had started out as a composer and begun writing fiction after Jane Bowles’ brilliant, sui generis and only novel, Two Serious Ladies, appeared in 1943. Everyone who thinks about their marriage also ponders how his novel, The Sheltering Sky, especially its very successful publication, affected Jane. Her novel was a succès d’estime; his drew wider acclaim. Jane Bowles never wrote another novel, and some blame him. I don’t. There was nothing simple about either of them together or singly. And no one cause could ever explain her not finishing any writing after 1949.

  For the concert—a night I won’t forget, at least I believe I won’t—my date was Charles Henri Ford, another sophisticated, elderly and former American abroad, a poet, artist and filmmaker. I watched Charles and Paul greet each other, Paul in his wheelchair, Charles bending down to talk to him. Both must have been somewhat stunned, I thought, but both were elegant, world-weary men, casual about the moment and unexpected events. “I haven’t seen Paul in fifty years,” Charles told me as we walked to our seats. He said it blithely, without any importance, and I wondered if, some night, I might experience something similar.

  Paul Bowles died in 1999, Charles Henri Ford in 2002. Their lives encompassed and contributed to the twentieth century, what some once called The American Century. They also lived long enough to see the end of that.

  C is for Character

  Cut Up Life

  Dear Poet

  Charles Henri Ford

  Did the lake overturn

  When Narcissus fell in

  Become opaque

  A mad lake—

  Oh poet dear

  Please make it clear

  And let it recover

  The reflected image

  Of that foolish lover—

  Amazedly

  Florine Stettheimer

  Charles Henri (né Henry) Ford made his entrance on February 10, 1908, in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, to Gertrude Cato and Charles Lloyd Ford. It was his idea to change the spelling of Henry to Henri. “I was tired of being asked if I was related to Henry Ford,” he says, “and a young girl wrote me on lavender paper and in red ink and made a mistake that I liked so I kept it.”

  Ford’s parents, and his father’s brother’s, owned hotels in various small cities in Mississippi and Texas—Ford was born in a hotel that burned down soon after—and his early life was peripatetic. His mother, whom he compares in his diary with Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, was an artist herself and seems to have been a dramatic, beautiful and compelling character. This primary love led the way to Ford’s two great loves—Djuna Barnes and Pavel (Pavlik) Tchelitchew.

  All spoken remarks are Charles Henri Ford’s to the author in two recent conversations. All other quoted material is from Water from a Bucket, unless a source is cited.

  Ford met Barnes in New York in 1929, before he left for Paris in 1931, and lived with her in Morocco, where he typed the manuscript of her novel Nightwood. “She couldn’t spell,” he says. His most enduring relationship was with Russian painter Pavlik Tchelitchew. They lived together for 23 years. Ford and Tchelitchew met in Paris, in 1933, at an opening, when Ford was 24 and Tchelitchew, 35. Of the meeting Ford notes in his diary that he wrote Parker Tyler at the time, “I’ve found a genius.” In a powerful way, the diary circles around and is about Pavlik, “his great heart,” and their complicated love and long relationship.

  His younger sister, Ruth Ford—the diary’s “Sister”—was a well-known actor. She debuted in Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater production of The Shoemaker’s Holiday in 1938; performed in plays by Tennessee Williams; had a lead in Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit (translated by Paul Bowles); and received a nomination from the London Drama Critics, in 1957, for her performance as Temple Drake in Requiem for a Nun, which she had adapted into a play with William Faulkner. Ruth Ford was married to Hollywood actor Zachary Scott, who died in 1965, and lives in the Dakota, four floors below her older brother.

  I loved the Blues before I loved the Poem. Somehow the two loves were from the same source, so it was natural I called my poetry review Blues.

  Precocious and ambitious, the young poet launched Blues, The Magazine of New Rhythms, in 1929. William Carlos Williams and Eugene Jolas were two of its contributing editors and Kathleen Tankersley Young its associate editor. For nine issues, Ford solicited and published writing from Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Kay Boyle, Harry Crosby, James Farrell, H.D., Kenneth Rexroth, Mark van Doren, Louis Zukofsky, Edouard Roditi, Erskine Caldwell. He was the first to publish Paul Bowles.

  From Mississippi, Ford moved to New York, to write poetry and lead la vie bohème in Greenwich Village. Ford had published Parker Tyler, the poet and future film critic and writer, in Blues and was corresponding with him. They met in person in New York—“I could hardly see his face, he had so much makeup on,” Ford says—and soon collaborated on writing The Young and Evil. Called by some the first gay novel, published in 1933, banned in the United States and England, it is—like Ford himself—unapologetic, unashamed, poetic, candid and determinedly free of conventions.

  It’s not doing the things one wants to do—even if considered a vice, like opium-taking—that makes one age, but doing things one doesn’t want to do.


  A kind of Surrealist free verse, the uninhibited novel was influenced, in part, by Ford’s mentor Gertrude Stein, who took him up when he was first in Paris. When Ford fell in love with Tchelitchew, Stein found less reason to see him; she and Tchelitchew had had one of those famous, furious partings of the way. But in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein wrote of Ford: “He is also honest which is also a pleasure.”

  Along with The Young and Evil, Ford is perhaps best known for View, the international art magazine he edited in New York, from 1940 to 1947. Europeans Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, Max Ernst—forced into exile during World War II—Americans Maya Deren, Meyer Schapiro, Joseph Cornell, Florine Stettheimer, Man Ray, Paul Bowles and many more found a home in View’s pages and on its covers. Not coincidentally, Ford begins his diary a year after he stops View and ends it shortly after the death of Tchelitchew in 1957.

  Since finishing the diary, Ford has produced or invented the “poem poster” (shown at the Ubu Gallery in New York in 2000); published many books of poetry, including a limited edition, unique collage book, Spare Parts, and Out of the Labyrinth: Selected Poems (City Lights, 1991); directed the feature-length movie Johnny Minotaur (shot in Crete, starring Allen Ginsberg among others) and exhibited his photographs, most recently with fellow Mississippian Allen Frame (at the Leslie Tonkomow Gallery in New York).

  You have to enjoy what you’re doing and do it every day.

  Ford has made a habit of doing what he wants to do, and his life is dedicated, as much as anyone’s can be, to poetry, art, and the pursuit of pleasure. He usually adheres to a self-imposed, rigorous routine, and now, just short of 93, he writes haiku poems and makes collages daily. When I visit him on a brilliant fall day, October 1, 2000, one of the day’s haikus is on his disk: