You Are Not I: A Portrait of Paul Bowles

Amazon.com
At the center of Millicent Dillon's provocatively titled You Are Not I burns a mystery. The ever elusive Paul Bowles indirectly captured Dillon's attention. When in Tangier, Morocco, at work on her biography of Jane Bowles (A Little Original Sin, 1981), she was told repeatedly by friends of the Bowles that she bore an uncanny physical resemblance to Jane. For Dillon, this burgeoned into a compulsion, which she found "...unsettling, as if I am overstepping a line, violating that most rudimentary law of biography--not to confuse oneself with one's subject." Alas, in spite of the strong declaration implicit in the biography's title, one is made uncomfortably aware of the author's wavering boundaries. "To be a biographer," Dillon confesses, "meant that I was in the grip of an obsession."

Rejecting chronology as the chief organizing element of her biography, Dillon interweaves the "facts"--mundane and extraordinary--of Bowles's life with both of her Moroccan journeys (the Jane project of 1977; the Paul project of '91), constructing his portrait through their conversations and her subsequent reflections. Such a prismatic approach indeed celebrates Bowles's obliquity as a subject. But then, Millicent Dillon is herself "...in search of a different kind of knowing--one that is consonant with secrecy, one that ... is more akin to the knowing one has of a character in a work of fiction." That unique teasing out of the truth makes You Are Not I an exploration of the form, biography, itself.

Bowles was born on Long Island. As a child he leaned toward musical composition and short story writing. In young adulthood, he would study with Aaron Copland, and later, mingle in Paris with the likes of Gertrude Stein, who advised him to journey to Morocco with Copland to work on music. He married Jane (in 1938); she had had affairs with women only; he'd had bisexual attachments. Paul continued his involvement with avant-garde music; Jane struggled with her novel, Two Serious Ladies. As he helped her, his old love of fiction was triggered, and in 1949, he published The Sheltering Sky, which became an international bestseller. After Jane Bowles's death, Paul's work life receded. It would be Bertolucci's film of The Sheltering Sky (1987) that delivered Bowles back into the public eye.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

You Are Not I is a portrait of the elusive writer-composer Paul Bowles, who left the United States in 1947 to live permanently in Morocco. There he created some of the finest American prose of the century, including the international bestseller The Sheltering Sky. In his brilliant and terrifying short stories and novels, he explores haunting themes of desire, exile, and emotional disintegration. Millicent Dillon interweaves episodes in Paul Bowles's life, distillations of his work, reports of their conversations, and speculations on the connections between his life and his work.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal

Dillon, perhaps best known for her biography of Jane Bowles (A Little Original Sin, LJ 6/1/81), might easily have titled her latest effort You and I. Rather than focusing on Bowles's life, she uses her memoir to examine her relationship with the expatriate novelist-composer and to ruminate on the nature of literary biography. As a result, the reader learns more about Dillon and the craft of biography than about Paul Bowles. Dillon's analysis of her association with Bowles is generally intelligent and interesting, as are her comments on the biographer's art. As such, this memoir will appeal most to those interested in understanding the complex relationship between biographers and their subjects. Readers interested primarily in Bowles's life and times should consult Bowles's autobiography, Without Stopping (LJ 3/1/72), or Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno's An Invisible Spectator (LJ 3/1/72).William Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNY

Edmund White - Los Angeles Times Book Review

[Dillon] has written a maddening, exhilarating, category-defying "portrait" of Paul￯﾿ﾽ A study of contrast: between a sophisticated but relatively sheltered heterosexual woman and a thoroughly disabused homosexual man; between a biographer with Jamesian sensitivity in search of spiritual drama in her subject, a man intent on letting everything-his past, his writings, his present, his loves and hates-wash over him as though he wore a particularly solid stolid and impervious boulder at the foot of a waterfall.

Michael Upchurch - The Washington Post

Unexpectedly funny, disarmingly intimate and usefully disorienting￯﾿ﾽ Dillon's prose is spare and supple and her offbeat approach to her "portrait" works like a charm￯﾿ﾽ The service Dillon has done Bowles and his admirers is rare and welcome. Where previously we've had only three frame shots of him, now we can see him in action, growing "transparent, opaque, and transparent again," as Dillon puts it. A pleasure to read in itself, You Are Not I undoubtedly will become a treasured primary source of future Bowles biographers.

Terry Meisel - The New York Times Book Review

With implications well beyond what she intends, [Dillon's] new book is a strange and uncanny success. Using the atmosphere of Tangier to advantage, Dillon lights the chilly Bowles from a number of angles￯﾿ﾽ Bowles' sadness and sense of opportunities lost profuse Dillon's narrative and weigh it with emotion￯﾿ﾽ The book abounds with new notions if we look and listen.

Kirkus Reviews

This jumbled but ever readable account of the expatriate composer and author is not so much a biography as a meditation on the biographical process and its pitfalls. Anticipating the death of Paul Bowles, the last of the Tangiers giants, a full-scale literary industry is beginning to gear up. Bowles himself has never been a particularly prolific author, but each work of fiction, from The Sheltering Sky to the shortest of his short stories, arrived with a resounding fullness to it. A world so complete, so considered, that each work feels like a life's oeuvre. There's an elusive archetypal quality to his work that seems to mediate between the noumenal and phenomenal, as if these classic philosophic distinctions were almost resolvable. Like his work, Bowles seems to be just beyond full understanding, a passive acquiescent personality who can't say no, but is very good at avoiding anything uncomfortable. He is particularly elusive when Dillon (who edited The Portable Paul and Jane Bowles as well as a volume of Jane Bowlesþs letters) attempts to tease out the deeply autobiographical elements of his work: "Hadn't he always been in the process of escaping? Escaping into another room, escaping across borders into another country, escaping into regions within himself, escaping into others, escaping into his characters, even as they too are escaping." Dillon here has thrown over the traditional biographical method in favor of a free-form approach, part interview, part reminiscence, part autobiography. Based largely on hundreds of hours spent with Bowles, it's a fascinating mix that doesn't quite gel, although there are flashes of real insight. The autobiographical elements areoverplayed, although such elements as the arrival of a second, rival biographer and Dillon's sense that she is trapped in a Bowles novel are so intriguing, one excuses their irrelevance. (15 b&w photos)

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Part portrait and part rumination on the nature of biography, You Are Not I is a remarkable study of Paul Bowles. — Ernesto Grillo