the inofficial Paul Bowles website

Paul Bowles Jane Bowles

1910 , 30.12, *Paul Frederic Bowles in Long Island/NY. Taught himself to read and write at the age of 2
1917, 17.2. (one year earlier than my mother, but in the same town) *Jane Auer

1926 His two revelations: „Lafcadio’s Adventures by André Gide and „Firebird“ by Stravinsky
1929 sails for France, goes to Paris, but is too shy to meet people
1930. music. writes letters to Gertrude Stein
1931 second trip to France, were he meets Gertrude Stein (which calls him Freddie). Stage in Berlin, he meets Jean Ross (Sally Bowles), then Hannover, he works with Kurt Schwitters. Spends some time in Gertrude Steins and Alice B.Toklas‘ summerhouse in Belignin (link to interview)

Sails to Morocco with Aaron Copeland. Tangier. Fez. Spain. back to Paris.
1932 after being ill in Torino, Bowles lives in Montmartre, then travels to Mahgreb again. Sahara. Shares a house in Tangier with Charles Henry Ford and Djuna Barnes. 1932 Jane Auer falls off her horse and breaks her leg, develops tuberculosis of knee. Leysin/Switzerland. learns French.

1934 her leg’s still bad. She returns to NY and decides to be a writer

1935 Contact with the US communist party
1937 meets Erika Mann and Jane Auer in a Harlem party. They travel to Mexico 1937 meets Paul Bowles, her future husband, They travel to Mexico

1938 marriage they marry, though they are both homosexual and shall have affairs with same sex

the couple travels to Middle America, then to Paris Jane meets Henry Miller

1939 Paul lives in NY. Orson Welles. Leonard Bernstein Jane lives in Staten Island with her friend Mary Olivier

1940they meet Tennessee Williams in Mexico Jane stays in mexico with her friend Helvetia Perkins

1941 a house in Brooklyn Heights: ground floor: George Davies (future husband of Lotte Lenya, first floor Oliver Smith, Jane and Paul Bowles, second floor Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, W.H.Auden, attic: Golo Mann
Paul works with John Cage 1942 Jane Bowles and Helvetia Perkins in Vermont

1945 first meeeting with Jean Paul Sartre, who taks about Jean Genet
1947 Paul Bowles composes music for the Max Ernst and Alexander Calder episodes of Hans Richter’s surrealist film „Dreams That Money Can Buy“

(to be continued)

Tangier Days:

Talking with Paul Bowles, 1984-1988

Richard F. Patteson

"...Much of the conversation that day was in Spanish, which everyone in the room, except me, understood, although my host was kind enough to pause and translate anything he thought I might find especially interesting. During the course of the next few days the talk turned to literature, music, politics, the perversity of publishers (over the course of my visits to him he complained energetically about several of them), and travel. Bowles dissuaded me from traveling as far south as Erfoud, where he said the weather was miserably hot and the palm trees were like umbrellas with no fabric--only spokes. He also told me, after learning that I had made the Grand Hotel Villa de France my headquarters, that the place had a history. Never mind that it had seen its better days and was no longer grand. Never mind that the water went off daily during the hours after noon, or that the swimming pool was filled with leaves and bugs. It had once been the favorite hotel of his friend Gertrude Stein (who had recommended it to him decades before), and Matisse had also stayed there when he came to Tangier."

"Jane drank...alcohol.

I stayed home and smoked kif."