Paul Bowles writes to author and playwright James Leo Herlihy about the death of his mother, Rena Bowles, the nausea brought on by repetition, and the proto-Oulippean poet Raymond Roussel.
Tangier, Morocco
Your letter has been here several days, but I’ve written no letters—only cables, the past few days. My mother died Wednesday, and my life has been vague during this time. I’ll have to go back to the States sometime soon, but not before you would be coming, and not even before you would have been here a while. So it seems fine, your arrival. It will be wonderful to see you. The reason why I shan’t be going to the U.S. immediately is that I intend to go from there on to Thailand, and shall have to arrange ships from here before sailing, because I don’t under any conditions want to be caught in New York for a long time, trying to get out and not being able to. You speak of nausea in connection with attempts to work. It’s the real thing, that kind of nausea, too, and I think it comes from a sensation of having been there before—that is, from a not very well defined feeling of doing again what one has already done. And of course one always hopes to be covering new ground, at least for oneself. There are certainly all kinds of games one can invent, but without going necessarily as far as Roussel (Comment j’ai écrit certains de mes livres or whatever it’s called) or even going as far as Roussel if one has to (since the subject matter is so unimportant finally) it’s possible to invent a viable method, and a different one for getting through each work. (Method having to do, of course, only with working, and not with one’s idea of the finished product.) (Finished product always turning out to be what it wants to be.) (I’ve never even had a remote insight into what was going to happen in any of my short stories, and I’ve always gone into them fully conscious of that fact, full of curiosity as to what it was going to be about.) (The old surrealist technique I suppose, but none the less practical.) Give my love to Lilla when you see her. Have you found out if the baby is hers? I should shut this off and take it out to post, or you won’t hear from me before leaving New York. I hope you do come; let me know.
FURTHER READING
For the opening scene to the film adaptation of James Leo Herlihy’s novel Midnight Cowboy, click here