In summer, close to the horizon and dark in color and now and then silently pulsing with interior flashes of fire. But above that surface is the aura that I spoke of, intangible and powerful, bringing to mind one of those clouds that you have seen There is a curiously double level to this novel. It exists far more significantly in a certain philosophical aura that envelopes it. The imprint is not visible upon the surface of the novel. With the hesitant exception of one or two war books by returned soldiers, "The Sheltering Sky" alone of the books that I have recently read by American authors appears to bear the spiritual imprint of recent history in the western world. Only among the insurgent novelists of France, such as Jean Genet and Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. And, to me very thrillingly, it brings the reader into sudden, startling communion with a talent of true maturity and sophistication of a sort that I had begun to fear was to be found nowadays Has come at the meridian of the man and artist. Better known as a composer than a writer, he has not allowed his passion for either form of expression to interfere with his growth into completeness of personality. Paul Bowles has deliberately rejected that kind of rabid professionalism. They feel it is something to adopt in the place of actual living, without understanding that art is a by-product of existence. Of what it means to be a writer or any kind of creative artist. I think that this stems from a misconception You know they belong to Alcoholics Anonymous or have embraced religion or plunged headlong into some political activity with nothing but an inchoate emotionalism to bring to it or to be derived from it. Otherwise they get panicky, and the first thing The "get-ahead" principle, carried to such extreme, inspires our writers to enormous efforts. In America the career almost invariably becomes an obsession. Moreover,īecause success and public attention operate as a sort of pressure cooker or freezer, there has been a discouraging tendency for the talent to bake or congeal at a premature level of inner development. Even in past decades the first novel has usually been written during the writers' first years out of college. It has been a good while since first novels in America have come from men in their middle or late thirties (Paul Bowles is 38).
In the appearance of "The Sheltering Sky," Paul Bowles' first novel. That is precisely the event to be celebrated On for those gifts that arrive by no other way than the experience and contemplation of a truly adult mind, now is obviously a perfect time for a writer with such a mind to engage our attention. DecemAn Allegory of Man and His Sahara By TENNESSEE WILLIAMSįter several literary seasons given over, mostly, to the frisky antics of kids, precociously knowing and singularly charming, but not to be counted
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