The Review of Contemporary Fiction
An Invisible Spectator: A Biography of Paul Bowles by Christopher-Sawyer LuaçannoAnne Foltz
Christopher Sawyer-Luaçanno. An Invisible Spectator: A Biography of Paul Bowles. Grove, 1999. 502 pp. Paper: $15.00.
The paperback reissue of An Invisible Spectator is a welcome invitation to again consider Paul Bowles, one of our most enigmatic writers. An expatriate novelist, short-story writer, translator, and cultural commentator, Bowles entices his readers into fantastical worlds with simultaneously fascinating, terrifying, and compelling portraits of often ordinary people in exotic places.
Sawyer-Luaçanno traces Bowles’s less-known musical career alongside fellow composers Aaron Copeland and Virgil Thompson as an exploratory platform from which many of his later fictional themes emerge. Equally influential was Bowles’s relationship with wife and fellow writer Jane Bowles. Complicating their marriage was Jane’s lesbianism and Bowles’s own guarded sexual ambivalence. Only in a recent documentary (Let It Come Down) has he indicated a lifelong loathing of his own homosexuality. Sawyer-Luaçanno’s presentation is devoid of lurid accounts of sexual liasions; it strives to be an objective, respectful, and somewhat distanced account of places visited, people encountered, and mental illness manifested.
A direct reflection of his subject’s evasive nature regarding emotional display, the accessibility and clarity of Bowles’s emotional life begins to fade following Jane’s illness and death. This horrifying detachment is, however, the very stuff of which Bowles’s writing is made, and is succinctly carried over in this biographer’s portrait. As Bowles enters his nineties, this is an especially important representation of his life and work. Sawyer-Luaçanno accurately captures Bowles’s ear as a reflection