Travels: Collected Writings 1950-1993 By Paul Bowles, Sort Of Books, £14.99
Paul Bowles is most famous for his seminal novel The Sheltering Sky, and although much of his work features exotic locations, his travel writing has played second fiddle to his fiction. This book collects together more than 40 articles spread over half a century of wandering the globe.
Bowles appetite for travel seems unquenchable. When still a teenager in New York, he disappeared to Paris, telling no one of his plans, and at the age of 20 found himself in Morocco. This was to be the beginning of a lifelong love affair with the country and he settled in Tangier after the second World War.
Morocco takes up the lion’s share of the book – which is perfectly understandable if you’ve been there. The beauty is that Bowles retains his fascination throughout, and evokes the place, which as he notes so many travellers arrive at in search of “mystery”, with confident strokes of language, brilliantly realised passages of colour, intelligence and wit.
A smattering of thinkers and artists move ceaselessly in the background, perhaps best illustrated in his elegant slumming around the bohemian chic of a Parisian Left Bank populated by Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso and a gaggle of artists who never make it beyond the glorious French metropolitan gutter.
These are, first and foremost, terrific stories, and Bowles’s reasoning is perhaps the best advice for any travel writer: “What is a travel book? For me it is the story of what happened to one person in a particular place, and nothing more than that . . . there is nothing I enjoy more than reading an accurate account by an intelligent writer of what happened to him away from home.”
No lists, no recommendations, no drab information then; you will find little better advice than this, or few better writers in the genre than Paul Bowles. Stirring, admirable stuff that most of us have been trying to emulate.