THE DREAM AT THE END OF THE WORLD

PAUL BOWLES AND THE LITERARY RENEGADES IN TANGIER

by Michelle Green ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 1991

More a nightmare than a dream, the Tangier that Green (a senior writer for People magazine) depicts so vividly here attracted an international collection of expatriate artists, writers, aristocrats, disaffected rich and their parasites, lovers, criminals, addicts—all drawn by a free-money market, inexpensive living, and a permissive atmosphere. In 1947, Paul and Jane Bowles, talented writers, homosexuals, and married—``famous among the famous,'' as Gore Vidal claimed, but otherwise unknown—found a refuge in Morocco's exotic blend of worldly pleasures, decadence, spirituality, and occult. Over the next 40 years, they were joined or visited by Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Timothy Leary, Susan Sontag, Mick Jagger, New York intellectuals, European aristocrats, and American heiresses such as Barbara Hutton and her various consorts. While rioting and civil upheaval brought independence to Morocco in the 50's, the sybaritic expatriates, their activities only partly curtailed by new restrictions, wandered about the Casbah, Casablanca, Marrakech, and the Sahara, gathered periodically at the Parade bar, exchanged sexual partners, experimented with drugs, and created an entire culture of their own, hallucinatory and brutal, where deviance, eccentricity, extravagance, even insanity were the norm. Here Burroughs, living in a male brothel he called ``Villa Delirium,'' wrote ``routines'' that his friends, particularly Ginsberg, gathered into Naked Lunch, and Bowles wrote The Sheltering Sky, an autobiographical fiction that remained a cult novel until popularized by the 1990 film version that Bowles narrated. Working from letters, book reviews, and conversations, Green captures the pace, vitality, and immediacy of a good gossip, and the dynamics of time, place, people, and style that comprise cultural history. She also offers an enlightening context for the 1989 Malcolm Forbes birthday party that drew Henry Kissinger, William Buckley, and Barbara Walters to this ``depraved Eden'' at the end of the world. Entrancing history, then—and there is a great novel to be made of all this.

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1991

ISBN: 0-06-016571-5

Page Count: 400

Publisher: HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1991

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION