A Relentless Drive Toward Doom

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March 2, 1952

A Relentless Drive Toward Doom

By ROBERT GORHAM DAVIS

y a long, immense and reasoned derangement of all the senses," the young LET IT COME Arthur Rimbaud proclaimed eighty years ago, DOWN "the poet makes himself a seer." By seeking in himself "all forms of love, pain and madness," by By Paul Bowles. turning himself into "the great sick man, the great criminal, the great accursed," the poet "reaches the unknown; and if, maddened, he should end by losing understanding of his visions, at least he has seen them." It is in this spiritually perilous tradition of vision and intensity at any price--even at the price of a pointless and repellent murder--that Paul Bowles has written an appropriate successor to his first book, the bestselling "Sheltering Sky." The new one, "Let It Come Down," is more continuously exciting than its predecessor and has more shape and style as a novel. It drives its central character relentlessly toward doom, toward the final orgastic shudder, with the nightmare clarity, the hallucinative exoticism, of the best of Bowles' short stories. And as in the short stories, artistic power and inhumanity go together. The more convincingly horrible the event, the less real the person it happens to. When the professor of linguistics in Bowles' story "A Distant Episode," has his tongue cut out by Arab fanatics, the reader is completely persuaded that this must be what it feels like to lose a tongue. The humiliations which follow for the professor are as fascinating as they are terrifying. But the professor to whom it is all supposed to happen hardly exists at all. The diabolist, the seer of visions in "Let It Come Down," has nothing of the genius of Arthur Rimbaud, even though, like Rimbaud, he goes to Africa to seek adventure, to make a completely new life for himself. Nelson Dyar is a moderately young American who has been stuck in a
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A Relentless Drive Toward Doom

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bank clerk's job for ten years, and still lives at home with his father and mother in a state of progressive paralysis of will. He has read nothing, loved nothing, committed himself to nothing. In a vaguely Existentialist way, Bowles has tried to define the basic human situation by removing everything that makes a man human. The hero of "Let It Come Down" is not the Everyman of the old morality plays, but No-man, a living cipher, a moral idiot. Dyar has been brought to Tangier, in Morocco, by an old friend, Wilcox, to whom he had written in a sudden, desperate need to give his life character and meaning. But when he arrives, Wilcox, who runs some sort of mysterious agency in which he has promised Dyar a job, puts him off repeatedly, with sinister implications. While he is waiting to find out what Wilcox is up to, Dyar gets a rapid introduction to Tangier's international society. On every level Dyar experiences a mingling of Arabian and European cultures that brings out the worst of both. Within a few days he is elaborately involved with a remarkable assortment of women. He contends with a fat, forceful lesbian, Eunice Goode, for the possession of a subtly beautiful, foul- spoken Arabian dance-hall girl; he accepts money from a Russian agent, Madame Jouvenon, to whom he promises information; under the influence of hashish he makes violent love to the Marquesa de Valverde. When Wilcox finally gives him an assignment to smuggle a large sum of money, Dyar tries on his own to outdo in corruption and intrigue the whole corrupt, intriguing society to which he has been so freshly introduced. The results are as disastrous and exciting as one might expect. But "Let It Come Down" takes its character not so much from what Dyar does as from his state of mind and excitation of nerves when he does it. The Africa which so intensely reveals itself to him is the Africa of European decadence, the Africa of Andr Gide and Oscar Wilde. A hundred years ago Flaubert wrote in his travel journals descriptions of erotic dances by Arabian male transvestites and of love affairs with Arabian girls which anticipate completely some of the descriptions in Paul Bowles' two novels. The hero of "Let It Come Down" feels closest to communion with other men when he watches a bloody, masochistic knife-dance in an Arab cafe. It creates for him a world "which had not yet been muddied by the discovery of thought."

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A Relentless Drive Toward Doom

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The sources of Dyar's visions are also African or Arabian, and quite mindless--the smoking of kief on an empty stomach, the eating of hashish like candy, with strong tea after it. The Arab whom Dyar kills is in a rather different situation than the Arab who gets killed in Camus' novel, "The Stranger," but in both cases the death has philosophic rather than human meaning. The manner of the murder in "Let It Come Down" is doubly symbolic. It implies both perverted sexuality and specific hatred of the brain. Bowles describes Dyar's visions magnificently, especially when they become nightmarishly compounded with very real fear. But the derangement of the senses is always "reasoned," in Rimbaud's phrase. There is nothing obscure or surrealist in "Let It Come Down"; the writing is always perfectly lucid, the author always completely in control. Bowles is writing in a well- defined romantic-decadent mode with such a sharp reportorial eye for current realities that his story is fully engaging so long as we can keep from thinking about its philosophic intentions or about the character of the hero. The metaphysical and imaginative dimensions of the pathological visions are impressive as created by Paul Bowles. They are quite unaccountable in the lay figure Dyar to whom they are attributed and who is totally uninteresting when not under narcosis. Yet it is clear that the action of the novel is intended to be taken as a philosophical and even spiritual quest for "reality" on Dyar's part. There is an uncomfortable suggestion that Dyar's murderous hashish dreams are the only possible equivalents in our time for the Platonic delight in beauty, even for the beatific vision, and that a masochistic torture dance is the only equivalent for the redeeming sacrifice of love. We are expected to believe that these rootless, purposeless, irresponsible Americans, cut off from their own pasts and the traditions of their own country, and exposed to the worst aspects of a totally alien civilization which they have no real desire to understand, are somehow demonstrating the meaninglessness of modern life, the impossibility of creativity, the impossibility of love. The evidence is insufficient, especially when we have only the blank eyes of a Dyar to see it through. What "Let It Come Down" does demonstrate is Paul Bowles' talent for dealing with the macabre, the dreamlike, the cruel and the perverse in a genuinely imaginative way. As a comment on the human situation in Western civilization today, Paul Bowles' novel has exactly the same
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relevance as "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Castle of Otranto," and some of the more Freudian of Grimm's fairy tales. So taken, it has its place in a well defined literary tradition with deep psychological roots. But if we try to make it mean more than that, if we take it as a serious social or philosophical novel, then it seems malign and corrupting. Mr. Davis, Associate Professor of English at Smith College, is a frequent writer on modern American fiction.
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