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When the first stories of Paul Bowles appeared in New York at the end of the 1930s critics noted the emergence of a remarkable new talent. Subsequently Bowles was to make his reputation on only a handful of  books: four novels and five collections of stories. But what novels and what stories! Stories that Gore Vidal considers “among the best ever written by an American, with few equals in the 20th century – even though he is odd-man out for American academics because he writes as if Moby Dick never existed”. Likewise his friend of many years Tennessee Williams claimed that Bowles was a better writer than Hemingway and Faulkner.

I had the good fortune to meet Paul Bowles in a cold, rainy winter in the middle 1980s in Tangier. I had just read his novels “Under The Sheltering Sky” and “Let It Come Down” and his collection of stories in “The Delicate Prey” and was already a convert to his works. After an exchange of several letters to establish the timing – for years he had no phone, no fax or such, only a post box at Tanger Socco - I spent a week in Tangier for an extended interview with the mystical cult figure.

I was as excited about meeting him as the many others who traveled to Tangier had been during the 1960s. However by the 1980s figures like Allan Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Truman Capote, Jean Genet and the Rolling Stones no longer crowded the Moroccan scene. Young people no longer made the pilgrimage to exotic Tangier to search for the strange man who lived in quiet exile among his Moroccan friends. The Tangier craze was over.

By then Bowles had been living in Tangier since 1947, the last 30 years in the same apartment just opposite the residence of the American Consulate on the hill of Marshan looking over the old town. He had suggested in his last letter that I drop by each afternoon, after he had finished his day’s work: he was then transcribing a group of his early songs for publishing in the United States.

When I arrived on the first afternoon at around six the tape of a piece for oboe by his friend Aaron Copeland was playing. Paul Bowles was waiting at the door of his fourth-floor apartment. A fire was blazing, the unpretentious Moroccan-European salon inviting. Beguilingly the elegant maestro did not appear mysterious. His warmth and simplicity contrasted with his exotic reputation and the unreal world of his art. It was the aura around him that was mysterious, not he the person. In the United States he was considered mysterious chiefly because little was known about him since he lived his life abroad and wrote little about the American experience.

My host first proposed a cup of  tea, only to discover he had no cooking gas. But in that moment his friend the Moroccan writer Mohammed Mrabet arrived, put in a full bottle of gas, and water was soon boiling. His Spanish speaking chauffeur then walked in and took a seat along the wall as if it were his assigned place. He was followed by two servants who set in cleaning rather ineffectually. Paul blithely didn’t seem to care.

While we were drinking tea and smoking kif - fresh kif-filled cigarettes were always drying by the fireplace as every afternoon in the Bowles household – the door banged open. Another Bowles literary discovery entered, Mohammed Choukhri, whose stories like those of Mrabet have been published in various languages. Choukhri presented Bowles with his latest essay on Jean Genet, which he on the spot dedicated to his friend, drank a cup of tea, smoked a kif cigarette, and hurriedly left.

Gertrude Stein

Unexpected entertainment was then offered by a “jilala” musician, the quaspah player, Abdalmalek, an illiterate for whom Bowles had promised to write a letter. Bowles explained to me that when a sick or depressed Moroccan says “I think I need to dance,” it means he needs “jilala” therapy. Abdalmalek  provides it. His music-therapy group plays the flute-like quaspah, bendir drums and bronze castanets called quarquaba until the frenetically dancing patient falls into a trance and leaves his body so that his saint can enter and clean house. Scenes like that appear not infrequently in Bowles literature.

“Probably no worse than many other treatments,” Bowles commented at the end of the impromptu 15-minute concert.

I never understood if Bowles had staged this Moroccan theater to impress the visiting journalist. I still doubt it.

Paul Bowles went to Morocco the first time in 1931, on the recommendation of his new friend, Gertrude Stein. “I had spent that spring in Berlin studying music with Aaron Copeland,” he recalled. “In Paris I told Gertrude that I planned to pass the summer in Villefranche. She found that idea frankly absurd.

Alice Toklas said: ‘Tangier!’ And Gertrude said: ‘That’s the right place.’ So Aaron and I came here together and rented a house. That summer he worked on his “Short Symphony” and I composed my first piece – “Sonata For Oboe and Clarinette” - that was played that winter in London.”

If that part of his life is often forgotten by his literary admirers, music was always important for Bowles. Yet contrary to some critics who noted the influence of music on his literature - the French critic, Marc Saporta, mentions the influence of American music forms like jazz and spirituals - Bowles said that he never felt that.

“I don’t have such highfaluting ideas. I just try to write as simply and clearly as possible. I’m not thinking about rhythm or music. I just try to get it into proper English. French critics haven’t a clue,” he added with a playful smile. “The French can’t play my music either.”

Nonetheless, during the 30s and 40s and occasionally afterwards Bowles was to compose a lot of music. Just to get some of this on the record: Bowles did the music for Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie,” “Sweet Bird of Youth,” “Summer and Smoke,” and “The Milkman Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore,” for William Saroyan’s  “Love’s Old Sweet Story,” Orson Welle’s “Dr. Faust” and others, for Arthur Koestler’s “Twilight Bar,” for Jose Ferrer’s film “Cyrano de Bergerac.” He composed a Mexican ballet and “Yankee Clipper” for the American Ballet Theater, an opera based on Garcia Lorca’s “Asi Pasen Cinco Anos” [1943] directed by Leonard Bernstein in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and an opera, “Yerma” [1958]. His compositions were performed in that period at Lincoln Center, which was to be his last visit to the United States.

[dropcap]L[/dropcap]ike a character from a classical novel, his was a precocious biography. He was 21 on that first visit to Tangier but he had already been exposed to the Old World two years earlier. “I then thought Paris was the center of the world and I wanted to be there. College in America was boring. One way or another I had to get out. Since I was under age and my parents refused to sign for my passport, I got one under false pretenses and shipped out to France in 1929. I worked in Paris as a telephonist and the only people I met were the surrealist Tristan Tzara and his wife….I was impressed by his wonderful collection of African art.”

The die was cast. Music studies with Copeland in New York and Berlin, with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. Young Bowles had already frequented an art school in New York and written poetry in college. “I knew I wanted to be in the arts but I didn’t know in which art.”

And in fact, until 1945, music was the chief field of the future writer, precisely in the period when critics were saying that music and literature should be combined. Later Gore Vidal was to see that combination of arts in Bowles’ stories as “something most writers don’t have, the result of which are his disturbing stories like nothing in English literature.”

In those years Paul Bowles remained the inveterate traveler – North Africa, Latin America, Asia – until his final escape in 1947 when he returned for good to his beloved Morocco. He went back to Tangier with a literary reputation. He was a writer. Three of his first stories in particular had caused that stir in the New York literary world – “Pages From A Cold Point,” “The Delicate Prey” and “A Distant Episode” – which proposed one of his main themes: how inhabitants of alien cultures regard creatures of the civilized world. In those stories he tells Poe-like stories of horror, told so gently however that you hardly realize the horror.

When I met him in Tangier, Paul Bowles was no guru. I didn’t think of him that way. It was more a question of involvement. And of a man torn between diverse worlds. He helped his friends – “I can never get enough of them,” he said – and they helped him to bridge the gap between those worlds. Involvement with Mrabet was a long-standing one. Bowles translated the Moroccan writer’s first collection of stories, “Love With A Few Hairs” [1968] and helped him with the six subsequent books. Mrabet  spent much time in Bowles’ apartment where he had his work desk.

Another evening: from downtown the walk uphill along the Boulevards Mohammed V Pasteur to the Marshan became familiar as was the warmth chez Bowles. The same dogs were always barking opposite his house. “Careful of those dogs,” he often warned me, “Packs of them right here in town.” When I asked him about the presence of dogs in his works he explained that he’d had a rabies scare after one bit him.

The fire was right, the teapot full and a row of kif cigarettes ready on the hearth when Bowles began recalling the old days in Tangier. “Morocco was a magic land when I first came. But it had changed radically when I returned in the 40s. It had become very Europeanized. After the war artists came here because of the monetary advantages and the cheap life.

“Tennessee Williams, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Alan Sillitoe, Cecil Beaton all passed through post-war Tangier; yet, there was never a real Tangier group. It was a fluid affair, with much coming and going. I was the only constant and I simply observed that movement. I was never a beat poet as some critics believe. I never felt close to Kerouac. I saw that group in New York and they came here for visits and I once took Allan Ginsberg to Marrakech but that doesn’t make me a beat poet. I knew them personally but I was not associated with the movement.”

Bowles seemed to enjoy reminiscing about old friends and that fantastic Tangier period that still has a limited literature: “Tennessee had lent his name to be used on the stationery of some ‘red network’ organizations and Senator McCarthy was breathing on his neck. In December of 1949 his agent asked me to get him out of the country, so we came here. He brought his car and we traveled to Fez and to south Morocco before he went on to Rome. He returned here many times though. You know, Tennessee was always rootless, he didn’t belong anywhere and had to move about. But he wouldn’t travel alone. Unlike me, the only good way to travel is alone.

“Then there was Daisy Valverde!” - a character in his novel about Tangier in the 1950s, Let It Come Down. “Daisy was mad. And very rich. Her wild parties were famous all over Europe. For one party she installed a whole Berber tribe in the ballroom and an entire village on the roof. After 1965 the hippies arrived! They came chiefly to smoke kif - or to look for LSD. Marrakech was the big attraction. They were romantics and felt at one with Moroccans … but they didn’t really know anything about them.”

Let It Come Down is Bowles’ most existentialist novel. A young American swept up in that Tangier life is attempting to establish his real identity in a world he sees as made of winners and losers. Alienated, with no character, no authority, no volition, he is a born loser. He commits a murder and that, ironically, is by accident, not by choice. High as a kite on majoun and kif, he confuses the ear of his sleeping friend with a banging door and drives a nail into it.

“That really happened in France,” Bowles said. “Sounded like a good book ending. Yes, I’m an existentialist, but not of the Sartrian type. [He by the way was the translator of Sartre’s play, “Huis Clos,” which he entitled “No Exit,” Daniel Halpern reports because of that phrase written over a subway gate that blocked his way.] I’m closer perhaps to Camus. I liked “L’Etranger.” I believe that that which is to happen will happen. In the early years I found it hard to write fiction because I couldn’t identify with the motivation of human beings. But then I don’t see man as naturally isolated, not any more than he wants to be.”

Yet, despite the daily visitors to his apartment that week, I thought of him as isolated. A hermit. In a permanent, self-imposed exile. He didn’t travel any more. He said that he only liked to travel with huge amounts of luggage, impossible today. So why move?

During those days I kept wondering where his ideas came from. Was he even an American writer? Or simply a writer who by chance wrote in English? The only thing he wrote about America was in his autobiography.

“Yes, I’m an American writer,” he claimed. “I loved the New York of the 1930s, until the FBI and later McCarthy began pestering me about my 20-month stay in the Communist Party in 1938-39. I always wanted freedom … chiefly freedom from my parents. Like many things in my life, I joined the Communist Party to spite my parents. That was the worst thing I could have done to them, except go to jail! I was never a Marxist. It was all a personal matter. No, I’m not de-Americanized. I’m delighted to be an American. Still I don’t write about American themes. What I remember of America is of three decades ago. But I can write about expatriated Americans because they don’t change much. Anyway I’ve never thought autobiographical material proper for fiction! My idea is to write about things I’ve never experienced.”

The Bowles artistic world is thus non-American. Alien. The setting is primitive, in the jungle or in the desert or on the edge of Europe. His tension results from the clash between civilized man and an alien environment. The Westerner is inevitably defeated by primitive man. For Bowles, modern man is lost. And therefore he is searching.

But in the jungle or in the desert he is not only lost but also a victim of the primitive environment. Like the sage linguistics professor in “The Delicate Prey”: savages cut out his tongue and make of him a dancing clown for their entertainment. Or in the novel, “The Spider’s House,” the 15-year old Amar of Fez wins out over the American writer.

Natural man is superior and defeats the neurotic product of technological society. Someone called Bowles’ modern-man protagonists “fellow-travelers of primitive society”: they search it out, love it, need it, but in the end are defeated by it. For Bowles they are two incompatible cultures. And that is his theme.

“Perhaps this has no significance,” he said and reached for another of the kif cigarettes that seem to keep him going. “I simply want to show how badly prepared the average Westerner is when he comes into contact with cultures he doesn’t know – or only thinks he knows. The more he tries to penetrate it, the worse it gets. Primitive man has retained things that western man has lost and can operate in natural surroundings. Americans are less prepared than Europeans in such circumstances because they think everyone must do it the American way. Therefore it’s hard for them to establish real contact with others. It’s a paradox that self-subsistent primitive man is more adapted for communal life than is dependent western man, whose attempts at communal life are disasters.

“Primitives have a communal life. No one owns anything. Everything belongs to all. This couldn’t work in advanced societies. As soon as personal property appears, you have to invent another system. Before arriving in the desert, Port – in “Under The Sheltering Sky” – said he didn’t need a passport to prove he is a member of mankind. But when he loses his passport traveling around in the desert, he is lost: he loves and needs the primitive world and seeks salvation in it, but he is demolished by the loss of his passport.  He says he is only half a man without it, that he no longer knows who he is. Like his wife, who likes to spread her things around the room and look at them; by observing familiar objects she regains her identity.

Dinner at Bowles’: He cooked a dinner of roast chicken and rice in a non-American kitchen, haphazardly, distractedly but with great delicacy, claiming that he cooks only to survive. I believed he liked the preparation and the intimate ceremony more than the actual consumption. Thin, wiry, resilient and underneath tough, he only nibbled at his food.
“I’ve had about every disease,” he claimed, “from typhoid to hepatitis to dysentery but I think I’m healthy. I don’t even want to think about illness for there are no doctors here and little medicine. I’d have to go abroad if I fell ill. If it comes, it comes, I don’t worry about it.” Let it come down was his philosophy.

He was sitting on the floor with his back to the fire while we dined from a low Moroccan table. The room was half dark, the logs crackled and we could hardly hear the rain, for me omnipresent in his literature – which he denied. Instead we talked about the desert, the setting of his first novel, Under The Sheltering Sky.

“I had written poetry about the desert before I visited it the first time. I had a feeling for it. It has always provided me with many materials. The desert for me is exciting, more romantic than the sea, hard to encompass in words. I had always imagined the desert with dunes every place; it isn’t like that at all. Few dunes, mostly wasteland.”

His desert is endless. In the same novel about an American couple in the Sahara, each is seeking – the minor characters too - himself in that primitive world. “They made the fatal error,” Bowles said rather distantly as if it no longer concerned him, “of treating time as non-existent. They imagined that nothing would ever change, that it didn’t matter if you did something this year, or in ten years. Perhaps those who live here a long time begin to think that way.

“But what can we do about time? It goes very fast and I’ll soon be dead. [He was in his late seventies but in fact lived a number of years afterwards.] I regret that our life span is limited but I can do nothing about it. When you get to the end you have to accept it.

“Despite the grim endings in my stories I’m not interested in death except in that it puts an end to life. Everyone shares that fate. I can’t really think about it because for me it is non-existence. I’m only interested in what can be seized by consciousness. Once that’s gone, there’s nothing left. If you think there is life after death then you can fear death. If not, then there is nothing to fear except the act of dying. You can hope for a quick death. That’s the moment when you’re most alone. Of course if one is not certain there is nothing afterwards, it’s another matter. You believe what you want. A matter of volition. I just think about how long it will take.

“I’ve never been tempted by suicide but I have thought about it. My wife Jane – the writer Jane Bowles – was sick for a long time before she died. She begged me to end it all for her. And I would have done it if there were no law against it for I believe in euthanasia.”

Volition is a word Bowles used frequently. However, not didactically. His existentialism, he said, derived from instinct rather than from active intellectual search. Yet he was not anti-religious as such. “Although religious ideas permeate everything, they have played little role in my life. I never had religious instruction as a child since my parents and grandparents were agnostics. I’m not even anti-Christian and I don’t think Christianity is negative; all religions offer something. Christianity interests me in the same way as do Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism or Islam. Islam is no better than Christianity.

“I think each religion is made for certain people. Religions, unlike invented political ideologies, sort of grew along with man. Religions are part of man. But if I say that all religions are interesting, in general I would say it’s better to leave them alone.”

I remember my feelings of nostalgia and a certain sense of incompleteness when I left Bowles’ apartment the last day. Nostalgia for the former times he experienced in his life; incompleteness for the little I had learned about this complex man. Paul Bowles, outwardly exquisitely polite and considerate, was distant from the world. He didn’t need it any longer.
“It’s dark and drizzling walking down from the Marshan,” I ’m reading from a faded draft of my interview with Paul Bowles. “A light fog hangs over the rooftops of the elegant El Minzah Hotel on Rue de la Liberté, one of Bowles’ locales. But he doesn’t go to such places anymore. No more trips to the desert. No more walks through the old cities. His life is now quiet and meditative. The Bowles path leads across the Zocco Grande into the labyrinth of his Tangier medina, to the Café Tingiz, ringed by a maze of passages, the Casbah above, the port below, the setting of “Let It Come Down”. Bowles knows every nook and corner of it. He doesn’t have to visit it anymore. Nor does he visit the great Fez medina, the background of “The Spider’s House.” They somehow belong to him.”

P.S. Like many writers of his generation, Bowles was interested in and wrote for the cinema. In a letter to me in Rome he later reminded me of the time he was holed up in a Rome hotel to write the dialogue for Visconti’s famous film, “Senso.” He wanted to set the record straight for me: “I shared credits on it with Tennessee Williams, whom Visconti called in afterwards to rewrite the love scenes because he found mine too objective and removed. That was all right with me; I left Rome and went to Istanbul.”

A few more words about Paul Bowles and the cinema world: shortly after my interview with Bowles appeared in Rome’s Espresso Magazine – one of the first interviews with the writer published in Italy  – I had the privilege of interviewing the film director, Bertolucci [1988] who said he was looking around for ideas for his next film, which he wanted to do in some exotic place. He had Africa in mind. I only mentioned Bowles’ book “Under The Sheltering Sky” and my recent interview with him, so great was my surprise when some time later Bertolucci announced he was going to do a film version of that novel, with Paul Bowles himself as consultant. In the end, Bowles, still active, an unwilling traveler, did travel some with the cast in the Sahara. Unfortunately I can’t say what Bowles really thought of the Bertolucci film entitled “Té nel deserto.” [Tea In The Desert.]

At the time I published the same interview with Paul Bowles on the cultural pages of the Dutch newspaper, NRC Handelsblad, under the title “Stranger In A Strange Land.” Since then books and many articles, like “The Last Existentialist” by the poet Daniel Halpern in the New York Times Book Review, have been published about this still mysterious American writer.

If the totality of Paul Bowles’ literary production is not voluminous, his works taken together nonetheless constitute a consistent statement about life – an accomplishment for any artist.

Gaither Stewart
Rome, Italy
Email: GaitherStewart@libero.it

Whose "national security" is this worm talking about? Certainly not that of the American people. The degeneracy of the corporate media, and its integration with the Deep State are now clear for everyone to see. (Provided you haven't been fully brainwashed by these selfsame organs of plutopropaganda.) Note that Newsweek is regarded and regards itself as a liberal bastion of journalism.

[dropcap]S[/dropcap]o it turns out it’s really really important for powerful people to be able to lie to us with impunity, you guys. I know this because an actual, literal spy told me that that’s what I’m meant to believe in an article published by Newsweek yesterday.

If you were wondering how long it would take the imperial propagandists to ramp up their efforts to explain to us why it is good for the Trump administration to prosecute WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange after we learned that sealed charges have been brought against him by the United States government, the answer is eight days. If you were wondering which of those propagandists would step forward and aggressively attempt to do so, the answer is Naveed Jamali.

To be clear, I do not use the word “propagandist” to refer to a mass media employee whose reliable track record of establishment sycophancy has propelled him to the upper echelons of influence within platforms owned by plutocrats who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, as I often mean when I use that word. When I say that Jamali is a propagandist, I mean he is a current member of the United States intelligence community telling Newsweek‘s readers that it is to society’s benefit for the US government to pursue a longstanding agenda of the US intelligence community in imprisoning Julian Assange.

“This is not reporting, this is not journalism and Assange is not a journalist providing analysis or investigative reporting— this is the hocking of stolen secrets, with no regard for the very real damage their disclosure does.” My latest for @Newsweek https://t.co/FdNJ1vRvZh

— Naveed Jamali (@NaveedAJamali) November 25, 2018

[dropcap]J[/dropcap]amali is currently a reserve intelligence officer for the United States Navy, and is a former FBI asset and double agent. He is also like many intelligence community insiders an MSNBC contributor, and is a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a think tank which has featured many prominent neoconservative war whores like Donald and Frederick Kagan, Max Boot, and James Woolsey. Any think tank with the words “foreign policy” in its title is nothing other than a group of intellectuals who are paid by plutocrats to come up with the best possible arguments for why it would be very good and smart to do things that are very evil and stupid, and Naveed Jamali sits comfortably there.

His Newsweek article, titled “Prosecuting Assange is Essential for Restoring Our National Security”, begins with the sentence “Full disclosure: I am not a fan of Julian Assange or Wikileaks,” and doesn’t get any better from there. The article consists of two arguments, the first being that since Assange is “not a journalist” he is not protected by the First Amendment from prosecution by the US government. This argument is bunk because (A) this is a made-up nonsense talking point since neither the US Constitution nor the Supreme Court have made any distinction between journalists or any other kind of publisher in press freedom protections, and (B) WikiLeaks has won many awards for journalism. The second argument is that it is very important for the US government to be able to hide any kind of secrets it wants from the American people.

And really that’s the only thing these paid manipulators are ever telling you when they smear Assange or argue for his prosecution: powerful people need to be able to lie to you and hide information from you without being inconvenienced or embarrassed by WikiLeaks. If they say it often enough and in a sufficiently confident tone, some trusting, well-intentioned people will overlook the fact that this is an intensely moronic thing for anyone to believe.

Forget Jim Acosta. If you’re worried about Trump’s assault on the press, news of a Wikileaks indictment is the real scare story. Matt Taibbi's latest https://t.co/0UB8d6GH4o pic.twitter.com/WtgQoFd3Ts

— Rolling Stone (@RollingStone) November 23, 2018

I’m going to keep answering this the same way: these charges almost certainly involve pre-2016 behavior, and you might want at least try to understand what that might mean, or why people like Jeff Sessions and Mike Pompeo were gunning for a case. https://t.co/su7mB6D3NY

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) November 23, 2018

I’m going to keep answering this the same way: these charges almost certainly involve pre-2016 behavior. So you might want to try to think about what that means. https://t.co/CYRFuaYhwY

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) November 23, 2018

I’m going to keep answering this the same way: this case almost certainly pre-dates 2016, and you might want to think about what that means. https://t.co/dYHzCJqwZs

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) November 23, 2018

I guess I have to keep repeating that this case almost certainly pre-dates 2016. It’s amazing how many people aren’t interested in big-picture legal issues if the protagonist is someone they don’t like. https://t.co/iNM5PRGBk8

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) November 23, 2018

[dropcap]C[/dropcap]ontrary to what US intelligence operatives would have you believe, the prosecution of Julian Assange by the United States government would indeed be disastrous for press freedoms around the world. A good recent essay by Matt Taibbi for Rolling Stone titled “Why You Should Care About the Julian Assange Case” breaks down exactly why everyone should oppose this administration’s aggressive pursuit of Assange, even if they hate him and everything he stands for. In terms of speech protection there is nothing that legally distinguishes an outlet from WikiLeaks from outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post, both of whom have published secret documents and information which was taken through illegal means. If Assange is successfully prosecuted for doing the same thing other mainstream publications do to hold power to account, there will be little stopping the US government from going after those types of outlets all around the world for publishing its secrets.

After Taibbi published his article, he spent a couple hours on Twitter explaining to Democratic Party loyalists over and over and over and over again that the charges Assange is facing almost certainly have nothing to do with the 2016 WikiLeaks publications, and rather relate to much earlier publications of a far more classified nature than a few Democrats’ emails. He had to do this because Russiagate conspiracy theorists have been shrieking that it’s #MuellerTime ever since news broke about the sealed charges, and now you’ve got the strange scene of liberals everywhere cheering on a Trump administration agenda which threatens to cripple the free press they claim to be protecting from the very administration that they are cheering for. The concept that the prosecution of someone they’ve been trained to hate has nothing to do with the thing they hate him for is inconceivable from within the walls of the binary narrative matrix that these people have become trapped in by establishment manipulators like Jamali.

Taibbi’s essay wraps up with the words, “Americans seem not to grasp what might be at stake. Wikileaks briefly opened a window into the uglier side of our society, and if publication of such leaks is criminalized, it probably won’t open again.”

He’s right. They don’t grasp it. Here’s hoping they do before it’s too late.

_____________________________

Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My articles are entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.

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By Bryan Farrell, Earth Island.org
First posted on Jan. 12, 2012

Indian Roots of the Term Speak of a History of Non-Violent Resistance

Photo courtesy Waging Nonviolence

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he Chipko movement (which means “to cling”) started in the 1970s when a group of peasant women in Northern India threw their arms around trees designated to be cut down.

A version of this article appeared in Waging Nonviolence

Show the slightest bit of concern for the environment and you get labeled a tree hugger. That’s what poor Newt Gingrich has been dealing with recently, as the other presidential candidates attack his conservative credentials for having once appeared in an ad with Nancy Pelosi in support of renewable energy. Never mind that he has since called the ad the “biggest mistake” of his political career and talked about making Sarah Palin energy secretary. Gingrich will be haunted by the tree hugger label the rest of his life. He might as well grow his hair out, stop showering and start walking around barefoot.

But is that what a tree hugger really is? Just some dazed hippie who goes around giving hugs to trees as way to connect with nature. You might be shocked to learn the real origin of the term.

The first tree huggers were 294 men and 69 women belonging to the Bishnois branch of Hinduism, who, in 1730, died while trying to protect the trees in their village from being turned into the raw material for building a palace. They literally clung to the trees, while being slaughtered by the foresters. But their action led to a royal decree prohibiting the cutting of trees in any Bishnoi village. And now those villages are virtual wooded oases amidst an otherwise desert landscape. Not only that, the Bishnois inspired the Chipko movement (chipko means “to cling” in Hindi) that started in the 1970s, when a group of peasant women in the Himalayan hills of northern India threw their arms around trees designated to be cut down. Within a few years, this tactic, also known as tree satyagraha, had spread across India, ultimately forcing reforms in forestry and a moratorium on tree felling in Himalayan regions.

Despite this powerful history of nonviolent resistance, we still consider tree hugger a derogatory term. Meanwhile, a current example of forest protection in Brazil, where the country’s environmental agency has a special ops team that hunts down illegal loggers, gets all kinds of glory. Not that it shouldn’t, considering Brazil has cut deforestation by nearly 80 percent since 2004. But do environmental heroes need to, as the BBC recently described Brazil’s forest agents, “wear military fatigues, with heavy black pistols slung casually on their thighs” in order to get any respect?

In Africa, there are several conservation organizations that have a shoot-to-kill policy when they see a suspected poacher. Private security firms in Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Malawi provide military-style protection for the iconic animals that Western tourists flock to see. While some have argued in support of these desperate measures–pointing to the dramatic rise in poaching in recent years–the “shoot first and ask questions later” approach has led to the deaths of locals, who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. These incidents of course lead to resentment toward conservation, which has been shown to be most effective when local communities are involved in the process.

Not surprisingly, people want to protect the land they live on. And like the Bisnhois and people of the Chipko movement, they are often willing to lay down their lives for it–armed only with their own two arms.

Asheville post office, 1900.

“I think no one could understand Thomas Wolfe who had not seen or properly imagined the place he was born and grew up,” wrote Maxwell Perkins, Wolfe’s editor at Scribner’s Sons. “Asheville is encircled by mountains. The trains wind in and out through labyrinths of high passes. A boy of Wolfe’s imagination imprisoned there could think that what was beyond was all wonderful – different from what it was where there was not enough of anything for him.”

Thomas Wolfe’s fictional town of Altamont, that is, Asheville, was a town of 50,000 people, at an altitude of 2,100 feet, ringed by the Blue Ridge, Pisgah and Newfoundland mountains. That Asheville, today a number one tourism and retirement site, has always had a magic attraction.

In Wolfe’s time every other house hung out a “tourist rooms for rent” shingle. Sumptuous hotels like the Grove Park Inn overlooking the city, the Biltmore Castle modeled on those of Bavaria’s “Mad Ludwig,” the East’s highest peak of Mount Mitchell, the Cherokee Indians, trout-filled rivers and a four-seasoned climate make it special. Cosmopolitan, the town is a major arts and cultural Mecca, once labeled “Little Paris.” The Black Mountain School of Arts became internationally famous under the direction of Josef Albers, attracting teachers like Willem de Kooning, John Cage, Merce Cunningham and the French – Russian writer, Kirill Chenkin.

Wolfe’s Asheville was sophisticated. It attracted visitors from the Antebellum plantations of the Deep South, the rich from Florida, and puzzling New Yorkers. Scott Fitzgerald came from Hollywood to be near his wife Zelda confined in the Highlands Hospital. “Scotty” titillated with his antics guests at the plush Grove Park Inn where he lodged, while Glenn Miller played swing in the Battery Park Hotel. Asheville was a hidden “in” place.

Raising the flag in Asheville, 1918.

Such was the setting. The town of the 20s, 30s and 40s Wolfe wrote about was divided into three socio-economic groups—the rich in exclusive areas around the lakes, in the forests and on the mountainsides; the middle-class and poor whites in wood frame houses in town; and blacks segregated in wood shanties in niggertown.

That’s the town Wolfe seemed to attack in his masterpiece, Look Homeward Angel, published in 1929 when he was 29 years old. His over 200 characters were hardly disguised. Ashevillians of the day were furious if they were identified in the book or chortled about the others if they escaped notice. Anticipating their anger, Wolfe never returned home again until 1937, while the book was officially banned in Asheville.

Thomas Wolfe was one of the most autobiographical writers of the 20^th century. Two Wolfean images remain in literary memory: his trains and niggertown. Marvelous descriptions of one, racism in the other. Wonderful trains of escape out of the mountains that carried him to New York. Trains like the Carolina Special and the Asheville Express that brought him back.

His niggertown, that is, the black ghetto in the Asheville downtown earned him a racist label for all the things said or left unsaid—a reputation from which he never escaped. Hs racism was inbred. As a result of his epoch. As a product of his upbringing. Not a racism based on racial hatred, but simply a society of two races symbolized by the two water fountains, one for white, one for colored, that once stood on Pack Square near his house.

Six feet six and 240 pounds, Wolfe ate and drank and consumed life in huge portions. He wrote the same way. There is little tranquillity in his works. For him life was a desperate affair. He attacked life. His art was shouted at the top of his lungs. His favorite words were furious and savage. His world reeled about him. Life was a demonic dance. Of his own creative process, he wrote: “The words were wrung from him in a kind of bloody sweat, they poured out of his finger tips, spat out of his snarling throat like writhing snakes; he wrote them with his heart, his brain, his sweat, his guts; he wrote them with his blood, his spirit; they were wrenched out of the last secret source and substance of his life.”

His work has been called “a vast but incomplete saga of one man’s pilgrimage on earth. A saga so formless that the term novel can be applied to it only with extreme caution. So monumental that it exploded the covers of four vast books in which it was imprisoned.”

For Wolfe the separate parts of his writing formed portions of a great whole. He wanted to put one man on record. And through that person represent America. Yet, his central theme was eternally the loneliness of the individual – the stranger, the wanderer, lost in the complex currents of time. Wolfe himself said he was dealing with 150 years of time, 2000 characters of every racial and social class of America.

“The book on which I have been working for the last 2-3 years is not a volume but a library,” he wrote in a letter of 1932. In 1934, he wrote two long novels, really the same book, Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time And The River, and five short novels.

In 1936, he traveled to Germany, a country he thought he loved. But once there his eyes were opened to Nazism. His stay in a Munich pension in Amalienstrasse and the beating he took at the Oktoberfest left an imprint on him. He then wrote the truth about Hitler’s Germany in his novella I Have A Thing To Tell You [Nun Will Ich Ihnen Was Sagen], written in the crisp Hemingway style that he admired.

Between 1936 and his death in 1938 he wrote a huge manuscript from which his then editor, Edward Aswell of Harper’s, assembled two novels – The Web and the Rock [the south and the north, the feminine and the masculine] and You Can’t Go Home Again [published posthumously and difficult to digest today!], seven short novels and many short stories. These shorter works contradict anti-Wolfe criticism that he had no control. As in his letters that read like perfect short stories he showed his craftsmanship, focus and artistic control.

His were gigantic works. In the first scene of Of Time And The River at the Asheville railroad station he held the suspense for over 30,000 words. Yet he recognized the need for cuts and always agreed: he knew he had no time for revision.

Some critics have found Wolfe’s voice less southern than 19^th century English romantic. He was not trying to come to terms with the South. He was a prisoner between a search for a tradition and his attempt to escape from any limitations at all. His goal was to describe all of American society. The South was the flavor. The result of his attempt was violent and explosive just as his South was and is violent and explosive. Fundamentalist, vindictive, warmongering America speaks today with a southern accent.

Wolfe always retained his deep feelings for Asheville, the cradle of his world. When he tried to come home in 1937 he took a cabin in the outskirts of town. He saw friends and threw great parties but like the eternal stranger he never really returned.

He saw life as a thing of “becoming.” And he was always starting over. Time itself stood at the center of the mystery of experience. Each scene, each person had to be placed in time in order to have meaning; isolated they had little value. In The Story of a Novel he breaks down his time into three types: present time, of people moving forward to the immediate future; past time, the accumulated impact of man’s experience so that each moment of life is conditioned by all that one has experienced up to the moment; and immutable time, the time of rivers, mountains, oceans, the earth, the unchanging universe of time compared to the transience of man’s life.

A former Asheville Wolfe specialist, Kenneth Brown, once called Thomas Wolfe the Tchaikowsky of writing. “Even though Tchaikowsky was a good orchestrator and Wolfe was not a good organizer, they were in the same vein. You cannot mistake anything Wolfe wrote. He has a stamp. Like Dostoevsky who fascinated Wolfe! At the time the Russian writer was still unheralded and disreputable, he was Wolfe’s model. Wolfe once wrote a dozen pages about his experience of reading Brothers Karamazov. “Joyce,” says Brown, “was more skilled. Wolfe’s writing was a great outpouring of ideas. He gave the reader the sensation of living through a continuous virtuoso performance. To read him you must accept it all in order to get to the gold his works contain. The only way to get it is to read it all.”

Wolfe: Not quite beloved by critics.

Critic Bernard DeVoto initiated a great anti-Wolfe campaign in 1936 in an article in Saturday Review entitled “Genius Is Not Enough,” in which he lambasted the excesses and deficiencies of Wolfe’s first two novels. DeVoto argued that Wolfe lacked the maturity and discipline to achieve real art. As if personally offended at his lack of restraint, critics spoke of the neurotic side of Wolfe’s writing: He wrote in a compulsive frenzy. He did not know how to compose. John Peale Bishop concluded that, “he achieved the utmost intensity of which incoherent writing is capable.” Alfred Kazin labeled the writing “an imperial maladjustment” and his imagery “swollen and turgid.” Wright Morris called Wolfe’s work “a river of clichés, nouns and soaring adjectives,” repeating the charge that “appetite and raw material are not enough.” The English critic, Pamela Hansford Johnson, in “Thomas Wolfe and the Kicking Season,” while admitting that critics sometimes gang up on writers, writes that “Wolfe had almost all the virtues of major novelists except good taste and power of organization,” and that “he was not only an adolescent like us: he was a sillier adolescent and at his worst makes us blush.”

Wolfe was hit hard by the critics. His reactions appeared pettish in later writings, like his play on words with DeVoto’s name- DeVoto Blotto – to signify his contempt for despised critics. Yet the fact that Perkins let Wolfe convince him to retain those passionate flights in his work made of Perkins one of America’s most famous editors.

American critics have always had precise ideas about how novels should be written, being oriented toward form, poise and orthodox sophistication that cannot tolerate the country bumpkin - which Wolfe was. Academics tend to avoid him like the plague, unforgiving of the fact that he wrote like Thomas Wolfe.

Not only the Ashevillians who peopled Look Homeward, Angel worked against Wolfe. People there who never read a book in their lives joined in the outrage against native son-traitor Thomas Wolfe and his family. I once asked the elderly father of a boyhood friend, who had a garage just behind the Wolfe house, what The Old Kentucky Home—Dixieland in the novel—was like in the 1930s and 40s. He said it was a filthy pigsty and the whole family pigs … a bunch of drunks and nuts.

Yet, Thomas Wolfe was much admired by many other writers. Pat Conroy, a hopeless Wolfean, writes in his introduction to the Scribner Classics edition of Of Time and the River that “that’s all right, [the critics who despise Wolfe, he meant]. They are just critics, and he is Thomas Wolfe.” William Faulkner rated him number one among significant modern American writers—before Dos Passos, Steinbeck and Hemingway.

Faulkner underlined that Wolfe wrote on a grand scale. He was audacious. A more learned and mature person would never have attempted what he did. His writings sound like bluster and bravado. But he believed it. He was the ultimate romantic. Youth loved him for that, because he was speaking for them. He still appeals to some young as do Carson McCullers, J.D. Salinger, and William Golding.

For Faulkner the problem was to discern quality among imperfection. “We all fail,” he observed, “but Wolfe made the best failure because he tried the hardest to say the most.”

Wolfe was the chief reason for Scott Fitzgerald’s attraction to Asheville. He was so closely linked to Asheville from the time he brought his wife Zelda to the Highland Hospital on the advice of H.L. Mencken that he was considered a resident until his death in 1940. Zelda then stayed on in the hospital until she died in the hospital fire that Ashevillians believed she herself set. Legend has it that Scotty went to the public library quite drunk one day in 1937. When he was told that because of budgetary limitations the library had no books by native son and bad boy Thomas Wolfe, he rushed to a bookstore, bought two copies of Wolfe’s banned novels and slammed them down on the library table. The library’s Board of Directors met and took the historic decision to put Wolfe on its shelves. So was born the story that Scott Fitzgerald rehabilitated Wolfe in Asheville and really started the Wolfe Collection, the pride of the Pack Memorial Library today.

William Styron remarked that it would be difficult to exaggerate the effect Wolfe had on youth and especially on those from small-town, southerly backgrounds. Himself from Virginia, Styron said that Wolfe influenced him to become a writer. Perhaps no southern writer expressed Wolfe’s total, all-consuming influence on him more than the young Pat Conroy who admitted that Thomas Wolfe took his boyhood by storm. Wolfe simply transmitted to him his fire. “Ride the trains with Thomas Wolfe in this book [Of Time and the River] and you will never look at trains the same way again,” Conroy writes. His mother, after reading Look Homeward, Angel, urged her son to become “a Southern writer.”

The last part of the 20th century saw a change in Wolfe criticism. His friend and literary agent, Elizabeth Nowell, wrote a predictably positive biography in the 1950s. Andrew Turnbull published a balanced biography in the1960s. Then rehabilitative articles and essays appeared. His name spread abroad. Meanwhile, his books have never been out of print. Beautiful new editions now stand on the shelves of Barnes and Noble throughout America. Wolfe is the trend today.

Maxwell Perkins wrote: “Whatever happened, Wolfe would have been what he was. Those mountain walls, which his imagination vaulted, gave him a vision of an America with which his books are fundamentally concerned. He spoke of the artists of America – how the whole color and character of the country was completely new – never interpreted; how in England, for instance, the writer inherited a long accretion of accepted expression from which he could start. Wolfe needed a continent to range over. And his place was America. I believed he opened it up as no other writer ever did for the people of his time and for the writers and artists and poets of tomorrow. Surely he had a thing to tell us.”

Thomas Wolfe died of brain tuberculosis in Baltimore on September 15, 1938, 17 days short of his 38^th birthday. He lies at the hilltop in Asheville’s landmark Riverside Cemetery next to transplanted Ashevillian, O. Henry. Over the years a Wolfe cult has developed. In Asheville, Thomas Wolfe has been institutionalized. There is the Thomas Wolfe City Auditorium, the Thomas Wolfe Playhouse, The Thomas Wolfe Collection used by scholars from everywhere, and the old Wolfe house, the “Old Kentucky Home,” is a shrine. Yet, despite all the rhetoric he is remembered in Asheville more for his world-wide reputation than for his works.

I personally agree with the critics; I find him unreadable today. But, after all, an important voice in our America of today.

—Gaither Stewart

Rome, Italy