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(Rome)
[dropcap]I[/dropcap] have wondered if the German Field-Marshal Friedrich Paulus after his defeat and capture by Russians at Stalingrad in February 1943 really changed when as a prisoner of war in Soviet Russia he joined the National Committee For A Free Germany and the anti-Fascist Union of German Officers. Were his words sincere when he broadcast anti-fascist messages to Germany over Radio Moskau? Did he betray his entire background, his military career and the homeland he had fought for in order to save his life? Was he a traitor to Germany, to his beloved wife and to himself?

Readers may wonder why an article about a German General today, seventy-five years since the battle of Stalingrad. The answer is: many historians agree that Stalingrad was the turning point in World War II, making the failure of the German invasion of Russia ineluctable and the collapse of Nazi Germany, Hitler’s Thousand-year Reich, inevitable. In June 1941 Operation Barbarossa had begun in great fanfare and optimism in Nazi Germany. German blitzkrieg had already conquered most of West Europe. The German military machine seemed invincible. So now blitzkrieg was loosed on Germany’s erstwhile partner in the division of Poland, the USSR: first Nazi Germany’s mighty artillery, then the Luftwaffe’s Stukas and Messerschmidts and Henkels zooming eastwards with their loads of bombs made in Germany, the ferocious Tiger panzer tanks crushing everything between Poland and the heart of Soviet Russia, the Wehrmacht’s unstoppable infantry mopping up, while the SS men busily shot and hanged the Slav Untermenschen left behind. Especially Jews and Red Army commissars. We will be in Moscow by Christmas, the Führer gloated.

But then came the stall at the very gates of Moscow and Leningrad. Winter set in. German supplies did not arrive. Russia was not a cakewalk after all. Yet Paulus and his panzer divisions raced toward the Russian oil fields in the Caucasus. Thousands of Germany’s best young men lost their lives but Paulus’ panzer divisions were still undeterred on their flight eastwards. Final victory would be achieved quickly once Russia’s oil supplies were cut off.

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Then on his maps Hitler saw Stalingrad. Right on Russia’s supply routes. There stood the city on the Volga, the city named for his enemy-in-chief. He wanted that city first of all. Thus Hitler lost his bet, Paulus lost his army, and Stalingrad was lost to the Russians who won World War II there on the River Volga. In Stalingrad. After that epic battle Russians could laugh at the puny Anglo Normandy invasion … chiefly so the Allies could share in the booty that was Germany. Russians won the war and changed the flow of history for which the USA has never forgiven them. It was not supposed to play out with Russia’s victory.

[dropcap]B[/dropcap]ut my question about a human being remains: Did Field-Marshal Paulus undergo an epiphanic transformation? Did he cross over to the victorious enemy? Did the meticulous man change? Did the man who commanded the 300,000 soldiers of Hitler’s famed Sixth Army of whom only 5000 returned to Germany after World War II change? Did the man who loved family, Germany and Beethoven, in the end betray his Fatherland and everything he loved? Or, was Field-Marshal Friedrich Paulus—after sending tens and hundreds of thousands of men to their deaths in the Stalingrad debacle—after all a coward? Hitler named General Friedrich Paulus Field Marshal in the last hours of the catastrophe, not as a reward but as an invitation to suicide: no German Field-Marshall in history had ever fallen live into enemy hands. But Paulus did not die in Stalingrad.

Since reading the section about Paulus and Stalingrad, “The Last Field-Marshal”, (page 328-410 in the Penguin edition) of William T. Vollmann’s epic Europe Central, I have been asking myself that question: Did Paulus really change? Or did he live the rest of his life in a lie just to prolong his existence—apparently miserable—for a few more years? If not, what are the real reasons for his betrayal? After a life of obedience to Prussian militarism first and then to Adolf Hitler, did he truly become anti-Nazi and anti-war after his capture by Russian troops?

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[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he question is not rhetorical. Friedrich Paulus faced a dilemma much greater than ordinary people face in life. He was a military man. A Prussian soldier. Before and during the battle of Stalingrad he was faithful to “his” Führer. To his people. To his beloved wife whom he wrote daily letters of love and devotion; and yet whom he betrayed: she spent years in the Dachau concentration camp for his defection to the Communist Slavs.

Paulus, I believe, was a timid man. Reserved. Uncertain of himself. I find it difficult to believe he was truly a coward, although his external life did change dramatically remarkably soon after his capture by Russian troops. Was it then normal human fear that changed the man who commanded hundreds of thousands of soldiers and whose decisions conditioned the outcome of World War II?

Declassified Stasi documents describe Friedrich Paulus as an energetic and ambitious young man born in 1890 in the village of Guxhagen in the German state of Hessen, the son of an accountant. After brief studies at famous Marburg University, at the age of nineteen he enrolled in the army, the Deutsches Heer of the former German Empire and fought WWI in offices and planning sections. He remained in the Reichswehr of the Weimar Republic, rising steadily through the ranks, a cold military professional; he never joined the Nazi Party. In the Weimar period he trained Russian officers in Germany at which time he met the future Russian General Tukhachevsky who, according to Stasi, once told Stalin presciently: “When Paulus is no longer needed in Germany, we can use him.” Meanwhile Paulus married the daughter of Romanian aristocrats and had three children. When the Nazis arrived in power in 1933, Paulus remained the professional soldier, becoming one of the non-political generals, “courageous and calm”, although in the Nazi era he became a General he was allegedly reluctant to make great decisions without the approval of his Führer.

And so it was at Stalingrad. When he was finally encircled by Russian armies and his own generals urged an organized breakout of the encirclement, he tried to follow Hitler’s orders: Fight to the last man. He vetoed the breakout proposal but did not fight to the last man. Lying in his cot in his headquarters in the cellars of Stalingrad’s huge Univermag department store he declared himself a “private person” and thus not a prisoner of war. He and his generals were taken to Moscow for interrogation and on August 8, 1944 , six months after Stalingrad, he broadcast over Radio Moscow an appeal to German people charging Hitler with the terrible war. He also testified in the Nuremberg trials against German Generals Jodl and Keitel. In Moscow he was rewarded: he lived in a luxurious dacha with servants.

After Stalin’s death in 1953 Friedrich Paulus was allowed to settle in Dresden in the German Democratic Republic in the East, also there in a villa but under 24-hour Stasi supervision. He met military officers of East and West and was active in a movement against West German rearmament and the Federal Republic of Germany in the West. From 1953-56, as he lived in Dresden, he worked as the civilian chief of the East German Military History Research Institute. His trajectory was approaching its end. In late 1956 he developed amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and became progressively weaker. ALS is usually called Charcot's Diease in France, Lou Gehrig's disease in the US, honoring its most famous victim, the baseball New York Yankees star. He died within a few months, in Dresden, on 1 February 1957, 14 years and one day after his surrender at Stalingrad.

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I read German writing and the archives of STASI, State Security, or Staatssicherheit about Field-Marshal Paulus. And I pondered the act of crossover from one ideology to another. Crossover for him would have meant changing from everything he had yet experienced in his military and family life to a new morality. Crossover points unwaveringly at transformation. Transformation is more than mere change, a different matter altogether. Though change makes us uneasy and anxious, we are still capable of returning to our original state. Even the change from a familiar place to another may make us feel uneasy. For we have lost a point of reference, a sense of belonging. That sensation of loss triggers our nostalgias. That loss can become a black hole in our existence. So though I feel sorry for the Field-Marshal, I still have not decided what I believe moved Friedrich Paulus.

Crossover is no less difficult than the breakout from Russian encirclement about which Field-Marshal Paulus could not decide. Yet I don’t believe he made the crossover any more than he risked the breakout that time in disobedience of his Führer’s orders. On the other hand he did not commit suicide as Hitler ordered and neither he nor his soldiers fought to the last man; they went into captivity. Perhaps Field-Marshal Paulus decided not to decide. Not out of cowardice, I don’t believe. The human mind is complex. And his times were difficult times; the decisions were greater than those most of us must make in our lives. Once a decisive man, he lost that capacity in the magnitude of his time and place. His situation was greater than he was. And then, again, the human mind is complex.

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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.

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.”

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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.

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“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

A world in which Pinochet Is Better Than Communists!

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Special to The Greanville Post—
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[dropcap]P[/dropcap]remise: Reporting on the still unresolved abduction and murder of statesman, Aldo Moro, by the Red Brigades back in 1978—or in their name—the Rome sometimes left-wing investigative magazine, Espresso, reported that the USA and many European leaders considered Premier Moro’s project to bring the Italian Communist Party (PCI) into the Rome government destabilizing and of the utmost danger to European security. On both sides of the Atlantic, Premier Moro was considered an obstacle to be removed at all costs.

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Today, forty years later, Europe (this time the European Union, EU, is perplexed as to what to do about Italy. Yesterday, Communism threatened in Italy; today, Fascism is taking root in that land south of the Alps where the lemon trees bloom. Yesterday, European nations feared that Italian Communism was contagious; today, Italian Fascism is instead part of a spreading and contagious Fascism, of which a full-blown Fascist Italy would be the leader: the disease of Fascism spreading from the focal point in Ukraine, to Poland, and south to Hungary, and southwest to Italy, Europe’s third economy, the world’s seventh or eighth, while fascistic movements in neigboring countries grow.

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In January of 2018, four decades after Moro’s murder in which the USA was surely involved, the US government opened to the public 372 secret cables between the US Embassy in Rome and the State Department in Washington about the Affaire Moro. Certainly a small number for a case of such relevance: the murder of the Prime Minister of one of the chief US vassal states. Washington must have thousands of still secret communications between the State Department and the US Rome Embassy concerning Premier Aldo Moro.

Nonetheless, 35 files divulged by Wikileaks and Espresso sufficed to reveal the sordid nature of US international relations of that historically recent past and permit the reconstruction of Washington’s fear of the Communists of the PCI led then by Enrico Berlinguer and its entrance into the Rome government of 1978.

Espresso Magazine cited a cable of January 1978 which describes a Christian Democratic leadership moving “slowly but inexorably in the direction of more and more concessions” to the force of a Communist party supported by one-third of the Italian electorate and the powerful left-wing trade unions. Moro’s so-called “historic compromise” of the Christian Democrat government with the dreaded Communists infected not only the air of the Italian peninsula but also faraway lands beyond the Alps and Italy’s seas.

Governments of France and Spain—with their strong Communist parties to deal with—were uneasy at the time, aware that they were not immune to contagion from a Communist-leaning Italy. In that fateful year of 1978 the government in Paris confessed extreme concern: “If the PCI enters the government in Rome before French elections in March, there would be a deep echo in France.” According to Espresso the US Ambassador in Paris wrote to the State Department that the Secretary General at the Elysée Palace blamed the Italian Christian Democratic Premier Aldo Moro “who is convinced there is no other political solution today in Italy without the PCI.” Likewise the then German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt was critical of Moro and his agreements with the Communists.

When then American diplomats (and CIA, which at the time claimed it “ran things in Italy”) spoke with the insiders of Italian politics such as the prominent right-wing journalist Indro Montanelli about the concern in the US and European capitals they concluded that the situation in Rome was calamitous and would spread like flood waters across Europe.

Montanelli, the PCI and Pinochet
The popular Italian historian, writer, journalist, Indro Montanelli, preferred the Fascist General Pinochet at the helm of the Rome government rather than Communists. In a cable with the title “Montanelli sees blood in arrival”, US diplomats reported to Washington the “tactics” proposed by Italy’s ambiguous right-wing journalist, so beloved by Liberals: he suggested blackmailing the Christian Democratic Party (DC) which was about to make concessions to the Communists; force Berlinguer to return to hardline policies which would surely ignite a civil conflict in which the PCI would be destroyed. Blackmail? The DC would be terrified by threats to reveal to the public the US funding for that party since WWII, while the threat of the PCI’s return to its revolutionary roots was real to most people.

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Montanelli saw blood flowing in the streets of the Bel Paese. Indeed, a difficult time for all. But, he concluded, the PCI would be defeated. Such was his fervent dream. The mystery however, even according to Montanelli, is what would then happen within a victorious Christian Democracy. Perhaps Italy would create a “democracy like that of General Pinochet in Chile with a strong military component. A hellish prospect,” US diplomats reported in January of dramatic 1978 … BUT still better than a governmental alliance with the Communists. According to the famous journalist Montanelli, “an authoritarian government of the right would be more desirable than a government with communists.” At that point the die was cast. Moro had to be eliminated.

Indro Montanelli described himself as an “anti-communist, anarcho-conservative”. During the Fascist era he supported Italian colonialism in East Africa and Libya: he was a Fascist though he acquired the designation of “post-Fascist or neo-Fascist” in the post-war when official Fascism was outlawed. As a journalist he tried to disengage himself from public affairs and declared himself and his newspaper, Il Giornale, supporters of the “little man”, something like the class on which President Trump finds his base today. Montanelli obscured the difference between Fascism and anti-Fascism (the antifa of today) and between right and left as per the nouveaux philosophes like Bernard-Henri Lévy in France. Thus he shared with them the creation of a gray zone between the leading ideologies of last century.

Of March 16, 1978, the day the Italian statesman was abducted by the Red Brigades and his four-man bodyguard massacred, when all of Italy was in tumult—media, police, people—not one single cable leaving the US Embassy on Rome’s Via Veneto was made available, The missing cables that could explain the Italian triangular mysteries reigning in America’s complex vassal state last century: the true identity of the still beloved Red Brigades of 1978; the truth about American-linked (read financed and guided by Washington) DC-led government of Italy; and the dire future of Europe’s biggest Communist Party, the PCI.

The ensuing situation related to three “parties”: the “armed party” of the Red Brigades and those great powers they represented; the US-supported and run Christian Democracy; and the Italian Communist party with one-third of the national electorate behind it. I have placed the Red Brigades (BR) in the first position since they appeared as the principal actors-instruments—and the Lee Oswald-like patsy in the Moro assassination.

The original Red Brigadists had been infiltrated, arrested and safely tucked away in Italian penitentiaries. Some years afterwards, one of its two original founders, Alberto Franceschini, told me in my Rome apartment that the Italian secret services could easily have “arrested us all years earlier but we were convenient and left in place.” As ISIS is today, I would add. The rump of the BR after the arrest of the original Brigadists was under US control. The leadership of the new Brigades had become an asset of CIA and Italian secret services.

Behind the scenes, much of the “terrorism” by right and left organizations raging in Italy and Germany was orchestrated by the NATO-organized Gladio secret army and the P2 secret masonic lodge headed by the self-vaunted Fascist Licio Gelli on which, like the Bilderbergers of today, top Italian leaders of all shades were members. Therefore it is no longer a surprise that in early 1978 the CIA, Italian secret services and their rump Red Brigades tool pulled off the abduction of the decade. After a farcical two months-long manhunt while official Italy hypocritically debated whether or not to negotiate Moro’s release with the BR, the Premier’s body was found stuffed into the trunk of a car, left, ironically, a few steps from Communist Party headquarters near Piazza Venezia in the center of Rome. The CIA had so decreed.

After Moro’s abduction and the slaughter of his escort, Montanelli wrote in his Il Giornale Nuovo on March 17, 1978: “Naturally we hope this tragic adventure will end in the best of manners. But as Italian citizens we cannot and must not offer the spectacle of a State that negotiates its prestige, its authority, its duties with ideological criminals just because the survival of one of its exponents is at stake. The higher the political exponent, the more necessary it is that they are subjected to the common rule: one does not negotiate with terrorists.” So Montanelli, who allegedly escaped execution in German Nazi jails in miraculous if not suspicious ways—maybe himself a snitch, some suspect—condemned Moro to die for a yet to be executed plan.

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he Christian Democrats had been in power since 1946, put there at an enormous, incalculable cost to the American taxpayer.  After already over thirty years in power, their rule continued, longer than the official Fascism of Mussolini. Falling governments, newly constituted government coalitions and Prime Ministers lasted an average of eight months. Giulio Andreotti was Prime Minister seven times and spent sixty years in Parliament during which time he was accused and subsequently acquitted of cooperation with the Sicilian mafia and became famous for his quips, such as: “Power wears out those who don’t have it.” Il potere logora chi non ce l’ha.

No less than their US financiers, the main body of the DC could never consider the idea of Communists in their government. Moro had to go: no negotiations with terrorists was the hypocritical decision. In reality, the decision had to have arrived from higher levels. That is, from Washington. But since the BR had been disowned by the Communist Party almost from the start, whose terrorists were then the Red Brigades? The answer is: the Red Brigades then belonged—maybe not anima e cuore, heart and soul—to Italian secret services and to CIA. And that remains an important point. Because of the Cold War it was easy for Christian Democrat-CIA power in Germany to write off the Red Army Faction (RAF) in Germany—which was shattered in the same late 1970s—RAF was allegedly an instrument of the East German Stasi, the State Security Agency. That is another story … and in my opinion not true.

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hy is this history of four decades ago important? It is important because a nation’s history reaches into and affects the present. Though on the one hand the world in 1978 seemed to have never had it so good, on the other hand Saigon had fallen to the Vietnamese in 1975, in effect confirming the defeat of the USA in Southeast Asia. The fake Cold war raged and fear of Soviet victory in Europe was kept alive by new Western propaganda machines. The specter of Communists at the helm in Italy—and perhaps a domino effect in Germany, France and Spain—haunted the US State Department. Communism lived and thrived and, as contradictory as it sounds, to the delight of Western propagandists. For the existence of Communism has always justified the innumerable institutions of anti-Communism, enormous “defense” budgets and military occupation of West Europe.

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he media and part of academia had the same field day with anti-Communism forty years ago as they do with Islamic terrorism today. Democracy? Maybe it cannot be saved. Maybe it does not even exist. No matter. “Our freedoms” come first. Fear of Communism spread while the Berlin Wall stood there like a familiar, almost comfortable reminder of the great Satan, the “evil Empire” in the East. Power on both sides of the so-called Iron Curtain just loved the Berlin Wall built by those evil dastardly Communists lurking behind it.

The stability of that world was nonetheless shaky. The West was engaged in more serious matters than democracy: capitalism searched desperately for new markets for its survival. America’s expansion however was hampered by the nuclear-armed evil empire behind that wall in Berlin. The USA ousted from Southeast Asia, the British Empire out of India, the French out of North Africa. The whole globe whirled. Where it would stop nobody knew. Neither the US government, nor the CIA, nor European Communists even imagined a traitorous Gorbachev coming to power in Russia. No one suspected that the dissolution of the USSR was just around the corner. No one would seem more surprised (and I sometimes believe disappointed) than the CIA.

Meanwhile in Italy the Moro case did not die. In the post-Moro period the Italian government was reduced to asking Americans for information about the Red Brigades, another sign that the re-made rump terrorist group (that I find difficult to refer to as Red Brigades) had become, I believe, a CIA -American appendage. Strange personae populated the Italian political stage. The silence of the US and Italian governments about their Red Brigades created widespread speculation in Italian political circles. The then US Ambassador in Rome, Richard Gardner, answered official Italian requests for information about the Red Brigades saying that the “US government has not furnished any substantial information about the Red Brigades because we have no information: we do not gather information about terrorists here … nor do we have the capacity to do so.” That pure lie in a Rome, with one of the biggest CIA stations in Europe! Nonetheless, there were no objections or follow-ups from the Italian side.

Moro died. His murder changed the political complexion of Italy. One can only speculate about what the effects of Communists in the Rome government in that period might have been. Yet time excluded doubts. For in any case the beloved PCI died a decade later. Still, the successors to the historic compromise with the PCI could have developed differently. And Italy and its Communists might have emerged from Montanelli’s gray zone more intelligently and left a more leftist legacy in Rome than the fascistic government of today run by new European strongman, Matteo Salvini.

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By Gaither Stewart

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]t was raining in Torino. A North European rain. The kind that lasts. Through the restaurant’s great windows the wide avenue lined by plane trees points in the direction of the whitened Alps on the horizon. The rain, the trees, the distant mountains, and the silence create a sensation of nostalgia. Nostalgia for things that once were and can be again. Also the handful of journalists are unusually silent; they nibble at the delicate nouvelle cuisine appetizer served quietly by slim young waitresses in one of Turin’s best restaurants.

The restaurant atmosphere reflects above all good taste. The good taste of restraint and limits. The good taste reigning in Gianni Agnelli’s Turin, the city of Agnelli’s FIAT and the Juventus Football Club. Foreign journalists in the 1980’s encountered frequently the good taste of events sponsored by FIAT and Gianni Agnelli: visits to the great FIAT automobile factories of the traditional old Lingotto in southwestern Turin and the nearby FIAT Mirafiori; annual art exhibits in the FIAT-owned Palazzo Grassi on the Grand Canal in Venice, restructured as an art palace by Milanese architect Gae Aulenti. A natural Turinese-Agnelli good taste never acquired by Milanese business shark, Silvio Berlusconi. Gianni Agnelli was an effortless and early fashionista.

This was the heyday of the “Avvoccato” as Agnelli was popularly called. He was in his prime. Agnelli entrepreneur, Agnelli politician, Agnelli playboy. Agnelli womanizer—Anita Eckberg and Jackie Kennedy allegedly count among his conquests. Agnelli in constant movement: lunch in Venice or Paris, a day in Rome for a vote in Parliament as a Senator For Life or a dinner with his friend, Giovanni Berlinguer, chief of the PCI, the Italian Communist Party, or a long weekend in his beloved New York in his Park Avenue apartment, In the winter it was skiing at St. Moritz. Summers, sailing with his son, Edoardo, or yachting with international VIPs on the Mediterranean.

Giovanni “Gianni” Agnelli (1921-2003) was a capitalist, as was the Agnelli family and their associates. Enlightened capitalists. And Gianni thought of himself that way. In turn he had gained the love and esteem of his workers because he showed a personal interest in their well-being, which, in turn strengthened his ties with the PCI and the trade unions.

Agnelli saw himself literally as an exceptional man, living his life outside the boundaries of class and history itself...

Yet he himself lived a life of fable. His great family home on La Collina, or hill, in the low mountainous area across the Po River where the Turin rich live. The Agnelli country estate in Piemonte. An apartment in Rome. Another on Park Avenue. A palazzo on Venice’s Grand Canal. All luxurious. All tasteful. The Agnelli fortune was immeasurably enormous.

In fact the extent of Agnelli’s fortune is today a matter of dispute and mystery. Audits have not resolved the riddle. Financial investigations have not gotten to the bottom of the diaspora of a hidden part of the Agnelli fortune. One estimate is that the “black” part amounts to much much more than a reported four billion—black funds stored somewhere in the offshore firmament. In such a case, if and when proved, it would mean a case of tax evasion for funds stolen from Italian workers and public. The amount of stolen monies is of minor importance. Important is that fiscal authorities were defrauded—Italian or foreign—and became ordinary under-the-table administration.

Again, Gianni Agnelli was a capitalist. A good capitalist. He even befriended the Italian Communist Party, especially its leader, Giovanni Berlinguer, beloved of Italian workers and Italians in general. And Agnelli befriended the still powerful trade unions and dealt with the social problems of his workers. At the same time—at the roots of the evil of capitalism—he was stealing. Not only from worldwide fiscal authorities, but he was pocketing and adding to his personal fortune part of the surplus value his workers produced throughout the world—from Russia to Latin America—surplus value created with their labour.

So if capitalist society projects Gianni Agnelli as a symbol of “good capitalism”, he was without any shade of doubt a symbol of capitalism tout court. A symbol of capitalism at its worst, because he was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, making meaningless distinctions between good or bad capitalism.

Moreover, there were blatant cases in which Agnelli’s benevolence degenerated into malevolence, from worker-friendly to the capitalist exploiter of the working class, again underlining that the interests of the working class have never been and can never be reconciled with capitalism. Class struggle exists today, has always existed and will continue to exist. No “good capitalism” can alter that reality.

While in the nouvelle cuisine restaurant the slim waitresses served quietly the delicate unidentifiable main course, the journalists rehashed in subtle tones the 1980 general strike—a rara avis in the Bel Paese. FIAT workers had marched up and down the tree-lined avenues of Torino like the one outside the restaurant windows. The strike had lasted thirty-five days and blocked all production at FIAT, when the so-called Marcia dei quarantamila materialized, the forty thousand workers who marched through the streets of Turin, demanding “the right to go to work”. Scabs at work. The general strike fizzled out.

That October 14 marked a turning point and a brusque collapse of Italy’s trade unions with which Agnelli had maintained such good relations. Since that historic moment Italian trade unions have never again had the same influence in Italian society and national politics. Gianni Agnelli’s relationship with the Italian Left, especially with the PCI of Giovanni Berlinguer had previously represented the essence of industrial relations with the political world, and dramatically sapped the power of trade unions. That period came to an end.

Twenty years later, in the year 2000, another of many family tragedies struck the Agnellis: Gianni’s only male child, Edoardo, committed suicide at age 46. Born in New York, schooled in Turin and university studies at Princeton, Edoardo was the natural male heir to FIAT leadership, as per tradition passing from father to son. Yet he was both inept and disinterested in the business world. Edoardo’s interests were mysticism, Buddhism and Islam, defense of the poor … and furthermore he was allegedly anti-capitalist. His life was solitude and unhappiness, caught in the trap between what he wanted to do with his life and what his loving family expected of him: Edoardo was both the love and the desperation of his adoring parents. Yet no more than bourgeois capitalism can be compatible with the authentic interests of the working class, Edoardo Agnelli and the capitalism of which FIAT was the symbol were incompatible. Leadership of the Agnelli empire had no place in Edoardo’s world. On November 15 he drove his FIAT Chromo to a viaduct over the Torino-Savona autostrada and took the leap.

And three years later, on January 24, 2003, Gianni Agnelli died of prostate cancer, perhaps also from grief for his “wayward” son.

In that tasteful Turin restaurant à la Gianni Agnelli in the mid-1980s, the significance of Agnelli’s turnabout in 1980 weighed heavy. We foreign journalists were aware that he was too sophisticated and civilized to viscerally “hate” communists, since he loved life and relished human nature in all its forms. But still, he remained faithful to his capitalist class. The “good capitalist” was relegated to his indulgent, hedonistic youth.

Agnelli was a supporter of American intrusion in European affairs. His real associates were the Kissingers of the world. A Bilderberger himself. He gave his support to NATO, even if he also played with Russia and built factories there as he did in many places in the world—including Latin America. He saw no need of the risks implicit in a class struggle for real change in reigning socio-political arrangements. Never was Agnelli out of sync with the new bourgeois Italy, nor with the home of capitalism across the pond. For Gianni Agnelli, perhaps, capitalism could only progress from good to better.  Sitting at the apex of social power all his life, but shaped by historical forces he never came to fully understand (nor respect), he—like the rest of his class— remained stubbornly blind to the reality unfurling around him, an obstacle to the arrival of a desperately needed world.