The Review of Contemporary Fiction

You Are Not 1: A Portrait of Paul Bowles by Millicent Dillon
Allen Hibbard

Millicent Dillon. You Are Not I: A Portrait of Paul Bowles. Univ. of California Press, 1998. 340 pp. $27.50.

This latest book on Paul Bowles, whose title is taken from one of Bowles’s short stories, will likely provoke ambivalent feelings among its readers. For those unacquainted with Bowles, it will doubtless spark interest in the subject. Those already familiar with Bowles’s life and work, however, may become impatient with repetition of facts and anecdotes available any number of other places.
Dillon bills her work as an experiment in biography. Her narrative, as much memoir as biography, is based on a series of trips she made to Tangier in the late seventies when she was working on her biography of Jane Bowles, A Little Original Sin, and trips made more recently in the early nineties. Her conversations with Paul (some apparently taped, some recalled) are placed within particular settings and interspersed with analytical comments, conventionally arranged biographical material, and the author’s musings. A number of key issues are probed: Bowles’s attitudes toward sex and money, the significance of his unique childhood experiences, his relations with his father, and the nature of his creative process.
What emerges, very much like in A. J. A. Symons’s Quest for Corvo, is a double portrait of the biographer and her subject. There is Bowles, the subject, at once charming, enigmatic, and evasive. There is Dillon, the biographer, persistent and constantly frustrated in her attempts to pin things down and gain her subject’s approval. Dillon’s insecurities and jealousies arise starkly in the last section of the book when Virginia Spencer Carr, another Bowles biographer, arrives in Tangier during her visit and the two women must contend for Paul’s time (“A second biographer? A second woman biographer? I say bitterly to myself”). These later sections of the book are, to my mind, the most interesting, demonstrating the kind of possessiveness biographers have for their subjects.
What Dillon confirms, above all, is the immense, though sometimes subtle, power Bowles has held over those who have come into his orbit, his biographers being no exception. One can only wonder why Mr. Bowles has put up with so much relentless, tortuous interrogation—lest it be that he has a streak of masochism. “But what could I do?” I can imagine him saying with a groan, as though he had no way of controlling the events around him. [Allen Hibbard]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction You Are Not 1: A Portrait of Paul Bowles by Millicent Dillon Allen Hibbard Millicent Dillon. You Are Not I: A Portrait of Paul Bowles. Univ. of California Press, 1998. 340 pp. $27.50. This latest book on Paul Bowles, whose title is taken from one of Bowles’s short stories, will likely provoke ambivalent feelings among its readers. For those unacquainted with Bowles, it will doubtless spark interest in the subject. Those already familiar with Bowles’s life and work, however, may become impatient with repetition of facts and anecdotes available any number of other places. Dillon bills her work as an experiment in biography. Her narrative, as much memoir as biography, is based on a series of trips she made to Tangier in the late seventies when she was working on her biography of Jane Bowles, A Little Original Sin, and trips made more recently in the early nineties. Her conversations with Paul (some apparently taped, some recalled) are placed within particular settings and interspersed with analytical comments, conventionally arranged biographical material, and the author’s musings. A number of key issues are probed: Bowles’s attitudes toward sex and money, the significance of his unique childhood experiences, his relations with his father, and the nature of his creative process. What emerges, very much like in A. J. A. Symons’s Quest for Corvo, is a double portrait of the biographer and her subject. There is Bowles, the subject, at once charming, enigmatic, and evasive. There is Dillon, the biographer, persistent and constantly frustrated in her attempts to pin things down and gain her subject’s approval. Dillon’s insecurities and jealousies arise starkly in the last section of the book when Virginia Spencer Carr, another Bowles biographer, arrives in Tangier during her visit and the two women must contend for Paul’s time (“A second biographer? A second woman biographer? I say bitterly to myself”). These later sections of the book are, to my mind, the most interesting, demonstrating the kind of possessiveness biographers have for their subjects. What Dillon confirms, above all, is the immense, though sometimes subtle, power Bowles has held over those who have come into his orbit, his biographers being no exception. One can only wonder why Mr. Bowles has put up with so much relentless, tortuous interrogation—lest it be that he has a streak of masochism. “But what could I do?” I can imagine him saying with a groan, as though he had no way of controlling the events around him. [Allen Hibbard]

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