March 12, 1966

The Destruction of Innocence

By CONRAD KNICKERBOCKER

UP ABOVE THE WORLD By Paul Bowles.

ou must watch your universe as it cracks above your head," Paul Bowles once told an interviewer. Mr. Bowles has cocked a wary, ironic eye at a tumbling universe since 1929, when he left the University of Virginia for an expatriate's life on the Left Bank. His subsequent wanderings in North Africa, Latin America and India have provided the overriding theme of his fiction: the civilized Anglo-Saxon consciousness in sometimes fatal confrontation with the irrational, perverse, violent realities of alien modes of life.

His first novel, "The Sheltering Sky," published in 1949, amplified this theme with a skill that ranks the book, in my opinion with the dozen or so most important American novels published since World War II. The book describes the gradual psychic destruction of two American tourists caught up in a weird net of circumstances in North Africa. Mr. Bowles invests his ominous African landscape with a tremendous symbolic charge, so that Port and Kit Moresby, his protagonists, come to stand for 20th century man overwhelmed in a Sahara of moral nihilism. "The Sheltering Sky" is that rarity, a novel that functions perfectly on both the intellectual and the narrative levels.

Variations on a Theme

In his subsequent fiction, Mr. Bowles continued to explore variations on his theme. "Let It Come Down," his second novel, concerns a spiritually bankrupt American who goes to Tangier to seek, in corruption and violence, a new self-knowledge. Mr. Bowles presses his sense of evil to the outer limits of horror. The book reaches its climax in one of the most shattering scenes in modern literature. When Nelson Dyar, the American, insane with hashish, hammers a nail into a sleeping Arab's head, it is as though Mr. Bowles had offered the ultimate confirmation of man's capacity for degradation. His short stories are filled with similar concusive [sic] insights. His third novel, "The Spider's House," which was not a success, also dealt with the futility of the quest for salvation in a blasted universe. Among American writers he stands in the front rank for the substance of his ideas and for the power and conviction with which he expresses his own particular vision, which, if hellish, is totally appropriate to the times.

"Up Above the World," his first novel in 10 years, returns to the same moral climate of "The Sheltering Sky." Now, however, the scene is a Central American republic. His protagonists, a stodgy, wealthy American doctor and his beautiful young wife, are on a leisurely tour. Taylor Slade and his wife Day are careful people of small emotion, always in control of themselves and the situation. They hold a belief peculiar to middle-class Americans, that money and common sense are sufficient bulwarks against evil.

A chance encounter in a hotel lobby throws them in contact with Grove Soto, a rich, handsome, charming idler who appears eager to show them a good time. Soto's goal in life is to maintain an eternally empty schedule in which he enjoys the maximum liberty to make sudden decisions. He has specialized tastes. Jazz emanates from loudspeakers concealed in the plantings of his lush apartment. His bed has electrically adjustable mirrors in place of the headboard and the footboard. Luchita, his 17-year old Cuban mistress, is equally exotic. She already has a five-year old son, but motherhood has not stifled her craving for high life. She spends most of her time smoking marijuana and plotting her escape to Paris.

The Slades suddenly become ill, apparently from a tropical virus that produces high fever and delirium. Soto nurses them back to health. Slowly it dawns on Day Slade that Soto is holding them captive; his concern for their well-being masks other intentions, but what? Finally, their middle-class bulwarks come crashing down, swept away in the Bowlesian night of violence and depravity.

It worked very well in "The Sheltering Sky," but it does not work as well here. One of Mr. Bowles's chief talents lies in the slow, artful building of tension, a gradual crescendo of seemingly harmless details that works up to a scream. He achieves this effect through the use of a pitiless, flat, matter-of-fact style, almost toneless, that withholds emotion even at the crucial junctures. His landscape proliferates with omens. In every Bowles garden a buzzard sits waiting behind the greenery. He is at his best in creating a world in which innocent appearances dissolve to reveal malignant realities.

Achieves Monotony

But this shift from sunlight to shadow, from bright to dark, becomes monotonous unless relieved by other artistic movements. In "Up Above the World," Mr. Bowles performs like a musician who has fallen in love with one tune which he plays magnificently, but over and over again. The novel is lopsided, 193 pages of tension and 26 pages of release.

When it does finally come, the relief is so banal that it is an anti-climax. Soto's vicious--an extraordinary, bizarre new kind when it was finally revealed, turns out to be ordinary money lust, the sort that motivates the average heavy on television. And Soto himself lacks heft. Mr. Bowles's characters are bloodless, at best (he is so much better at evoking a sense of place than of people), but Soto, who smokes pot and reads German philosophy, is too much the thinking man's villain, the kind an intellectual would conceive if he were asked to imagine a depraved human being.

Still, "Up Above the World" is worth reading, if only to see how a first-rate writer goes about creating the environment of menace. And Mr. Bowles's theme, the destruction of innocence, is defined, if not resolved, with an ability that once more confirms his stature.

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