Without Stopping: An Autobiography

Had Paul Bowles died when he was thirty, he still would have lived three times more life than 98% of us ever live. This autobiography is a chronicle of only the first fifty-odd years of a life that went on for another three decades. So much happens in *Without Stopping* that Bowles can no more afford to dwell too long on any one episode in the telling of his life than he seemed to dwell in the living of it. He's on his way to somewhere else on virtually every page, meeting someone new in practically every paragraph. This is the story of a man who basically lived as if the seat of his pants were on fire. The list of people whose paths he crossed, who he sought out or was sought out by, read like a "Who's Who" of the most important cultural figures of the 20th century. His travels took him to many of the most exotic locales on earth. Bowles, as his title aptly emblemizes, truly seemed to never stop. Life as he lived it was the exercise of a boundless curiosity that fed an equally boundless capacity for creative endeavor. The amazing thing is that he started out so unprepossessingly as the son of a suburban dentist in Queens, New York. His father was a super-critical, psychologically abusive, control-freak. Yet Bowles, still only in his early twenties when he ran off to Paris, had the chutzpah to call on no less an imposing a personage as Gertrude Stein! At that age, I was too intimidated to call Dominoes on the phone and have a pizza delivered. Really, if there's one bad thing about this book, it's that it makes you feel like you've wasted your life, that you've lived a timid, if safe, mouse-life forever cowering under a sheltering sky. When death comes, as it must, you'll regret leaving so much of the world behind. A man like Bowles could truly say goodbye to himself and life--as he highlights in the epigram from Valery at the end of *Without Stopping*--because he so thoroughly used up both. For such a man, death, when it comes, is more than anything else, the embarking point towards a new adventure. Those who've read Bowles' fiction will recognize in this autobiography many of the real-life events that served as the foundation from which he eventually built up and crafted his stories and novels. In fact, *Without Stopping* itself often reads like fiction and not because it doesn't ring true, but because it is just so stupendous that any one man could have lived such a totally connected life at the very center of the cultural matrix of his time. If you enjoy the work of Paul Bowles, *Without Stopping* is a must-read. But the book can be read with profit and pleasure by those who don't know Bowles as well--indeed, it is a distillation of everything Bowles ever wrote. For anyone with a heart in their chest, a brain in their head, and a committed interest in life and art, *Without Stopping* is both goad and inspiration--it is an unreserved, if unsentimental celebration of the dark and the light, of the act of breathing while one can, and g

Reading books like this makes me wonder why I have a day job. Bowles weaves an intricate yet breakneck-speed bio of his life, starting with childhood and racing to his life in Tangiers in the early 70's. The biggest shock to me was the amount of work this guy got done. He was writing ballets, scores, soundtracks, books, poetry, newspapers, pamphlets, and orchestra pieces almost nonstop. Even as a kid, he'd write pages and pages a day, and later, he'd type for hours without stopping, hence the title of the book. His travels are also amazing; in an age with little air travel he zips to France, Morocco, India, Panama, Cuba, the Bahamas, all over the US, and dozens of other places too numerous to count. Plus he's met and had long friendships with scores of famous people: Salvador Dali, Bela Bartok, Aaron Copeland, Gertrude Stein, Arthur C. Clarke, Bill Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Tennessee Williams, and many others. The book is thick and takes time to crawl through, but every time I set it down, I wanted to either start writing a book or a play or take off for a distant region. My only complaint is that sometimes Bowles like to insert a random line of French or Spanish, which annoys me because I know either. And he tends to drop names rapidly, making you wish you had a score card or a flowchart or something. But Bowles is definitely an interesting guy, and his life story is worth reading.