John Martin

The founder and former publisher of Black Sparrow Press, John Martin, has died. The Times has a nice obit by Adam Nossiter, who can be forgiven for a throwaway reference to the press's authors as "offbeat literary rebels." The online version even includes the cover art for my favorite Black Sparrow book, Paul Bowles's Things Gone and Things Still Here. Martin is survived by his wife, Barbara, who was responsible for the elegant design of the Black Sparrow volumes.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919-2021)

City Lights Books has announced the death of its co-founder, the writer, bookseller, and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, after an astonishingly long and productive career. Ferlinghetti was 101 and had just published a book a year or so ago, making him (along with Herman Wouk) a rare centenarian author of consequence.

I've never been to San Francisco and it's been years since I read any of Ferlinghetti's poetry, but the bookstore and publishing company remain active, having survived a financial crisis a year ago with the help of donations. Long may it continue along its cantankerous way.

I've owned a handful of City Lights books over the years, but the only two I seem to have now are shown here. Both are fairly minor works by writers I admire, but the press did a nice job on them and I'm glad that they exist.

The Wolf (Paul Bowles)

Last night's Jeopardy featured, of all things, a clue that referred to Paul Bowles's venomous short story "The Frozen Fields," which is one of the few pieces Bowles set in the US and which is also, in its twisted way, a Christmas story. Of course I had to pull it out today and read it again.

The story is set at a family gathering at a rural farmhouse somewhere in the northeast, presumably in the early decades of the twentieth century, and is told largely through the eyes of Donald, a boy of six who is visiting the farm along with his parents. Despite the Norman Rockwellish ambience, all isn't well; there are whispers of illicit goings-on, and Donald's father is a surly martinet who eventually precipitates a family crisis with a rude insinuation uttered during the course of Christmas dinner.

There's no love lost between father and son (the story almost certainly draws on Bowles's difficult relationship with his own father), and when Donald lies down to sleep in the farmhouse bedroom he lets his imagination run free:

On his way through the borderlands of sleep he had a fantasy. From the mountain behind the farm, running silently over the icy crust of the snow, leaping over the rocks and bushes, came a wolf. He was running toward the farm. When he got there he would look through the windows until he found the dining room where the grown-ups were sitting around the big table. Donald shuddered when he saw his eyes in the dark through the glass. And now, calculating every movement perfectly, the wolf sprang, smashing the panes, and seized Donald's father by the throat. In an instant, before anyone could move or cry out, he was gone again with his prey still between his jaws, his head turned sideways as he dragged the limp form swiftly over the surface of the snow.

So, in the end, this atypical Bowles story maybe isn't so atypical after all. It has the same sudden, pitiless violence of many of his North African tales, and the frozen fields of the rural US turn out to be just another kind of desert.

Black Wall of Certainty

Amar, a Moroccan adolescent, hides out on the roof while the house he has been staying in is raided by the French, who are looking for members of the Istiqlal, an underground independence movement:

He listened: they were going back down the stairs, back along the galleries, back through the house, and away. They had parked their jeeps somewhere far out in the fields, for he waited an interminable time before he heard the faint sound of doors being shut and motors starting up. When they were gone he turned over and sobbed a few times, whether with relief or loneliness he did not know. Lying up here on the cold concrete roof he felt supremely deserted, exquisitely conscious of his own weakness and insignificance. His gift meant nothing; he was not even sure that he had any gift, or ever had had one. The world was something different from what he had thought it. It had come nearer, but in coming nearer it had grown smaller. As if an enormous piece of the great puzzle had fallen unexpectedly into place, blocking the view of distant, beautiful countrysides which had been there until now, dimly he was aware that when everything had been understood, there would be only the solved puzzle before him, a black wall of certainty. He would know, but nothing would have meaning, because the knowing was itself the meaning; beyond that there was nothing to know.

Probably my favorite of Paul Bowles's novels, The Spider's House, which was published in 1955, represents its author's most sustained attempt to depict the interior lives of Moroccans, even if the passage above seems to borrow as much from twentieth-century existentialism as it does from cultural anthropology. Other sections of the book deal, more conventionally, with an expatriate American novelist named John Stenham and a wayward young American woman named Lee Veyron. As the narratives converge, the mutual failure of understanding across cultures comes to the fore. The French colonizers, in the meantime, are depicted as cloddish torturers, while the members of the Istiqlal, who drink alcohol and sport Western clothing, are regarded by Amar (and presumably by Bowles) as corrupt and un-Islamic. Stenham, who speaks Maghrebi Arabic, deplores the encroachments of the modern world into traditional Morocco; Veyron welcomes them.

All of this no doubt reads very differently now than it did when the book was first published; the attempt of an outsider to depict (and thereby define) the consciousness of an inhabitant of a third-world country would probably be regarded as presumptuous if not downright offensive, and Bowles's pessimism about decolonization, like Naipaul's, would be seen as serving the interests of imperialism. But though Stenham seems, on the surface, an obvious stand-in and mouthpiece for Bowles, the writing of fiction exacts its toll on the characters. Stenham is a nostalgist for the primitive, but he is also an insensitive boor who ends by availing himself of his privilege as a Westerner to flee a situation that Amar has no escape from. Bowles the novelist is already a step ahead of his potential critics.

Things Gone & Things Still Here

The pieces in this little volume have all been republished in subsequent collections of Bowles's stories, but I still prefer to read them as they first appeared, in an edition published by Black Sparrow Press in 1977. Four of the stories -- "Allal," "Mejdoub," "The Fqih," and "The Waters of Izli," form a natural group, both in style and setting. "Istikahara, Anaya, Medagan and the Medaganat" and the title story, though also set in North Africa, stand somewhat apart as they take the form of historical anecdotes rather than fiction. All take place in a Moslem Maghreb in which European influence is felt only distantly, if at all. Women are hardly present, and when they are they're generally up to no good. "Afternoon with Antaeus" is a mythological jeu d'esprit, and only in "Reminders of Bouselham" do Europeans share the stage with Maghrebis. "You Have Left Your Lotus Pods on the Bus," a description of an outing with some Buddhist monks in Thailand which may be either fiction or travelogue, is the only piece not set in North Africa.

The narratives are not much concerned with interior states, and descriptive detail is kept to a minimum; the unraveling of the tale is all, with each step provoking the next by inexorable fate -- "everything is decided by Allah." If the stories convey anything beyond fatalism, it's a sense of the impossibility of penetrating the consciousness of another, especially across cultures. This is so even in the one story, "Allal," where identities are literally exchanged, in this case between a young Maghrebi and a snake, under the influence of kif paste; the transaction ends in the destruction of both parties.


I miss John Martin's Black Sparrow Press. Back in its heyday, in the '70s and '80s, these colorful, matte-surfaced books were a refreshing alternative to the glossy trade paperbacks that were the standard in the publishing world. (There were also hardcover editions with acetate jackets and paper spine labels, but I could never afford them.) A lot of bookstores wouldn't touch them -- I'm not sure Martin really pushed their distribution all that much -- but they were always on prominent display in places like the Gotham Book Mart.


Much of the Black Sparrow list was devoted to writers like Charles Bukowski and lesser-known Beat poets I wasn't all that interested in, but it also included people like Bowles who had kind of fallen between the cracks of the publishing business at the time. (Bowles, by the way, firmly disavowed Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno's statement that he had complained of never being paid royalties for the Black Sparrow editions of his work.) Martin also put out a series of numbered pamphlets, entitled Sparrow, usually showcasing excerpts from the full-length books. He sold the bulk of his list to David Godine when he retired in 2002, the balance (Bowles, Bukowski, and John Fante) going to Dan Halpern's Ecco Press, which also had a long relationship with Bowles.


All of these books have colored endpapers and all except Midnight Mass below (perhaps because my copy is a second edition) have colored title pages as well. The designer was Barbara Martin.

Late Bowles

When this slim volume was published in 1982, it was marketed on the jacket flap as a novel, which is the one thing it isn't, at least in any conventional sense of the word. Points in Time is, more accurately, a collection of tales, anecdotes, and vignettes set in Morocco and ranging, in chronological sequence, from the time of Hanno the Carthaginian to the late 20th century. The pieces vary in length from a paragraph or two to several pages, and the whole thing can be read comfortably in one sitting — which in fact is how it ought to be read. For there is a unity to the book, even though there are no shared characters or any direct connections between sections.

What does hold the book together is, to begin with, the author's interest in the country where he lived for many years, and his personal take on both the Moroccan landscape (which is always there, in the background, though rarely described in detail) and its succession of inhabitants (Berbers, Arabs, Jews, and Christians). The tales also have in common a decidedly fatalistic view of human existence: people scheme and plan, love and hate, but in the end nobody controls his own fate.

Even the land itself doesn't remain unchanged by time; the book begins with these two paragraphs, which get a page by themselves:

After a half day's voyage they came to a large lake or marsh. No such place now exists, the lagoons being all to the north of the cape. South of it the shore is either guarded by cliffs, steep slopes, or stony and sandy beaches.

Nor is there any sign of such a lake having existed, and the sudden winter rains which make every dry watercourse roar from bank to bank are not of a character fit to cause floods likely to be mistaken for a marsh or a lake.

Besides such quick illuminations, Points in Time contains a half dozen or so more or less fully developed episodes, all of them apparently retold from either historical or contemporary accounts. Like earlier Bowles stories like “A Distant Episode” and “The Delicate Prey,” these tales display an affinity for unpredictable outcomes and a merciless fascination with sudden, almost ritual violence.

The book is, in a way, a distillation of the author's entire output, or one side of it at least. In principle, at least, that's not necessarily a good thing; you could make a case, I think, that Bowles was at his most interesting when he wasn't being just one kind of writer. These stories, shorn of any kind of interior life or social observation, are not particularly representative of his full range, but they may represent his work at its most Bowlesian, that is, they show the aspect of his art that no other writer really shares.

And the distillate is very pure. The writing is beautifully controlled and efficient throughout; any sense of an authorial presence has been carefully shorn away. Having come, in his progress of tales, to the present day, he closes with the following brief final chapter:

The river runs fast at the mouth where the shore is made of the sky, and the wavelets curl inward fanwise from the sea. For the swimmer there is no warning posted against the sharks that enter and patrol the channel. Some time before sunset birds come to stalk or scurry along the sandbar, but before dark they are gone.