Writers Read: D.W. Buffa

The Dark Backward is among D.W. Buffa's more recent novels to be released. The story revolves around not just the strangest case William Darnell had ever tried;

it was the strangest case ever tried by any lawyer anywhere. It was impossible to explain; or rather, impossible to believe. The defendant, who did not speak English or any other language anyone could identify, had been found on an island no one knew existed, and charged with murder, rape and incest. He was given the name Adam, and Adam, as Darnell comes to learn, is more intelligent, quicker to learn, than anyone he has ever met. Adam, he learns to his astonishment, is a member of an ancient civilization that has remained undiscovered for more than three thousand years.

Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Here is Buffa's take on The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles:

When Paul Bowles was ten years old his family bought a piano and he did what any ten year old would have done: studied music theory, sight-singing and piano technique, and then wrote “LeCarre: An Opera in Nine Chapters.” It was a story that any ten year old would think to compose: the tangled affair of two men who exchange wives. The private New York school he attended decided that the young Paul Bowles was perhaps not quite normal for his age and moved him from the fourth to the sixth grade. It might have been better had they simply sent him off to graduate school, though, if they had, it would have been difficult to know exactly what university he should be sent and what he should study. Music was not his only interest, or his only accomplishment. When he was fifteen, he wrote his first crime story, saw Stravinsky’s The Firebird at Carnegie Hall, and displayed considerable, not to say prodigious, talent as a painter.

It would take a dozen pages to list the musical compositions of Paul Bowles and more pages than that to describe the sometimes discordant events of his personal life. His marriage, in which he and his wife often lived separately, and sometimes with other people, could only be described in a novel, one something like the one he wrote himself, a novel that, it is fair to say, could only have been written by a great musician. The Sheltering Sky is music set to English prose.

The story, on the surface, is simple enough, and even, again on the surface, a little absurd. A young couple travel with a friend across North Africa, moving from one remote village to another across the arid, blindingly hot Sahara. An epidemic is raging across North Africa. The husband, named Port, gets Typhoid and dies. His wife, Kit, wandering off into the desert, is picked up by a caravan, sleeps with the Arab leader, is made part of his harem, and then escapes. That is all there is, an adventure story without much adventure. There are no battles, no rescues, and no happy endings. There is not much, really, in the way of an ending at all; nothing but a vast feeling of sadness and regret. It is, if you will, like the ending of Richard Strauss’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, a few dying notes in the distance that somehow seem to hint, and perhaps more than hint, at a new beginning, a beginning that gives a different, and a deeper, meaning to what you have just heard, or, in this case, what you have just read.

Begin at the beginning, begin with the title: The Sheltering Sky. There is a difference between Moslems and Christians, a difference in the way Moslems and Christians live, the culture, or more adequately, the horizon within which people take their bearings, what they look to when they try to define who and what they are. But, Bowles reminds us, there is another horizon, a horizon that everyone, Moslem, Christian, Hindu, Jew, or any other religion or nationality, share, the horizon that encircles and shelters us all — the sky, with the sun and the moon and the stars we gaze at at night. In the ancient understanding, this, what we see above us, was the inside of a covering that included within it the visible and only universe. Modern science removed this shelter and left us with nothing, no heaven, no hell; nothing but life and death, an earthbound existence in which life reproduces itself, and death repeats itself, over and over again.

The Sheltering Sky, though not a long book, is divided into three parts or books. The first book is called ‘Tea in the Sahara.’ The young married couple, Port and Kit, cross the Atlantic for the first time since 1939. The war has just ended and they intend to keep as far as possible from the places touched by it, which is why they have come to North Africa. They do not come as tourists; they come as travelers. A tourist hurries home after a few weeks or months; a traveler, “belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly, over a period of years, from one part of the earth to another.” A second difference follows from the first. A tourist “accepts his own civilization without question; not so the traveler who compares it with others, and rejects those elements he finds not to his liking.” There was one element in particular that Port was eager to reject: “the war was one face of the mechanized age he wanted to forget.”

Port and Kit are not traveling alone, A friend of theirs, Tunner, has come with them. Kit is married to Port, but Tunner is “astonishingly handsome, as the girls often told him, in his late Paramount way.” But he has not much depth. “Usually there was very little expression on his smooth face.” This “suggested a bland contentment,” but the reason for that contentment is as devastating a critique of American self-satisfaction as has ever been written. Tunner was “an essentially simple individual, irresistibly attracted by whatever remained just beyond his intellectual grasp.”

Tunner might be perfectly content with himself and with the world around him, but Kit was dissatisfied with everything, including especially herself. Small, “with blonde hair and an olive complexion,” she was saved “from prettiness by the intensity of her gaze,” an intensity so great that when she looks at you, there was a “piercing, questioning violence” in her eyes. There is a struggle raging within her between “reason and atavism.” She lived always with the expectation of disaster; she saw in everything an omen of impending catastrophe. A feeling of doom pervaded her every daytime thought and her every nighttime dream. When she looked around her, she could only lament that, “The people of each country get more like the people of every country. They have no character, no beauty, no ideals, no culture — nothing, nothing.”

Port, her husband, shares this sense of things coming undone, of a world that has lost its way. “Europe,” he declares with almost angry conviction, “has destroyed the whole world.” The only protection left from utter destruction is the sky itself. “I often have the sensation when I look at it that it’s a solid thing up there, protecting us from what’s behind.” When Kit asks him what is behind the sky, he replies, “Nothing, I suppose. Just darkness. Absolute night.” And then he tells her that they are both afraid of the same thing. “We’ve never managed, either one of us, to get all the way into life. We’re hanging on to the outside for all we’re worth, convinced we’re going to fall off at the next bump.”

Port and Kit had not been in love for a long time. She could never rid herself of the terror that was “always with her,” and he could never “break out of the cage into which he had shut himself, the cage he had built long ago to save himself from love.” So they drifted along, and, after a while, forgot about time. “One year was like another year. Eventually everything would happen.” And nothing did.

In Book Two, “The Earth’s Sharp Edge,” the scene shifts from the movement across North Africa to a stationary place. Lieutenant d’Armagnac, the commander of the French military post of You Noura, has, after two years, lost his enthusiasm for the natives. “About the time he had grown tired of his half-dozen mistresses,” he stopped thinking about the Arabs and took them “for granted.” He was mainly concerned with the epidemic spreading across North Africa. Port and Kit arrive by train. Tunner has been left to travel with an old woman and her depraved and dishonest son in their enormous Mercedes motor car. Port has become quite ill, but this village, “without any visible sign of European influence,” is what they had hoped to find. It had the “unexpected quality of being complete which dissipated the feeling of chaos.”

Chaos, for Port and Kit and those after the war who tried to grasp the essential meaning of things, had become the overwhelming, inescapable condition of the modern, Western, world, the complete absence of any defining purpose, any singular method of measuring, determining, the relative significance of things. Without an agreed upon way of life, the world had become nothing more than an empty search for no one quite knew what. It was no accident that existentialism became the rage, the belief that it did not matter what you believed, so long as you believed in something. It did not matter what you decided, so long as you were willing to make a commitment.

Port’s illness became severe. He had typhoid and there was no question but that he was dying. He tells Kit: “There are so many things I want to say. I don’t know what they are. I’ve forgotten them all.” Words vanish from his mind, and that clarifies his thought. Dying, at the end, he understood meant to “Reach out, pierce the fine fabric of the sheltering sky, take repose.”

Port is dead, and Kit is left to decide on her own what to do. it is not what anyone, in the comfort of their middle-class existence, would expect or even think possible. She does not stay to arrange for her husband’s burial; she does not even bother to let anyone — the local authorities, their family and friends in America — know that he has died. She simply leaves. She packs a small bag and walks out of the village into the desert. There is no sadness, no regret, no mourning; the only feeling she has is, strangely enough, or perhaps not so strange after all, the thrill of being free. “Life was suddenly there, she was in it, not looking through the window at it.” She had “found it again, the joy of being.”

Lieutenant d’Armagnac drew his own conclusions. He thought she had left her husband to die alone. Worse yet, she had created a problem. “Death from typhoid was one thing,” but “the disappearance of a white woman in the desert was another.” Quite another. In Book Three, “The Sky,” the world is turned upside down. It is now not the question of how Europe, the West, has changed the Moslem world; it is how the Moslem world changes someone from the West, an American woman who suddenly finds herself free of all the restrains of her country and her past.

A woman wanders into the desert and after a few hours sees in the distance an Arab caravan, but instead of describing a woman, a woman whose husband has just died, as worried about what might happen, Bowles does something quite astonishing. He writes about a woman who suddenly discovers what, until now, has been hidden from her, hidden by the sky that has so long sheltered her from confronting who, beneath all that her civilization has taught her, she really is. She sees two men on their camels leading the procession. “Even as she saw these two men she knew that she would accompany them, and the certainty gave her an unexpected sense of power; instead of feeling the omens, she now would make them, be them herself.”

The first night she is with them, Belqassim, the leader, takes her. “In his behavior there was a perfect balance between gentleness and violence that gave her particular delight. The moon came up but she did not see it.” When Belqassim is finished with her, the other man takes her. She complains to Belqassim, but without anger or remorse. She was anything but distressed. She was instead, “happy for a while, floating on the surface of time, conscious of making the gestures of love only after she had discovered herself in the act of making them.” And then Bowles adds a line that puts everything in perspective, and places the ultimate lesson waiting to be learned somewhere the other side of the sheltering sky: “Since the beginning of all things each motion had been waiting to be born, and at last was coming into existence.”

After the caravan had reached home, Belqassim makes Kit part of his household. A prisoner in her room, she lives “solely for those few fiery hours spent each day beside Belqassim.” One day, going through the things in her valise — a lipstick, a compac — they seem to her “like the fascinating and mysterious objects left by a vanished civilization.” Eventually, realizing the Belqassim is not unique, and that anyone “even faintly resembling” him, “would please her quite as much,” she escapes. But where can she go? If she goes back to the West, the Americans will discover what she had done and make her try to explain herself, and that, she knows, will destroy her. She remembers what Port had told her, “that the sky hides the night behind it, shelters the person beneath from the horror that lies above.”

Taken to the American consulate in a city on the shore of the Mediterranean and left in a cab outside the hotel where, she is told, Tunner may be waiting, she disappears. A streetcar, heading toward the dockyard through shabby buildings and dimly lighted streets, stops at the edge of the Arab quarter. It is “the end of the line.”

And the end of the music only Paul Bowles could have turned into words.