In 1989, Virginia Carr Spencer was researching into a biography of Tennessee Williams. Travelling to Tangier, Morocco, to interview William’s friend Paul Bowles, she quickly scrapped her plans, finding the author and composer much more interesting.

Carr rapidly became friends with the writer, well known for his tight-lipped attitude on his personal affairs, visiting and researching until Bowles’ death in 1999. Five years later, in Paul Bowles: A Life, Carr has released an engrossing yet superficial account of a life even richer than his fiction would hint at.

“At birth I was an exceptionally ugly infant,” Bowles begins his story. “I think my ugliness caused the dislike which my father immediately formed for me.”

Born to an authoritative father and a somewhat loving mother, Bowles developed a habit of ingrained secrecy that would last throughout his life. Embracing anything his father abhorred, Bowles ran away to Paris, trying his hand at every form of artistic expression.

Soon, Bowles’ life developed into a litany of the famous. He exchanges letters with Gertrude Stein. He becomes the student and lover of composer Aaron Copland. He writes the musical scores for Broadway productions by Williams, Orson Welles, and many others.

Later, his unusual marriage to Jane Auer, the both of them homosexual, would provide Bowles with a lifelong companion to his constant wanderlust. Wandering Europe and Africa with Jane in tow, each taking lovers along the way, provided Bowles with the impetus to try his hand at writing. His first novel, The Sheltering Sky, is a seminal classic of Western alienation in a foreign land.

If there’s any aspect where Carr’s book truly suffers, it is that Bowles’ life was so full, so rich in detail, that a fully comprehensive picture of his life would be enormous. In trying to encompass a life devoted to exploration of the world and the self, a single-volume biography cannot help but seem shallow in comparison.

Where Carr succeeds is in illuminating portions of a life that up until now have remained shrouded, providing context where none previously existed. Bowles’ own biography, Without Stopping, a more poetic work than Carr’s, was so devoid of personal details, author William S. Burroughs famously described it as “without telling.”

It is also a lively representation of a bygone age of experimentation, where artists left America and traipsed the globe, suspicious of their homeland’s obsession with communism and fear of the unusual. There is a palpable sense of the end of an era when Jane falls ill, leading to Bowles’s realization that “at some point when I was not paying attention [life] had turned into a different sort of experience, to whose grimness I had grown so accustomed that I now took it for granted.”

Carr does not attempt any literary appreciation of Bowles’ writings, nor should she. Bowles’ many works stand alone as monuments of fiction. While not wholly satisfying, Paul Bowles: A Life proves that “Bowles was not a tourist, but a traveller.” A man of limitless gifts, Bowles was an explorer of the soul who never stopped. ( )