The Time of Friendship: The Short Fiction of Paul Bowles

Abstract

of a single volume of short fiction exactly as originally printed-that is, as an entity possessed of some degree of putative integrity. Such a deliberately limited study might well itself possess a greater scope and intensity than one devoted to the output of an entire lifetime in one particular genre. In the case of the American expatriate composer and writer Paul Bowles, a striking original claim on the attentions of readers of the short story was made with the 1950 publication of his first collection, A Delicate Prey. Stories by Bowles continued to appear in relatively distinguished magazines throughout the 1950s and 1960s, however, and in 1967 the products of those years were brought together in the single volume The Time of Friendship.' What follows will be an attempt to isolate the artistic and humanistic values that emerge from the reading of The Time of Friendship, with an eye eventually to establishing, or starting to establish, some clear idea of what makes a Paul Bowles story work. Of the thirteen stories in The Time of Friendship, nine are set in the North Africa of Bowles's longtime residence; the others take place in Mexico (two), New York City, and New England. Along with establishing the obvious importance of North Africa-specifically, Morocco-to Bowles, this preponderance also points to another, equally evident feature of Bowles's writing: the use of his exile abroad not, as was the case with some expatriates of an earlier era, to write about the