Lot 9: BOWLES, PAUL. 1910-1999.

37 Typed Letters Signed, 3 Autograph Letters Signed ("Paul," "Paul Bowles," and "Paul B.") and 1 Typed Letter, 44 pp, 4to, various places (Tangier, Chiengmai, Marrakech, etc), 1965-1984, to JAMES LEO HERLIHY, marginal chip to two letters with loss of several words, 2 signatures very smudged, with 9 letters of copy correspondence from Herlihy to Bowles or Mrabet.

Densely written correspondence, chock-full of anecdotes about and descriptions of life in Tangier; what Bowles is reading, writing and publishing; visits from fellow writers and hippies; and his travels in Morocco and to the Far East. More than half of the letters date from the 1960s. "Burroughs is in London, waiting, he says, for the rainy season to begin in Tangier before returning here. Perversity knows no bounds ... Do you really think of coming this way? It would be fine if you did,--fine for me, I mean. For you, God knows" (Oct 11, 1965); "When life is unbearable, I apply the principal of the counterirritant: I invent something still worse, beside which the actuality seems fairly benign. I suppose the necessity is to persuade the reader of the impossibility, or even of the undesirability, of happiness" (Apr 30, 1966); "Yes, here I am, back under bright skies. (Thailand never had such a sky as we have here) ... Only Jane is very ill, having been for the past six months or so in a really bad depression ... I am going to have to take her to Spain and leave her in a hospital, I'm afraid" (Mar 25, 1967); "I reread MIDNIGHT COWBOY once again a fortnight ago; each time I read it I admire it more, but that's certainly not why I read it. It's just one of those books that it's fun to reread once in a while, like A PASSAGE TO INDIA or ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS" (Jul 31, 1967); "Do you think the jacket [of Love with a Few Hairs] should be removed? The reference to homosexuality misrepresents the book, I think, making the reader expect something that isn't there" (Sep 21, 1967). Letters mentions Brion Gysin, Alfred Chester, Susan Sontag, James Baldwin, James Purdy, Andreas Brown, Timothy Leary, Jean Genet, Tennessee Williams, Mohamed Mrabet, et al.
See illustration.