On the road; A new biography follows the wanderings of Paul Bowles, the original hipster.(Paul Bowles: A Life)(Book Review)

Byline: Kate Bolick

Paul and Jane Bowles enjoyed one of the more extraordinary marriages

in the history of American letters. His output (countless musical scores, prolific fiction, collaborations with the likes of Tennessee Williams) may have bested in heft her tiny oeuvre (one novel, a play, and a handful of stories), but as Truman Capote once said of Jane, both were modern legends. It wasn't their unconventional arrangement that made them remarkable-Greenwich Village in the forties was rife with open relationships. Rather, it was because in spite of their proclivities (both were gay), their bi-continental lifestyle (he eventually settled in Tangier), and the potentially divisive fact of his fame in relation to her comparative obscurity, the two remained devoted to each other until Jane's death in 1973. It doesn't seem entirely unreasonable, then, that although Bowles lived another 26 years, Virginia Spencer Carr, who has also written acclaimed biographies of John Dos Passos and Carson McCullers, allots the bulk of Paul Bowles: A Life (Scribner) to the nearly four decades he spent with Jane. Yet her account is hardly a love story.

"Paul Bowles hated his father," reads the first line of Carr's book. And she should know. Bowles didn't merely cooperate with Carr-he befriended her, visited her, wrote her heaps of letters, and ultimately granted her carte blanche before he died to present his life as she saw it. Quite a surprise coming from a man whose ...