PAUL BOWLES THE OUTSIDER OF THE AVANT-GARDE
AN INVISIBLE SPECTATOR
A Biography of Paul Bowles
By Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno Weidenfeld & Nicholson.
501 pp. $24.95
A DISTANT EPISODE
The Selected Stories B
y Paul Bowles The Ecco Press.
352 pp. Paperback, $11.95
IN THE INTRODUCTION to the 1980 edition of his second novel, Let It Come Down, Paul Bowles calls one of its characters, Richard Holland, "a caricature of myself." Holland, it turns out, occupies a mere handful of paragraphs in a book of almost 300 pages. So far as he is revealed, he strikes the reader as a chatty cynic, but only a psychic would feel confident of having fathomed him even as a sketch. That in itself -- the guardedness of Bowles' self-caricature -- speaks volumes about a man whose fiction Gore Vidal has trumpeted, whose music Ned Rorem reveres and whose biography Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno has told in this well-proportioned book.