Irvine Penn, photo of Oliver Smith, Jane Bowles & Paul Bowles, New York, May 23, 1947

Jane Bowles(1917-1973)Writer and playwright

Paul Bowles(1910-1999)Composer, writer, and translator

The couple met and married in 1937.

Jane and Paul Bowles, photographer and date unknown

Plaque marking Paul Bowles’s longtime residence in Tangier, Morocco (Jane is not commemorated).

Paul moved to Tangier in 1947, Jane joined him in 1948.

Cecil Beaton, Photograph of David Herbert, Jane Bowles and Truman Capote, Morocco (1949)

Jane Bowles and Cherifa, Tangier (photographer and date unknown)

Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky (1949)

Dir. Bernardo Bertolucci, The Sheltering Sky (1990)

Locations in the The Sheltering Sky novel(the film was made in Morocco, Algeria, and Niger).

“From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.” –Kafka

(The Sheltering Sky 265)

His cry went on through the final image: the spots of raw bright blood on the earth. Blood on excrement. The supreme moment , high above the desert, when the two elements, blood and excrement, long kept apart, merge. A black star appears, a point of darkness in the night’s clarity. Point of darkness and gateway to repose. Reach out, piece the fine fabric of the sheltering sky, take repose. (The Sheltering Sky 235)

She had quite forgotten the August afternoon only little more than a year ago, when they had sat alone out on the grass beneath the maples, watching the thunderstorm sweep up the river valley toward them, and death had become the topic. And Port had said: “Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don’t know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It’s that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don’t know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon in your childhood that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.” She had listened at the time because it had depressed her; now if she had called it to mind it would have seemed beside the point. She was incapable now of thinking about death, and since death was there beside her, she thought of nothing at all. (The Sheltering Sky 238)

From Negar Azimi, “The Madness of Queen Jane”

His first novel, “The Sheltering Sky,” which he later said he was inspired to write after the experience of helping Jane edit her “Ladies,” was widely praised and thought to be a classic. (Some years later, it would be made into a film by Bernardo Bertolucci.) And yet, little attention has been paid to how Jane’s work and, perhaps, “Two Serious Ladies” in particular, set into motion a lifelong obsession and even an existential mode that came to mark not only Jane’s writing but also Paul’s for decades to come. “Two Serious Ladies,” published six years before “The Sheltering Sky,” appears to be cut from the same cloth. Both books take up travel and the situation of the foreigner in foreign lands. While Paul, in this work as well as in his short stories, captured how the East can break down men’s souls until they regress into a crazed primordial state, Jane saw in that same act of travel—uncomfortable, perilous, occasionally terrifying—her salvation. The Jane-like character in “The Sheltering Sky,” Kit, wanders deeper and deeper into the desert after her husband succumbs to typhoid, is repeatedly raped, and, finally, becomes the fourth wife and concubine of a Bedouin. Far from any trace of the civilized world and divested of reason, Kit goes completely mad.