You Are Not I: Portrait of Paul Bowles: A Portrait of Paul Bowles Book

At the center of Millicent Dillon's provocatively titled You Are Not I burns a mystery. The ever elusive Paul Bowles indirectly captured Dillon's attention. When in Tangier, Morocco, at work on her biography of Jane Bowles (A Little Original Sin, 1981), she was told repeatedly by friends of the Bowles that she bore an uncanny physical resemblance to Jane. For Dillon, this burgeoned into a compulsion, which she found "...unsettling, as if I am overstepping a line, violating that most rudimentary law of biography--not to confuse oneself with one's subject." Alas, in spite of the strong declaration implicit in the biography's title, one is made uncomfortably aware of the author's wavering boundaries. "To be a biographer," Dillon confesses, "meant that I was in the grip of an obsession."

Rejecting chronology as the chief organizing element of her biography, Dillon interweaves the "facts"--mundane and extraordinary--of Bowles's life with both of her Moroccan journeys (the Jane project of 1977; the Paul project of '91), constructing his portrait through their conversations and her subsequent reflections. Such a prismatic approach indeed celebrates Bowles's obliquity as a subject. But then, Millicent Dillon is herself "...in search of a different kind of knowing--one that is consonant with secrecy, one that ... is more akin to the knowing one has of a character in a work of fiction." That unique teasing out of the truth makes You Are Not I an exploration of the form, biography, itself.

Bowles was born on Long Island. As a child he leaned toward musical composition and short story writing. In young adulthood, he would study with Aaron Copland, and later, mingle in Paris with the likes of Gertrude Stein, who advised him to journey to Morocco with Copland to work on music. He married Jane (in 1938); she had had affairs with women only; he'd had bisexual attachments. Paul continued his involvement with avant-garde music; Jane struggled with her novel, Two Serious Ladies. As he helped her, his old love of fiction was triggered, and in 1949, he published The Sheltering Sky, which became an international bestseller. After Jane Bowles's death, Paul's work life receded. It would be Bertolucci's film of The Sheltering Sky (1987) that delivered Bowles back into the public eye.

By risking subjectivity, placing herself firmly in the "process" of biography, Dillon becomes unwilling to make absolute statements about her subject. An annoying cacophony ensues--of impressions, of contradictory and elliptical conversations, the contents of which refuse to be assigned significance. But it's not entirely annoying, for the utter foreignness of Bowles's world flashes through. Along with the accounts of the continuous smoking of cannabis and cigarettes, we're given vivid glimpses of a uniquely bohemian life, carved out of exile.You Are Not I has everything--the romance of the far away; on- the-scene reporting of a place at once sensuous and creepy. It's a guide for those intrigued both with the form of biography and with the life of the writer who would come to fear going out in public; who needed to smoke kif (cannabis) to relieve his almost continuous anxiety; who "abhorred directness." And it is nothing less than a quest to solve some fundamental mystery about the self, as if Millicent Dillon got entangled in a Paul Bowles story and is compelled by the force of the narrative events to ride them through to there exhilarating, perhaps fatal, finish.