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Chapter One interrogates Paul Bowles’s presentation of the human relationship to Nature in his bestselling novel The Sheltering Sky (1949). In his autobiography Without Stopping (1972), Bowles describes a “secret connection between the world of nature and the consciousness of man” that is activated by the presence of the North African desert landscape. The chapter investigates the prevalence of such interactions between the human mind and the desert landscape across Bowles’s fiction and non-fiction writing, and demonstrates the degree to which Bowles’s exposure to Sufism shaped his literary depictions of an infinite, ecological Nature with the power to influence and annihilate the human. This chapter reads The Sheltering Sky (1949) alongside Bowles’s extensive non-fiction travel writing, in order to expose the influence of Sufism on the novel’s depictions of an infinite and annihilating desert landscape.

This chapter examines the question of authenticity surrounding Paul Bowles's Denmark Vesey. Featuring music by Bowles set to a libretto by Charles Henri Ford, Denmark Vesey incorporates racial politics and Marxist allusions. Its language and music emphasize Africanisms and African American folklore, much of it thoroughly researched and, in Bowles and Ford's minds, authentic. This chapter first considers “authentic” representations of blackness in Denmark Vesey before discussing some of the opera's prominent themes, including Love versus Hate and the use of animal masks. It also explores Denmark Vesey's evocation of Communist-style revolution, paying particular attention to the conflicts and the gradual alliance between blacks and the Left as elements that set up the context of the opera. Finally, it analyzes the demise of Denmark Vesey due to the loss of the score and explains how Bowles and Ford achieved a distinctive result in their integration of race and politics as well as their bridging of race and labor unrest of the 1820s and 1930s.

Latouche had friendship with a circle dubbed by Virgil Thomson “The Little Friends,” which included Harry Dunham, Paul Bowles, Jane Bowles, and Latouche’s future wife Theodora Griffis, the scion of a distinguished and wealthy family. Latouche introduced Jane and Paul Bowles to each other. Latouche’s romantic relationship with Griffis led to marriage, although both were essentially homosexual. The Little Friends formed part of a larger group that included notable composers, such as Copland and Thomson, and artists, such as Kristians Tonny and Frederick Kiesler. Several of these artist friends drew Latouche’s portrait and photographed him. The social settings of these friends included the celebrated salon of Kirk Askew and his wife.

This chapter turns to weak forms of a strong religion. Against the contrasting examples of Paul Bowles, Mark Twain, and Edith Wharton, the blurry Islam in Henri Matisse, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Langston Hughes underwrites some of the boldest experiments in twentieth-century art, fiction, poetry, and politics. Embedded in the visual syntax of the Moroccan paintings, Islam inspires Matisse's observation that black is the “color of light rather than the color of darkness.” Dissolved into a sensory overload in Ulysses and scrambled as portmanteau words in Finnegans Wake, a barely legible Islam allows Joyce to write as a nose-thumbing hybrid—a “Mohammadhawn,” at once a Mohammedan and a homadhaun, Irish for a lout. An equally scrambled but largely idealized Islam, traced back to the splendors of medieval Granada, offers Pound refuge from his life in a cage at the American Disciplinary Center at Pisa, awaiting trial for treason. But an off-focus Islam can also have troubling consequences, as we see in Langston Hughes’s partisan vignettes when he traveled to Soviet Central Asia and Civil War Spain in the 1930s, suggesting that a low-resolution Islam serving a political experiment often does so at a cost.

This chapter explores the concept of a ‘networked modernism’, which demands a reaching beyond the boundaries of the corpus of a single author. The discussion starts with a place, Gibraltar, which plays a central role in James Joyce’s Ulysses. In its idealization, ‘it is as much a concept as it is a physical locality’, aligned with the Atlas Mountains and, implicitly, with Atlas’s daughter Calypso: ‘the Calypso effect’ identified here relates to the etymology of the nymph’s name, which derives from the Greek for ‘to cover, to conceal, or to hide’. The effect is, it is argued, a central aspect of modernist aesthetics. In the writings of Ezra Pound and Paul Bowles on Gibraltar and Morocco, a superabundance of detail creates an ‘atmospheric blur’ through which we see mere glimpses of geopolitical, religious, and historical formations.