A Novel Marketplace - Evan Brier

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which demanded even the vaguest participation on his part,” the engagement fatal to artistry. In this respect as in many others in the novel, Tunner is crucial. The novel’s explicit theory of art in “the mechanized age” is a theory of the cultural problem that Tunner purportedly represents. But to the extent that Tunner is a problem in the novel, the representation of Tunner as such constitutes a profitable solution to the problem of how to preserve an idea of high art in the age of mass culture; it is through the depiction of the flight from Tunner that Bowles shows Port and Kit’s—and his own—escape from the West.

      From the start of the novel, Port and Kit cast themselves as sophisticated travelers (again, as opposed to tourists) whose desire it is to find a place as yet untouched by the war and, more generally, by the West. The tourist “accepts his own civilization without question; not so the traveler, who compares it with others, and rejects those elements he finds not to his liking” (14). The distinction matters not so much because it accurately captures Port’s essence but because it is so clearly essential to Port’s own sense of his identity. Port and Kit are highbrows, members, as Williams notes in his review, of the New York intelligentsia. After Kit laments that “the people of each country get more like the people of every other country. They have no character, no beauty, no ideals, no culture,” Port replies, “‘You’re right…. Everything’s getting gray, and it’ll be grayer. But some places’ll withstand the malady longer than you think. You’ll see, in the Sahara here’” (16). Port is the expert, the artist, the intellect, and Kit—the fan—submits to his intellectual vision of the world, responds emotionally and intuitively to it, and attempts to live up to Port’s ideals.

      Tunner occupies the bottom rung of the hierarchy, and it is often through their attitudes toward him that Port and Kit define themselves. Moreover, although Tunner has not received close attention from Bowles scholars, the entire plot of the novel turns on Port and Kit’s attraction to and repulsion by him.40 What attracts and repulses Port and Kit is best captured in Kit and Tunner’s exchange as the trio arrive in a town even less civilized than the one from which they’d come. Says Tunner, “One thing I can’t stand is filth,” to which Kit replies, “Yes, you’re a real American, I know” (112). This is the role Tunner plays in Port and Kit’s lives—the American, the reminder of what they have tried to escape, the reminder of what they are better than. Tunner is, finally, the tourist (which is just another way of saying he is an American). He has not, as Port and Kit perceive that they have, abandoned the identity his home country has given him. Thus the novel’s first description of him: “He was a few years younger [than Port and Kit] … astonishingly handsome, as the girl [Kit] often told him, in his late Paramount way. Usually there was very little expression of any sort to be found on his smooth face, but the features were formed in such a manner that in repose they suggested a general bland contentment” (15). Bowles’s intention seems to be to paint Tunner as the unworldly American, but if Tunner is so American, what is he doing in the Sahara? Why does he want to listen to Port and lust after Kit? The narrator’s answer to this question is typically abstract: “With them as with no one else he felt a definite resistance to his unceasing attempts at moral domination, at which he was forced, when with them, to work much harder; thus unconsciously he was giving his personality the exercise it required” (67). Far from being an intellectual, Tunner enjoyed the company of those he perceived as such: “Tunner was essentially a simple individual irresistibly attracted by whatever remained just beyond his intellectual grasp.” Port and Kit are in Africa to see the Sahara. Tunner is in Africa to see Port and Kit. He is a step removed from their highbrow primitivism; he is their audience, and it is as such that Port both wants him near and ultimately runs from him.

      Tunner’s character is at least nominally modeled on George Turner, an American whom Bowles had met during an earlier foray into the Sahara. A more meaningful source for Tunner’s character might be the idea of the “middlebrow,” a staple of postwar American culture. The great fear of postwar intellectuals was not mass culture itself; for Macdonald and Greenberg, lowbrow fare for those who had no interest in (or ability to appreciate, as they would probably put it) “real” culture was just fine. As Macdonald put it, “If there were a clearly defined cultural elite, then the masses could have their kitsch and the elite could have its High Culture, with everybody happy. But the boundary line is blurred” (“Theory” 61). Middlebrow was what blurred that line. As such, it was a threat to the categorical distinction between art and nonart so crucial to the novel, the review, and the idea of highbrow art in the age of mass culture. “A tepid, flaccid Middlebrow Culture,” Macdonald wrote, using rhetoric that seems borrowed from anti-Communists, “threatens to engulf everything in its spreading ooze” (63–64); the image clearly suggests, as does Port’s refusal to write, that soon “high” art will vanish, in this case consumed by what Macdonald called midcult and masscult. The metaphor also suggests that middlebrow needs to be understood as both a demographic fact and an artistic problem, a form of cultural production and an audience that would happily consume it. Macdonald cited Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, the work of Thornton Wilder, and Mortimer Adler’s Great Books volumes as examples of middlebrow culture, all commercially successful products for educated people. It was the growth of the market for products such as these—the same growth that led Doubleday to give Bowles an advance and that made New Directions a profitable company—that, to Macdonald, threatened high culture.

      Port’s refusal or inability to write while engaged with Tunner is telling in this context. For if Tunner is attracted to the intellectual challenge of Port and Kit, it is equally clear that for Port, at times, Tunner serves as a surrogate American audience. At the start of their journey, against Kit’s wishes, Port offers a detailed account of a dream he has just had. Afterward, when they are alone, Kit upbraids him for telling “‘that dream in front of Tunner.’” Port responds incredulously: “‘In front of him! I told it to him, as much as to you’” (19). And Tunner wants to hear about it. Not long after Port shares his dream with Tunner, Kit is seduced by Tunner on the train. Bowles’s narrator notes that “Kit and Port … both resented even the reduced degree to which they responded to his somewhat obvious charm, which was why neither would admit to having encouraged him to come along with them” (67).41 Both Kit and Port wanted Tunner to join them in Africa; neither wants to admit it. In Port and Kit’s relationship with Tunner we see both the middlebrow audience’s desire to consume high culture and the debased desire of the supposed highbrow for an audience. Until Port and Kit flee from Tunner, the novel suggests, they have not truly left bland, contented America.

      Port and Kit’s solutions to the problem Tunner presents are extreme: not just not writing but also madness (in Kit’s case) and death (for Port). Bowles’s narrator seems to endorse this result: “It was all right to speed ahead into the desert leaving no trace” (200). Without stopping, as it were: leaving no trace is preferable to necessarily compromised communication or engagement. But Bowles is attuned to the paradoxes of this view and the economics on which they depend. Ultimately, there is one reason that Port has the opportunity to not write. That reason is mentioned just once, in the middle of the novel’s out-of-place look back, so quickly it might be missed: “Since the death of his father he no longer worked at anything, because it was not necessary; but Kit constantly held the hope that he would begin again to write” (199, emphasis mine). This is the only allusion in the novel to Port’s having aspired to being a professional writer at one time. Bowles thus marks the all-too-prosaic point at which it becomes possible to detach oneself from careerism: when one can afford it. Port’s inheritance functions as a kind of antipatronage. Usually, patronage is understood to free the artist from the demands of the commercial marketplace and thus to pursue his or her own artistic vision. Here, Port’s inheritance prevents him from the need to write at all in a world where even writing for no one in the Sahara is corrupt. As noted, the promotion of The Sheltering Sky depends on the association of Port with Bowles; in that Port’s financial situation allows him to detach himself from matters of commerce, he is also, coincidentally, a bit like James Laughlin.

       Career Moves

      Port’s flight from the Tunners of the world resonates in the context of the publication and success of The Sheltering Sky. The growth of middlebrow America, understood as a demographic

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