‘Every work suggests its own method. Each novel’s been done differently, under different circumstances and using different methods. I got the idea for The Sheltering Sky riding on a Fifth Avenue bus one day going uptown from Tenth Street, I decided just which point of view I would take. It would be a work in which the narrator was omniscient. I would write it consciously up to a certain point, and after that let it take its own course. You remember there’s a little Kafka quote at the beginning of the third section: ‘From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back; that is the point that must be reached.’ This seemed important to me, and when I got to that point, beyond which there was no turning back, I decided to use a surrealist technique—simply writing without any thought of what I had already written, or awareness of what I was writing, or intention as to what I was going to write next, or how it was going to finish. And I did that.’ Paul Bowles

Of course, it’s good to read as widely as possible—especially outside your race, class and gender—but, as a writer, I’ve found I’ve learned more by returning to the same book again and again. When you finish reading a novel for the first time, your memory of it does not stay fixed forever; it shifts and evolves. Years later, you might find yourself talking about it only to discover that your memory has retained only a few scraps—mythic representations—of the text. You realise that, in the intervening years, you have reconstructed in your mind an entirely different book—an inner book of ‘received beliefs’—from the actual one. This is when the value of re-reading becomes obvious. A book comes alive with each new reading. A book is born again every time you pick it up. When you re-read a book, it will appear to be different on a second, or third reading, but of course the book hasn’t changed, you have. Any text has the potential for several different interpretations, and no single reading can ever exhaust a text’s full potential because, on re-reading, each reader will search for connections in their own way, excluding other possibilities and so making them aware of their own role in the play of meaning. It’s not the case that subsequent readings are any ‘truer’ than the first—they are just different. The fact that readers can be differently affected by the same text shows the degree to which reading is a creative process. If you read a single book many times over, it marks the changes in your life and, whatever happens, you continue to have a conversation with it. 
    Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky is a novel that I happen to have read a number of times and, each time I re-read it, it offers fresh insights into how and why I think it is such a great piece of work. Set in North Africa just after the Second World War, the novel is about husband and wife, Port and Kit, and their travels after they arrive in Tangier. When I first read the novel, I thought it was Port’s story, but after a few more reads, I realised it was in fact Kit’s story. She is the character who undergoes the most change and the person in whose company we end the story. Also, I had not noticed at first how Port and Kit’s journey starts at the coast, in a well-populated city, and goes directly inland, stopping at places that become fewer and further between and less and less well-populated until, ultimately, they arrive in the middle of nowhere. The desert and its ‘virulent sunlight’ take on an increasingly claustrophobic, emptying role, smothering love and hope until all that is left is sand and wind. This doomed journey into the desert is a subtle, sophisticated metaphor for their relationship. I also had not noticed that, although Port and Kit both have sexual encounters with native Arabs, it is how they respond to those encounters that matters, that defines the difference between their personalities. Port’s is a one-night stand and the experience ‘poisons’ him and is his ultimate undoing. Kit, on the other hand, enters into a desperate, very physical affair with a Bedouin that rejuvenates her body entirely and sets her off on another journey altogether.
    Port’s death in the desert provokes an existential panic attack in his wife, Kit. She is crushed by his death, but she is also liberated in a way. The novel continues for another 60 pages as we see the consequences of Kit’s loss play itself out in the narrative and, by the end, we realise that the story had been about Kit all along, not Port. His death has not resolved her life, just set her off on a new and different journey. Indeed, endings of stories are, in a sense, just beginnings to other stories. In the most perfectly plotted stories, resolutions give rise to a new set of problems. 
    The start of The Sheltering Sky has its end seeded deep within it. Port has become so disenchanted with Kit that he has reduced their marriage to an intellectual exercise. What he comes to expect from it can never be sustained. At one point in the book while looking at the sky, Port says, ‘I often have the sensation when I look at it that it’s a solid thing up there, protecting us from what’s behind’. Bowles peels back that protection to reveal the pain and pitilessness of a modern relationship. We, the reader, sense this and pull against the inevitable and Bowles dramatises this tension. He has said that, after getting the idea for the novel, he wrote it ‘in cold blood’ in nine months flat. The only scene that proved tricky to write was Port’s death in the fly-blown desert town of Sbâ (one of the most convincing and harrowing evocations of death since Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich). He says, ‘I got to the death scene and I didn’t feel up to tackling it, so I ate a lot of majoun and just lay back that afternoon and the next day I had it resolved.’ 
    Literary novels such as The Sheltering Sky act as mirrors, but the act of reading and re-reading them presents us with the paradox—the reader is forced to reveal aspects of themselves in order to experience the reality of the text, a ‘reality’ that is different from their own. The impact of that reality will depend on the extent to which the reader actively participates and provides the unwritten part of the text, and yet, by participating in that way, the reader must think in terms of experiences beyond their own. Some texts offer nothing but harmonious world-building, purified of all contradiction and excluding everything that might disturb that illusion once established, but The Sheltering Sky doesn’t lie like this—it is so fragmentary that the reader’s attention is solely occupied with the search for connections, making us aware of our own capacity for providing links. Indeed, it is only by leaving behind the familiar world of their experience that the reader can truly participate in the adventure. In this way, Paul Bowles is Mercury, a messenger, world-traveller, transporter of communications from one realm to the next, and his cold, clear eye tells us that a truthful marriage can sometimes be both loving and loveless, that a modern love can be ‘twisted’.

‘A moral message is the last thing I look for.’ Paul Bowles

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​‘The machine in the title of Richard Skinner’s new collection is the cherry tree of its opening poem, which “explodes in white noise every spring”. It is a “perfect” machine, conducting towards healing, loading “a sense of surety and calm”. As does, in fact, the poem itself, with its villanelle-like repetitions and rhymes. Other forms of white noise we are familiar with – an untuned radio, the residual galactic hiss of the Big Bang, the sound of the ocean in a shell – act, I think, in the same way. Packed with data, inviting the imagination. Faced with such possibilities, Skinner can seem scarcely able to contain his excitement at the white noise of the world. In his poem “The Scene”, he ponders the constituent elements of a sea- and sky-scape, engages with possible similes, eventually concludes that

​‘All the world is drawn to this single point  
​Moved to convene by enormous forces’
 
And the result as he stands enclosed in this serenity?  If one were to ‘tap’ him today, he would ‘ring like a bell’. The enormous forces referred to are perhaps most movingly arrayed in “Amaryllis & the Iceman (for J)”. Here, dermatological traits visible in the addressed individual reflect a ‘journey (which) began in the Holocene/in Central Siberia’. The long development of our shared genome leaps compassionately into focus. 

​There’s a tremendous kinetic energy in these poems, evidenced in the wide variety of linguistic stratagems he deploys to express the wonder and joy of things. These range from bright-eyed vocalic transpositions to wholesale melding of poems by different authors. Wallace Stevens would surely have approved his evocation of the snow leopard (Panthera uncia) as ‘an ecru curtain/in an epic inert arena,/each inch an ounce in nuance’; while Louis McNeice and Paul Muldoon cohabit strangely in “Snow2”; and in “The Wild Swans at Coole N + 7” a technique of lexical substitution reminiscent of one employed by Christopher Middleton in parts of Pataxanadu leaves WB Yeats amusingly, but somehow still beautifully, transmogrified.
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There are many cultural references in this collection, but don’t let that put you off.  If you don’t recognise all, or even many, of them (and I certainly didn’t) then I can only testify that you’ll enjoy finding out about, say, ‘hunger stones’ in northern European rivers, the Sedburgh Embroidery, or the work of Agnes Martin or Claude Cahun.  It’s all part of the pleasure afforded by this truly remarkable collection.’
​— Peter Didsbury, author of A Fire Shared

Erik Satie was an iconoclast, a visionary and a pioneer. He was an iconoclast because, throughout his life, he refused all conventional teaching. As he said himself, he was a man who was happier using 13 letters of the alphabet to evolve his own language than using 26 letters like everyone else. He was a visionary because the music he composed broke so firmly with the past, particularly with Wagner. No one had written music like his before, nor have they ever since. His limpid, languorous style has often been imitated but never bettered. Finally, he was a pioneer because his music and ideas were the forerunners to a great deal of music that we take for granted today—furniture music, ambient music and repetitive (or minimal) music. Without Satie, we would have had a very different kind of John Cage, and without John Cage, we would have no Brian Eno. 
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Satie was born in Honfleur in 1866 and, apart from one trip to Brussels, lived in Paris the whole of his adult life. And, besides one disastrous six-month affair with an artist and acrobat called Suzanne Valadon, he remained single and celibate all his life. More than anything or anyone, he loved children and animals. For 27 years, he let no one into his room except stray dogs. He said, ‘The more I know about men, the more I admire dogs’. But Satie did have one great friend in Claude Debussy, who was the composer Satie most admired in his life and with whom he maintained one of the greatest ever friendships between musicians. Satie claimed to have only ever cried twice in his life—once at the death of Debussy and once at the death of Lenin. 

One of the keys to understanding Satie’s life and music was the idea of Immobility. He said that, for him, it was richer to ‘imagine’ life than to experience it. For him, experience was a form of paralysis and so he withdrew into himself. I think one of the reasons the act of withdrawing was so important to him was because he wanted to live many different lives in one place rather than the same life in many different places. Immobility allowed him to stay in one place and grow, change and shed skins, and this was symbolised by the various ‘uniforms’ he adopted throughout his life. He started out dressing in a priestly, floor-length ‘smock’, then, for seven years, he wore nothing but seven identical velvet suits, and then, in the last stages of his life, he wore the black suit and bowler hat of a minor civil servant.

Another key to Satie was the idea of The Miniature. Jean Cocteau said of him that ‘The smallest work by Satie is small in the way a keyhole is small. Everything changes when you put your eye to it.’ He made countless drawings of tiny houses, manors and châteaux, the production of which would absorb him for hours and days. These imaginary worlds were, for him, every bit as real as the ‘real’ world and he felt more at home in them. For Satie, The Miniature was a refuge of greatness. 

The final key to Satie’s work is the idea of Repetition. In 1949, John Cage went to Paris to find out more about Satie’s music (apart from a few cognoscenti, Satie’s work was unknown at that time) and one of the pieces he discovered was entitled “Vexations”. Played through once, this rather innocuous piece made up of 36 diminished and augmented chords lasts no more than 2–3 minutes, but Satie had set a trap for the performer by saying that the piece should be played 840 times in succession. To do this, he said, ‘it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities’. If you follow Satie’s instructions, the average time it takes to perform the piece is about 24 hours, which is longer than it would take to perform all his other pieces of music put together. 

It might seem like a joke, but Satie was deadly serious and the repetitive nature of all his pieces raises interesting questions about the function of boredom in art. Satie said that ‘boredom is deep and mysterious’. Of “Vexations”, Cage said, ‘The music first becomes so familiar that it seems extremely offensive and objectionable. But after a while the mind slowly becomes incapable of taking further offence, and a very strange euphoric acceptance and enjoyment begins to set in … It is only boring at first. After a while the euphoria begins to intensify.’

In May 2007, I was in the audience in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern for a performance of “Vexations”, performed according to Satie’s instructions. One of the pianists for the event was Gavin Bryars, who talked about its difficulties for a pianist. He said that, even after performing it many times over, pianists have great difficulty committing it to memory because of the baffling complexity of its construction and notation, and the piece requires tremendous concentration to play precisely because you return to zero 840 times. It is only in time that the piece works. For both performer and listener, “Vexations” is a test of the limits of endurance and patience—it is a maze, a koan, an inner journey as well as a spiritual vexation. 

Satie was never rich or famous in his lifetime; indeed he was a pauper by choice for the whole of his life, but he was greatly admired by many musicians and artists who would go on to become famous. At his funeral were, among others, Picasso, Cocteau, Brancusi, Man Ray and Georges Braque. Satie’s favourite book was Alice in Wonderland and he often said that, because he was half Scottish, he was the only Frenchman who could fully understand English humour. He approached life humorously and was by nature an absurdist, so when Dadaism and Surrealism came along, despite being much older than others in those groups, he fitted in quite naturally with their ethos. His younger friends called him ‘Le Mâitre’ (‘The Boss’) and he sat in on their meetings as chairman, but was also their mascot. 

Satie always maintained that he was a bad composer and an even worse pianist. He was indeed a very bad pianist, but of course, we now know that he was, in fact, a very good composer. The most famous of his pieces for piano are the “Trois Gymnopédies”, written when he was 21 and ill in bed during his military service. They were three versions of the same theme and Satie likened them to walking round a piece of sculpture and viewing it from three different angles. Based on ideas of purity, antiquity and tranquillity, the pieces remain amongst the best-known and most famous ever written for the piano. 
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But of all Satie’s creations, I think the most magnificent was his own life. I’ve always admired his refusal to conform, his dedication to his art, the singularity with which he pursued his dreams. Just as he was receiving some small recognition for his work, Satie fell gravely ill with pleurisy brought on by cirrhosis of the liver. He was moved to the St Joseph Hospital and was given a private room paid for by the fabulously wealthy Comte de Beaumont. It was there that he died in 1925. It is hard to sum up any life in a single line, particularly one as willful and eccentric as Satie’s, but his contemporary Louis Durey came closest in his description of Satie as ‘one of those capricious plants which produces a strange unique flower in some solitary and inaccessible place’.