The Spider's House Read Free

even as I started to write, events that could not be ignored had begun to occur there. I soon saw that I was going to have to write, not about the traditional pattern of life in Fez, but about its dissolution.
    For more than two decades I had been waiting to see the end of French rule in Morocco. Ingenuously I had imagined that after Independence the old manner of life would be resumed and the country would return to being more or less what it hadbeen before the French presence. The detestation on the part of the populace of all that was European seemed to guarantee such a result. What I failed to understand was that if Morocco was still a largely medieval land, it was because the French themselves, and not the Moroccans, wanted it that way.
    The Nationalists were not interested in ridding Morocco of all traces of European civilization and restoring it to its pre-colonial state; on the contrary, their aim was to make it even more “European” than the French had made it. When France was no longer able to keep the governmental vehicle on the road, she abandoned it, leaving the motor running. The Moroccans climbed in and drove off in the same direction, but with even greater speed.
    I was embroiled in the controversy, at the same time finding it impossible to adopt either side’s point of view. My subject was decomposing before my eyes, hour by hour; there was no alternative to recording the process of violent transformation.
    Fiction should always stay clear of political considerations. Even when I saw that the book that I had begun was taking a direction which would inevitably lead it into a region where politics could not be avoided, I still imagined that with sufficient dexterity I should be able to avert contact with the subject. But in situations where everyone is under great emotional stress, indifference is unthinkable; at such times all opinions are construed as political ones. To be apolitical is tantamount to having assumed a political stance, but one which pleases no one.
    Thus, whether I liked it or not, when I had finished, I found that I had written a “political” book which deplored the attitudes of both the French and the Moroccans. Much later Allal el Fassi, “the father of Moroccan nationalism,” read it and expressed his personal approval. Even coming so late, this was satisfying.
    Each novel seems to impose its own particular working regime. The Sheltering Sky and Let It Come Down were written during travels, whenever the spirit moved and the physical surroundings were conducive to writing. The Spider’s House , on the other hand, from the outset demanded a rigorous schedule. I began writing it in Tangier in the summer of 1954, setting thealarm for six each morning. I managed to average two pages a day. When winter came I sailed for Sri Lanka. There I adopted the same ritual; early tea was brought in at six o’clock, and I set to work, still meeting my quota of two daily pages. By the middle of March, in spite of visits to distant temples and nights spent watching devil-dances, the book was finished, and sent off from Weligama to Random House.
    The tale is neither autobiographical nor factual, nor is it a roman á clef. Only the setting is objective; the rest is invented. The focal point of the action is the old Hôtel Palais Jamaï, before it was modernized. I called it the Mérinides Palace because one had to pass the tombs of the Mérinide kings on the way to the hotel. There is now an actual Hôtel des Mérinides, built in the sixties on the cliff alongside the tombs.
    The city is still there. It is no longer the intellectual and cultural center of North Africa; it is merely one more city beset by the insoluble problems of the Third World. Not all the ravages caused by our merciless age are tangible ones. The subtler forms of destruction, those involving only the human spirit, are the most to be dreaded.
    Paul Bowles
December 1981

PROLOGUE
    It was just about midnight when Stenham left Si