“The Mediterranean was not so much wine-dark as oil-black.”
“Below them the sea began to spread out, a poster blue.”
The lines above, taken from stories by two of the most accomplished American short story writers of the 20th century, refer to a view of the Mediterranean from around the same area of Tangier in Morocco.
The first appears in John Updike’s “Morocco,” a story he twice unsuccessfully submitted to The New Yorker before the less discriminating Atlantic ran it in November 1979. The second line appears in Paul Bowles’s “Tea on the Mountain,” first published in his 1950 collection of stories, The Delicate Prey. (The book is freely accessible at the Internet Archive here.)
You can immediately note the tonal difference in the two lines. The first, after tossing off that “wine-dark” reference to Homer, as if Updike wants to remind you that he’s still one of you, not one of them, projects a bleak if suspect view of the sea.[1] He’s not in a good mood.
The second line suggests the freshness and amplitude of a first big breath in mountain air after a cramped car ride. That “poster blue” is–if there is to be an intended allusion here–more indigenous to the Arab surroundings. Blue in Arab and Islamic culture is a symbol of infinity, of the becalming spiritual.[2] Bowles lived 52 years in Tangier (he died there in 1999). He felt no need to borrow a reference from western culture to situate his western reader, though he wrote the story in Washington, DC, not in Morocco, long before his permanent exile: he will go below that surface blue only so far.
The two lines contain the totality of each story as single lines in good stories often do, though rarely with this unintended call and response across the decades by two Americans, and from the same geographic spot. The stories give us different, and in uncomfortable ways, familiar windows into how Americans see Arabs. It’s not a pretty picture in Updike’s hands. It’s a more lyrical, more bemused but still not admiring one in Bowles’s hands. Bowles is feeling his way around his subject, leaving room for doubt and interpretation. Updike is condemning it.
“Morocco” and “Tea on the Mountain” are each written from the perspective of an American writer very briefly visiting Morocco. Bowles’s writer is a young, unmarried, unnamed woman who has just received a cheque from her publisher for the novel she’s been working on. The excitement quickly wears off as “she had to admit that sometimes she was lonely,” though she’s also soon to return to the States. Against a Moroccan friend’s advice, she accepts a date for a picnic and a walk in the hills with Mijd, a Moroccan student much younger than she, along with Mijd’s schoolmate Ghazi, a student we would today call learning-disabled. She is attracted to Mijd “perhaps because he was more serious and soft-eyed, yet at the same time seemed more eager and violent than any of the others.” Violence is rarely far off in Bowles’s stories. You think you know where this is going.
Mijd is enamored with the American for “the pleasure of having a true European friend,” of her blue eyes, as he tells her. Europe and the United States are interchangeable in his eyes. She is the nameless, impressive other. His way of preening is to break rules, to hire a carriage, to drink wine and eat ham with her at his “country villa.” He doesn’t like wine, but he hates conventions. He thrills at being seen with “a symbol of corruption.” The day of the picnic he gifts her a massive silver ring. “You are magnificent,” is his refrain to her. He calls her, ambiguously, his sister.
Reading Bowles is like watching a Hitchcock movie. Something unsettling is lurking about. Because you’re a western reader, you begin to imagine that Mijd is setting a trap when Ghazi takes a nap and Mijd takes the American to a more secluded spot on the mountain. Your mental stereotypes take over. But he is all childish sweetness. He never makes a move. He thrills enough just to be with her, unaware that the latent aggression is all the American’s. She is using Mijd for her own Oriental fantasy: “The idea of such a picnic had so completely coincided with some unconscious desire she had harbored for many years. To be free, out-of-doors, with some young man she did not know–could not know–that was probably the important part of the dream. For if she could not know him, he could not know her.”
There’s an Alice Munro story about a well-educated adolescent girl making a little money as a maid in a middle-class house and groping her way through the unnerving dynamics of master-maid relationships her employers are too woke (to be anachronistic about it) to fully exercise. In the story’s final image, her employer’s cousin, whom she did not know, “took hold of her lightly, as in a familiar game, and spent some time kissing her mouth.” Shockingly (to us), she doesn’t mind.[3] “This stranger’s touch had eased her; her body was simply grateful and expectant,” Munro writes, “and she felt a lightness and confidence she had not known in this house,” even as she is very faintly aware of “a tender spot, a new and still mysterious humiliation.”[4]
I think that’s how the American protagonist has behaved with Mijd. The story is that stranger’s kiss, without the kiss but all the humiliation Mijd may eventually sense, after she has tossed him aside the way she did the little card where he’d written his address and the word “magnificent,” foolishly thinking they would one day join again.
There is nothing overtly offensive in the story. In most ways it’s effortlessly sweet on Mijd’s part, though he’s not innocent of using the woman to his own ends, as she has used him. But Mijd is all wide-eyed, while you sense that the woman, if not Bowles, condescends to Mijd’s simplicity and ultimately can’t resist the western marker, like Updike’s reference to Homer: “I’m leaving for Paris tomorrow,” the American tells Mijd, not just ending all his hopes of ever seeing her again, but reminding him that they are not of the same world. Hers is the one he dreams of, not the other way around (though it is to Mijd’s world that Bowles would eventually migrate). Bowles never moves his protagonist too far away from a sense of indulgent, good-doggy superiority over Mijd. At least she’s uncomfortable about it, as Updike’s writer in “Morocco” is not.
Updike seemed reluctant to republish “Morocco” in book form after its first appearance in 1979[5], for good reason. It was not reissued until his last collection in 2009, My Father’s Tears, published six months after his death, appearing first in that collection. As with most of Updike’s stories and more than half his novels, the story is almost entirely autobiography. The word “almost” may be superfluous. In 1969, his marriage on the brink, he took wife and four children–two boys, two girls–on “an exhausting five-hundred-mile dash in a rented car from Tangier to Agadir.”[6]
The story is a travelog, written vaguely here and there as a letter to his children but mostly as bleak memoir of an unhappy trip that from the first lines about the seacoast road wails of fearful peril: Other cars appeared menacing on it, approaching like bullets, straddling the center strip.” Even little girls selling flowers at roadside look threatening. “What were we afraid of? A trap. Bandits.” We’re still in the first paragraph.
The plazas are “bleak.” “Dark men,” who have always frightened Updike, “frightened our baby” (babies are not frightened by different races, only by the reaction of their parents to different races). The eldest daughter is attracting “stares from native men everywhere,” as if she would not, say, at any mall back home, as Updike’s stories well document. Aboard a bus in Tangier, before the rental, Moroccans are all “dusty hunched patient unknown people.” There is never an attempt to know them. One of the couple’s boys “could not stop staring at a man so badly crippled he seemed a kind of spider.” They witness a traffic accident, the killing of a little girl, the ululating wails of the mother, because no story about Arabs by an American stuck on stereotypes could spare us ululations. A mother’s grief is a tourist’s spectacle. On a beach in Agadir, a man nearby is masturbating “Out of his folds. At Judith and us.” Judith is one of the daughters. From ululations to predation.
They escape to a hotel run by a French couple “where all the Europeans were swimming and tanning safe from the surrounding culture.” Then “We escaped from Agadir, from Morocco, narrowly,” though the narrator admits to his “cowardice,” but his confession is self-absorbed, it’s “a stain upon my memories of Morocco,” not a stain upon Morocco itself.
Racism hangs like smog over Updike’s works, more visible from a distance than up close, where you more easily miss it for the gorgeousness of his language. “In Updike’s defence it is often maintained that these are the thoughts of his characters, not necessarily of their creator,” the critic James Wood wrote. “But obsessions of this kind have recurred and overlapped thickly enough in his work to constitute, now, the equivalent of an artist’s palette: this is how Updike chooses to paint the world.”[7]
I find the defense disingenuous. The racism, more rancid for being so casually guarded, aggregates in his novels, his stories, his personal behavior, as when he mimicked 1965 civil rights marchers in verbal blackface, the way he tosses off the n-word for the fun of an alliteration during an all-white dinner party in Couples, a novel without a single Black character, the way he described a Japanese woman’s eyes–he calls her a “girl” in the story–as “those opaque little pools of racial ambition, noncommittal as camera apertures.”[8] What has a landscape designer’s assistant in an American workplace to do with racial ambition? Why resort to the stereotype of a camera metaphor? Non-white foreigners, like Manhattan’s non-white neighborhoods or pedestrians, made him uneasy, perhaps ashamed of his unease, too, like his writer in Morocco, prompting him to hide behind witticisms and wordplay.
In “Morocco” the racism isn’t distant smog. It is the story’s momentum, as “oil-black” as his slander of the Mediterranean. Unlike the American in “Tea on the Mountain,” there’s never an attempt to connect, not even for self-gratification. The Orientalist overtones of the story[9] are impossible to miss, like Mark Twain in his travels in the Levant comparing Arabs to Blacks as a shortcut to derogatory putdowns or the way Melville, who celebrated American diversity before it was a word, could reduce Palestine to “bleached leprosy-encrustations of curses-old cheese bones or rock–crunched, knawed and mumbled–mere refuse of creation.” Take these Americans to Arab lands and suddenly they become vulgar orientalists in the Napoleonic mold.
Bowles flirts with the same condescension. His American writer never really gets past herself to understand Mijd on his terms, on his turf. He paints Mijd as a stereotype down to his none too believable boast of having a 12-year-old mistress. Even as Mijd bucks local culture, everything he does and says is to impress the westerner as he would not a fellow-Arab. But there is a tenderness in the moment on the mountain that touches the reader. It’s what you’re left with when they part, as if Bowles wants to save Mijd and the American from overt disappointment. They had their moment. It just wasn’t in Paris, where she flies off. You wish her well. You imagine Mijd will have a happier life than she will.
Updike’s family flies back to Paris too where, unsurprisingly, they have a crabby time of it. It’s not that you wish them ill, but you’ve had enough of them, of him especially. If he had encountered an older Mijd along the way, Mijd would not have called him magnificent. He’d have called him pathetic and pitied his family for what they missed. If only they’d taken the time for tea with a local, the oil-black colored glasses might’ve been left behind.
Notes and amplifications:
[1] I grew up by the Mediterranean, and while I well remember how “Walking along the beach, we picked up tar on our feet,” as Updike’s protagonist notes, I don’t remember the Mediterranean, however dirty it could sometimes be, looking any less than radiant turquoise, at least in good weather.
[2] The Flagler Beach architect Joseph Pozzuoli, who may have Mediterranean roots, wants to paint the ceiling of the renovated pier’s A-Frame “haint blue” for the same becalming reason.
[3] In retrospect, knowing the lack of urgency with which Alice Munro reacted on learning that her second husband had molested her daughter from her first marriage, the girl’s reaction in the story takes on a differently disturbing dimension.
[4] “Sunday Afternoon,” by Alice Munro, originally published in The Canadian Forum in 1957, from Dance of the Happy Shades (Vintage 1998), pp. 161-71. ,
[5] Incidentally, four months after I had entered the United States as a permanent resident, permanently exiled from my own Mediterranean Azure.
[6] Adam Begley, Updike (Knopf, 2014), p. 307.
[7] James Wood, “Gossip in Gilt,” a review of John Updike’s Licks of Love, London Review of Books, April 19, 2001.
[8] John Updike, “The Faint,” rejected by The New Yorker, published in Playboy, May 1978–the same issue that carried the infamous interview with Anita Bryant–collected in Problems (1979), quoted here from the Library of America’s Collected Later Stories (2013), p. 55.
[9] By Orientalism I mean what the academic Edward Said defined as westerners’ impulse to define that vast expanse of the Orient not merely as backward, but as redeemable only through western interpretation, and therefore control. Forget about trying to understand the Orient on its own terms, or letting the Orient explain itself to you, free of your assumptions. The Orient does not exist until it is interpreted through western assumptions and points of reference, through Western eyes.
Pierre Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive.
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