A Long Short Trip to Tangier
by Robert Eastman
The sign was missing. To the right of the door, where it should have been, there was but the shadowy outline of where the sign once was, the ghost sign a silent witness to the passage of time in Tangier.
DEAN.S BAR
1937
I am in Tangier, at a certain address, standing in front of a building, staring at a ghost of a ghost. I would not understand what I was really looking at until much later. At this moment, I am instead struck by disappointment. In my head, the sign was still there. I wanted it to be there, to see white letters standing out from the metal plate under a noirish light on a dark night, Joseph Dean standing under the lit-up marquee jutting out over the sidewalk.
Do I have what Simon-Pierre Hamelin, owner of Tangier’s Librairie des Colonnes, calls “Tangier Syndrome”? He cites the symptom of self-reinvention as the “primary pathology” – pretending to be what one is not. However, when Hamelin refers to “a veritable manufacture of larger-than-life characters,” I am unclear whether he is discussing self-reinvention or excessive idolatry of writers and artists. Coming to Tangier to try to understand what Tangier meant to Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Corso, and Bowles – to the extent that is possible 75 years later – makes me feel that I am in Hamelin’s crosshairs. I make no pretense of being a literary pilgrim – an inadvertent literary tourist, perhaps. I may be afflicted more with a secondary pathology, nostalgia, than the primary; the cure for either seems worse than the disease.
* * *
My little hometown, Buckland, Massachusetts, was far away from Morocco – 3,500 miles west, and 7º of Latitude further north. Buckland and the neighboring town of Shelburne are often collectively known as “Shelburne Falls,” particularly the small downtown where the excitement of the day in my youth might have been the bowling alley hidden behind Main Street, the community swimming pool, the drive-in Theater, or enjoying a root beer at the Baker Pharmacy counter. When all else failed, we would say we were from “near Greenfield”, the county seat, 15 miles east of Buckland, which seemed like a big town to us – Greenfield’s population of 17,000 dwarfed either Buckland’s or Shelburne’s populations of a couple of thousand residents each. Greenfield is where the restaurants were (Howard Johnson’s all-you-can-eat fish fry on Wednesday nights was a place to be seen), the Garden movie theater, Wilson’s Department Store (grand by Western Massachusetts standards), and the Franklin County Fair every September.
My mother took my sister and me regularly on many Saturdays to our small-town library in Upper Buckland, where I devoured biographies of the presidents and the Hardy Boys. Our home was not particularly literary. The built-in bookshelves in the living room of our 150-year-old house were always full, but not with what one would call “literature”. The composition of the shelves changed somewhat after my father died when I was 6 years old, and my mother remarried 4 years later. I would be forever looking at the books lined up on the shelves (never opening any of them to read): 2-3 Abridged Reader’s Digest books (“Forever Amber”); H.G. Wells’ The Outline of History, Volumes I and II; A Treasury of Great Mysteries; at least 3 Bibles, and several scrapbooks, sitting among assorted bric-a-brac.
I was not aware of the Beats in my youth, except for reading On the Road in high school. (I would not learn until I was about to embark on my trip to Morocco that Herbert Hunke, who with Jack Kerouac conjured the term “Beat,” was born in Greenfield in 1915, and had lived at 10 Grinnell Street, Greenfield for the first 3 years of his life.) I had heard about Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” in the hallway or on the bus, but neither Ginsberg nor “Howl” registered with me.
Somewhere in my youth, however, I had developed a deeply buried enthrallment with the Beat, or was it the derivative Beatnik? They represented a secret society, a cabal of some sort. The Beatnik oozed a coolness that I could only dream of possessing: the goatee, black turtleneck, black pants, and dark glasses. They hung out in places, I imagined, that I would never be admitted to, a smoky, chiaroscuro setting, softly playing jazz music drifting over furtive conversations in dim lights. Where this fantasy came from, I have never been able to resolve. Could it be a yearning for admittance to a fold of platonic male companionship, perhaps to fill a void left by the death of my father? Or did this fantasy develop from a book that I eagerly ordered from the high school library’s monthly book catalog?
My reading appetite began to turn to the most arcane and obscure topics before I turned 13. Even more than my high school library’s shelves, the monthly book catalog was a menu of unimaginable delights to me. I would pore over each catalog multiple times, unable to choose which or how many books to order. Inevitably, my focus was increasingly drawn to the books on the most obscure topics. I immersed myself in existentialism and was delighted by the arcaneness of Madame Blavatsky’s theosophy.
These two aspects of my youth lay dormant for most of my life: my secret desire to belong to the secret society, and my thirst for books of the most arcane nature. A trip to Provincetown, Massachusetts, years later would force me to revisit these impressions of my youth and start me on a journey I never knew I wanted to take.
* * *
On a warm August day in 2018, I was on a regular, but not frequent, visit to Provincetown (Massachusetts), “Ptown” to any local and to most tourists. Every such visit inevitably involves a customary ritual of wandering from one of Ptown’s 3 bookstores (at last count) to another. I was in the 3rd bookstore on Commercial Street, Tim’s Used Books, eager for a score. As usual, I was shifting indecisively from one shelf to another, looking for that arcane volume that would have the most obscure references in the back pages of the index. After working my way through the shop, I returned to the tall, narrow shelf that greets customers as they enter. On a shelf higher up, my eyes landed on the thick binding of “Dharma Lion,” Michael Schumacher’s 2016 biography of Allen Ginsberg.
Dharma Lion’s 82 pages of endnotes and index beckoned – oh, the obscure references to people and places one might find. Sparkie Bourne had bought this book in October 1993 and marked it up throughout in pen, and then apparently was done with the book. Of such small moments, journeys are begun. For the princely price of $7.50, my ticket had been punched for a trip I had no comprehension or intention to make. Any why would I? “Tangier” does not appear in the “Dharma Lion” index and appears only 68 times across the book’s 769 pages.
Dismissive of Allen Ginsberg 50 years earlier, now this notoriously slow reader ran through “Dharma Lion” like a wildfire, and the fire ignited an intense interest in the Beats. One book led to another, through some two dozen books over the next 4 years: William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, Brion Gysin, John Clellon Holmes, Herbert Huncke, Diane di Prima, Ian Sommerville, Paul Bowles, and Mohamed Choukri.
An old phantasm of my childhood had been revived. If I was not ready or able to fully explore in my young undeveloped state of mind, I could allow it fully bloom now. John Clellon Holmes’ definitive 1952 essay in the New York Times Magazine (“This Is The Beat Generation”) captured the Beats and the context of the times well before I was born: a group of writers who had a “lust for freedom, and the ability to live at a pace that kills”. No one has described the 1950s existential center of the Beats better than Holmes, and he makes me wonder now if we might not be hungry again for the restlessness that epitomized the Beats. Later in this essay from almost 75 years ago, Holmes writes: “Sociologists, with a more academic concern, are just as troubled by the legions of young men whose topmost ambition seems to be to find a secure birth in a monolithic corporation. Contemporary historians express mild surprise at the lack of organized movements, political, religious, or otherwise, among the young…Perhaps they have not noticed that, behind the excess on the one hand, and the conformity on the other, lies that wait-and-see detachment that results from having to fall back for support more on one’s capacity for human endurance than on one’s philosophy of life.”
* * *
Tangier is, above all else, a product of its history. Sitting at the juncture of Europe and Africa and at the juncture of the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, on the Strait of Gibraltar, the city has always been perfectly juxtapositioned at the center of considerable intrigue before and after World War II. For much of its history, the Portuguese, Spanish, British, and French were trying to strongly influence, if not colonize, the country. In 1923, Tangier was declared an International Zone controlled by France, Spain, and the U.K. (and later Italy and the U.S.). World War II complicated matters further. Spain occupied Tangier from 1940 to 1945 before being ousted, and the country returned to the control of France, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and the U.S. In this maelstrom of international influence, Tangier became a haven of free trade ⏤ and smuggling, espionage, drugs, homosexuality, prostitution, and intrigue ⏤ from 1923 until 1960. (In August 1957, The Sunday Mirror reported that prior to July 1955, Tangier had accommodated at least 25 licensed brothels – 12 for Europeans, 13 for Arabs.) The movement toward Moroccan independence gained momentum in the years following World War II, resulting finally in Morocco declaring its independence on 2 March 1956.
Paul Bowles, who famously lived in Tangier for over 50 years, arrived in 1947 and remained until his death. Brion Gysin, writer, poet, painter, multimedia innovator, restaurant owner, and close associate of Burroughs and Paul Bowles, had come to Tangier in 1950 (on the advice of Paul Bowles) and stayed until 1958. William S. Burroughs came to Tangier via Rome (which he did not like), ⏤ drawn (according to Barry Miles) by Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky and Let It Come Down as well as the rampant vice of Tangier.
Tangier’s location, tolerant attitude, and attraction to all manner of vice and intrigue drew many literary figures, painters, and artists, particularly in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. In the same orbit as the Beats, writers such as Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Jean Genet, John Hopkins, Samuel Beckett, T.S. Eliot, and Rupert Croft-Cooke mixed it up with a coterie of other poets, painters, writers, and adventurers. They gathered at Villa Muniria (and the TangerInn Pub attached to the Villa Muniria), the Parade Bar, Dean’s, the Bar La Mar Chica, Hotel El Minzah, Guitta’s, Hotel Rembrandt, Café Central, Café de Paris, La Grenouille, Madame Porte’s, and Hotel Armor.
* * *
Christmas is just days away. My son and daughter, grown up and with children of their own, are each spending the holiday this year with in-laws. Given the choice between spending the holiday alone or traveling, the choice seems obvious. I am reading Mohamed Choukri’s For Bread Alone, the 14th book I have read about the Beats or people associated with the Beats since my visit to Provincetown. I am thinking about the intersection of desire and opportunity, and about taking a trip I never thought about taking. A book I bought five years earlier, some sentimental childish fantasy, and a hopeless nostalgia for the restless energy that people used to have before we were overcome by the relentless stress of getting ahead, paying the mortgage, climbing the corporate ladder, and hanging on for dear life until retirement. They are leading me to Tangier.
* * *
From the rooftop of my riad, I can look out on Tanger Bay and, across the 30 kilometers of the Strait of Gibraltar, to the coast of Spain. This afternoon, the water is a shimmering blue; the Strait will always be this lovely shade of blue, I think. The bright sun is still lighting up the waterfront, although sunset is just an hour away.
I walk out of the riad to explore Tangier. Away from the waterfront, the buildings are beginning to cast long shadows. The air is warm for December for a visitor, but about 25 degrees cooler than in midsummer in Tangier.
Along the waterfront, in the late afternoon, many families are out walking – children, parents, and grandmothers. Away from the waterfront, during the day, men seem to outnumber the women in the street – either standing outside their shops awaiting a customer, standing together talking, transacting in the Grand Petit or Grand Socco, or sitting at a café. Younger women are apt to dress modestly but not traditionally. Older men and women are often, not always, wearing the traditional djellaba. One Tangerine told me he had 6 or 7 djellabas in his closet, much as a gentleman in the West might have several sport coats in his closet. Being December, the women often wear a warm coat over their djellaba, with a headscarf for tradition and modesty, not warmth.
Everywhere in Tangier, there are cats. As much as cats are revered in Arabic culture, the life of a street cat seems precarious in Tangier. In one shop in the souk, a shopkeeper had a bowl of food out for a cat and its litter of kittens; in a restaurant, a patron set aside his unfinished plate for two cats milling about. Near my riad one evening, however, a taxi driver picking me up ran over a cat without the least reaction; the cat ran under the wheels under the driver’s side, and then, before slithering away, went under the wheels on the passenger’s side. The driver seemed no more surprised than the cat, and not the least concerned about any moral consequences. I would see more savagery before I left Tangier. This apparently is not, however, the explanation for the Arabic culture, assigning the cat only 6 lives, not 9; the accepted narrative is that cats are respected and cared for in Arabic cities, including Tangier.
Some alleyways are very clean, but the cleanliness coexists with a fair amount of shabbiness. Some alleyways are lined with lovely plants in pots outside every door. Other alleys and passageways are shabbier, with littered empty lots, and the purpose, occupancy, or habitability of buildings unclear. No one pays much attention to the crumbling. (The Café Hafa has always been Tangier’s version of shabby chic. On the day I visited, the restrooms were filthy to the point of use-at-your-own-risk.)
I come to a stop at the bottom of a steep street rising to my right. With only a vague sense yet of Tangier’s geography, I suddenly wonder if the Villa Muniria is nearby. I have seen a photograph of this famous literary landmark in a guidebook, but the address is vague. Finding one’s way around Tangier requires patience and reliance upon one’s geographical instincts. There are streets with no posted street name. It’s unclear what constitutes a street and what constitutes a wide alleyway. Streets may have no name, or have 2 or 3 names, names have changed over time, or have a name that is not posted on the street. The visitor trying to traverse the city without Josh Shoemake’s Tangier: A Literary Guide for Travelers, perhaps having inexcusably discovered the book only upon their return, is at a considerable disadvantage.
In room #9 of the Villa Muniria, in 1957, William S. Burroughs was in a manic creative period, furiously throwing off pages of what would become Naked Lunch onto the floor as quickly as he typed them. Jack Kerouac, who had arrived in Tangier first, and Allen Ginsberg, who had arrived after Jack, gathered the pages covering the floor, and reorganized and retyped the material into the first of several versions of William S. Burroughs’ most famous book.
Burroughs had written 3 books (Junkie, Queer, and The Yage Letters – only Junkie had been published); he was better known for having shot and killed his wife, Joan, in 1951, in a William Tell party game gone wrong. Kerouac, perpetually restless and uncertain, was still trying to get the book he had written 6 years before, On the Road, published and dealing with the rejections of several other works. He was coming to Tangier for a reunion with Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Gregory Corso. Allen Ginsberg’s growing reputation was about to explode when he arrived in Tangier with Peter Orlovsky several weeks after Kerouac in late March 1957. (Not liking Tangier, Jack left two weeks after Ginsberg and Orlovsky had arrived.) Ginsberg had just published Howl three months before. He was in Tangier for no more than several days when Customs officials in San Francisco seized copies, declaring them obscene. This brought Ginsberg considerable notoriety. Greg Corso had met Ginsberg in 1950, just after being released from prison. Despite a troubled adolescence, Corso developed into a notable poet and associate of Ginsberg’s. His first book of poetry had been published in 1955, and he had been giving numerous poetry readings with Ginsberg.
Going on instinct more than anything else, I walk up the street, feeling a need to head north and west. The choice of streets is limited, so I take the first street heading north. At the very least, I am heading back in the direction of my riad. This street at first looks respectable enough. An abandoned building on the side of the street is across from a bakery. Then, an empty trash-strewn lot that opens up the view out to the bay, letting light penetrate the neighborhood, signals a change in character for the street. The next block is dreary. Indifferent, characterless buildings of ambiguous use and occupancy close in on the street. One would never know that one of the buildings on the north side of the street is the Hotel Armor, in whose penthouse Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and Gregory Corso stayed on a 1961 visit to Burroughs. (Days later, they were joined at the Hotel Armor by Timothy Leary, also there to see Burroughs.)
Ahead of me, past the next corner, a group of men and several uneasy dogs watch my approach with what I hope is curiosity. At the corner, a street rises up on my left, framed by another shabby-looking empty lot on one side of the street, opposite a high wall on the other side. The wall is flat and chamfered where it wraps around the corner of the street. At the chamfer, on top of the wall, a white sign with thin black lettering, “Hotel El Muniria and the TangerInn Pub,” sinks into the bushes. A white 3-story building, shrouded in shade, dominates this short, rising street. Two signs hang vertically over the entrance: “EL MUNIRIA VILLA”, in blue lettering, and, above it, in red lettering, “TANGERINN”.
With no thought as to how I will explain my visit, if I even understand it myself, I knock on the heavy, grated door. There is no light from inside. The only signs of life are a single car parked in front of the entrance. I knock again and then press my finger to a discreetly located doorbell. At last, there are faint sounds of human presence from within. A woman, perhaps in her 40s, opens the door to see who is asking entrance at this late hour in the afternoon in the largely deserted neighborhood. She greets me in what I presume is Darija. (While both Darija and Berber are official languages of Morocco, Darija is by far the more common language in daily use in Tangier.)
My improvisation skills are required to gain admittance. Through some gesticulations and jumbling of words – “Beats”, “photographs” – I convey my wish to see “the photographs” (understood without explanation to be the photographs of the Beats reported to hang on the walls of Muneria.). A stroke of luck – my surprised greeter opens the door and bids me to enter. I cross through the two heavy doors into a small, dimly lit split-level entryway, too small to pass as even a tiny lobby. A stairway to the upper floors takes up most of the space; to the right, a narrow hallway leads back to parts unknown. Awkwardly, we engage, without a common language, in a “Here’s the photographs, should I show you more?” pas de deux.
What first catches my attention, on the wall just inside the door, is a mash-up of a well-circulated photograph. The original photograph or its variants shows Peter Orlovsky, William S Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Alan Ansen, Paul Bowles, Gregory Corso, and Ian Sommerville in the Muneria garden, in 1961. This mash-up is a cut-in-half photograph of Peter Orlovsky, William S Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg, together with a long letter on paper with a “JB or possibly JC monogram” of unknown authorship. The clues are tantalizing but inconclusive.
My erstwhile hostess steers me toward the stairs. In the short stairwell, Allen Ginsberg’s 1961 photo of a “slightly zonked” William S. Burroughs in his trademark fedora; then Paul Natkin’s March 1981 photo of Burroughs in Chicago, wearing a heavy wool suit and sitting on a couch in front of a graffiti-scarred wall. Near the top of the stairs, Ginsberg’s August 1961 photo of Corso, Bowles, and Burroughs in front of a kneeling Ian Sommerville and Michael Porter in Muniria’s garden. On the first-floor landing, over a weeping fig, a composite of Gysin and Burroughs from an April 2013 flyer for a Gysin-Burroughs exhibit in Tangier. I had expected, without reason, for the photographs to be older or original. This is a collection, not Collection.
The 3rd floor is half residence, half terrace. The terrace looks out over Tanger Bay to the north. I am taking in the lovely view of the Mediterranean when my host directs my attention behind me. Her family is staring out at me through a set of double doors with a mix of impatience and curiosity. There are no signs of any guests at the hotel; in the finest tradition of Tangier, the ambiguity of the entire street extends to the Villa Muniria. If I wish to know that the family is looking out at me from the apartment in which, first, Burroughs, then Kerouac, and, later, Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, lived, I will have to learn that myself. Burroughs moved from this room to the room on the bottom floor, where he wrote Naked Lunch. I wonder if language is the only barrier to my learning any of this from my erstwhile hosts.
With the fixed stares of the family increasingly pressing on me, I feel an urgency to conclude my unexpected visit. In the confusion of the moment, I forget to look over the wall of the terrace into Muniria’s garden below, missing an opportunity to imagine the orgone accumulator that Burroughs built (his fourth, at least) in Muniria’s garden to capture “orgone energy.
This elusive energy was first described by Dr. Wilhelm Reich in 1939 as a biological energy, the basis for (among other things) the human orgasm. Reich’s theory was that when this energy did not find a sexual outlet, when it was dammed up, a person could suffer any one of several psychoanalytic issues. Although Dr Reich’s theories were in decline by 1961, eventually resulting in his imprisonment, Burroughs remained a believer in orgone for much of his life. Paul Bowles described Burroughs in the Muniria garden, sitting in his orgone accumulator that Bowles described as being “like a dog kennel.”
I feel a mixture of satisfaction and unease on making my exit. The visit has been too quick, too constrained. As a technology analyst, my entire world has been about exploring hidden spaces where no one else is looking, asking questions that no one else is asking, and being quite good at it. I was not so good at it today. I would have liked to wander without urgency, letting the building reveal its secrets to me, looking into empty rooms, and meditating about what had gone on in this hotel — the conversations, the writing, the camaraderie that had filled this space. The TangerInn Pub, attached to the Villa, is not yet open for the evening. And with that, my visit to the street that Josh Shoemake calls “the most storied street in Tangier” is over. If the stories are still here, I have not found them.
* * *
The Adhan for Fajr – the first of the 5 Islamic daily calls to prayer – awakens me just before seven. Tangier, 99% Muslim, gives scant notice that this is Christmas Eve morning. The riad I am staying in offers a token Christmas gesture to their Christian visitors — white lights on a Song of India tree in the lobby. A guide recommended by the riad has come to collect me.
We walk along the north wall of the Kasbah, heading for the souks in the Medina. By 9:30, the air has warmed up just a few degrees. A sweater suffices to take the chill off. My guide is a square, middle-aged man of officious bearing. He wears a blue canvas jacket over a blue polo shirt and black jean pants. His jacket does little to hide a middle-aged paunch. His broad face has unexpected dimples framing his poor teeth, attesting to the Moroccan affinity for sugary mint tea and an attention to dental care that are not in the right proportion.
My guide is brusque and informative about everything Tangerine, except the Beats. He knows where to take me – he tells of taking another group of men months ago to find the Beats. He evinces no personal interest. He does not know the why, only the where. After nearly an hour and a half of walking, I have learned much about Tangier: the history, the geography, the people, relations with Algeria, the daily calls to prayer, and the bitter orange trees. The Beats are but a small chapter in Tangier’s history, albeit an interesting chapter. He has, I will learn, saved the two places he wants to show me for the end of our time together.
We stop at a corner where 4 streets converge into a square. The Grand Hotel Villa de France is high up on a hill, gleaming in the sun. We turn left onto a nondescript street. Down 100 meters, we stop in front of a shabby gray building. Even the bright light of the day cannot cast any radiance onto what looks like a bomb shelter. A brown bicycle with a green milk crate mounted on the back has found sanctuary, stuffed into the doorway, padlocked to the grate. Two rusted grated ventilation ports on each side of the door look like empty eyeball sockets that have lost their flesh. Now defaced and rusted, a utility box of unknown purpose hangs from the building front. Below, trash spills out from another opening that once served a better purpose.
I look to my guide for some explanation. “Dean’s Bar”, he says. I look back at the shabby façade differently, incredulous. I had heard that it was closed. I had not expected the famous watering hole and literary gathering spot to have aged so gracelessly. In one of many old photographs, Joseph Dean is seen standing under the “Dean’s Bar” marquee hanging over the sidewalk in the black of night. “Dean’s Bar” lights up the black door, making it gleam even at night. Joseph Dean stands in a spotlight, looking roguish, his suit jacket hanging loosely, a handkerchief flowing like a wilted flower out of his breast pocket.
Robin Maugham describes the mix of intrigue and glamour that once was “Dean’s Bar” in Maugham’s 1948 book, “North African Notebook.”
“[At] Dean’s Bar gather the bogus barons and furtive bankers, the tipsy journalists and sober Jewish businessmen, the young diplomats and glamorous spies, the slender French and Moroccan girls, the English self-styled colonels and their friends, the foreign agents.’ More specifically, this is a place where all of Tangier’s most celebrated residents and visitors, such as Errol Flynn, Ava Gardner, Francis Bacon, Samuel Beckett, Cecil Beaton, Cyril Connolly, John Gielgud, Helena Rubenstein, T.S. Eliot, Noël Coward, and countless others, gossiped hard and drank harder.”
The glamorous, noirish setting is long gone, and along with it, any glamour the building once had. I stand in front of Dean’s, wishing I could somehow turn the clock back. Now even the iconic “1937” was gone, purloined, reportedly.
Joseph Dean has his own complicated history, much of it shrouded in mystery. Whether he was always “Joseph Dean” seems as likely as not. Before he was “Joseph Dean,” he is reported to have been “Don Kimfull,” a man of questionable character in Britain who escaped to Tangier to leave behind his legal troubles. The story is most powerfully told in Marek Kohn’s 1992 book, Drug Girls / The Birth of the British Drug Underground, which leads one back to a 1966 conversation (that may have been concocted) between British rogue, spy, and conman Gerald Hamilton and Robin Maugham (nephew to Somerset Maugham).
The mystery has outlived Joseph Dean, who passed away on 14 February 1963, either by heart attack or heroin overdose; take your pick. The only newspaper outside of Morocco known to have reported his death was London’s Daily Herald (15 February 1963).
Famous barman
Joseph Dean, owner of the
famous Dean’s Bar in Tangier, a
favorite with the international
set, died yesterday at 59. Mr.
Dean was born in Herne Bay,
Kent.
Dean’s Bar finally ceased to exist, except as a shabby monument, in 2015 (sometime between mid-February and November), having lost its glamour and intrigue long before. Joseph Dean, ⏤ owner, bartender, confidant of writers & spymasters, and procurer of everything you needed except possibly drugs ⏤ is buried, with his secrets, in the cemetery of St Andrews Church, 100 meters away, which my guide leads me past without notice.
Burroughs himself was not welcome at Dean’s ⏤ Joseph Dean disapproved of Burroughs. Barry Miles quotes Burroughs, “Dean wanted not to serve me, rolling his eyes in disapproval….Dean has heard that I am a dope fiend. More than that, he instinctively feels me as a danger, far out, an ill omen.” Bill was more often seen at the Parade Bar. But this is no easier to find than any of the other bars known to have been gathering spots.
Don Cook, a journalist, described in 1976 his visit to the Parade in the period after WWII:
“I had been told to seek out a place called the Parade Bar, an expatriate hangout of suitably dubious repute. Tangier is a small place, and the Parade Bar was not difficult to find. I stumbled into an atmosphere of incense and incest, where a number of the gentlemen customers wore mascara and lipstick, and a parrot chained to a perch was hurling obscenities in French at a nearby cage of lovebirds.”
The Parade closed in mid-1984, without even the dignity of being left to rest as a ghost. At the location where the bar once stood, a large modern building now stands, sitting over a shop on the ground floor that repairs clocks.
I am stepping into the Librairie des Colonnes, over which threshold writers and readers have been crossing since 1949. Simon-Pierre Hamelin, the current owner, refers to this bookshop as “one of the principal stations of the Tangier pilgrimage.” Hamelin reminds, “Jean Genet used to come to pick up his royalties sent by Gallimard; Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote would meet up there; Jane and Paul Bowles used it as a postal address; Choukri came to borrow books; Mrabet exhibited his phantasmagorical paintings and drawings and always dropped in once a week to say hello to the staff.” Francis Poole, too, has been known to show up, but they do not carry Poole’s book on Dean’s Bar, “Everybody Comes to Dean’s”, which is a tough find. (I eventually find a copy at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.)
The bookshop is smaller than I imagined, both in footprint and in shelved volumes, and is better scrubbed than one expects for a literary bookshop. I sense, again, that Tangier has happily left its storied literary past behind in so many ways. I cannot feel the past in the bookshop or find it on its bookshelves. Perhaps Hamelin feels he is only encouraging Tangier Syndrome if the Librairie des Colonnes retains any of its past. I make it a rule to never leave a bookstore without a purchase, so leaving the Colonnes with nothing that has caught my interest leaves me instead with a sense of guilt. My guide has been getting increasingly edgy, and – as at the Villa Muniria – I let someone else’s impatience burden me.
We are hailing a petit taxi. My guide is still not interested in sharing the planned itinerary with me; I don’t know where we are headed. Ten minutes later, we are on Rue Al Hafid Ben Hajar, across from a dingy, gray 5-story apartment building. The structure resembles a Soviet-style block building from a previous decade. Four stories sit on top of five street-level shops of no distinction. The top 4 floors, apartments are heavily niched, left and right, astride the center section of balconies. There is no front entrance to the apartment floors.
My guide anticipates my question. “Where Paul Bowles lived”, he offers. If he knows that this building is known as Immeuble Itesa, he is leaving this, as with so much else, for me to figure out on my own. Paul Bowles was not one of the Beats. He sometimes derided what they stood for. He was, however, companionable with them and was not loath to be photographed with them. I have to imagine that he taught them much about Tangier, having arrived much earlier, made Tangier his home, and lived in Tangier much longer.
Looking at the building, I try to imagine Jane and Paul Bowles living in separate apartments, one over the other. John Hopkins describes a 1 April 1963 visit:
“Dinner with the Bowleses in Jane’s apartment. The spontaneous affection and sense of fun they share make them seem more like brother and sister than man and wife. Their intimacy is more fraternal than sexual. They live in separate apartments, one above the other, and communicate by a squeaking mauve toy telephone. Jane: “Fluffy, (squeak) come on up. John is here. Dinner (squeak) is ready.”
Paul Bowles was not known to ever own a telephone in Tangier, which makes the infamous pilgrimages made by so many to Paul Bowles all the more remarkable. Some visitors were expected, some arrived by surprise – all were welcomed.
A common detail emerges from the visitors’ trip reports – the stacks of suitcases inside Paul’s door (which can now be seen in the Paul Bowles room of the American Legion Museum in Tangier.) In the lobby of my riad, there is a trunk and suitcase stacked against the wall, across from the Song of India tree. I wonder if a stack of trunks and suitcases sits in other Tangerines’ houses, and whether this is a metaphor, perhaps, for the journey we are always on, whether we know it or not.
We walk around the back of the building to a wide alley that runs 50 feet between the back of the Immeuble Itesa and a high wall. An overgrown grass island juts out halfway down the alley, spilling out a jumble of weeds and trash. An Oleander tree reaches up from the middle of the island above the wall. We stop at a set of double, green steel-barred doors. My guide rattles the door. This is the first time, he says, he has ever found it locked. My visit to Tangier seems destined to be waiting outside dark, locked doors. Behind me, in the weedy mess, an orange cat sits at the curb amid a pile of debris. Another cat is sleeping a few feet away under the Oleander tree. Only when I look closer, through the debris, do I notice the carcass of another cat back against the wall. The cat’s end was not an easy one, nor perhaps a recent one.
An unseen hand finally opens the door, and we are admitted into a tiny foyer dominated by a steel door to the elevator. My guide directs my attention to a small sign with irregular lettering high on the wall beside the elevator door:
PAUL BOWLES
AMERICAN WRITER&
COMPOSER
LIVED HERE FROM1960/1999
This small sign is what we apparently have come to see. Here, as apparently elsewhere in Tangier, the stories are gone from the premises. At least this sign is still here, unable to disappear from behind the locked door. The descriptions and photos of the interior of Paul’s apartment, and the stories of his visitors, are all that is left now.
* * *
The El Minzah Hotel’s restaurant is empty this evening. The “Korsan” in El Korsan translates to “pirate”, intended perhaps to the history of pirates along the Barbary coast from the 16th to 19th centuries, but then, Tangier does not care to explain itself. The restaurant is elegant and spacious, which is enhanced by several mirrored pillars that throw off soft lighting throughout the large room. A long, raised platform runs back-to-front, covered with a crimson rug featuring a gold center medallion and a decorative border suggesting a Persian or Oriental design.
Black lacquered chairs are set at tables covered with ornate gold-colored tablecloths, complemented by gold plates and napkins. Floor-to-ceiling chiffon curtains drape the windows on the far side of the room. Moroccan-style samovar lamps highlight the corners of the room. Servers wearing white jackets and red Fezes have little difficulty attending to the few patrons this evening. I am seated on a heavily pillowed couch at a table at the front of the room. Where did Paul Bowles and Bernardo Bertolucci sit, I wonder, when they met here to discuss putting Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky to film?
In its elegance, the restaurant reminds me of the descriptions of Brion Gysin’s restaurant, 1001 Nights, which opened in 1954 in Tangier. In his biography of Gysin, Nothing is True Everything is Permitted, Geiger describes the scene:
[1001 Nights had] “intricately designed brass lanterns (that) cast wild designs on the ceilings, the menu was burned onto a wooden tablet, Gysin’s watercolors of Algerian and Moroccan desert scenes graced the walls, and what graced the tables is reputed to have been the finest Moroccan fare ever served in a restaurant in that country.”
The entertainment provided at 1001 Nights included the Master Musicians of Joujouka, from the Moroccan village of Joujouk, and, on other nights, acrobats, fire-eaters, and a dancing boy. The 1001 Nights was the hit of the town for as long as it lasted, which was considerably less than 1001 nights before financial difficulties resulted in Gysin being pushed out, to his everlasting disappointment. A dinner at El Korsan would be the closest I could come to imagining what patrons might have experienced at 1001 Nights.
Four musicians wearing red fezes and light-colored djellabas take to the low platform at the front of the room. The man on the far left, slim with a friendly face, alternates between a drum and tambourine. Next to him, a second man, more serious, works a tambourine. The third man, stockier, with a pleasant face, cradles his oud, a traditional lute-like instrument. On the far right, the oldest member of the band shows his mastery of the violin. The staccato-heavy beat of their music enchants the restaurant.
A woman wearing a traditional costume (white silk top, a colorful scarf, and a long, deep red skirt, and on her head a sheshia — a broad-brimmed straw hat with colorful pom-poms around the brim) emerges from behind the platform. She dances about the room, a 100-dirham note prominently tucked into her wide velvet belt to encourage tips. She entices one reluctant dinner guest after another to dance with her, to the bewitching music, working her way about the room before disappearing from the stage.
Tradition gives way to allure. A belly dancer emerges – it is impossible to say whether this is a different dancer or simply a different costume. This dancer wears a shimmering silver bedlah, her long black hair flowing halfway down her back. Her dance seems more of a popular dance than a traditional Moroccan Shikhat. This performance is more alluring, and patrons seem even more willing to accept an invitation to dance with the performer. The entertainment does not compare to the description of the 1001 Nights, but then, Tangier is tamer now than it was then.
After 1001 Nights, Brion Gysin became better known for an invention Gysin called the Dream Machine. Geiger tells the story of the origins of the Dream Machine:
“On December 21, 1958, Gysin was traveling by bus to La Ciotat, an artists’ colony on the Mediterranean, near Marseilles, for the Christmas and New Year holidays. As the bus passed through an avenue of trees, Gysin closed his eyes against the setting sun. He recorded the experience in his journal, ‘An overwhelming flood of intensely bright patterns in supernatural colors exploded behind my eyelids: a multidimensional kaleidoscope whirling out through space. The vision stopped abruptly when we left the trees.”
In May 1982, I was on a commuter train heading home from work, as I did every day. On this particular day, as the train turned from west to south, the setting sun entered my window through a line of trees. I was dozing off slightly. The intense flickering light hit my eyes and produced a mesmerizing effect that put me into a semi-hypnotic state, rendering me incapable of thought. The effect was like an explosion of sensation. I tried with limited success to reproduce the conditions on subsequent days, letting the sunlight come through the same trees with a strong flickering effect. I could never understand what had happened, or why. I had no knowledge of Gysin – I had never heard of him, or his Dream Machine. But I had experienced precisely what Brion Gysin had experienced nearly 25 years before. After his experience, Gysin studied the work of W. Grey Walter and, with Ian Somerville, developed the Dream Machine. A light flicker rate of 8 to 13Hz, Gysin and Somerville found, following on the work of W. Grey Walter, matches the alpha wave rhythm of the brain, producing mesmerizing effects. The discovery – and the invention, unfortunately – proved more fascinating than practical, and Gysin would spend 20 years in futility trying to market his Dream Machine.
* * *
My last hope for encountering anything left of the Beats in Tangier rests with a visit to the American Legation Museum. I am standing outside large Moorish-style studded wood doors in a dark, narrow-arched passageway, waiting in the darkness for the doors to open. The American Legation Museum is characteristically Moroccan beyond its architecture –the entrance does not reveal any of the complex secrets hidden beyond. That the Legation is the only U.S. National Historic Landmark outside the U.S. is, I will discover, the least of the reasons to visit. Yet, I have left this for my last day in Tangier, reluctant as I have been to leave the streets.
When the doors open, I enter a small lobby that is small and undergoing some renovation. I am handed a two-page Museum map, together with an apology for its inadequacy. Like so many places in Tangier, this institution seems determined to be unassuming, to make you work to uncover its stories.
The building, since the early 1800s, has passed through a series of purposes (and expansions): government offices, U.S. Consular housing, U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during WWII, a language school for the State Department and Peace Corps, and since 1976, a Museum. The map is no more than a footprint of the Museum; one has to wander from room to room, and more rooms beyond that, to finally realize what a labyrinthine structure it is. There is so much in the Museum that the staff struggles with how to present it, and this has resulted in a continual changing of identities, purposes, and contents of the rooms and collections. Moroccan, European, and American culture, art, and history: Zohra, “Morocco’s Mona Lisa”; James and Marguerite McBey; the Perdicaris Affair; the WWII spy closet behind a mirrored wall; Paul Servant’s 2000 glass negatives from early 1900s Tangier; research archive of Moroccan newspapers, books, and papers numbering more than 8,000 are among the Museum’s treasures. I am tempted to seek the explanation for the dearth of historical preservation out on the streets of Tangier in the richness of the collections in the Museum – the metaphor of the Museum as a vacuum that has sucked everything into its collections. This may be true in part, but even the Museum gives the Beats only brief attention.
In the Arab Pavilion, downstairs, in the Paul Bowles Wing, nestled between a movie poster for Sheltering Sky and several of Mohamed Mrabet’s ink drawings are four photographs of the Beats. The photo of what was then Room #9 in the Villa Muniria, where Burroughs furiously ejected sheets of Naked Lunch from his typewriter, a photo shows a writing table pushed against an open window. The Museum considers the Beats in perspective: “[The Beats were] one small group of authors, who shall we say, discovered Tangier [and] who lived in Tangier for five or six years in the 1950s.”
The Legation Museum – and many others – think better of Paul Bowles, who lived longer in Tangier and did not have all of Burroughs’ moral shortcomings. The Paul Bowles Wing contains rooms of artifacts. I take them all in, but stop in front of Paul Bowles’ suitcases stacked in a pyramid in a corner. Nearby, on the wall, a framed montage of Paul Bowles’ 1979 book, Five Eyes, pays tribute to five Moroccan writers: Abdeslam Boulaich, Mohamed Choukri, Larbi Layachi, Mohammed Mrabet, and Ahmed Yacoubi.
* * *
I am sitting in the Café Central, which has been a gathering spot for all manner of characters since 1921. The café is a long building that dominates the Petit Socco. As I sit with a mint tea, I think as much about what I have seen as what I have not seen – places no longer on the streets, all but forgotten except for a few brief stories here and there. Guitta’s, a villa and restaurant across from a mosque on Sidi Bou Abib, where Tangier’s English-speaking once met and where Jane Bowles may or may not have stripped naked once (she is also reported to have stripped naked in the Parade Bar). The owner, Mercedes Guitta, passed away in the early 2000s. A French Bank has replaced it. The Bar La Mar Chica is nowhere to be found. Madame Porte’s has reportedly been turned into a McDonald’s restaurant. Dutch Tony’s former restaurant, rooming house, and male brothel was located around the corner from where I am sitting, but they are no longer there. Owner Anthony Reithorst, a Dutchman, had five poodles, a penchant for lipstick and rouge, and a reputation for arranging in his rooms absolutely any sexual configuration. Allen Ginsberg’s photo of William Burroughs, Peter Orlovsky, and Paul Lund sitting at a table having lunch in Dutch Tony’s in 1957 is beguiling. I like to wonder what the three were doing before and after lunch.
I think of this photo again when my guide takes me to a small café near the Petit Socco. The café is narrow and deep, with bright green tiles interspersed with bands of mosaic tiles. The cook and the grill dominate the front entryway looking out into the souk. I squeeze by the cook to get to one of the 4 tables in the back. Shortly, I was served a plate of fish filet, rice, tomatoes, and French fries. I can picture Peter Orlovsky, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Paul Lund sitting here, except that instead of sitting on a black stool at a table with sage floral tablecloth under a piece of butcher paper, Dutch Tony’s had chairs and checkerboard tablecloths. And rooms and a brothel. And a good lunch could be had at Dutch Tony’s back in the day for 30 cents.
* * *
My trip is nearing the end. Of the many trips I have taken, this is the first trip that I never knew I wanted to take, and which started long before I was aware I was on a journey. This trip feels like the closing of a chapter for me – a journey that I began either 5 years ago or 60 years ago. I had hoped to see the stories of the Beats still very much alive in Tangier. That may have been expecting too much. The vestiges of the beats are quickly fading. This is disappointing. Their energy and restlessness could be good for more of us now.
I have learned from this trip that our lives are stories of many journeys. Not all of which involve a car, train, boat, or airplane; some of our journeys are inside of us. Every act every day may be the start of a journey, small or momentous. Whether we choose to recognize the journey can be the difference between living and existing. I learned that the best trips have many layers. If you don’t look at the layers, you may forget that there are questions in your life that you want answers to. You miss the connections. You don’t add to the meaning in your life. I think of Pico Iyer describing Peter Matthiessen’s incredible journey of a quite different sort: “a journey not away from reality but deeper into it…” Perhaps this is the best kind of journey that too few of us embark on.
BIO
Robert Eastman is a Boston-based writer. After a successful career as a technology analyst and writer, he now devotes himself to crafting personal narratives drawn from unfinished family stories, overlooked lives, neglected places, and the dustbins of memory. He divides his time between Boston and Cape Cod. Find him on Bluesky: reastman.bsky.social
