The Folded Clock: A Diary

Chapter 64: September 12

Today I received an e-mail from a friend who might introduce me to some people he knows. He and I once spent a summer together in Morocco twenty years ago. I requested these introductions because I want to offer these people some work. I realized, however, that I was not just asking to be introduced; I was asking to be recommended. He and I are both academics and so even innocent introductions have a whiff of putting one forth or putting one up (tenure language) about them. Character evaluations are required.

My friend said he would introduce/recommend me to the people I wanted to meet. Then he related a story about Paul Bowles, the cultish American writer of The Sheltering Sky who lived most of his life in Tangier, and about whom this friend had been writing his dissertation the summer we lived in Morocco. Every weekend he’d take the train from Fez to Tangier to hang out with Bowles.

He wrote, “Did I ever tell you the story of when I asked Paul Bowles to write a letter of introduction for me to William Burroughs?” I told him he had not. He described the encounter.

ME: I mean, I think it would kind of, like, help if you could write a letter of introduction.

PAUL B: Now?

ME: No, like when you had time.

Next day, after about two hours of chitchat.

PAUL B: Oh, I wrote that letter to Bill Burroughs for you.

ME: You did? (Thinking: OMG!! What will it say?)

PAUL B: Yes, it’s over there on the table.

I begin searching, on my hands and knees for about an hour. Under Bowles’s bed, among the detritus. Nothing. Never found it.

I thought this was such a great story — I laughed about it quite a bit. Then I stopped laughing and wondered: did this mean he wasn’t going to make the introductions I’d requested? Such is the inconvenience of e-mail. I could not dig beneath his bed for proof of what he maybe had not written.