The Delicate Prey

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The Delicate Prey , published in German under the title Die Leicht Beute , is a short story published in 1949 by the American writer Paul Bowles (1910–1999).

She also gave the title to Bowle's first collection of short stories, The Delicate Prey and Other Stories (1950).

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Like many of Bowle's works, the action is set in the Sahara . Two brothers, leather merchants from the Filali tribe from Tabelbala , and their young nephew Driss set off with their camels for Tessalit and cross an area where caravans have often been attacked by the Reguibat . In the desert a lone rider comes towards them and asks to be allowed to join them, since he has the same dangerous path ahead of him. Despite initial distrust, the brothers agree, since the rider is apparently not a Reguiba, but comes from the town of Moungar, whose residents are considered pious and decent. Under the pretext that he wanted to hunt down a gazelle (the “easy prey” of the title) for an evening mechoui , the new companion later moves away from the entourage, lures the brothers into an ambush and shoots them. Driss hears the shots, suspects what happened and runs away, but then doubts his judgment and returns to the last resting place. Here the robber, intoxicated with hashish, overpowers him , ties him up, tortures him in the most cruel manner, cuts off his genitals, rapes him and finally saws his throat through.

When the Moungari in Tessalit tries to sell the leather stolen from the robbery, he arouses the suspicion of a local Filala, Ech Chibani. He reports his suspicions to the French commander of the place, who believes him and gives him permission to take revenge. Ech Chibani and his people catch the moungari, tie him to their camels and lead him deep into the desert. There they dig a pit, dig the moungari up to their necks and move on. “When they were gone, the moungari fell silent, waiting through the cold hours for the sun to bring warmth, then heat, thirst, fire and visions. The next night he no longer knew where he was, nor did he feel the cold any longer. The wind kicked up the dust from the floor and blew it into his mouth as he sang. "

Emergence

The story allegedly goes back to a true incident that Bowles claims to have learned about from the military commander of Timimoun on his journey through the Sahara in 1948 . He wrote the story down in December 1948 during a stormy night on board the Italian liner SS Saturnia sailing from New York to Gibraltar. On board was Tennessee Williams (who mistook the ship for the SS Vulcania in his memoir ) and Frank Merlo's lover at the time; Williams at the time suspected Bowles of cheating on him with Merlo, but was finally satisfied with the explanation that the two only smoked hashish together. Williams, to whom Bowles submitted the story soon after, was impressed by the literary quality of the work, but advised Bowles against the publication of such a violent work.

Bowles was puzzled that Williams had written a no less daring short story with Desire and the Black Masseur (1948) and insisted that everything that is written should be published. In the summer of 1949, the story first appeared in the avant-garde magazine Zero, which was then published in Bowles' adopted home Tangier . A year later it appeared in the USA as the eponymous story of his first short story collection The Delicate Prey and Other Stories . In the English edition of the collection, published in 1950 under the title A Little Stone by John Lehmann , The Delicate Prey was missing , as was Pages from Cold Point ; Lehmann admired the stories, but Cyril Connolly and William Somerset Maugham advised him not to publish them, as they would probably be picked up by the censors , and even if not, they would certainly not appeal to the public; in Great Britain the story only appeared like this in 1968.

reception

As Williams predicted, history was and is not to everyone's taste; Even in the more recent literary criticism, it often causes astonishment because of its violence. Edgar Allan Poe's influence, however, is undisputed ; Bowles dedicated the collection The Delicate Prey and Other Stories , published in 1950, to his mother, who was the first to read Poe's stories to him; Leslie Fiedler , after reading twice as cruel a story as The Delicate Prey, was vaguely amused by the idea of ​​a happy childhood in the Bowles house.

The decisive difference to Poe's horror stories, however, is the almost indifferent narrative attitude; While Poe illustrates the horrors of his stories through an exuberant multitude of adjectives and often from the inner perspective of his frightened or delusional protagonists, Bowles depicts incredible atrocities with an almost “clinical precision.” For Bowle's admirers, this is what makes his stories so impressive. One of these is Gore Vidal , who counts The Delicate Prey, along with several other stories by Bowle, among the best American short stories of the post-war period.

In Bowles oeuvre is The Delicate Prey of the story A Distant Episode (1947) the next, but also in his most famous novel, The Sheltering Sky (1949) is the Sahara theater of cruelty and destruction. The Delicate Prey differs from these two works, however, in that all the figures are “locals”, that is, Berber desert dwellers.

literature

expenditure

  • The Delicate Prey . In: Themistocles Hoetis [di GP Solomos] (ed.): Zero Anthology of Literature and Art 2, Tangiers 1949. pp. 60-70. (Initial release)
  • The Delicate Prey . In: Paul Bowles: The Delicate Prey and Other Stories . Random House, New York 1950.
  • The Delicate Prey . In: Paul Bowles: Collected Stories and Later Writings . Library of America , New York 2002. ISBN 978-1-93108220-4
  • Easy prey . Translated from the American by Pociao . In: Paul Bowles: The easy prey: Stories from Morocco . Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1996. ISBN 3-499-22007-5
  • Easy prey . Translated from the American by Pociao. In: Paul Bowles: Gesammelte Erzählungen I (= Collected Works , Volume V). Goldmann, Munich 2001. pp. 247-260. ISBN 3-442-30910-7

Secondary literature

  • Greg Bevan: Change of Key: A Reinterpretation of Paul Bowles' The Delicate Prey. In: Studies in English Literature (ed. By The English Society of Japan ) 56, 2015, pp. 111–126.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno: An Invisible Spectator: A Biography of Paul Bowles . Grove Press, New York 1989. p. 267.
  2. ↑ Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno: An Invisible Spectator: A Biography of Paul Bowles . Grove Press, New York 1989. pp. 278-279.
  3. ^ Tennessee Williams: Memoirs . New Directions, New York 1975. p. 159.
  4. ↑ Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno: An Invisible Spectator: A Biography of Paul Bowles . Grove Press, New York 1989. pp. 279-280.
  5. ^ Leslie Fiedler: Style and Anti-Style in the Short Story . In: The Kenyon Review 13: 1, 1951, pp. 155-172, here p. 171.
  6. ↑ Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno: An Invisible Spectator: A Biography of Paul Bowles . Grove Press, New York 1989. p. 279; Morris Dickstein: Fiction and Society, 1940-1970 . In: Sacvan Bercovitch (ed.): The Cambridge History of American Literature , Volume VII: Prose Writing, 1940-1990 , p. 154.
  7. ^ Gore Vidal: Introduction . In: Paul Bowles: Collected Stories, 1939-1976 . Black Sparrow Books, Santa Barbara CA 1979.