Echoes of Tangier

Romanticizing a golden literary city and its writers

It’s a rainy morning outside small shed where I write. Candle lit. Coffee near. Feels like a misty. cool day in a deep-forest cabin. The earthy smell of rain and leaves and pine, or the musty dampness an old cottage by the sea after a storm has passed. Contemplative setting. It comes after some time in my kitchen earlier, just after sunrise, when I mixed spices of cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, and cardamon in dark, robust coffee beans—the makings of Moroccan spiced coffee. Late the night before I watched an episode of Anthony Bourdain's “Parts Unknown,” the one about Tangier. I'd seen it before and so wanted to see if again after reading Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky. Moroccan spiced coffee came up several times in the Bourdain episode, as did kif and hashish, of course. But I have none of the makings for a hit off a hash pipe. A sip from a coffee cup? That’s a different story. 

Tangier’s literary history has always fascinated me. The creative forces tinged with madness—William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Arthur Rimbaud, Truman Capote, and yes, Paul Bowles, the literary king of Tangier. That era in Morocco doesn't exist anymore, at least not in the way that we have dreamed it once was, romanticized what it must have been like to live and write at such a time in such a place, the tawdry glory of Tangier. All those literary outlaws, all that creativity, the headiness, the drugs, and decadence. What does exist to this day, however, are the echoes of that time, whether they are true or not. It does doesn’t matter. It’s the dream of it that resonates. The hippies that came in the 1960s, the tourists who come today, still sat then and sit now for many hours at the cafes, revering the writers who dared to live and work in a part of the world that once had been both sophisticated and raffish. Now, at my writing desk, I can only think of those echoes and the impressions they’ve made.

I've been to Cuba. The echoes of Hemingway. I visited his home, Finca Vigia, in the hills outside Havana and Hotel Ambos Mundos where he wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls. I've lived in Jack Kerouac's home in Orlando as a writer-in-residence. I walked the streets of Paris where Fitzgerald walked. I long to travel to Wales and peek inside Dylan Thomas' boathouse, the writing shed that inspired my own. Echoes. All of them.

It's easy to dismiss the appreciation and affection I have for these literary touchstones by calling myself a helpless romantic for bygone eras of creative awakening that never really were as I have imagined them to have been. Each of these artistic places, and so many others, has been lifted to a level that even in their time was likely exaggerated. They have been elevated to the unnatural. Each is no more than a simple spot on the globe—a home, a workspace, a city of interest, a port of artistic individuality and lifestyle. In their day, none was as unique or special as time has made them out to be. The years and the echoes have turned them into museums. There may have been something unique in each, and certainly in Tangier, but not one of them was as special as we all want to be believe. What matters more, however, is how we imagine them to have been. That’s the allure.

A contemplative afternoon drinking spiced coffee at the Gran Cafe de Paris among the ghosts of poet Jean Genet and playwright Tennessee Williams remains a beautiful dream. I will never know the experience of sinking into the atmosphere of that romanticized era in Morocco. But I can dream, can't I? I can dream that the magical, mystical port city that sits a ferry ride away from the southern coast of Spain truly was in its golden era an extraordinary place, and that the spiced coffee I drink this morning is as magnificent as the cup at a street cafe on a balmy night in Tangier.