The Tangier Diaries

John Hopkins

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780857736642
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

Tangier in the 1960s and '70s was a fabled place. This edge city, the 'Interzone', became muse and escapist's dream for artists, writers, millionaires and socialites, who wrote, painted, partied and experienced life with an intensity and freedom that they never could back home. Into this louche and cosmopolitan world came John Hopkins, a young writer who became a part of the bohemian Tangier crowd with its core of Beats that included William Burroughs, Paul and Jane Bowles and Brion Gysin, as well as Tennessee Williams, Jean Genet, Yves Saint Laurent, Barbara Hutton and Malcolm Forbes. Those intoxicating decades - Tangier's 'Golden Years' - are long gone. Grand old houses that once sparkled with life are shuttered and dark and most of the eccentrics who once lived and loved in the city have died. But here, in the pages of John Hopkins' cult classic, all the decadence and flamboyance of those days is brought to life once more.

1962

JULY 12 - HOTEL OLID, CALLE CRISTIANOS, TANGIER

Arrived last night via the Mons Calpe ferry from Gibraltar. The first person we ran into was Frank Wisner,¹ washing his feet in a fountain outside the old Spanish post office. He’s been sent here by the U.S. State Dept. to learn Arabic. We sat at the Café Central in the Zoco Chico until 4AM, drinking Fundador and reminiscing about Princeton. The urchins wouldn’t let us alone. Do these diminutive hustlers ever sleep? Do they have parents who wonder where they are? The Zoco Chico, apparently, is the square that inspired Tennessee Williams to write Camino Real. According to Wisner, the master is in Tangier right now.

JULY 14 - LA PLACE DE LA KASBAH

We parked the motorcycle by a high white wall with pink geraniums spilling down. A Moroccan kid pointed at a green door: “Englishman live there!” We knocked, and a man dressed in impeccable tweeds opened and welcomed us inside.

We entered a courtyard paved with green and red tiles. White Moorish arches ran along one side. A gnarled old fig tree, whose branches were so heavy they had to be supported by chains—the chains themselves had long ago become embedded in the wood—shaded the patio with its broad leafy expanse. This was the tree, our host explained, where Samuel Pepys wrote his Tangier diary back in 1683, when England ruled this city. Green figs as big as your fist hung precariously over our heads.

A bust of Seneca scowled from the top of a Roman column. Water splashed in a little fountain. A yellow-crested cockatoo hung upside down in a cage, shrieking, “¡Patatas fritas! ¡Patatas fritas!” Somewhere someone was moaning an old Andalusian lament. The scene was Mediterranean and timeless. It could have been a house in ancient Rome or Greece, Leptis Magna or Alexandria.

This was the home of Jim Wyllie, artist and long-time resident of Tangier. We told him we’d come to Tangier to teach at the American School and wanted to live in the Kasbah. No sooner said than done. He led us along a whitewashed alley to another carved and studded keyhole door belonging to a tiny house built into the Kasbah wall. It was for rent and we could have it!

JULY 17

Wisner has been in Tangier only two weeks but seems to know everybody. Today he took us to visit Paul Bowles in his apartment behind the American Consulate. We sat respectfully on the floor while the man of letters made tea. Bowles was dressed conservatively in coat and tie, like a university professor. You come to North Africa in the middle of summer and everyone is wearing tweeds!

I said I’d come to teach at the American School but wanted to write a novel. Bowles nodded non-committally: he’d heard that one before. Jane Bowles hobbled in. She radiated a kind of twisted, broken beauty. She wanted to see what the American boys looked like. Her welcoming smile conveyed a wound. She left with the words, “Remember, Fluffy, Tennessee is coming for dinner!”

JULY 22

Saw T. Williams at Sun Beach today. Not an impressive sight in a bathing suit with a rather large pot belly and greyish skin. He seemed to be in a rush—always going somewhere in a hurry, never stopping or taking his time. Arab boys danced about him like bright leaves fluttering from an ageing tree. The bodies of the poor: lean, sculpted, brown, with every muscle showing; the bodies of the rich: white, flabby, shapeless, ugly.

JULY 31

Now alone and approaching my 24th birthday. I wonder what will become of me. Where shall I go and what will I do? Who will come into my life and who will leave it? Who will be touched and who will reach out to me?

AUGUST 2

Forty-five pages of my novel written in nameless dedication.

AUGUST 6

Birthday yesterday; today 24.

AUGUST 28

At an art show at the Casino de Tanger yesterday an American woman came up and introduced herself. A black sheath dress, bright red lipstick and piercing hazel eyes. Thirty-three years old, she has lived in Tangier five years and teaches at the American School. Carla Grissmann by name. With her hair done up in a bun, she does look a bit like a school marm—a very chic Parisian school marm.

SEPTEMBER 5 - 62 BAB EL ASSA, PLACE DE LA KASBAH, TANGIER

This diminutive Moorish house is built into the old stone rampart of the Kasbah. Three storeys straight up, immaculately whitewashed with red tile floors. First floor: dining room, kitchen and breakfast nook; second floor: two bedrooms and bath; top floor: living room and terrace. From the table where I work I have a panoramic view over the sprawling medina, across the Bay of Tangier and the Strait to the Spanish coast as far as Jebel Tariq (Gibraltar) and Jebel Musa (Mount Moses) — the Pillars of Hercules.

When I take a break from writing, I step out onto the terrace to smoke a cigarette and watch the ships slide through the Strait toward exotic and unknown ports. The hubbub of Moroccan life rises from the city below me. I inhale the mingling scents of wisteria, ripe figs and cook smoke from grilling kebabs. I am stunned by the beauty of the setting, and by my good fortune to have stumbled into it.

SEPTEMBER 7

Tangier characters: Sonia and Narayan Kamalakar. He’s an Indian prince and she, apparently, is descended from a noble Georgian family. He resembles a rather limp beanpole, while she’s shaped like a rubber ball. Then there’s Tamara, Sonia’s daughter, 19 years old with a mane of auburn hair. They all squeeze into Villa Darna, a tiny house on a track fenced in by live cane off rue d’Ecosse, at the bottom of the Old Mountain. Poor as church mice, they manage nonetheless to maintain a spiritual identity. Once a week there’s a poetry reading at Villa Darna (Arabic: Our House). The arrogant and learned Alan Ansen² read from his former employer, W. H. Auden. The joints go around with the teacups. We sat on stones in the garden.

SEPTEMBER 12

This evening I was having a beer at the Café de Paris when a line of camels, ridden by lean, hawklike men in black turbans and blue robes, ambled by.

“Vamos a la Kasbah!” they called in sibilant desert voices. Meaning: they had been invited (paid) to form part of the decor for Barbara Hutton’s annual blast in the Kasbah.³ Later we eavesdropped on a pair of French queens dolling themselves up for the big event in the house across the street (the alley we live on is so narrow I can practically reach across and tap on my neighbour’s window). Eyeshadow, make-up, squeals of excitement punctuated by murderous asides.

SEPTEMBER 14

The Kasbah gate has been widened so BH’s great green Rolls Royce can glide through. When the alley narrows and the monster can proceed no farther without wedging itself between converging walls, the chauffeur hops out—a blond uniformed giant of the stormtrooper ilk—picks up the heiress—legs swinging limply like a rag doll’s—and carries her the last few steps to her palace in the Kasbah.

OCTOBER 13

As the American School keeps Spanish hours, Joe, Carla and I lunch in a restaurant on the beach. The summer season is over, and the tourists have departed. The Moroccan waiter set up a table for us on the sand. Soccer games ebb and flow across the wide beach. The shouts of the young players, as they struggled for the ball, were echoed by the hungry mewing of seagulls that wheeled above our heads.

For Carla, food is a way of life. I have never known a woman who loves food so much but, mysteriously, she stays slim. Grilled sardines, Moroccan salad, and a bottle of wine. After lunch she put on a black terry-cloth bikini, and we waded out through the soft lapping waves of the bay and fell into the water. These clear October days the Strait is like a mirror. Distant fishing boats dot the surface like flies on a window pane.

OCTOBER 15

Today Mina came to cook. Petite, ivory-skinned, dark eyes, wrapped and veiled in white, Spanish speaking. Our first lunch: oeufs mayonnaise with the hard-boiled yolks removed (replaced by rolled anchovies) and crumbled over the mayo; San Pedro (John Dory en anglais) and a miraculous salad. We pay her 5 dirhams (about a dollar) a day to clean and cook, and everybody is happy.

OCTOBER 25

Since the weather changed asthma is nearly killing me in this place. I feel weak, enervated, the strength dragged out of me. It has been raining for days, and the walls of our house have turned green with mold. Apparently the sand from which the cement is made comes straight from the beach full of salt, which of course absorbs and retains moisture. The sheets never dry out. Awake since 4AM, it was four hours before I had the energy to get out of bed. Thus a part of the morning—in which I had planned a great deal of writing—ruined.

NOVEMBER 11

During the winter, everyone in Tangier suffers from the damp. Central heating doesn’t exist. The other day I overheard an Englishman in a café telling a visitor how he heated his house. His solution is to take a can of gasoline home every night. He pours a little into a pot on the floor in the middle of the room and throws a match at it. Whoomp!—a big cloud of flame and hot air shoots up. It took the chill off the room, but every fifteen minutes or so he had to do it again. Whoomp! Whoomp!—that’s how one man passes the winter evenings in Tangier, finally tucking himself into a bed sandbagged with hot water bottles.

NOVEMBER 15

The school, it wears me out. My students—Moroccan, Spanish, American, French and English; Muslim, Christian, Hindu and Jew—they take too much from me. I love teaching but wish I were digging ditches instead. At the end of the day nothing is left. Too tired to write.

DECEMBER 1

A crystal day inspired Joe and me to visit Tetuan, a snow white town spilling down the rocky hillside. We bounced through cactus country in a native bus that stopped every mile or so to let off a robed patriarch with turban and stick, or to take aboard pretty, clear-skinned Anjera girls with their bundles and babies. No hurry or rush. I was reminded of our archaeological expedition to the Valle de las Culebras in Peru, and the bus trip over the Andes from Cerro de Pasco to Huanuco.

DECEMBER 7

A talk at the school by Carlton Coon, Harvard anthropologist. He has been attempting to trace Berber origins in the Rif Mountains. The Vandals, a German tribe, passed through Morocco (429–435AD) on their way to Carthage, leaving behind a trail of mysterious blue eyes.

DECEMBER 8

Another asthma attack has landed me in the Italian Hospital. Carla brought soup to revive me.

DECEMBER 9

What am I expecting? Love, I suppose, from all directions. Joe reads this and laughs.

DECEMBER 15

Carla’s way of making soup: Go to market and buy the oldest and toughest bird she can find. She takes it to the chicken killer and waits, eyes averted, while he chops off the head, feathers and guts this mother of roosters. She boils the bird all day before fishing the carcase out of the pot and giving it to the cat. She arrives in the Kasbah carrying the pot wrapped Moroccan-style in a hammam towel to keep it warm. Her high heels slip...

Table of contents

• About the Author
• Endorsements
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• The Tangier Diaries, 1962–1979
• Epilogue