Tangier, Tangier

I’m a small-town boy, not an adventurer. I’m a terrible traveller. I feel safe at home behind my writing desk. So, when I’m drawn to a foreign place, it has to really pull me in; it has to fascinate me. New York City does this to an extent (in a way that other big cities, like London or Paris, never do). But the city I have romanticized out of all proportion is not Manhattan, it’s in Morocco: Tangier. Before I gave up dreams of becoming a writer—a real writer, not an academic who writes—I had a contract with a top publisher for a novel called Tangier, Tangier. It had started out as a more or less straight literary biography of the city, with a conventional focus on its famous expats, but then I ran into Iain Finlayson out there and discovered he was doing the same (his City of the Dream came out in 1992), and that another writer, Michelle Green, was also already doing the same (her The Dream at the End of the World came out in 1991)—well, three new books would have been a crowd, so I turned it into a noir novel. My book never got published, which is probably for the best, but it captured the paradox of being drawn to a place so elusive and alien that you can’t help trying to master it in some obviously futile way. The novel used words, but I also spent many a day in the 1980s making maps of the medina in little notebooks which I carried around with me in the early hours, before the narrow alleyways became too crowded and I became too conspicuous.

Having visited in the 1980s and into the early ‘90s, life got in the way of returning to Tangier until November 2014, when I had the chance to organise a conference at the Hotel Chellah. My youngest daughter was only 4 months old at the time, and it says something about the depth of my fascination that all I could think about was mapping the medina and the talk I was to give about Burroughs’ writing life there in the 1950s. I had made a few forays into that history for the 50^th anniversary of Naked Lunch (writing posts for a website long since expired (1 calle de los Arcos, Burroughs’ Tangier 3 and Rembrandt – Burroughs Tangier), which were fun but really more about Interzone, Burroughs’ fantasy of Tangier, not the actual city, about which I was and remain almost entirely ignorant. It’s that place of the imagination that was real, the only reality, like the haunting room which reflects back from the dark mirror in Burroughs’ favourite film, Dead of Night… Tangier the dream city, Tangier as the femme fatale in a B-movie film noir, waiting for me, knowing that I’d come back to her sooner or later, one way or another…

A holding image for my next book…