PAUL BOWLES, the American writer, composer, and expatriate, died eleven months ago in Tangier, the northern Moroccan city where he had lived for more than half a century. Bowles was controversial in Morocco, and his death was a major news event there; yet the Moroccan response to Bowles has not made it into American accounts. Next to nothing has been written here about the last decades of Bowles's life, nor about his often tense residence in Morocco, where he had as many enemies as friends. Even with various articles and memorials planned to commemorate the first anniversary of Bowles's death -- a two-day tribute is planned at New York City's 92nd Street Y on October 29 and 30 -- it's safe to wager that his fans will be fed the tired and typical version of Bowles's life abroad. We can expect little more than the usual and unrevealing stereotypes about the "mysterious" and "primitive" country of Bowles's self-imposed exile. It's become a familiar routine, and a comforting one, though in a rather disturbing way.

The same stories are circulated about Bowles: his expat apprenticeship in Gertrude Stein's Paris salon (Stein insisted on calling him Freddy and made him wear lederhosen); his initial trip to Tangier with Aaron Copland (Copland hated it, Bowles loved it); his reign over the Tangier literary scene in the fifties; his queer marriage to Jane Bowles; the affairs both were having; her spiral down into heavy drinking, mental breakdown, and an early death. They are entertaining tales, but they're wearing thin. In them, Morocco remains a mere backdrop, an exotic scrim upon which writers project love triangles and kif reverie. Much as Hollywood's Casablanca is confused with the real city by many Americans, Bowles's Morocco stands in for the living, breathing one; it becomes little more than "a projection of his inner geography," as one critic described it. But Bowles didn't invent Morocco -- he lived there and was affected by it. And he wrote about it through the last decade of the colonial period, the ensuing independence struggle, and for more than thirty years of the postcolonial period.

Western obituaries had Bowles's life petering out with Jane Bowles's demise in the late fifties and sixties, and pretty much stops by the time of her death in 1973. It is no coincidence that these years correspond with the first decade and a half of Moroccan independence -- a period where Paul's Moroccan friends and collaborators increasingly became central to his life and his output turned largely to translations of their work. The quasi-official Bowles Story then resumes, heroically, in the nineties, with the rediscovery and celebration of the grand maître in America; he returns to New York for his first visit in decades to attend Lincoln Center performances of his own music he hasn't heard since the thirties. The intervening years are covered by the passing reference to the Moroccan Arabic tales Bowles translated -- a major and prolonged endeavor that is brushed aside in a phrase -- which serves as additional evidence of the author's originality or idiosyncrasy. It still seems, after all, as if Bowles was really just another New Yorker with a strange hobby.

But the idea that Bowles preferred to live in isolation from the world -- because he never moved back to New York -- is an enabling fiction: it lets journalists and critics off the hook for not bothering to learn about Morocco or Bowles's life there. It seems that Bowles specialists never bother to talk to any Moroccans, even those Moroccans with whom Bowles worked and lived. That does his readers a disservice. For the experience of living in North Africa radically altered Bowles's life and work, in ways we have not yet fully appreciated. From his 1949 novel The Sheltering Sky, and his shockingly explicit and violent short stories of the forties and fifties (which provoked Norman Mailer to write that Bowles had "opened the world of the hip"), to his lesser known publications of the seventies, eighties, and nineties, the bulk of Bowles's writing was set in the Maghreb. Throughout, the rhythms and voices that had fascinated him since the thirties played a central part in his life and work. Without understanding that context, we can't understand the turns his later writing took. Perhaps Bowles isn't as familiar as we thought.

EVEN AS BOWLES lay in a Tangier hospital for twelve long days last fall, cable news channels and Internet news sites around the world prepared the public for his death. When it finally happened, on November 18, The New York Times ran a full-page obituary, in which Mel Gussow perversely concluded that, for Bowles, the "point of life is to have fun" -- an odd analysis of a man who cooped himself up in a dingy flat with drawn shades, and wrote about castration, typhoid, and tongue excision. Then the New York Times Book Review published a tribute by Daniel Halpern, who, despite the fact that he had actually lived downstairs from Bowles for a couple of years in Tangier, could conjure up only the "mystique" of Bowles's life amid Berbers -- a kif-infused symphony of flavors, in which expatriates talk about French literature while wearing bow ties. During these years, however, Morocco was in the midst of some of its most fraught political times, laboring under a tense atmosphere that Bowles followed closely. (Halpern is one of the scheduled speakers at the 92nd Street Y). In London, The Economist wrote disparagingly of Bowles's cult status and of the stream of Western journalists and American beatniks who flowed through his apartment.

In Morocco, where Bowles evoked strong opinions, the story was much bigger and more immediate. Bowles was a well-known figure, his white hair and long features familiar from press photos and to Tanjawis who spotted him on his daily walks or visits to the Café Hafa or the post office. Any young hustler in Tangier could take you to his door for a few dirhams. Interviews with Bowles appeared frequently in the Moroccan press, and his fiction entered the curriculum of Moroccan universities, where it was critiqued harshly. More positively -- but no less controversially -- Bowles was also known in Morocco for bringing the work of illiterate Moroccan storytellers to an international audience. Following the death of King Hassan II by a couple of months (Hassan had ruled Morocco for nearly four decades), Bowles's passing convinced Moroccans that an era really had ended. On the front page of the Moroccan daily Libération, Salah Sbyea made the announcement: "Paul Bowles is dead. The circle of ghosts of Tangier is now fully complete with its guru." Libération carried three stories about Bowles on its front page that particular Friday. Most of the other Moroccan papers ran obituaries or tributes.

For Moroccans, Bowles's death represented much more than the passing of an American writer and composer. Bowles, who first visited Morocco in 1931, and had lived in Tangier since he came with an advance and a book contract to write The Sheltering Sky, had long been the most immediately available symbol of the "Orientalist" writers of the past, plagued by a fascination with the Maghreb. "Many passed through, he remained: a captive," comments Mohamed El Gahs, Libération's editor. For many, the image of Morocco he conveyed to the world was an embarrassment, and his apparent preference for the Morocco of old was an insult to national pride. Bowles seemed to focus too much on Moroccan "primitiveness" -- superstitions, magic, folk culture, and violence -- and many educated or otherwise elevated Moroccans were afraid that the rest of the world would get the wrong idea. Bowles was a frequent target for Moroccan intellectuals, whose existence he barely acknowledged, and the whipping boy for Moroccan writers living in Tangier, a handful of whom he had helped bring to a wider audience. All this despite Bowles's genteel demeanor, and the fact that he spent the majority of his time in bed in his pajamas.

It was Bowles's very presence in Tangier that kept alive the enmity. There, in his gloomy apartment near the center of town, he continued to receive foreign and Moroccan interviewers, fans, celebrity friends, celebrity hounds, television and film crews, and a fair share of confidence men, usually in his bedroom, where he lay in a narrow bed propped up by pillows. The scene was widely known in Morocco and scandalous for many. Though Bowles himself was extremely discreet about his personal life, making a point to avoid discussions of his sexuality with interviewers, rumors of his (and his friends') affairs with Moroccan men circulated widely, adding to the list of Bowles's alleged "sins," in this case the suggestion that Bowles had violated an unwritten rule and flaunted his sexual proclivities. Morocco, which had welcomed generations of gay male tourists with open arms earlier in the century, was now anxious to keep up a front of unimpeachable masculinity. A week after his death, one of the Arabic-language papers in Morocco published a distasteful photo of Bowles's bed, empty, the covers pulled back, the pillow still bearing the impression of his head; the caption translates: "the bed of the American writer after his final departure." It was a final, nasty jab at Bowles, a tabloidish act of revenge against his all too public bed.