Green Songs
[New York]: Éditions de la Vipère [1935?].
Item #8783
A collection of four short musical compositions by Bowles with lyrics by Richard Thoma, first performed in 1944. Bowles had traveled extensively in France and North Africa in the 1930s and was introduced to Thoma through the collaborationist Bernard Faÿ in 1931. (See, Sawyer- Laucanno. The Invisible Spectator a 98.) Éditions de la Vipère was Bowles's musical imprint and he published this and several of his own works in small editions of 100 copies. (See, Miller, In Touch- The Letters of Paul Bowles @575.)
Laid in is an undated 1p. ALS from Jean Cocteau to Thoma ("I have a lot of trouble living. the biggest odds don't even pull me to the surface".) In 1930, Thoma joined Samuel Putnam's New Review as an associate editor and was involved in much of the New Review 's warfare against Edward Titus's conservative This Quarter. Thoma dedicated one of the poems in his rare collection Green Chaos to Cocteau and he was well known among the expatriates in Paris in the 1920s.
Good in faded wrappers with wear and water stains to cover, tape repair to spine. Rare. Miller E6.
Price: $1,200.00