Out of Place: A Memoir (48 page)

I recall that he seemed to revel in the complexity of what he was doing, but his evident pleasure induced despondency and a considerable sense of inadequacy in me. I never had anything useful to add, since my father and Daniel were much too fast, too certain and deft in what they traded back and forth. Yet, one weekday afternoon my father made a rare call from the club; I was sitting in his office, reading a magazine, I think. “You’re going to get some papers—a contract—delivered to you this afternoon. I want you to sign them and send them back to Daniel with the messenger.” He explained that he had made me the principal
because, he said, “After all, you’re an executive too.” It didn’t seem like anything of great interest to me: here was I “just being there” for him, only occasionally performing what appeared to be a useful task or two. The contracts he had told me about were duly signed an hour later; I recall clearly not giving the transaction any further thought. Yet for the next fifteen years I was unable to return to Egypt because that particular contract, and I as its unsuspecting signatory, were ruled to be in contravention of the exchange-control law. My father told me that police officers came to his offices looking for me, one of them once threatening to have me brought back in handcuffs from abroad. But there, too, I did not for a very long time feel that my father was to blame for this surprising lapse by which he put his son up to do something basically illegal. I always assumed that the Egyptian police were to blame, and that it was their zeal, not my father’s ostensible indifference to my fate, that had led to my being banned for fifteen years from the one city in the world in which I felt more or less at home.

Thus, our Cairo world started to close menacingly in on us, actually to come apart, as the Nasserite assault not only on the privileged classes but also on left dissidents like Farid Haddad opened up in earnest. I realized by my second year of graduate school (1959–60) after Farid’s death and George Fahoum’s trial for “business corruption,” that our days as alien residents in Egypt were finally drawing to a close. A palpable air of anxiety and depression pervaded my family’s circle of friends, most of whom were making plans to leave (which most of them did) for Lebanon or Europe.

MY FIVE YEARS (1958–63) AS A HARVARD GRADUATE STUDENT
in literature were an intellectual continuation of Princeton so far as formal instruction was concerned. Conventional history and a wan formalism ruled the literary faculty, so in fulfilling my degree requirements there was no possibility of doing much beyond marching from period to period until the twentieth century. I recall hours, days, weeks, of voracious reading with no significant extension of that reading in what professors lectured on or what they expected from a largely passive student clientele. There was scarcely a ripple on the surface of student placidity, perhaps because, with no sense of intellectual example to
animate our exertions, all of us were out of place, or uncomfortable in the institution. My own intellectual discoveries were made outside what the regimen required, alongside those of gifted originals who were also at Harvard, like Arthur Gold, Michael Fried, and Tom Carnicelli. The most momentous events for me, as the Middle East drifted further and further from my consciousness (after all, I did no reading in Arabic then, nor did I know any Arabs, except Ralph Nader, who was, unlike me, an American-born law student at Harvard, who helped me resist and finally evade the Selective Service draft at the time of the Berlin crisis in 1961), were such things as Vico’s
New Science
, Lukacs’s
History and Class Consciousness
, Sartre, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, all of whom shaped my dissertation on Conrad, written under the benign supervision of Monroe Engel and Harry Levin. Twice I tried to study under the aging I. A. Richards, the most avant-garde figure then at Harvard, and twice he defected from his courses just after the midpoint, when his secretary would enter and say that the course had been unilaterally dissolved. He was a comic miniaturization of the once-adventurous thinker—vague, vain, rambling—and as I read it, his major work struck me as thin and unaccomplished, as unprovocative as Blackmur’s was stimulating and, despite its gnarled syntax, suggestive. There was occasional excitement from visitors, very few in those days, but I was stirred by Kenneth Burke’s lectures on “logology,” as he called it.

The most important musical influence on my life, even while I was at Harvard, was Ignace Tiegerman, a minuscule (four foot ten) Polish pianist, conservatory director, and teacher resident in Cairo since the mid-1930s. Very few musicians to my knowledge have had his gifts as pianist, teacher, and musician. A student of Lechetitzky and Ignaz Friedman, he came to Egypt on a cruise, loved it, and simply stayed, perfectly aware what the advent of Nazism would mean to Jews like him in Poland. He was endemically lazy, and when I knew him he had already stopped practicing and giving concerts. But he had the whole of the piano literature from mid-Beethoven to early Prokofiev in his head and fingers, and could play pieces like
Gaspard de la nuit
or the Chopin études in thirds and sixths fabulously well and with the utmost polish. As for late Brahms pieces, or Chopin nocturnes, mazurkas, and above all the Fourth Ballade and the Impromptus and Polonaise Fantaisie, no one I have ever heard played them as Tiegerman did, with
such perfection of tone and phrase, unfailingly “right” tempo, anagogies and all. He encouraged me more than I can adequately say, less by what he said directly to me than by what he did on the second piano, and by showing what in my playing (which he could mime perfectly) might be modified. Above all he was a musical companion—not a hectoring or admonishing authority—for whom music was literally a part of life in the sense that during our long conversations on hot Sunday evenings in Cairo, or later in his little summer dacha in Kitzbühl, we would drift naturally, meander, between periods of talk and periods at the piano.

When it came to music, my interest in a professional career diminished as I found myself intellectually unsatisfied by the physical requirement of daily practice and very occasional performance. And, it must be said, I realized that my gifts, such as they were, could never be adequate to the kind of professional trajectory I imagined for myself. Paradoxically, it was Tiegerman’s example, living and acting inside me, that finally discouraged me from making of the piano anything more than sensuous pleasure, indulged in at a decent level of competence for the rest of my life; I felt that there was a shadow line of raw ability I could not cross separating the good amateur from the truly gifted executant, someone like Tiegerman or Glenn Gould, whose Boston recitals I attended between 1959 and 1962 with rapt admiration, for whom the ability to transpose or read at sight, a perfect memory, and the total coordination of hand and ear were effortless, whereas for me all that was truly difficult, requiring much effort and in the end only a precarious, uncertain achievement. Yet with my flamboyant friend, Afif (Alvarez) Bulos, a former Jerusalemite about fifteen years older than I who was studying for a degree in linguistics and who was, for those days, an unusually colorful and almost parodistically mannered gay, I gave concerts, he with his good baritone, I on the piano. He was one of the rare contemporaries from my Harvard days whom I continued to see in Beirut, where he taught until his appallingly lurid death by stabbing in the spring of 1982. It was a ghastly sign and premonition of the Israeli invasion three months later, and of the Lebanese civil war raging furiously all around where Afif lived in Ras Beirut.

In Cambridge, Afif and I used to practice where I lived, in the house at the end of Francis Avenue of my gentle landlady Thais Carter, whose
daughter had been a Bryn Mawr classmate of Rosy’s. Thais was a divorced, middle-aged woman who lived alone, except during the summer months, when her Florida-based father, Mr. Atwood, would come up to stay with her. She rented out two rooms on the top floor, one of which I lived in for three years, and where thanks to her understated wit, hospitality, and capacity for friendship, I was genuinely contented. Roughly my mother’s age, Thais was patient where my mother was impetuous, methodical where my mother delighted in surprising and upsetting any method, quietly worldly where my mother was a unique combination of naïvete and busy sophistication. She and my mother became good friends, although a more contrasting pair of opposites could not be imagined. Thais easily tolerated and had an amused affection for Afif’s flamboyant homosexuality, whereas Afif made my mother uncomfortable. I remember in 1959 telling her that Afif was homosexual and, to my astonishment, discovering that she had no idea what that meant, except that, like all mentions of sexuality, it made her shudder with apparent revulsion.

I still regarded her as my point of reference, mostly in ways that I neither fully apprehended nor concretely understood. In the summer of 1958, while driving in Switzerland, I had a horrendously bloody, head-on collision with a motorcyclist; he was killed and I was badly hurt. I can still recall with a jolt that awesomely loud and terrifyingly all-encompassing sound of the actual collision, which knocked me unconscious, and the very moment I awakened on the grass with a priest bending over me trying to administer the last rites. A moment later, after pushing away the intrusive cleric, with infallible instinct I knew I had to call my mother, who at that very moment was in Lebanon with the rest of my family. She was the first person to whom I needed to tell my story, which I did the moment the ambulance delivered me to the Fribourg hospital. That feeling I had of both beginning and ending with my mother, of her sustaining presence and, I imagined, infinite capacity for cherishing me, softly, imperceptibly, underwrote my life for years and years. At a time when I was myself going through radical change—intellectual, emotional, political—I felt that my mother’s idealized person, her voice, her enveloping maternal care and attention, were what I truly could depend on. When I divorced my first wife, the terrible confusion I felt was, I believed, best sorted out by my mother, despite her extraordinary ambivalence, which I either overlooked or
overrode: “If things are so bad between you, then, yes, by all means you should divorce.” This was followed immediately by “On the other hand, for us [Christians] marriage is permanent, a sacrament, holy. Our church will never recognize divorce.” These were statements that often paralyzed me completely.

Yet I managed for years to get past her irresolution, and reach the sustenance she gave me, especially after I lost Cairo, behind which I began to realize more and more was the continuing loss of Palestine in our lives and those of other relatives’. And 1967 brought more dislocations, whereas for me it seemed to embody
the
dislocation that subsumed all the other losses, the disappeared worlds of my youth and upbringing, the unpolitical years of my education, the assumption of disengaged teaching and scholarship at Columbia, and so on. I was no longer the same person after 1967; the shock of that war drove me back to where it had all started, the struggle over Palestine. I subsequently entered the newly transformed Middle Eastern landscape as a part of the Palestinian movement that emerged in Amman and then in Beirut in the late sixties through the seventies. This was an experience that drew on the agitated, largely hidden side of my prior life—the anti-authoritarianism, the need to break through an imposed and enforced silence, above all the need to draw back to a sort of original state of what was irreconcilable, thereby shattering and dispelling an unjust Establishment order. Some of my mother’s frenetic restlessness was a reaction to my father’s loss, and to the many bewildering changes around her as the PLO grew in size and importance in Beirut along with the Lebanese civil war. She lived through the Israeli invasion of 1982, for instance, with admirable good humor and fortitude, taking care of a house in which my youngest sister, Grace, lived, plus two homeless friends, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod and Sohail Meari, whose apartment had been gutted by an Israeli rocket early in the war. It was an amazing display of bravery under fire. Yet when I tried to talk to her about politics,
my
dissenting politics in particular, or the complex political realities that caused the daily problems of her life since her marriage, she would upbraid me: go back to being a literary man; politics in the Arab world destroy honest and good people like you, and so on.

It took years after the end of my formal education for me to realize how much she had, whether by design or instinct I shall never know, insinuated herself not just into our affairs as four sisters and a brother,
but also between us. My sisters and I still live with the consequences of her redoubtable skills, all of them resulting in prickly barriers between us, fed, to be sure, by other sources as well, but first erected by her. Some of those barriers are immovable, which I regret. Perhaps they exist in all families. But I also realize now that our odd family cocoon back then was no model for future lives, nor was the world we lived in. I think my father must have sensed that, when at inordinate expense he did the totally unheard-of thing and sent four of us to the United States (my sisters for college only) for our education; the more I think about it, the more I believe he thought the only hope for me as a man was in fact to be cut off from my family. My search for freedom, for the self beneath or obscured by “Edward,” could only have begun because of that rupture, so I have come to think of it as fortunate, despite the loneliness and unhappiness I experienced for so long. Now it does not seem important or even desirable to be “right” and in place (right at home, for instance). Better to wander out of place, not to own a house, and not ever to feel too much at home anywhere, especially in a city like New York, where I shall be until I die.

During the last few months of my mother’s life, she would tell me plaintively and frequently about the misery of trying to fall asleep. She was in Washington, I in New York; we would speak constantly, see each other about once a month. Her cancer was spreading, I knew. She refused to have chemotherapy:
“Ma biddee at
dthab,”
she would say, “I don’t want the torture of it.” Years later I was to have four wasting years of it with no success, but she never buckled, never gave in even to her doctor’s importunings, never had chemotherapy. But she could not sleep at night. Sedatives, sleeping pills, soothing drinks, the counsel of friends and relatives, reading, praying: none, she said, did any good. “Help me to sleep, Edward,” she once said to me with a piteous trembling in her voice that I can still hear as I write. But then the disease spread into her brain, and for the last six weeks she slept all the time. Waiting by her bed for her to awaken, with my sister Grace, was for me the most anguished and paradoxical of my experiences with her.