She hadn’t finished. Like Italo Calvino, like Bruce Chatwin, like Raymond Carver, she died at the height of her powers. For writers, these are the cruelest deaths: in mid-sentence, so to speak. The stories in this volume are the measure of our loss. But they are also our treasure, to savor and to hoard. Raymond Carver is said to have told his wife before he died (also of lung cancer), “We’re out there now. We’re out there in Literature.” Carver was the most modest of men, but this is the remark of a man who knew, and who had often been told, how much his work was worth. Angela received less confirmation, in her lifetime, of the value of her unique oeuvre; but she, too, is out there now, out there in Literature, a Ray of the clear Fountain of Eternal Day.
April 1995
Beirut Blues
At one point in Hanan al-Shaykh’s new novel, Beirut Blues, the narrator, Asmahan, learns that her grandfather, a dirty old man who likes to bruise women’s breasts, has taken up with a young Lolita. The nymphet, Juhayna, is suspected by various family members of having designs on their inheritance, but Asmahan is moved to a more generous, and stranger, judgment. “In choosing him she was merely choosing the past which had proved its authenticity compared to the bearded leaders, the conflicting voices, the clash of arms.”
The past is mourned throughout Beirut Blues, mourned without sentimentality. The past is the place in which Asmahan’s grandmother had to fight for the right to literacy, but it is also the lost village land, occupied first by Palestinians and then by local thugs; it is Beirut, that once-beautiful, brilliant, cosmopolitan city, transformed now into the barbarity of ruins in which perch snipers picking off women in blue dresses and other fighters who are afraid of the hooting of owls. The young Asmahan grew addicted to the voice of Billie Holiday. Now she writes letters to departed friends, to her lost land, to her lover, to her city, to the war itself, letters with the quality of slow, sensuous, sad music. Now the strange fruit is hanging from the trees outside Asmahan’s own windows, and she has become the lady singing the blues.
“In Lebanon,” Edward Said has said, “the novel exists largely as a form recording its own impossibility, shading off or breaking into autobiography (as in the remarkable proliferation of Lebanese women’s writing), reportage, pastiche.” How to create literature—how to preserve its fragilities, and also its tough-minded individuality—in the middle of an explosion? Elias Khoury, in his brilliant short novel Little Mountain (1977), created an amalgam of fable, surrealism, reportage, low comedy, and memoir that provided one response to this question. Hanan al-Shaykh, perhaps the finest of the women writers to whom Said referred—author of the acclaimed The Story of Zahra and Women of Sand and Myrrh—offers a new solution. What unifies her novel’s shattered universe is the presence, everywhere in her prose, of the low, unabated fever of human desire. It is the melancholy, luscious portrait of letter-writing Asmahan, a true sensualist of Beirut, a woman given to spending long afternoons oiling her hair, who acts with a sexual freedom and writes with an explicitness of erotic feeling and description that makes this novel pretty daring by the puritanical, censorious standards of the mosque- and militia-ridden present.
Asmahan begins and ends her epistolary narrative with letters to an old friend, Hayat, now living abroad; and the question of exile is one of the book’s recurring motifs. (Modern Arabic literature is, more and more, a literature not only of exile but by exiles; the men of violence and God are making sure of that.) Asmahan feels sorry for her old friend, living away from home and missing Lebanese food; she feels almost contemptuous of the returning writer Jawad, with his smart questions, his appointments, his arrival as a voyeur of her lived reality. “Then one day he opened his eyes . . . the newspapers no longer provided him with a hunting-ground for his sarcastic jokes; it almost seemed to cause him physical pain to read of the senselessness of what was happening.” At this moment, he and Asmahan begin their affair; and so she must choose between new love and old home, for Jawad will leave Beirut. She, too, must contemplate exile. Perhaps, in the name of love, she must become like Hayat, her friend and mirror-soul, for whom she has felt such pity, even scorn.
It would be wrong to reveal Asmahan’s final choice, but it is not easily made. Her attachment to Beirut is very deep, even though, in a letter to Jill Morrell, she compares herself to the hostages. “My mind is no longer my own. . . . I possess my body but not, even temporarily, the ground I walk on. What does it mean to be kidnapped? Being separated forcibly from your environment, family, friends, home, bed. So in some strange way I can persuade myself that I’m worse off than them. . . . For I’m still in my own place, but separated from it in a painful way: this is my city and I don’t recognize it.” Al-Shaykh brings to this transformed Beirut a passion of description. Here are cows that have become addicted to cannabis, and Iranian signs on shopfronts, and plastic-bottle trees. Old place-names have lost meaning and new ones have sprung up. There are Palestinians who speak a Beckettian language: “I’ll have to kill myself. No, I must keep going,” and there are militias and terrorists, and there is the War. “People have a desperate need to enter any conflict which has become familiar . . . to save them searching further afield and investigating the mysteries of life and death,” Asmahan writes. “You [the War] give them confidence and a kind of serenity; people make this precious discovery and play your game.”
What shall I do with these ideas? agonizes Asmahan, and perhaps the best answer lies in her indomitable grandmother’s advice. “Remember who we are. Make sure the larder and the fridge are never empty.” In this, her finest novel, fluently translated by Catherine Cobham, Hanan al-Shaykh makes that act of remembrance, joining it to an unforgettable portrait of a broken city. It should be read by everyone who cares about the truths behind the clichéd Beirut of the TV news; and by everyone who cares about the more enduring, and universal, truths of the heart.
March 1995
Arthur Miller at Eighty
[Originally delivered as part of a birthday celebration for and of Arthur Miller at the University of East Anglia]
Arthur Miller’s is not only a great life; it is also a great book, Timebends, an autobiography that reads like a great American novel—as if Bellow’s Augie March had grown up to be a tall Jewish playwright and had, in Bellow’s famous words, “made the record in his own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.”
In an age when much literature and even more literary criticism has turned inward, losing itself in halls of mirrors, Arthur Miller’s double insistence on the reality of the real, and on the moral function of writing, sounds once again as radical as it did in his youth. “The effort to locate in the human species a counterforce to the randomness of victimization,” he calls it, adding, “But, as history has taught, that force can only be moral. Unfortunately.”
When a great writer reaches a great age, the temptation to turn him into an institution, into a statue of himself, is easily succumbed to. But to read Miller is to discover, on every page, the enduring relevance of his thought: “The ultimate human mystery,” he writes, “may not be anything more than the claims on us of clan and race, which may yet turn out to have the power, because they defy the rational mind, to kill the world.” The sharpness of such perceptions makes Miller very much our contemporary, a man for this season as well as all his others. Willy Loman’s line “I still feel kind of temporary about myself” is also the way Arthur Miller says he has always felt. “This desire to move on, to metamorphose—or perhaps it is a talent for being contemporary—was given me as life’s inevitable condition.” In Miller, the temporary and the contemporary are united, and shown to be the same thing.
Miller’s genius has always been to reveal what the opening stage directions to Death of a Salesman call the “dream rising out of reality.” By paying attention, he discovers the miraculous within the real. His is a life dedicated as passionately to the remembrance, and the enlivening through art, of the small and the unconsidered as it
is to the articulation of the great moral issues of the day. Here, in his autobiography, is an endless sequence of men and women caught in wonderful cameos: the great-grandfather who was “an orchestra of scents—each of his gestures smelled different”; and the rabbi who stole the dying patriarch’s diamonds, and had to be beaten up by the dying man before he returned them; and Mr. Dozick the pharmacist, who sewed up Miller’s brother’s ear on his drugstore table; and the Polish school bully who taught Miller some early lessons in anti-Semitism; and Lucky Luciano in Palermo, nostalgic for America, and scarily over-generous, so that Miller began to fear being lost in the Bunyanesque “swamp of Something for Nothing, from which there is no return.”
Moral stature is a rare quality in these degraded days. Very few writers possess it. Miller’s seems innate but was much increased because he was able to learn from his mistakes. Like Günter Grass, who was brought up in a Nazi household and had the dizzying experience, after the war, of learning that everything he had believed to be true was a lie, Arthur Miller has had—more than once—to discard his worldviews. Coming from a family of profit-minded men, and discovering Marxism at sixteen, he learned that “the true condition of men was the complete opposite of the competitive system I had assumed was normal, with all its mutual hatreds and conniving. Life could be a comradely embrace, people helping one another rather than looking for ways to trip each other up.” Later, Marxism came to seem less idealistic. “Deep down in the comradely world of the Marxist promise is parricide,” he wrote, and, when he and Lillian Hellman were faced with a Yugoslav man’s testimony of the horrors of Soviet domination, he says, unsparingly: “We seemed history’s fools.”
But he has not remained history’s fool. Through his stand against McCarthyism, in his presidency of PEN, his fight against censorship, and his defense of persecuted writers around the world, he has grown into the giant figure we are gathered here to honor. When I needed help, I am proud that Arthur Miller’s was one of the first and loudest voices raised on my behalf, and it is a privilege to be able to speak here and thank him tonight.
When Arthur Miller says, “We must re-imagine liberty in every generation, especially since a certain number of people are always afraid of it,” his words carry the weight of lived experience, of his own profound re-imaginings. Most of all, however, they carry the weight of his genius. Arthur, we celebrate the genius, and the man. Happy birthday.
October 1995
In Defense of the Novel, Yet Again
At the centenary conference of the British Publishers’ Association recently, Professor George Steiner said a mouthful:
We are getting very tired in our novels. . . . Genres rise, genres fall, the epic, the verse epic, the formal verse tragedy. Great moments, then they ebb. Novels will continue to be written for quite a while but, increasingly, the search is on for hybrid forms, what we will call rather crassly fact/fiction. . . . What novel can today quite compete with the best of reportage, with the very best of immediate narrative? . . .
Pindar [was] the first man on record to say, this poem will be sung when the city which commissioned it has ceased to exist. Literature’s immense boast against death. To say this today even the greatest poet, I dare venture, would be profoundly embarrassed. . . . The great classical vainglory—but what a wonderful vainglory—of literature. “I am stronger than death. I can speak about death in poetry, drama, the novel, because I have overcome it, because I am more or less permanent.” That is no longer available.
So here it is once more, wrapped up in the finest, shiniest rhetoric: I mean, of course, that tasty old chestnut, the death of the Novel. To which Professor Steiner adds, for good measure, the death (or at least the radical transformation) of the Reader, into some sort of computer whiz-kid, some sort of super-nerd; and the death (or at least the radical transformation, into electronic form) of the Book itself. The death of the Author having been announced several years ago in France—and the death of Tragedy by Professor Steiner himself in an earlier obituary—that leaves the stage strewn with more bodies than the end of Hamlet.
Still standing in the midst of the carnage, however, is a lone, commanding figure, a veritable Fortinbras, before whom all of us, writers of authorless texts, post-literate readers, the House of Usher that is the publishing industry—the Denmark, with something rotten in it, that is the publishing industry—and indeed books themselves, must bow our heads: viz., naturally, the Critic.
One prominent writer has also in recent weeks announced the demise of the form of which he has been so celebrated a practitioner. Not only has V. S. Naipaul ceased to write novels: the word “novel” itself, he tells us, now makes him feel ill. Like Professor Steiner, the author of A House for Mr. Biswas feels that the novel has outlived its historical moment, no longer fulfills any useful role, and will be replaced by factual writing. Mr. Naipaul, it will surprise no one to learn, is presently to be found at the leading edge of history, creating this new post-fictional literature. *6
Another major British writer has this to say. “It hardly needs pointing out that at this moment the prestige of the novel is extremely low, so low that the words ‘I never read novels,’ which even a dozen years ago were generally uttered with a hint of apology, are now always uttered in a tone of pride . . . the novel is likely, if the best literary brains cannot be induced to return to it, to survive in some perfunctory, despised, and hopelessly degenerate form, like modern tomb-stones, or the Punch and Judy Show.”
That is George Orwell, writing in 1936. It would appear—as Professor Steiner in fact concedes—that literature has never had a future. Even the Iliad and Odyssey received bad early reviews. Good writing has always been attacked, notably by other good writers. The most cursory glance at literary history reveals that no masterpiece has been safe from assault at the time of its publication, no writer’s reputation unassailed by his contemporaries: Aristophanes called Euripides “a cliché anthologist . . . and maker of ragamuffin manikins”; Samuel Pepys thought A Midsummer Night’s Dream “insipid and ridiculous”; Charlotte Brontë dismissed the work of Jane Austen; Zola pooh-poohed Les Fleurs du Mal; Henry James trashed Middlemarch, Wuthering Heights, and Our Mutual Friend. Everybody sneered at Moby-Dick. Le Figaro announced, when Madame Bovary was published, that “M. Flaubert is not a writer”; Virginia Woolf called Ulysses “underbred”; and the Odessa Courier wrote of Anna Karenina, “Sentimental rubbish. . . . Show me one page that contains an idea.”
So, when today’s German critics attack Günter Grass, when today’s Italian literati are “surprised,” as the French novelist and critic Guy Scarpetta tells us, to learn of Italo Calvino’s and Leonardo Scascia’s high international reputations, when the cannons of American political correctness are turned on Saul Bellow, when Anthony Burgess belittles Graham Greene moments after Greene’s death, and when Professor Steiner, ambitious as ever, takes on not just a few individual writers but the whole literary output of post-war Europe, they may all be suffering from culturally endemic golden-ageism: that recurring, bilious nostalgia for a literary past which never, at the time, seemed that much better than the present does now.
Professor Steiner says, “It is almost axiomatic that today the great novels are coming from the far rim, from India, from the Caribbean, from Latin America,” and some will find it surprising that I should take issue with this vision of an exhausted center and vital periphery. If I do so, it is in part because it is such a very Eurocentric lament. Only a Western European intellectual would compose a lament for an entire art form on the basis that the literatures of, say, England, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy were no longer the most interesting on earth. (It is unclear whether Professor Steiner considers the United States to be in the center or on the far rim; the geography of this flat-earther vision of literature is a little hard to follow. From where I sit, American literature looks to be in good shape.) What does it matter where the great novels come from, as long as they keep coming? What is this flat earth on which the good professo
r lives, with jaded Romans at the center and frightfully gifted Hottentots and Anthropophagi lurking at the edges? The map in Professor Steiner’s head is an imperial map, and Europe’s empires are long gone. The half century whose literary output proves, for Steiner and Naipaul, the novel’s decline is also the first half century of the post-colonial period. Might it not simply be that a new novel is emerging, a post-colonial novel, a de-centered, transnational, interlingual, cross-cultural novel; and that in this new world order, or disorder, we find a better explanation of the contemporary novel’s health than Professor Steiner’s somewhat patronizingly Hegelian view that the reason for the creativity of the “far rim” is that these are areas “which are in an earlier stage of the bourgeois culture, which are in an earlier, rougher, more problematic form.”
It was, after all, the Franco regime’s success in stifling decade after decade of Spanish literature that shifted the spotlight to the fine writers working in Latin America. The so-called Latin American boom was, accordingly, as much the result of the corruption of the old bourgeois world as of the allegedly primitive creativity of the new. And the description of India’s ancient, sophisticated culture as existing in an “earlier, rougher” state than the West is bizarre. India, with its great mercantile classes, its sprawling bureaucracies, its exploding economy, possesses one of the largest and most dynamic bourgeoisies in the world, and has done so for at least as long as Europe. Great literature and a class of literate readers are nothing new in India. What is new is the emergence of a gifted generation of Indian writers working in English. What is new is that the “center” has deigned to notice the “rim,” because the “rim” has begun to speak in its myriad versions of a language the West can more easily understand.