A Writer's World
Page 5
Thus Nestorius might have spoken, I thought, during his exile at Kharga.
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Something about the detainees’ injuries, too, told me of the camp’s reformatory methods, but since I had to go on living and working in President Nasser’s Egypt I felt it wiser to let readers of The Times glimpse that between the lines.
Lebanon
In the 1950s Beirut, the capital of the Lebanese Republic, was the delight of the Arab world, largely apolitical, still Frenchified after years of French mandatory rule, beautiful of setting and kindly of temperament – the very antithesis of the dangerous city of terrorism and religious bigotry that it was later to become. I went up there from Egypt whenever I could find a professional excuse.
Beirut is the impossible city, in several senses of the adjective. It is impossible in the enchantment of its setting, where the Lebanese mountains meet the Mediterranean. It is impossible in its headiness of character, its irresponsible gaiety, its humid prevarications. It is impossible economically, incorrigibly prospering under a system condemned by many serious theorists as utterly unworkable. Just as the bumble bee is aerodynamically incapable of flying, so Beirut, by all the rules and precedents, has no right to exist.
Yet there it stands, with a toss of curls and a flounce of skirts, a Carmen among the cities. It is the last of the Middle Eastern fleshpots, and lives its life with an intensity and a frivolity almost forgotten in our earnest generation. It is to Beirut that all the divinities of this haunted seaboard, the fauns and dryads and money-gods, orgiastically descend. It is a tireless pleasure-drome. It is a junction of intrigue and speculation. It is a university city of old distinction. It is a harbour, a brothel, an observatory on the edge of the Arab deserts. Its origins are ancient but it burgeons with brash modernity, and it lounges upon its delectable shore, half-way between the Israelis and the Syrians, in a posture that no such city, at such a latitude, at such a moment of history, has any reasonable excuse for assuming. To the stern student of affairs Beirut is a phenomenon beguiling perhaps, but quite, quite impossible.
*
Beirut stands on no great river, commands no industrious hinterland, and all through the centuries it has been chiefly significant as a gateway and a conduit, the threshold of Damascus and the outlet of Syria. It has been a halting place or transit camp, through which successive civilizations have briefly tramped, leaving a stele here, a carving there, a legend in a library or a pillbox on a beach.
A stele, a pillbox – nothing more substantial has been left behind by the conquerors, for the texture of Beirut is flaky and unretentive. Earthquakes and fires have destroyed much of its heritage, but mostly it is the character of the place that makes this a city without a visible past. It is always contemporary, shifting and tacking to the winds of circumstance. It is the capital of a state that is half Christian, half Muslim, and it remains poised between the Eastern way and the Western, between the Francophile and the Afro-Asian, between the suave hotels that line the waterfront and the tumbled oriental villages spilled on the hillside above. It is not one of your schizophrenic cities, though: on the contrary, it has triumphantly exploited its own dichotomies, and become the smoothest and most seductive of entrepreneurs. Everything is grist to this mill: a crate of steel bolts, a letter of credit, a poem, a navigational system, a cocktail, a tone of voice, a power press, a soup – Beirut accepts them all, processes them if necessary, and passes them on at a profit.
It lives by standing in the middle, and by the itchiest of itchy palms. There is almost nothing this city will not undertake. It will pass your wheat inland to Damascus, or ship your oil westward to Hamburg. It will paint your upperworks, translate your thesis, introduce you to the Sheikh of Araby, accommodate you in pampered splendour in an air-conditioned suite beside the water. It will perform your atonal music at an open-air festival, or feed you with unreliable statistics about political controversies in Zagazig. It will, without a flicker of surprise, convert your Norwegian travellers’ cheques into Indian rupees and Maria Theresa dollars. It has nothing of its own, no resources of iron or coal, no factories to speak of, no big battalions, but it will do almost anything you ask of it, providing you pay properly.
No, that’s unfair – it is not all for cash. Beirut is also an entrepôt of ideas, linking the bazaars with Cambridge and the Sorbonne. Whether a man comes from Peking or Pittsburgh, he will soon find some corner of this liberal place where, lapped in eroticism or deep in the discussion of philosophical concepts, he is sure to feel at home. There is a tang in the Beirut air, bitter-sweet but easy-going, that survives nowhere else on earth: for it is compounded of an old alliance between east and west, washed in the humanism of the ancients and bathed in the incomparable Mediterranean sunshine. It is the spirit that created old Alexandria, and it makes Beirut, for every lover of the classical mode, for everyone of generous instinct, a city of nostalgic regret.
*
Regret always, for Beirut is a prodigy of the second class – a sideline city. It stands on the rim of the Arab world, peering inside with a wry and sceptical detachment, and its conscience is rudimentary.
This undeniably makes for fun. All the Middle East makes for Beirut. Here you may see the political exiles, talking dark and interminable subterfuge, or the resplendent hawk-nosed sheikhs, in all the gilded refulgence of the Arab patrimony, fingering their beads and indulging in flamboyant bickering. Here are the silken ladies of Syria, svelte and doe-eyed, and here are the waterside harlots, curled but smouldering, Semite with a touch of baroque. There are many poets in Beirut, and artists of visionary tendencies, shaggy existentialists in frayed sandals, dilettantes by the score, spies by the portfolio. Sometimes you may see Druse tribesmen in the city, out of the eastern hills, ferociously hirsute and gloriously swaggering. Sometimes the fleet puts in (British, American, French or Greek) and the waterfront bars are loud with ribaldry. And when one of the perennial Middle Eastern crises erupts into the headlines, then the imperturbable hotels of Beirut are crammed again with foreign correspondents, the hall porters brush up their jargon and sniff around for tittle-tattle, and the whole city seems transformed into one sensitive, quivering antenna.
But in Beirut you are seldom in the heart of things. The firemen are always visiting, the crisis is usually somewhere else. It feels a transitory place, like an exceedingly corrupt and sophisticated girls’ school. Such a way of life, you feel, cannot be permanent: it is all too fickle, too fast, too make-believe and never-never. It is Alexandria without the philosophers, without the Pharaohs, perhaps even without Cleopatra (for age does distinctly wither the grandes dames of Beirut, waddling with poodles and sunglasses from salon to couturier). For all its age and history Beirut feels a rootless city – salacious but not earthy, virile but infertile. A breath of wind, it seems, a shift of fortune, and all this bright-painted fabric would be whisked away into oblivion.
Such is the nature of the place. Beirut is the small capital of an infinitesimal republic, and its events do not often feel crucial. Give it time, Beirut always whispers, don’t fuss, wait and see, have a drink. You can usually find a blind eye here, a hole in the corner, the back of a hand, the underneath of a counter. This is not an earnest city. Proper Victorians would have hated it. Harvard economists or British civil servants, examining its improbable methods, its flibberty-gibbet charm, its blatancy and its blarney – men of sombre purpose, deposited one scented evening in Beirut, would probably pronounce it irredeemable.
*
But who would redeem such a place, in a world of false redemptions? Club-women and bluestockings infest our age, but the frank and lovely libertine still makes the heart lift. Such a heedless delight, such a glint in a blithe eye, is the gift of Beirut. This is a city without much soul, but with allure immeasurable, and above all it is graced by a celestial beauty of setting: beauty of a classic and timeless kind, a blue and wine-dark kind, with bewitchment such as you dream about in long damp northern evenings, as you pine for a beaker of
the warm south. The city of Beirut often feels second-rate, but the setting of Beirut is superlative. At this point on the Levantine coast the mountains of Lebanon stand in magnificent parallel beside the sea, so close that the citizens of Beirut may, if the wild whim takes them, ski in the morning and swim in the afternoon. It is the presence of these fine hills, all around the city, that elevates Beirut from the entertaining to the sublime, and provides, in its contrast between the ephemeral and the eternal, a marvellous foil to the bubbling frivolity of the metropolis.
Imagine a terrace table beside the sea in Beirut, during the brief moment of the Mediterranean twilight, when the shops are raising their shutters for the evening’s business, and your restaurant rustles with the first silks and sibilances of the night. There are prawns on your table, perhaps, or red mullet from Sidon, fruit from the lush Bekaa valley, a gay white wine of Lebanon or some haughty vintage out of France. Around the bay the city rumbles, hoots and chatters: there is a clink of metal from some unseen smithy, a suggestion of spice and raw fish on the breeze, the echo of a blaring radio beyond the promenade, a distant clanging of trams – all the hot, heavy, breathless symptoms of an expiring Levantine day, like a sigh in the sunset. Below you the last of the water-skiers scuds home in a flurry of spray, showing off to the girls on the beach. Out at sea a tall elderly schooner loiters, like a ghost in the half-light, and beyond the breakwater, perhaps, an Italian liner steals out for Greece with a soft tread of her turbines and a flutter of her flags. Sometimes an airliner labours in from the sea, blinking its red lights as it lands beyond the cedar groves, and sometimes a razzle-dazzle sports car, top-heavy with blondes and young muscle-men, screams and skids along the corniche towards the night clubs. All along the shore the tall white buildings stand, concrete and rectilinear, with their parasols and their lighted balconies, their dim-lit bars and their muffled music.
Now, before the night comes, while the evening is still purple and hazy, while the velvet twilight lasts – now you may taste the impossible beauty of Beirut: for rising in strides above the capital, in serried terraces, above the skyscrapers, above the last suburbs, above the olive groves, above the foothill villages, above the winding Damascus road – there, lording it above sea and city, stand the mountains, ‘afloat in heaven’s pool’. A sheen of snow hovers about their high ridges, and their tawny slopes tumble away through scree and field and olive grove to the Mediterranean below. Beneath their serenity Beirut festers and celebrates: and even as you watch, sipping your wine or toying with your fish, the lights go on like star clusters in the villages of the hills, higher and higher up the slopes, until at last the dark falls, the end of the sunset fades, and away above Beirut only the snow of the summits remains like a dim corona in the night.
Beirut was an all-too-favourite place of recreation for the Western Press corps in the Middle East, and one of my American colleagues in Cairo happened to have escaped up there for a few days of hedonism when a great news story broke in Egypt. Legend says that he was handed a message from his newspaper while sunning himself on the beach with a long cool drink. ‘King Farouk has abdicated’, it said. ‘What are your plans?’
Jordan
The Times sent me, in 1955, to cover the wedding in Amman of King Hussein of Jordan and his Egyptian bride. The Hashemite monarchy there owed its existence to the British Empire, which had sponsored its creation after the First World War, and until 1946 it had been, as Transjordan, a British mandatory territory – a sort of imperial protectorate. This occasion was almost the last demonstration of the hybrid sense of ceremony which had been born out of Turco-Arab tradition by British imperialism.
The King received his wedding guests standing beneath a portrait of his father the unbalanced King Talal, and beside him stood a royal cousin – King Feisal II of Iraq. How small and helpless and nice they looked, those two little kings, both of them youths, both small and stocky, with their somehow ill-fitting dark suits and their hands not quite at ease – Hussein, not long from Sandhurst, standing roughly to attention, Feisal, a little more experienced, with his legs apart and his hands clasped in front of him. Kings they were, but kings in a troubled and republican world.
The really significant moment of that lavish day (for the capital was alive with parades and demonstrations from dawn to fireworks time) was the assembly, later that evening, at which the King officially met his Queen. In the past this would have been held behind the curtained doors of the harem, and the innumerable ladies of the household would not for a moment have been exposed unveiled to the gaze of the world at large. This time, though the affair was still predominantly female, some men were allowed to attend it; and the ladies, far from being veiled, appeared bewitchingly, or at least compellingly, uninhibited.
I stood in a corner of the room while the assembly prepared itself for the arrival of the royal couple. Circassians in long black cloaks, astrakhan hats, high boots and cluttered accoutrements guarded the entrance to the hall, as the eunuchs would have stood sentry in an earlier age. At the head of the stairs were two bold lancers in scarlet tunics and white breeches. But the body of the room was a mass of women. They were dressed magnificently, a glitter of satins and brocades and furs, a mosaic of lipsticks and mascara, a tinkling kaleidoscope of earrings, a flurry of sequined handbags. Chanel and Dior thickened the air. When the Queen Mother of Jordan arrived a sibilant Arabic whisper rippled through the hall; for the first time she was appearing in public with no veil above her sumptuous silk gown.
All the same, I could not help feeling that we were close in spirit, if not in textile, to the huddled jealousies and schoolgirl pleasures of the harem. How often and how brazenly did those women of the court eye each other’s couture and coiffure! How heavily accentuated were the outlines of their eyes, like eyes seen through diaphanous curtains in forbidden corridors of the Seraglio! How scratchy and talon-like were the fingernails, how pinkly fleshy the figures, and how passive and doll-like those emancipated ladies looked, in serried and perfumed phalanx, as if some lascivious Sultan was about to pass through their ranks, picking a beauty here and a beauty there with a lordly gesture of his forefinger!
But it was only little King Hussein who entered the room, with his calm, intelligent, literary wife. The illusion vanished in a trice, and as the court ladies smoothed their skirts and pressed the wrinkles from the wrists of their gloves, a cameraman in a crumpled jacket suddenly pressed his way past the Circassian guards and said just one more, ladies, please, give us a nice smile now.
Despite these formalities, Jordan in the 1950s was in an endemic condition of incipient revolution – like much of the Arab world as a whole. For a different glimpse of the national preoccupations I attended the trial, in Amman too, of five political subversives.
A revolution is an awesome thing and we think of it, as often as not, in grand abstractions. We talk spaciously, like astronomers, of the turmoil that is now sweeping across the Arab world and only occasionally, in sharp passing moments of enlightenment, do we collate the great political design with the poor little human conscience, struggling there beneath the manifestos. One such flash of illumination occurred this morning in the officers’ mess of the Jordanian Army training regiment on a hill outside Amman.
The mess was white with tablecloths, as though lunch were about to be served, and the silver baubles of the regimental collection gleamed from their glass cabinets handsomely. The neon lighting was bright in spite of the sunshine. There were pictures of armoured cars on the walls, and a faint tangy fragrance emanated from the dwarf pines outside the window. The trial was taking place of five Jordanians accused of conspiracy and the possession and illegal use of explosives, the penalty demanded being death: and here, as in some fierce silhouette, you could see the images of revolution clear and cruel.
On one side of the court sat the accused. There were two placid, shabbily dressed Jordanians in kuffiyahs, sitting silent and composed, as though they were in church. There was a fattish, puffy-faced man with a t
owel over his head, clearly so harshly used by his interrogators that he was near death already: great blue weals scarred his hands, his movements were agonizingly slow, suffering stared from his watery eyes, and sometimes with a gesture of despair he heeled over and laid his head on his neighbour’s lap. And at the end of the row sat a pair of lovers, he tall and bearded, she slim and wide-eyed, the very epitome of revolutionary and Byronic romance. The young man was cheerful and smiling, in a blue open-necked shirt: the girl was pale but proud, her great black eyes anxious and unsettled, in a dress with orange stripes and a white bangle, and a fragile gold crucifix round her neck.
On the other side of the room sat authority in the form of a military court, stern and khaki-coloured, and shuffling its papers portentously. The defence lawyers sat in double-breasted suits at one table. The prosecutor, a scared and ineffectual subaltern, sat at another. Two rather pudgy majors formed the ancillaries of the bench, and the president was a brigadier, red-tabbed and beribboned, of fine commanding presence and assurance: his face was large and craggy, like a face from the desert, his voice was very loud and rather rasping, and he glared at the court from deep-set eyes above a clipped and bristly moustache.
So they sat there, the accusers, the accused, and the judges: and all around them jostled the audience, idly lounging or half-heartedly enjoying themselves. There were troops of soldiers, apparently off-duty, sitting in the courtroom or crowding about the open door. There was a handful of eager attentive civilians. Policemen sat stoutly in their spiked helmets, vacant but willing, like country coppers on bicycles in pre-war English comedies. A few foreign pressmen doodled on their pads (‘You might do an atmosphere piece on it, old boy, but you can’t call it hard news, except for the girl angle’). A policewoman with bobbed black hair, gold earrings and a forage cap, sat incongruously among all the men, her face heavily powdered. There was a sense of muted and unhilarious recreation to the scene, such as you might experience in a suburban cinema during a fairly dreary second feature.