Out of Place: A Memoir

by Edward W. Said

  Princeton in the fifties was unpolitical, self-satisfied, and oblivious. There was no collective Princeton in any political sense aside from football games, rallies, and parties. The closest thing to it was when my classmate Ralph Schoenman (later Bertrand Russell’s secretary and spokesman) organized a campus visit for Alger Hiss; that brought out a crowd of curious undergraduates and some picketing protesters. Until the Suez invasion in the fall of 1956 (like the Cairo fire, an event I experienced at a distance with great emotional stress since my family was there) whatever politics came up was restricted to my conversations with Arab graduate student friends, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod—a recent Palestinian refugee, then a doctoral candidate in Oriental, i.e., Middle Eastern, studies at Princeton—principal among them. And yet except for these private exchanges my growing concern with what was taking place in Nasser’s Egypt had no outlet at all. During the Suez Crisis, however, I discovered what for two years I hadn’t known—that one of my roommates, Tom Farer, who has remained a friend, was Jewish but gave no support for Israel or what Israel was doing. I remember a rather heated conversation with Arthur Gold in which we screamed at each other about the injustice (my word) of Israel to us (as Palestinians), he taking a viewpoint totally opposed to mine—but that was an isolated event which was totally disconnected from anything else I was doing at Princeton at the time. Over the years our views, however, became more reconciled. McCarthy was treated at Princeton as a bagatelle and no Princeton professor was known to us as having been persecuted for his Communist views. In fact there was no left presence of any sort at Princeton. Marx was barely read or assigned, and for most of us Gordon Craig’s big final lecture on Hitler (complete with blood-curdling imitation) in History I was the closest we came to contemporary history.

  A very strange incident took place in Dodge Hall, which housed studios, a tailor shop (run by the freshman tennis coach), a cafeteria, a small theater, and several offices for students of various religions—the Catholics, the Jews, etc. I was on my way to the cafeteria and suddenly came face-to-face with the rabbi of the Hillel Foundation; he was walking down the stairs from his office, and our eyes met. “You’re from Egypt,” he said to me with a slight edge to his voice. I admitted to that bit of intelligence, taken aback that he not only knew me but knew where I lived. “What do you plan to do when you finish here?” he asked peremptorily. I said something vague about graduate or even medical school (for at least half of my Princeton career I had been a premed, though I was a humanities major), but was impatiently stopped short by him. “No, no. I mean after you finish all your education.” Then, without waiting for an answer, he preached on. “You should go back. Your people need you. They need doctors, engineers, teachers. There is so much misery and ignorance and illness among the Arabs that people like you are a crucial asset.” Then he marched out of Dodge without waiting for my response.

  This happened before the Suez invasion, when I volunteered to write a column about the war from the Arab point of view for the university newspaper. The article was published without provoking the kind of response that it might have had if it had appeared after 1967. It was my first piece of political writing, but so quiescent were political passions and so muted were Zionist opinions—this was, after all, when Eisenhower in effect compelled Israel to withdraw from Sinai—that I was able to publish it quite easily. Even so, I was aware of Cold War tensions and of problematic patterns in the Arab world by virtue of time spent with the Maliks in Washington.

  While at Princeton I first approached the political currents and issues not only of the period but which in one way or another were to influence my outlook intellectually and politically for the rest of my life. It was then that I heard from Malik about ideology, communism, and the great battle between East and West. He was already close to John Foster Dulles and was beginning to make a mark on American life of the time: universities showered him with honorary degrees, he gave lectures, and was much in demand socially. He had an amused contempt for Princeton and me, but he was willing to talk to me at quite some length (conversation, except for an occasional question from me, wasn’t really possible). Later I understood that Nasser’s approach to the Soviet Union coupled with his Islamic faith were the real problem for Malik; hidden beneath the discourse of statistics and demographic trends were Communism and Islam. Yet I was unable finally to sustain any kind of counterargument: Malik’s manner kept reminding me that I was only a sophomore, whereas he lived in the real world, dealt with great people, was so much more elevated in vision, etc.

  Malik’s attitude really troubled me in its mixture of politics with family, his and my sense of community and genuine relationship coming up against alien forces that he felt (and, I realized, most of my Lebanese relatives also felt) threatened “us.” I couldn’t feel that, somehow, couldn’t feel either that social change and the majority culture had to be opposed as a way of preserving our status as Christians, or that we had a separate status at all. It was in those Washington discussions that the inherent irreconcilability between intellectual belief and passionate loyalty to tribe, sect, and country first opened up in me, and have remained open. I have never felt the need to close the gap but have kept them apart as opposites, and have always felt the priority of intellectual, rather than national or tribal, consciousness, no matter how solitary that made one. But such an idea during my undergraduate years was difficult for me to formulate, although I certainly began to feel it keenly. I had neither the vocabulary nor the conceptual tools, and I was too often overcome by emotions and desires—basically unsatisfied in the Princeton social wilderness—to make those distinctions clear that would later become so central to my life and work.

  What remained from the relentless daily pressure of my Cairo years was an equally intense feeling of drivenness at Princeton: a lot of my unfulfilled emotional energy went into intense activity. I kept up with sports by playing tennis and, through my sophomore year, being on the swimming team. Choir and glee club, where I was both singer and accompanist, took up time, and piano playing. I had won a generous prize given by the Friends of Music at Princeton to study with an eminent New York (usually Julliard) teacher; following the sudden death of Erich Itor Kahn, my first teacher, there was the redoubtable and abrasive Edward Steuerman, the amiable Beveridge Webster, the awkward Frank Sheridan, none of whom in their unimaginative conformity proved as useful a teacher as Louise Strunsky, a local Princeton woman of great insight and musicality with whom I studied for some months.

  During the last part of my time at Princeton, the sense of myself as unaccomplished, floundering, split in different parts (Arab, musician, young intellectual, solitary eccentric, dutiful student, political misfit) was dramatically revealed to me by a college classmate of my oldest sister, Rosy, whom I happened to meet in Philadelphia when she asked herself along to join the two of us for a performance of Death of a Salesman with Mickey Shaughnessey as Willie Loman. Both of them were Bryn Mawr sophomores, my sister barely getting over her crippling homesickness but not her dislike of the place, her friend a blue-blooded Social Registered campus leader whose devastating personableness and charm overcame, indeed obliterated, any reservations one might have had about her unusual but modest good looks. She was very tall, but carried herself with astonishing grace. She cried liberally during the performance, borrowing and promising later to return (this pleased me) my handkerchief. There was something wrong with her front teeth which she tried to hide when we spoke face-to-face.

  The next time I saw her a couple of weeks later she had had them fixed. And then I realized that I had been gripped by her with such intensity and passion that I felt I wanted to be with her constantly, a desire that fed itself just as constantly on the fact that I could not be. Princeton’s regulations, the distance to Bryn Mawr, complicated academic schedules abridged the frequency of our encounters. But this was also the time of my involvement with Eva, which developed and took place only during summers in Dhour el Shweir. Thus for my final year at Princeton I wou
ld chase after—with results only once every six weeks or so, and then most frustratingly—my Bryn Mawr love, as in a sense a part of my American life, while Eva in the Middle East was integral to that life. Both relationships, counterpointed and plotted with fiendish regularity, were chaste, unconsummated, unfulfilled. As an older friend of hers told me ten years later, this stunning American woman was a Diana figure, infinitely attractive to me and at the same time infinitely unattainable.

  After my relationship with Eva lapsed in the late fifties I continued fitfully with this enigmatic, strangely passionate, and yet increasingly elusive American woman. I made an unhappy marriage with someone else, and when after a short time it ended, I returned once again to my Bryn Mawr friend. We lived together, were genuine companions for almost two years after twelve or thirteen years of intermittent relationship touched by, not to say drenched in, sexual desire constantly heightened and just as constantly and bizarrely dampened. She was neither an intellectual nor someone with very clearly outlined goals for her life. We were at Harvard together for the first year, 1958–59, she in education, I in literature. Once during that fall she confided in me about the difficulties of a relationship she was having with someone else (this hurt and puzzled me, but I managed to keep calm, and offer a friendly ear and counsel), but by the middle of the year we were seeing each other regularly again. She left for New York to work as a private school teacher for a while, then went to Africa to teach for two or three years. She was always interested in theater and film, but because her degree was in education she ended up teaching, though my impression was that despite her fantastic gifts for dealing with young people, this was expedient for her, rather than a vocation.

  It is difficult to describe the tremendous power of her attraction, the romance of her body, which was for a time just beyond sexual reach, the overwhelming pleasure of intimacy with her, the utter unpredictability of her wanting and rejecting me, the irreducible joy of seeing her after an absence. These were what tied me to her for so many years. At times, she represented that aspect of an ideal America that I could never gain admission to, but which held me enthralled at the gate. She had a moralistic “don’t-say-bad-things” side to her, which sometimes made me feel even more alien, and put me resentfully on my best behavior. There was also (and later centrally) her family, which was represented to me as blue-blooded, and more or less impecunious because her dashing lawyer-father quixotically took on gigantic opponents like the defense department for purely idealistic reasons, bankrupting himself in the process. But there was taste and breeding, elegance, and a sort of literary refinement about her family, whom I was not to meet for a considerable time, that sometimes induced in me an almost subservient attitude. Her closest attachment in life was to her eldest brother, a famous athlete and exact contemporary of mine, though he was at Harvard. I think I saw them together only twice, but in what she said about him over the years I sensed a more-than-usual combination of love, awe, respect, and, yes, passion that for years I dimly felt prevented us from the fulfillment I quite desperately wanted and which seemed impossible. In this, it now seems to me, I must have been complaisant.

  It is difficult now to reconstruct the feelings of terrifying abandonment she induced when she was about to, as she so often did, leave me. “I love you,” she would say, “but I am not in love with you,” as she announced her decision never to see me again. This happened in the late spring of 1959, on the eve of my departure for Cairo and the long summer vacation. I was at Harvard graduate school, and still dependent on my father’s business, which by now was hemmed in by Nasser’s socialist laws, nationalizations, and the illegality of foreign accounts, on which our business was built. Entering the city from the airport I felt a direct sense of being threatened, an insecurity so profound that it could only come, I thought, from the sense of our being torn up by the roots, such roots as we had in Egypt. Where would our family go?

  A few days later the city’s eternal rhythms—the people, the river, my Gezira Club acquaintances, even the traffic, certainly the Pyramids, which I could see from my bedroom window—had calmed my spirit. This was the East, I remember a friend of my parents saying, and things happen slowly. No abrupt changes. No surprises, although there were, ironically enough, new “Arab socialist” laws being promulgated daily. Contradictions and anxieties notwithstanding, I was lulled into the routine of going to my father’s business every day, still, as ever, with very little actual work to do there. Then a postcard arrived from Chartres. It was from her, and two weeks later she asked if she could visit me in Cairo. It was bliss for me but after a week the Diana impulse asserted itself. “I must leave,” she said, and would not be deterred. A few weeks later we were together again, and then we weren’t, and so it continued.

  When she went to Africa some months later, she had to come rushing back almost immediately because her brother had been taken ill. Three weeks later he was to die in her arms—of leukemia, a disease for which there was no effective therapy thirty years ago. It was the worst blow of her life, and although she returned to Africa for two more years I was not able to gauge accurately the profound extent and depth of her loss. Later we drifted apart, as I finished my graduate career, started work at Columbia, and married my first wife. When my marriage began to fall apart I returned to her, but my feelings for her had changed. All the years of waiting for my Diana had suddenly come to an end. She had been so intimate a part of my life, so necessary to my starved and repressed hidden self, that life without her, I had felt, was unimaginable. She seemed to speak directly to that underground part of my identity I had long held for myself, not the “Ed” or “Edward” I had been assigned, but the other self I was always aware of but was unable easily or immediately to reach. She seemed to have access to that part of me when I was with her, and then suddenly (actually, over a period of a few restful weeks in Lebanon) my becalmed spirit recognized that she and I could no longer go on. Our time was over. And so we did not continue.

  I graduated from Princeton in June of 1957 with a pronounced case of German measles. My parents were there to watch the Phi Beta Kappa ceremony, and later to meet with some of my professors. Though I had done very well, my father persisted in asking my teachers whether in fact I had done my best, with a tone suggesting that I hadn’t. My mother tried unsuccessfully to reassure me later how proud he was of my achievement (among them a fat fellowship to Harvard, which I deferred for a year). Most of the professors (as is their lamentable wont) mumbled something polite, whereas only Szathmary literally assaulted my nonplussed parents with a short diatribe on the philosophical nonsense contained in the logical (or rather illogical) form of the question “Did he do his best?” What a champion of critical thought he was, I thought glowingly, and how I wished I would be able to be one too.

  So torn was I by differing impulses that I finally decided with my parents that I should have a year off to return to and sample the Cairo life I would lead if—there was always an “if” in my life then—I decided to take over the business. But the year (1957–58) turned out to end with a number of closed doors. No, I could not work in something my father owned and had created: it was his terrain and the dependency I felt was hateful to me. Money and property were two things I knew instinctively I could not win from him in a contest. During my Princeton and even graduate years at Harvard when he was still generously providing me with money, a disagreeable ordeal for me was the day of my return home. He would act agitated and uncomfortable around me until, to end his restlessness, he would say, “Edward, could we have our little talk?” For at least ten years “our talk” took the same form, duplicated exactly year after year. He would pull a piece of paper out of his pocket and read a figure, a sum in dollars, from it. “This year I sent you $4,356. How much do you have left?” Since I knew that I would have to answer the question once I got home, and since also I never kept records of what I spent, I would employ several anxious hours during the long plane journey back to the Middle East trying to make a li
st of my expenses, among which were tuition, room rent, and board. This sum always fell very far short of the total, so when I faced him I was left with a terrible sense of culpability and guilt, and felt relatively speechless, or silly. “You say you spent fifty dollars on haircuts. That still leaves fifteen hundred you haven’t accounted for. Do you realize how hard I have to work to earn that money? How much do you have left in the bank?” he would then say, as if giving me an opportunity to redeem myself. Before leaving for the summer I had drawn out all but about ten dollars. He remonstrated irritatingly. And again and again until I was in my mid-twenties.

  I could never reconcile this with his extraordinary generosity—paying for expensive piano lessons in Boston, letting me buy a car in Italy for a long European summer tour in 1958, including weeks spent at Bayreuth, Salzburg, Lucerne, and on and on. I felt that only by asking my mother to intercede could I get him to say yes, since his rapid-fire answer to any request I made was invariably negative; besides, I should confess that most of the time I was too timid, intimidated, embarrassed, to ask him myself. The fact is that he financed my education and my extracurricular undertakings and still I couldn’t talk to him about money, nor did he like me to have too much of it.

  It must also be said that my father clearly possessed an owner’s sense, something I never acquired nor in a subtle, silent way, I believe, was ever allowed to acquire. Until the fall of Palestine he and his cousin Boulos’s family (Boulos had died in 1939 or 1940) co-owned the businesses in Egypt and Palestine. During that time none of us, least of all my father, ever took anything from the showroom, not even a pencil, without signing for it. He was scrupulous about protecting their interests. Along with that scrupulosity went an unbridled anger at any sign of extravagance or heedless expenditure in us. For years and years—during which time his profits were based on enormous machine and furniture sales to the Egyptian government, the British army, and large corporations like Shell and Mobil Oil—he would fire at us, saying, “Do you realize how many pencils I have to sell before I can make the fifty piasters you squandered on cakes at the club?” I really believed this amazing fiction until I was about twenty-one; I clearly remember challenging him with “What pencils are you talking about? You don’t sell pencils; you sell Monroe calculators and make thousands of pounds in one sale.” That stopped him, although the sly smile on his face suggested to me that in spite of himself he enjoyed being bested that once.