FORWARD : Arts

Self-Made Man

Looking for the Real Edward Said
"Out of Place"
By Edward Said
Knopf, 295 pages, $26.95.
By HILLEL HALKIN
Barely had I finished mentioning Columbia University literary critic, musicologist and Palestinian political polemicist Edward Said in a review in these pages several weeks ago (of a new book by Bernard Lewis) when the mail brought me a new book by Mr. Said himself. Called "Out of Place," it is a memoir of his early years, from his birth in Jerusalem in 1935 to his five years of graduate school at Harvard from 1958 to 1963, and it arrives in the eye of a literary storm.

This storm was started, on the eve of the publication of Mr. Said's memoir, by Justin Reid Weiner, a scholar in residence at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, who, in an article in September's Commentary, accused Mr. Said of falsifying the story of his childhood and adolescence in numerous interviews and written passages over the years. Contrary to his repeated claims, Mr. Weiner wrote, Mr. Said, though born in Jerusalem, never lived there but grew up in Cairo; his parents did not own a much-loved house in Talbieh, a Jerusalem neighborhood that is now a posh Jewish area, and was by no stretch of the imagination the Palestinian refugee that he has represented himself as being. Mr. Said immediately replied, angrily calling these charges politically motivated. Others joined in, and the ensuing fray, while it can hardly be pleasant for the author of "Out of Place," will by no means harm the book's sales.

I must admit to having a mild personal interest in all this. Although I have never met Mr. Weiner, I did once speak to him on the telephone when he called to ask what I knew about the Saids' supposed house in Talbieh. He did this because he had heard that a deceased relative of mine had lived in the neighborhood and knew the history of this house, which he thought I might have inquired about while writing a long "Open Letter to Edward Said" that was published in a 1979 issue of Commentary. In that piece, which had started out as a review of Mr. Said's "The Question of Palestine," I reflected on the irony of our having, as it were, exchanged lives: I, the Zionist, born in 1939 and raised on Manhattan's Upper West Side as the son of a Columbia University professor, now living in Jerusalem (as I then was); he, the Palestinian, born in 1935 and raised (as I then thought) in Jerusalem, now teaching English literature at Columbia (from which I had obtained two degrees in the same subject) and living where I grew up.

This article eventually led to a breakfast between us at Manhattan's Tavern on the Green, brokered by a mutual acquaintance, a television newscaster, who disappeared in response to an urgent beeper summons (purely fictional, I suspect) the moment we sat down. Still, it was a pleasant enough meal. Mr. Said and I talked about this and that and even agreed, if I remember correctly, on a reasonable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that was not far, in its main outlines, from the Declaration of Principles signed long afterward in Oslo. (Curiously, we both publicly opposed the Oslo agreement when it was signed, each of us feeling that its details had sold out his own side's interests.) Afterward I walked him, tennis racket under his arm, a long way through the streets of Manhattan. I liked him more than I had liked his book. I never saw him again and was saddened to hear several years ago that he had leukemia.

Now, having read Mr. Weiner's article, Mr. Said's response to it and "Out of Place," I can only conclude that Mr. Weiner is right in all major respects. By his own account in "Out of Place" (which, Mr. Weiner surmises, may have been partly written in self-correcting anticipation of the impending Commentary expose), Mr. Said's entire life until he left to study in America at the age of 16 -- except for vacations in Lebanon and Palestine and one stay of several months in 1947 with cousins in Jerusalem (to whom the house in Talbieh belonged) -- was spent in Cairo, where Mr. Said's Palestinian-born father was a wealthy businessman little concerned with Palestinian affairs. Mr. Said was given the English-language schooling of an haut-bourgeois Egyptian, longed for Cairo and not Jerusalem during his first years in the United States and developed no strong sense of Palestinian identity until after the 1967 war.

Is this important? Should I feel cheated? I suppose the answer is yes and no. In terms of Mr. Said's politics, his personal story is clearly irrelevant. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians did end up as refugees in 1948, and the case he has sought to make for them and their descendants is in no way affected by his not having personally shared their fate.

In terms of having been fooled into publishing a letter to him based on false premises, I suppose I needn't complain either. The piece still reads well, even if it now turns out to have been addressed to a partly fictional character. Besides, as we postmoderns know and are continually being remind between fact and fiction is not so easily drawn, particularly in our own age. I myself serialized a work in this newspaper not long ago in which real events that featured real people and real names were occasionally rearranged to suit the convenience of the story. Did Mr. Said do much worse?

Perhaps I sinned too. It is one thing, after all, to observe that our memories play tricks on us and that we do the same to them, retroactively rewriting and reshaping them to the point that there is something fictional about the remembered lives of us all. It is quite another to use this commonplace observation as a pretext for knowingly proclaiming a falsehood to be true -- especially when, like Mr. Said, one regards oneself as an intellectual with a responsibility toward the truth. To knowingly proclaim fiction as fact, even in seemingly trivial matters (and no one will contend that where the young Edward Said lived is of any great concern to humanity), is to start down a slippery slope at the bottom of which no intellectual life is possible at all.

Still, when it comes to "Out of Place," I have no doubts about its essential truth. No one could have purposely invented so dismal a childhood or one so obviously painful to write about.

No, the child whom Mr. Said describes in this book was not abused or the product of a broken home. He was instead something that Jewish readers of his generation are more familiar with: overdominated and overprotected, the son of a cold and ambitiously demanding father and an alternately seductive and rejecting mother ("my closest and most intimate companion for the first twenty-five years of my life"), who sought to control his every movement and under whose thumb he remained until leaving for America and, psychologically, for many years thereafter.

He was friendless, fearful, repressed, outwardly compliant and inwardly rebellious, a poor student despite his great intelligence, a prisoner together with his four sisters of a smothering family beyond whose confines it was forbidden to stray. It was a pathetic little kingdom whose royal couple lived in isolation themselves; set apart from Muslim society by being Christian and from Coptic society by being Protestant; not Egyptian yet no longer Palestinian; not Lebanese though Hilda Said's family came from Lebanon; not American though Wadie (William) Said had U.S. citizenship (he had lived in America as a young man); speaking a jumble of Egyptian Arabic, Palestinian Arabic and English; its main links with the outside world its prosperous office supply business, bridge clubs and spinster aunts; a huddled enclave of suspicion, prudishness, boredom, self-pity and claustrophobic intrigue.

It is to Mr. Said's credit that he makes this family interesting and even generates sympathy for a father who, for all his officiousness, worked hard and honorably to support a wife and children in style and a mother who, when not jealously scheming to be at the center of everything, possessed a refined sensitivity and a love for the arts. It is to his credit, too, that he has managed to retain the love for them that he has. In today's American culture of blame, there is something upright -- one nearly says "foreign" -- in Mr. Said's ultimate loyalty to kin and clan, which exists despite his disclaimer that "I have always felt the priority of intellectual, rather than national or tribal consciousness, no matter how solitary that made me." Don't believe it. As D.H. Lawrence once said: Trust not the teller but the tale.

And yet in the final analysis, the most impressive character in this book is not Wadie or Hilda Said or even Edward Said -- that "Edward" (or "Edwaad," as he self-mockingly mimics his mother calling him) whose "flawed, frightened, uncertain construction...superficially incoherent and disorganized" Mr. Said struggled to grow up with. It is rather the person referred to by Mr. Said as "the self beneath Edward" -- that "starved and repressed hidden self," a shadowy presence in "Out of Place," who eventually blossomed to become a well-known and much-honored American man of letters. Ultimately, Mr. Said's book is about the mysterious, almost vegetative inner power that enables some people to overcome the stunting influences of their childhoods and stubbornly keep growing toward a light, at first but dimly and intermittently glimpsed, that is their destiny to reach.

"I occasionally experience myself as a cluster of flowing currents. I prefer this to the idea of a solid self, the identity to which so many attach so much significance," Mr. Said writes toward the end of his book. When that "solid self" is, even today, perceived as the imprisoned and imprisoning "Edward," such a sentiment is not only postmodernistically a la mode, it makes psychological sense. And yet a more solid self might have been less prone to confuse a Cairo with a Jerusalem childhood. If writing "Out of Place" has helped Mr. Said to recover Cairo's "Edward" and integrate him in some measure with the "buried second self" he later was resurrected as, Justin Reid Weiner may have done him a favor.
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