Hitch-22: A Memoir

  One of my first reservations about Zionism was and is that, semiconsciously at least, it grants the anti-Semite’s first premise about the abnormality of the Jew. I once heard Avishai Margalit, one of Isaiah Berlin’s most brilliant disciples, phrase this very memorably during a lecture he gave at the New School. The Zionist idea, he said, was supposed to take the deracinated European Jew—the so-called luftmensch or person made of thin air—and make a man of him. How to achieve this? By taking him from his watchmaker’s shop in Budapest or his clinic in Vienna and putting a hoe in one hand and a gun in the other. In Palestine. The resulting sturdy farmer-soldier would then redeem the shuffling, cringing round-shouldered shopkeeper or usurer. This was the Leon Uris movie version of events, the theme music of which—I suddenly remember—my mother had at one point possessed on a long-playing record. Margalit pointed out that this “project” absolutely mandated a conflict with the Arab population, because it necessarily involved not just the occupation of their land but the confiscation of it. “Some say that this is the Israelis’ original sin,” he said deadpan. “With this I do not agree but I think we can call it Israel’s immaculate misconception.”

  For myself, I don’t feel like an apologetic luftmensch; I positively prefer the watchmaker and the bookseller and the doctor to the hearty farmer and colonist, and I pause to note that Arabs are retained on this forcibly Judaized land mainly in order that someone be available to do the hoeing and digging and heavy lifting that most Israelis are now too refined to do for themselves. There’s a certain amount of ambiguity in my background, what with intermarriages and conversions, but under various readings of three codes which I don’t much respect (Mosaic Law, the Nuremberg Laws, and the Israeli Law of Return) I do qualify as a member of the tribe, and any denial of that in my family has ceased with me. But I would not remove myself to Israel if it meant the continuing expropriation of another people, and if anti-Jewish fascism comes again to the Christian world—or more probably comes at us via the Muslim world—I already consider it an obligation to resist it wherever I live. I would detest myself if I fled from it in any direction. Leo Strauss was right. The Jews will not be “saved” or “redeemed.” (Cheer up: neither will anyone else.) They/we will always be in exile whether they are in the greater Jerusalem area or not, and this in some ways is as it should be. They are, or we are, as a friend of Victor Klemperer’s once put it to him in a very dark time, condemned and privileged to be “a seismic people.” A critical register of the general health of civilization is the status of “the Jewish question.” No insurance policy has ever been devised that can or will cover this risk.

  Edward Said in Light and Shade (and Saul)

  IN THE COURSE of a long engagement with this whole tortured Frage, I made a friendship that taught me a very great deal. It was at a conference in Cyprus in 1976, where the theme was the rights of small nations, that I first met Edward Said. It was impossible not to be captivated by him: of his many immediately seductive qualities I will start by mentioning a very important one. When he laughed, it was as if he was surrendering unconditionally to some guilty pleasure. At first the very picture of professorial rectitude, with faultless tweeds, cravats, and other accoutrements (the pipe also being to the fore), he would react to a risqué remark, or a disclosure of something vaguely scandalous, as if a whole Trojan horse of mirth had been smuggled into his interior and suddenly disgorged its contents. The build-up, in other words, was worth one’s effort. And very few allusions were wasted on him: he appeared to have memorized most of Beyond the Fringe and Monty Python and to be an excellent mimic of anything that smacked of the absurd. He could “do,” I remember, a very vivid George Steiner…

  I had not particularly liked the way in which he wrote about literature in Beginnings, and I was always on my guard if not outright hostile when any tincture of “deconstruction” or “postmodernism” was applied to my beloved canon of English writing, but when Edward talked about English literature and quoted from it, he passed the test that I always privately apply: Do you truly love this subject and could you bear to live for one moment if it was obliterated?

  I was on my way to Israel from Cyprus and he gave me some Palestinian contacts to look up, mainly at Birzeit University near Ramallah. Everybody he suggested I meet proved to be welcoming, sane, secular, and realistic. Over the years, whenever I went to Beirut or Syria or elsewhere in the region, he always seemed to have access to people of that stripe. Though he never actually joined it, he was close to some civilian elements of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which was the most Communist (and in the rather orthodox sense) of the Palestinian formations. I remember Edward once surprising me by saying, and apropos of nothing: “Do you know something I have never done in my political career? I have never publicly criticized the Soviet Union. It’s not that I terribly sympathize with them or anything—it’s just that the Soviets have never done anything to harm me, or us.” At the time I thought this a rather naïve statement, even perhaps a slightly contemptible one, but by then I had been in parts of the Middle East where it could come as a blessed relief to meet a consecrated Moscow-line atheist-dogmatist, if only for the comparatively rational humanism that he evinced amid so much religious barking and mania. It was only later to occur to me that Edward’s pronounced dislike of George Orwell was something to which I ought to have paid more attention.*

  After Cyprus, the next time I saw Edward was in New York. And, when I went to call on him up in Morningside Heights, I discovered the sidewalk around his building was alive with cops and “security” types. It was the era of the Jimmy Carter–Anwar Sadat–Menachem Begin “Camp David” deal, where the three leaders had attempted to square the circle by confecting an agreement in the absence of any representative of the Palestinians. Perhaps a bit sensitive to this rather conspicuous lacuna, Sadat had had one of his public fits of improvisation and caprice and declared—without asking any permission or giving any notice—that the good Professor Edward Said of Columbia University might perhaps make the necessary interlocutor for his dispossessed (and in this case excluded) people. It was the first time I had seen the media cliché in full action but yes, within hours the world had beaten a path to Edward’s door and I in turn had to beat my way through to his apartment for dinner.

  He was dismayed at Sadat’s presumption and embarrassed—as was his lovely Lebanese wife, Mariam—at the unsolicited attention it had earned him. I learned a lot that evening, including a crucial thing about Edward that so many people failed ever to understand about him. This was that he did NOT consider himself a direct victim of 1947/48 and the Israeli triumph. His family had in the long run lost a lot of property in Jerusalem and suffered a distinct loss of pride, but he firmly declined to call himself a refugee. He had left Jerusalem for Egypt in good time, completed his studies at a parodic English-style boarding school in Cairo (with Omar Sharif wielding the punitive gym shoe as the sadistic “head boy” of Kitchener House) and gone on—with his original American passport—to qualify many times over at various universities in the United States. He owed his current eminence at Columbia to the special encouragement of Lionel Trilling.

  However, it was precisely because he wasn’t a penniless or stateless refugee (even if the family had lost the lovely old house in Jerusalem where Martin Buber later lived) that he felt such a strong responsibility for those who were. I was to grow used to hearing, around New York, the annoying way in which people would say: “Edward Said, such a suave and articulate and witty man,” with the unspoken suffix “for a Palestinian.” It irritated him, too, naturally enough, but in my private opinion it strengthened him in his determination to be an ambassador or spokesman for those who lived in camps or under occupation (or both). He almost overdid the ambassadorial aspect if you ask me, being always just too faultlessly dressed and spiffily turned out. Fools often contrasted this attention to his tenue with his membership of the Palestine National Council, the then-parliament-in-exile of the people with
out a land. In fact, his taking part in this rather shambolic assembly was a kind of noblesse oblige: an assurance to his landsmen (and also to himself) that he had not allowed and never would allow himself to forget their plight. The downside of this noblesse was only to strike me much later on. I continued to observe how tightly and crisply he was buttoned and tied, as well as to notice that the well-wrapped contents were under pressure. I once walked Martin Amis up through the Morningside Heights area to go and call upon Edward—whose reviews and essays I had been urging Martin to print in his literary pages at the New Statesman—and on our arrival the good professor was perhaps slightly over-solicitous at the idea that we’d come on foot. His ’hood, at that time of the late New York seventies, could be described as a bit hairy. (After dinner, he had once sweetly insisted on walking me to the subway.) “If you mean,” said Martin, “that the guys round here seem to style their hair by shoving their dicks into the light-socket…” I didn’t think this was one of his absolute best, but I turned to see the Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature fighting down a great eruption of anarchic mirth in which he almost certainly disapproved of having indulged.

  Reading his autobiography many years later, I was astonished to find that Edward since boyhood had—not unlike Isaiah Berlin—often felt himself ungainly and ill-favored and awkward in bearing. He had always seemed to me quite the reverse: a touch dandyish perhaps but—as the saying goes—perfectly secure in his masculinity. On one occasion, after lunch in Georgetown, he took me with him to a renowned local tobacconist and asked to do something I had never witnessed before: “try on” a pipe. In case you ever wish to do this, here is the form: a solemn assistant produces a plastic envelope and fits it over the amber or ivory mouthpiece. You then clamp your teeth down to feel if the “fit” and weight are easy to your jaw. If not, then repeat with various stems until your browsing is complete. In those days I could have inhaled ten cigarettes and drunk three Tanqueray martinis in the time spent on such flaneur flippancy, but I admired the commitment to smoking nonetheless. Taking coffee with him once in a shopping mall in Stanford, I saw him suddenly register something over my shoulder. It was a ladies’ dress shop. He excused himself and dashed in, to emerge soon after with some fashionable and costly looking bags. “Mariam,” he said as if by way of explanation, “has never worn anything that I have not bought for her.” On another occasion in Manhattan, after acting as a magnificent, encyclopedic guide around the gorgeous Andalusia (Al-Andalus) exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, he was giving lunch to Carol and to me when she noticed that her purse had been lost or stolen. At once, he was at her service, not only suggesting shops in the vicinity where a replacement might be found, but also offering to be her guide and advisor until she had selected a suitable new sac à main. I could no more have proposed myself for such an expedition than suggested myself as a cosmonaut, so what this says about my own heterosexual confidence I leave to others.

  His insecurity, in other words, didn’t show at all where he feared it did, in his carriage or his turnout. Nor did he let it show when he was lecturing, or otherwise performing in public. I wish I knew anything about music, but to watch him sit down at the piano was to see someone instantly becoming less self-conscious rather than more (a thing I have sometimes noticed with other artists, as with Annie Leibovitz instantly acquiring confidence by picking up a camera). No, what made Edward uneasy was the question of Islam.

  He was so much the picture of different kinds of assimilation that it was almost a case of multiple personalities. He could at one moment be almost a cosmopolitan Jew of the Upper West Side, music-loving, bibliophilic, well-traveled, multilingual. When I asked him for a one-on-one tutorial about George Eliot and Daniel Deronda, for a lecture I planned to give after my own discovery of the occulted Judaism in my own family, he invited me to his apartment—he had by then moved to the Claremont area—and gave me one of the best sessions I have ever had with a teacher: drawing out all the ambivalences of commentary on Anglo-Judaism from Sir Leslie Stephen to Virginia Woolf, from F.R. Leavis to Lord David Cecil, and making an excursus or two to take in Proust, Sainte-Beuve, and Steven Marcus. Considering that the novel was among other things a romanticization of Zionism that almost completely failed to mention the non-Jewish inhabitants of the territory, I thought that this was exemplary on Edward’s part. But this was the other personality at work also: the donnish Englishman with pipe and tweeds, saying, “You might take a look at Frank Leavis on this point, even if it is a bit stodgy.” Edward had attended St. George’s Church of England school in Jerusalem—I assert this with knowledge and confidence in spite of the scurrilous campaign of lies on the subject that was later published in Commentary magazine—and felt himself to be a member of the small and somewhat derided Palestinian-Anglican communion in the city. He once invited me to lunch with the then-Anglican-Arab bishop of Jerusalem (a man later and rather too stereotypically arrested in a gentleman’s lavatory during an interval in the Lambeth Conference of the Church of England) and demonstrated great interest in the liturgy and the rituals of the old place.

  Arab nationalism in its traditional form was the way in which secular Arab Christians like Edward had found and kept a place for themselves, while simultaneously avoiding the charge of being too “Western.” It was very noticeable among the Palestinians that the most demonstrably “extreme” nationalists—and Marxists—were often from Christian backgrounds. George Habash and Nayef Hawatmeh used to be celebrated examples of this phenomenon, long before anyone had heard of the cadres of Hamas, or Islamic Jihad. There was an element of overcompensation involved, or so I came to suspect.

  It took a while for this disagreement between us to crystallize. I at first thought Edward’s Orientalism was a very just and necessary book in that it forced Westerners to confront their own assumptions about the Levant and indeed the whole of the Orient. (My favorite example here was provided by the art critic Robert Hughes, whose Australian family referred contentedly to Indonesia as “the Far East,” when if you could separate their colonial cosmology from their actual geography it was in fact their “Near North.”) In time I came to see that Edward underrated Turkish imperialism, say, when compared to French or British conquests, and was rather grudging about the relative importance of German scholarship, but Orientalism was a book that made one think.* It was with his much lesser effort, Covering Islam, that I began to realize that there was an apparently narrow but very deep difference between us.

  As he defended the book one evening in the early 1980s at the Carnegie Endowment in New York, I knew that some of what he said was true enough, just as some of it was arguably less so. (Edward incautiously dismissed “speculations about the latest conspiracy to blow up buildings or sabotage commercial airliners” as the feverish product of “highly exaggerated stereotypes.”) Covering Islam took as its point of departure the Iranian revolution, which by then had been fully counter-revolutionized by the forces of the Ayatollah. Yes, it was true that the Western press—which was one half of the pun about “covering”—had been naïve if not worse about the Pahlavi regime. Yes, it was true that few Middle East “analysts” had had any concept of the latent power of Shi’ism to create mass mobilization. Yes, it was true that almost every stage of the Iranian drama had come as a complete surprise to the media. But wasn’t it also the case that Iranian society was now disappearing into a void of retrogressive piety that had levied war against Iranian Kurdistan and used medieval weaponry such as stoning and amputation against its internal critics, or even against those like unveiled women whose very existence constituted an offense? (“Living in the Islamic Republic,” Azar Nafisi was later to say in her Reading Lolita in Tehran, one of the many books that demonstrate the superiority of literature over religion as a source of morality and ethics, “is like having sex with someone you loathe.” As the many male victims of rape in the regime’s disgusting jails can testify, this state-run pathology of sexual repression and sexual sadism is not cont
ent to degrade women only.)*

  Edward genially enough did not disagree with what I said, but he didn’t seem to admit my point, either. I wanted to press him harder so I veered close enough to the ad hominem to point out that his life—the life of the mind, the life of the book collector and music lover and indeed of the gallery-goer, appreciator of the feminine and occasional boulevardier—would become simply unlivable and unthinkable in an Islamic republic. Again, he could accede politely to my point but carry on somehow as if nothing had been conceded. I came slowly to realize that with Edward, too, I was keeping two sets of books. We agreed on things like the first Palestinian intifadah, another event that took the Western press completely off guard, and we collaborated on a book of essays that asserted and defended Palestinian rights. This was in the now hard-to-remember time when all official recognition was withheld from the PLO. Together we debated Professor Bernard Lewis and Leon Wieseltier at a once-celebrated conference of the Middle East Studies Association in Cambridge in 1986, tossing and goring them somewhat in a duel over academic “objectivity” in the wider discipline. But even then I was indistinctly aware that Edward didn’t feel himself quite at liberty to say certain things, while at the same time feeling rather too much obliged to say certain other things. A low point was an almost uncritical profile of Yasser Arafat that he contributed to Interview magazine in the late 1980s.