[ A biography of protean intellectual Edward Said situates the
advocate for Palestinian statehood as a deep political thinker and
skeptic of identity politics would both excoriate the crimes of Israel
and the US and denounce Arab despotism.] [[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

PALESTINIANISM: CHARTING THE LIFE AND WORK OF EDWARD SAID  
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Adam Shatz
May 6, 2021
London Review of Books
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_ A biography of protean intellectual Edward Said situates the
advocate for Palestinian statehood as a deep political thinker and
skeptic of identity politics would both excoriate the crimes of Israel
and the US and denounce Arab despotism. _

Edward Said, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

 

When Edward Said joined the Columbia University English department in
1963, a rumour spread that he was a Jew from Alexandria. He might as
well have been. Born in Jerusalem in 1935 to well-off Palestinian
Christian parents, he had grown up in the twilight years of
multicultural Cairo, where many of his classmates were Egyptian Jews.
His piano teacher was Ignace Tiegerman, a Polish Jew who had moved to
Cairo in 1931 and founded a French-speaking conservatoire. Said’s
closest friends at Princeton and Harvard, Arthur Gold, a brilliant
Luftmensch prone to tormented idleness, and the future art critic
Michael Fried, were Jews. His dissertation and first book were about
Joseph Conrad’s explorations of ambiguity and double identities. As
Timothy Brennan writes in _Places of Mind_, Said was ‘a photo
negative of his Jewish counterparts’.

Said spent his first years at Columbia as a kind of an Arab Marrano,
or crypto Palestinian, among Jewish and Wasp colleagues who were
either indifferent or hostile to the Arab struggle with Israel. He
published essays in the little magazines of the New York
intellectuals, went to cocktail parties with Lionel Trilling and Mary
McCarthy, and kept quiet about his identity and his politics. His
parents, who were themselves estranged from Palestine (his father said
Jerusalem reminded him of death), were relieved that their moody and
contentious son was showing such prudence. Thanks to his father’s
service in the American Expeditionary Forces during the First World
War, Said was an American citizen, and if he was reinventing himself,
well, that’s what immigrants did in the New World. The Egyptian
literary theorist Ihab Hassan had shed his Arab identity when he moved
to the US, and had never looked back.

 

Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said
[[link removed]]
By Timothy Brennan
Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 464 pages
March 23, 2021
Hardcover  $35.00
ISBN: 9780374146535

 

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
 

But something in Said rebelled against the concealment and silence
that the loss of Palestine had imposed, and that his father, William
Said, had accepted, leaving behind not only the family’s past in
Jerusalem but also his Arab name, Wadie. After 1967, Said embraced the
Palestinian struggle – an act of ‘affiliation’, as he put it, a
commitment based on belief, rather than ‘filiation’. If Wadie
chose to Americanise himself, adopting phrases like ‘hunky dory’
and supporting the war in Vietnam, Edward chose to ‘Palestinise’
himself.

In Cairo, Wadie Said had run a company that supplied office equipment
to the British occupying army. Edward and his four sisters had a
pampered childhood: servants, music lessons, family trips to New York,
a holiday home in the Lebanese village of Dhour el Shweir
(‘mind-deadening rigours of relentlessly regulated summers’, Said
complained). As Palestinian members of the Anglican Church, they were
a minority within a minority in Egypt. They gave their children
English names and socialised mostly with other Arab Christians from
Palestine, Lebanon and Syria. Wadie, who was proud of the whiteness of
his skin and sometimes pretended he was from Cleveland, identified
with America more than with Palestine. (The Saids celebrated
Thanksgiving.) Edward also spent part of his childhood in the
family’s homeland, in the West Jerusalem neighbourhood of Talbiyah,
but after 1948, as he wrote in his memoir, ‘Palestine acquired a
languid, almost dreamlike, aspect for me.’ It was only thanks to his
aunt Nabiha, who did charitable work among Palestinian refugees in
Cairo, that he became aware of the Nakba, which Wadie passed over in
silence.

In his memoir, _Out of Place_, Said describes his parents as
‘amphibious Levantine creatures whose essential lostness was
momentarily stayed by a kind of forgetfulness, a kind of daydream,
that included elaborately catered dinner parties, outings to
fashionable restaurants, the opera, ballet and concerts’. He
benefited from the daydream, as their world was shaken by the loss of
Palestine, and, in 1952, the collapse of the Egyptian monarchy, which
would eventually force the family to flee to Beirut. He read Balzac
and Dostoevsky with his mother and saw Furtwängler conduct (‘an
emanation’). Yet he portrayed himself in his memoir as an unhappy,
‘delinquent’ child, at the mercy of his father’s strict
discipline (and cane), vulnerable to his mother’s caprice and
emotional blackmail. The book’s depiction of Wadie as a domestic
tyrant infuriated his sisters, and Brennan has unearthed affectionate
letters from father to son. Said described his memoir as a
‘documentary fiction’ but Brennan largely confirms its accuracy.

Hilda, his mother, was ‘my closest and most intimate companion for
the first 25 years of my life’. (The intensity of the attachment was
due in part to Hilda’s loss of a baby boy the year before Edward was
born.) Their relationship, Said wrote, had ‘shattering results for
my later life as a man trying to establish a relationship ... with
other women’. According to Brennan, Wadie sent his fifteen-year-old
son to the Mount Hermon boarding school in rural Massachusetts not
because of his rebellious behaviour at the British-run Victoria
College, as Said later claimed, but because he feared that the
‘obsessive intimacies’ with Hilda would hinder Edward’s
emotional development.

Said’s letters home were ‘positively jaunty’, full of enthusiasm
for his adopted culture. But he chafed at the casual prejudice against
Arabs (his classmates privately referred to him as a ‘wog’). He
became a passionate anti-imperialist, expressing his support for the
Palestinian cause and cheering on Nasser’s revolution in Egypt, even
though his father’s business had been burned to the ground in
nationalist protests. (Said’s enthusiasm for Nasser, which his
mother shared and which sat uneasily with his anti-authoritarian
politics, was apparently undiminished by the murder of his childhood
hero, Farid Haddad, a communist activist who was beaten to death in
prison in 1959.) At Princeton, he met Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, a graduate
student from Jaffa, who told him about the revolution in Algeria and
schooled him in the Palestinian struggle. His ethnicity didn’t go
unnoticed on campus: a placement bureau form described him as ‘very
dark, big’ and ‘of Arab descent’.

Said came into his own as an undergraduate, writing his senior thesis
on André Gide and Graham Greene under the supervision
of R.P. Blackmur, while continuing his piano studies with Erich Itor
Kahn, a European Jewish émigré. His parents expected him to join the
family business after graduation, but he had no intention of becoming
his father’s subordinate. At first he flirted with a career in
medicine, a respectable compromise which his parents accepted. But his
friend Arthur Gold persuaded him not to give up his real passions.
Gold also introduced him to a book that would exert an enormous
influence on his thinking, Vico’s _New Science_. Vico’s emphasis
on historical beginnings as acts of human freedom gave Said the
framework he needed as he contemplated a career as a professor of
literature in the US.

The summer after graduation, while driving through the Swiss
mountains, Said collided with, and killed, a motorcyclist; when he
woke up, a priest was giving him the last rites. Only a few months
later, he was in graduate school at Harvard. His mentor there was
Harry Levin, the author of a study of realism which Said considered on
a par with Erich Auerbach’s _Mimesis_. As Brennan points out,
Levin’s belief in ‘universal interrelatedness’ inspired Said’s
own practice of making unexpected connections between literary and
cultural traditions, between fiction and contemporary philosophy.
While seeing a psychoanalyst, attending Glenn Gould recitals in Boston
and working on his Conrad dissertation, Said began to discover the
ideas that would shape his imagination as a critic: Merleau-Ponty’s
phenomenology (the subject of his 1967 essay ‘The Labyrinth of
Incarnations’), Lukács’s analysis of ‘reification’ and
Sartre’s theory of commitment.

At Harvard, Said also acquired a reputation for being irresistible to
women. One of those women was Maire Jaanus, the daughter of Estonian
refugees, whom he married at his family’s summer home in Dour El
Shweir in 1962. Jaanus, who worked on literature from the
18th century onwards, referred to her new husband as ‘Saidus’,
and described him as a ‘vexing trinity’: he ‘could have been a
philosopher, a poet or a critic’. She had left out his fourth
aspect: membership of a large and overbearing family in which, Brennan
writes, ‘uncles and aunts were almost as close as parents and no one
kept secrets from anyone.’ Hilda found Jaanus chilly and distant.
‘Edward, it was only normal for us to be wary of a foreign girl
marrying our son,’ she wrote to him. ‘But honest to God we tried
hard to love her, do you remember _all_ that happened before your
wedding – your reaction? Edward we didn’t know Maire then, we
still don’t know her, or know her even less. All we know and are
sure of now is that she has no use for _any of us six_, in any
way.’

Hilda had already succeeded in sabotaging his love affair with a
Lebanese Christian woman, seven years his senior, whom she considered
unsuitable. Said was furious and refused to serve as his father’s
go-between with a business partner in New York, declaring that ‘my
whole attitude to my past is in ruin.’ (Hilda responded by asking
where he would be without his father’s business.) He also wrote
seventy pages of an unfinished novel, ‘Elegy’, about a shady
Lebanese Christian owner of a ‘failing printing company and a grubby
stationery shop’ and his sickly wife, ‘stuff[ed] away in a shabby
apartment’. Said didn’t spare himself, including a mocking
self-portrait of a clueless employee called Mufid who idles away his
time on things that were ‘utterly lost on everyone else’. Brennan
presents the lost manuscript (and a story Said submitted around the
same time to the _New Yorker_) as evidence of the novelist he might
have become, but it seems more like a thwarted attempt to settle
scores with his family and break free of the past. He put aside his
literary ambitions, and grew estranged from Jaanus, whom he later
divorced. In 1970 he married Mariam Cortas, a Lebanese Quaker whose
family knew the Saids; they had two children, Wadie (a restoration of
William’s Arab name) and Najla. Hilda was overjoyed: she had
regained her wayward son. In his private life, at least, filiation
prevailed over affiliation. Said would seek out the company of other
women, many of them high-profile academics, while quietly griping
about the ‘bourgeois myth, which I now live, with increasing
discomfort and unhappiness’. But he never seriously contemplated
giving up his life as a husband and father.

In​ his first few years in New York, Said ‘settled into Columbia
life as an upstart member of the New York intellectuals’. His
relations with Trilling were cordial, but he found him ‘an
impenetrable egoist’ and drew closer to the radical literary critic
Fred Dupee, a founding editor of _Partisan Review_. In his early
literary journalism, Said marked his distance from the Cold War
moralism of the New York intellectuals as well as from the
conservative formalism of the New Critics by looking to Paris, where
writers were taking what Brennan calls ‘insurgent positions on the
politics of culture’. His old mentor Harry Levin tried to check his
enthusiasm for French theory, which, as he put it, ‘does not truly
aim at the understanding of literature, but at deriving metaphysical
paradigms from authors by superimposing certain abstractions supported
by quotations taken out of context’. Said would later tell Levin
he’d been right all along. But theory served him well in
establishing his intellectual independence, and aided his efforts to
deprovincialise the study of literature – to make it more
‘worldly’ (one of his favourite adjectives). He wrote variously on
existentialism, phenomenology and structuralism, borrowing whatever he
found useful.

Said’s relationship to ideas was supple and pragmatic, and, as
Brennan writes, he was often ‘drawn to writers he should have
disliked’. Conrad’s bleakness and Swift’s monarchism were
anathema to him; so was Foucault’s totalising vision of power in
which any and all resistance was destined to be swallowed up and
neutralised. But Said found them all compelling as writers, and he
sharpened his ideas by wrestling with theirs, in what he described as
a form of counterpoint. Writers of the political right, he once said,
can be ‘untimely, anxious witnesses to the dominant currents of
their time’. Brennan calls these interests ‘perverse
allegiances’, but they were also an expression of his commitment to
intellectual freedom – and to the university as a sanctuary. While
he styled himself an anti-imperialist, Said was mostly an
old-fashioned liberal when it came to campus politics. He supported
the 1968 student strike against the war in Vietnam called by Students
for a Democratic Society but recoiled from their attack on the
university, and from what he saw as puerile anti-authoritarianism.
When a group of striking students disrupted one of his lectures, he
insisted that they leave and called security when they refused.

For Said, the excitement of 1968 lay not in the student uprising,
which he saw as revolutionary theatre, but in the Battle of Karameh in
Jordan, where the Palestinian _fedayeen_ fought bravely against the
Israeli army. On his visits to Amman in 1969 and 1970, where he had
his first, brief meeting with Yasser Arafat, Said had the experience
of being ‘a visitor but also an exhilarated participant in the
national revival that I saw taking place’. In 1972 a year’s
Guggenheim fellowship took him to Beirut, where the PLO had set up
headquarters after being forced out of Jordan. There he renewed his
connection with a friend from Harvard, Hanna Mikhaïl, who had given
up an academic career in the US to become a PLO cadre, taking the
name Abu Omar. (He was killed in mysterious circumstances in 1976.)
Mikhaïl in turn introduced him to Jean Genet, ‘a very strange bird
given to long scary silences’.

While in Beirut, Said immersed himself in the work of Ibn Khaldun,
whose 1377 study of history, the _Muqaddimah_, became nearly as
important to him as Vico’s _New Science_, and received his
political education from intellectuals in the orbit of the PLO who
were struggling to make sense of the 1967 defeat. He met the
Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish; the Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury;
the Syrian Marxist Sadik al-Azm (who had published a blistering
anatomy of the Arab military failure); the Arab nationalist
Constantine Zurayk (the author of a book on the 1948 war that
popularised the term Nakba); and the PLO leader Kamal Nasser, who
was killed by the Israelis only hours after he and Said had been at
dinner together. In _Mawaqif_, a journal edited by the poet Adonis,
Said made his own contribution to the literature of Arab
self-criticism after the defeat, fretting – in the kind of
essentialising language he would later condemn as ‘Orientalist’
– that the ‘characteristic movement of the Arab is
circular ... repetition is therefore mistaken for novelty,
especially since there is no sense of recognition’.

The birth of the Palestinian guerrilla movement promised an end to the
grim repetition of Arab political and intellectual life. The
revolution’s centre was Beirut, and Said dreamed of staying on there
with his family, but Mariam was against the idea. Having been made to
feel unwelcome at the American University, he came to share her view:
anyone of talent and initiative, he concluded, was ‘shelved,
castrated or thrown out’. But his year in Beirut led to a creative
breakthrough. In his 1975 book, _Beginnings_, an ambitious study of
modern theories of language, Said made a case for writing as ‘an act
of taking hold of language (_prendre la parole_) in order to do
something, not merely in order to repeat an idea verbatim’. One
critic saw in it ‘powerful intellectual tools ... put in the
service of Arab nationalist interests’. In fact, it was a challenge
to the rigidities of structuralism, not Zionism, but its political
implications were clear: Said was arguing that intentional acts of
language, especially speech, could short-circuit systems of power and
become a form of resistance.

In November 1974, Said’s argument was given a live demonstration
before the world, when Arafat addressed the United Nations for the
first time. Said helped draft the speech and added the closing line:
‘Don’t let the olive branch fall from my hand.’ Although not
opposed to armed resistance, he took a dim view of the PLO’s cult
of the gun and believed that non-violent protest and diplomacy – the
‘olive branch’ – were more effective weapons, given the enormous
disparities in military power. The war for Palestine was, he
understood, a war of clashing narratives and images: ‘In no modern
conflict has rhetoric played so significant a part in legitimating one
preposterous quote after another.’ He soon became the PLO’s
unofficial liaison with the US government. Although he felt closer
to the secular leftism of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of
Palestine than to the traditionalist nationalism of Fatah, he remained
loyal to Arafat (‘a genius at mediation’) and in 1977 was elected
to the Palestine National Council, the PLO’s parliament in exile,
as an independent.

Said’s closest comrades on the American left were decidedly
unimpressed by the PLO as a national liberation organisation. Noam
Chomsky – one of the few people Said allowed to call him ‘Ed’, a
nickname he hated – said it lacked any sense of strategic direction.
Eqbal Ahmad, who had worked with the FLN during the Algerian
struggle for independence, was even more scathing. Given the number of
lavish dinners the PLO put on, he remarked that ‘banqueting’ had
become ‘the latest form of struggle’. But Said, who had lost his
father to cancer in 1971, found in Arafat a substitute father figure,
a refugee who not only hadn’t forgotten Palestine but had made it an
international cause. For nearly two decades, Arafat called on him
whenever the PLO wanted to send a message to the Americans.
The US government recognised his value too: in 1978, the secretary
of state, Cyrus Vance, told Said that the Carter administration would
recognise the PLO and launch negotiations for a two-state settlement
if Arafat accepted UN Resolution 242: a termination of the conflict,
Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Territories. Arafat wasn’t
interested. To Said’s frustration, Arafat would always see him as a
useful but somewhat suspect American professor, not a fellow fighter.

Said’s relationship to ideas was supple and pragmatic, and, as
Brennan writes, he was often ‘drawn to writers he should have
disliked’. Conrad’s bleakness and Swift’s monarchism were
anathema to him; so was Foucault’s totalising vision of power in
which any and all resistance was destined to be swallowed up and
neutralised. But Said found them all compelling as writers, and he
sharpened his ideas by wrestling with theirs, in what he described as
a form of counterpoint. Writers of the political right, he once said,
can be ‘untimely, anxious witnesses to the dominant currents of
their time’. Brennan calls these interests ‘perverse
allegiances’, but they were also an expression of his commitment to
intellectual freedom – and to the university as a sanctuary. While
he styled himself an anti-imperialist, Said was mostly an
old-fashioned liberal when it came to campus politics. He supported
the 1968 student strike against the war in Vietnam called by Students
for a Democratic Society but recoiled from their attack on the
university, and from what he saw as puerile anti-authoritarianism.
When a group of striking students disrupted one of his lectures, he
insisted that they leave and called security when they refused.

For Said, the excitement of 1968 lay not in the student uprising,
which he saw as revolutionary theatre, but in the Battle of Karameh in
Jordan, where the Palestinian _fedayeen_ fought bravely against the
Israeli army. On his visits to Amman in 1969 and 1970, where he had
his first, brief meeting with Yasser Arafat, Said had the experience
of being ‘a visitor but also an exhilarated participant in the
national revival that I saw taking place’. In 1972 a year’s
Guggenheim fellowship took him to Beirut, where the PLO had set up
headquarters after being forced out of Jordan. There he renewed his
connection with a friend from Harvard, Hanna Mikhaïl, who had given
up an academic career in the US to become a PLO cadre, taking the
name Abu Omar. (He was killed in mysterious circumstances in 1976.)
Mikhaïl in turn introduced him to Jean Genet, ‘a very strange bird
given to long scary silences’.

While in Beirut, Said immersed himself in the work of Ibn Khaldun,
whose 1377 study of history, the _Muqaddimah_, became nearly as
important to him as Vico’s _New Science_, and received his
political education from intellectuals in the orbit of the PLO who
were struggling to make sense of the 1967 defeat. He met the
Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish; the Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury;
the Syrian Marxist Sadik al-Azm (who had published a blistering
anatomy of the Arab military failure); the Arab nationalist
Constantine Zurayk (the author of a book on the 1948 war that
popularised the term Nakba); and the PLO leader Kamal Nasser, who
was killed by the Israelis only hours after he and Said had been at
dinner together. In _Mawaqif_, a journal edited by the poet Adonis,
Said made his own contribution to the literature of Arab
self-criticism after the defeat, fretting – in the kind of
essentialising language he would later condemn as ‘Orientalist’
– that the ‘characteristic movement of the Arab is
circular ... repetition is therefore mistaken for novelty,
especially since there is no sense of recognition’.

The birth of the Palestinian guerrilla movement promised an end to the
grim repetition of Arab political and intellectual life. The
revolution’s centre was Beirut, and Said dreamed of staying on there
with his family, but Mariam was against the idea. Having been made to
feel unwelcome at the American University, he came to share her view:
anyone of talent and initiative, he concluded, was ‘shelved,
castrated or thrown out’. But his year in Beirut led to a creative
breakthrough. In his 1975 book, _Beginnings_, an ambitious study of
modern theories of language, Said made a case for writing as ‘an act
of taking hold of language (_prendre la parole_) in order to do
something, not merely in order to repeat an idea verbatim’. One
critic saw in it ‘powerful intellectual tools ... put in the
service of Arab nationalist interests’. In fact, it was a challenge
to the rigidities of structuralism, not Zionism, but its political
implications were clear: Said was arguing that intentional acts of
language, especially speech, could short-circuit systems of power and
become a form of resistance.

In November 1974, Said’s argument was given a live demonstration
before the world, when Arafat addressed the United Nations for the
first time. Said helped draft the speech and added the closing line:
‘Don’t let the olive branch fall from my hand.’ Although not
opposed to armed resistance, he took a dim view of the PLO’s cult
of the gun and believed that non-violent protest and diplomacy – the
‘olive branch’ – were more effective weapons, given the enormous
disparities in military power. The war for Palestine was, he
understood, a war of clashing narratives and images: ‘In no modern
conflict has rhetoric played so significant a part in legitimating one
preposterous quote after another.’ He soon became the PLO’s
unofficial liaison with the US government. Although he felt closer
to the secular leftism of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of
Palestine than to the traditionalist nationalism of Fatah, he remained
loyal to Arafat (‘a genius at mediation’) and in 1977 was elected
to the Palestine National Council, the PLO’s parliament in exile,
as an independent.

Said’s closest comrades on the American left were decidedly
unimpressed by the PLO as a national liberation organisation. Noam
Chomsky – one of the few people Said allowed to call him ‘Ed’, a
nickname he hated – said it lacked any sense of strategic direction.
Eqbal Ahmad, who had worked with the FLN during the Algerian
struggle for independence, was even more scathing. Given the number of
lavish dinners the PLO put on, he remarked that ‘banqueting’ had
become ‘the latest form of struggle’. But Said, who had lost his
father to cancer in 1971, found in Arafat a substitute father figure,
a refugee who not only hadn’t forgotten Palestine but had made it an
international cause. For nearly two decades, Arafat called on him
whenever the PLO wanted to send a message to the Americans.
The US government recognised his value too: in 1978, the secretary
of state, Cyrus Vance, told Said that the Carter administration would
recognise the PLO and launch negotiations for a two-state settlement
if Arafat accepted UN Resolution 242: a termination of the conflict,
Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Territories. Arafat wasn’t
interested. To Said’s frustration, Arafat would always see him as a
useful but somewhat suspect American professor, not a fellow fighter.

‘The intellectual,’ Said wrote, ‘always stands between
loneliness and alignment.’ His decision to align himself with a
national liberation movement despised by many of his colleagues as a
‘terrorist’ organisation intensified his sense of loneliness and
heightened his already acute sense of vulnerability and woundedness.
In his introduction to _Orientalism_, which appeared in 1978, he
wrote:

The life of an Arab Palestinian in the West, particularly in America,
is disheartening. There exists here an almost unanimous consensus that
politically he does not exist, and when it is allowed that he does, it
is either as a nuisance or as an oriental. The web of racism, cultural
stereotypes, political imperialism, dehumanising ideology holding the
Arab or the Muslim is very strong indeed, and it is this web which
every Palestinian has come to feel as his uniquely punishing destiny.

_Orientalism_ not only made Said’s reputation, it incited a debate
that hasn’t ended, and inaugurated a school of anti-Orientalist
scholarship. Drawing on history, fiction, philology and philosophy,
Said argued that the Arabs and Asians who had lived under British and
French dominion had been captives not only of Western power, but of
the image that Western writers had of them as mysterious, effeminate,
timeless, immutable, irrational and, above all, incapable of
self-government (he didn’t discuss German or Russian versions of
Orientalism). Orientalism, he claimed, had not merely reflected but
influenced and shaped the practice of imperial domination. Still
strongly influenced by Foucault’s analysis of ‘discursive
formations’ and ‘power-knowledge’, he depicted Orientalism as a
discourse so pervasive as to be almost inescapable. In Said’s
account, even writers who appeared to praise non-Western cultures in
relation to their own had participated in the representation of the
Eastern ‘other’ as essentially different. This was anything but a
history of a distant past: Said made plain that he saw many of the
best-known scholars of the Middle East, notably Bernard Lewis, as
heirs of 19th-century Orientalism – and as apologists for, if not
servants of, a new imperialism.

The value of Said’s book was immediately evident to intellectuals
who felt their treatment by Western scholarship had been no less
punishing. ‘You are on the frontier – a Gramscian frontier,’
Cornel West wrote to him shortly after the book’s publication. But
Said was no man of the people; he wasn’t even a defender of Middle
Eastern cultural and political traditions. He made no secret of his
love of Western ‘high’ culture, even if he had assumed the task of
exposing how deeply it had absorbed Orientalist mythologies. Unlike
Eric Hobsbawm, whom he faulted for having a Eurocentric, top-down
perspective of the short 20th century, he took no interest in jazz or
popular music. (His daughter, Najla, would score a small victory by
turning him on to Sinéad O’Connor.) He was a critical, secular
humanist widely mistaken for a radical opponent of the Western canon.
In fact, the canon was his subject and remained so: he never once gave
a course related to the Middle East at Columbia, and only late in his
career did he begin teaching novels by writers from the Global South.
While he insisted that literary representations had helped shape the
Western ‘gaze’, he didn’t argue that writers such as Flaubert or
Montesquieu were irreparably stained: their (mostly unconscious)
complicity was another reason to study them. His was an ethics of
complex resistance, not an escape from complexity.

Still, Said’s bracing and accusatory tone, which
gave _Orientalism_ its rhetorical punch, helped fuel misperceptions.
While he praised the work of Orientalist scholars, including Louis
Massignon, Jacques Berque and Maxime Rodinson, he also sometimes
implied that the entire tradition of Orientalist scholarship was a
corrupted form of power-knowledge. But then what distinguished an
eminent figure like Berque from Lewis or from a vulgar propagandist
such as Daniel Pipes? And was all Western criticism – even Marxist
criticism – of the failings of societies in the Arab and Islamic
world to be dismissed as Orientalist? Said didn’t answer these
questions, which led some readers to assume that he thought all
Western writing about the East was Orientalist and therefore
unsalvageable. This wasn’t his view at all, but he could be prickly.
And his followers in postcolonial studies tended to be pricklier, as
well as far less devoted to Western literature and culture than he
was.

Some of the fiercest criticisms came from left-wing Arab intellectuals
who hadn’t left the region for academic posts in the West. In their
view, Said’s approach was indiscriminate, and ended up reproducing
the binary opposition of ‘East’ and ‘West’ he ostensibly
opposed. They also felt that, by placing the emphasis on the Western
gaze rather than on the imperialism that had formed it, Said had got
things back to front. Orientalism, in this view, was a justificatory
ideology that would fade away with the end of imperial domination. In
the meantime, Sadik al-Azm wrote in a long and forceful critique, the
book risked giving comfort to Islamists in their denunciations of
Marxism as a Western ideology and their campaign to ban the teaching
of science. These criticisms reflected a fundamental misunderstanding
of _Orientalism_: a study of literary representation exploring the
culture of imperialism, not imperialism itself. Yet they also
reflected a different set of priorities among intellectuals in the
region, for whom the book was less urgently needed than it was for
their counterparts in the West. Said did not take well to such
critiques, denouncing al-Azm as a ‘Khomeini of the left’.

But Al-Azm had put his finger on one of _Orientalism_’s unintended
effects: in spite of Said’s own opposition to dogmatic
anti-Westernism, to religious politics and any form of nativism, the
book lent itself to a ritualised condemnation of Western scholarship
and literature as ‘imperialist’. Academic postcolonialism, which
became a career path for a growing number of upper-middle-class
graduate students from the Middle East and South Asia, would develop
an increasingly orthodox critique of secularism and the Enlightenment,
exasperating Said. Later in his career, he would find himself
alternately embracing and lamenting the anti-Orientalist wave of
scholarship he had spawned: a tribute to his influence, but, he felt,
a misreading of his intentions. As if anticipating this wave, he wrote
in _The World, the Text and the Critic_ (1983) that ‘a
breakthrough can become a trap, if it is used uncritically,
repetitively, limitlessly.’ The history of ideas – and of politics
– ‘is extravagantly illustrative of how the dictum “solidarity
before criticism” means the end of criticism ... even in the very
midst of a battle in which one is unmistakeably on one side against
another’.

_The World, the Text and the Critic_ was also Said’s farewell to
French theory. It wasn’t surprising, he suggested, that Derrida’s
concept of undecidability and Foucault’s Nietzschean scepticism
about truth had flourished in Reagan’s America: both provided
sophisticated excuses for political quietism. This was an essentially
Lukácsian critique of postmodernism as an expression of decadence.
But his disenchantment also reflected a sense of personal betrayal:
Foucault had abandoned the Palestinian cause; Derrida had wounded him
by referring to him only as ‘un _ami_’ – not by name – in his
book on Genet. When Said’s friend Jean Stein, the editor of _Grand
Street_, asked him to review a book by Jean Baudrillard, he declined,
saying that Baudrillard’s ideas are ‘all sort of like little
burps’. He now preferred the company of Chomsky and John Berger, who
believed that ‘there is always something beyond the reach of
dominating systems.’ His own style became less cluttered and
precious – more ‘transparent’ and ‘worldly’. He used it to
demystify the ideology of Zionism in _The Question of
Palestine_ (1979), and to dissect the American media’s tendentious
portrayals of Muslims in _Covering Islam_ (1981). But he also
established himself as a belletrist, writing on Arabic fiction,
bullfighting, tennis and belly dancing. He interviewed Gillo
Pontecorvo, published essays on exile and Glenn Gould, and became
the _Nation_’s classical music critic.

Said​ was more prominent than ever, and more exposed. Letters
arrived at his home covered in swastikas or filled with used condoms.
‘You are now under surveillance and two of your associates know
it,’ an anonymous correspondent wrote to him. ‘Don’t think
you’re too small for this. Look for cameras – you won’t find
them.’ Informants at Princeton, Columbia and the Harvard alumni
office assisted the FBI in an investigation that examined his
banking and credit records, among other things. In 1985, Meir
Kahane’s Jewish Defence League called him a Nazi and his office was
firebombed and vandalised.

Beirut, where his mother lived, was still more dangerous for Said
during the Lebanese Civil War. This wasn’t simply due to the Israeli
invasion in 1982, which led to the massacres of Sabra and Shatila by
Israeli-backed Christian Phalangist militias and drove Arafat and
the PLO out of Lebanon: Said also faced threats of assassination
from Palestinians for expressing reservations about the efficacy of
armed struggle. During his year in Beirut, he had written that his
experience there made him aware of ‘the poverty of labels like
left-wing and right-wing’ when applied to Lebanese politics. Brennan
seems unconvinced by this, but Said knew what he was talking about:
while the Phalange had fascist sympathies, Lebanon’s civil war was
not so much an Arab version of the Spanish Civil War as a gruesome
power struggle between competing sectarian groups, made even more
murderous by the Syrian and Israeli interventions. The ultimate
winners were the country’s underdogs, the Shia, led by Hizbullah,
which replaced the PLO as Lebanon’s leading armed movement with
the backing of Iran – ‘a regime of exceptionally retrograde
cruelty’, in Said’s words. In the mid-1980s, armed clashes erupted
between Palestinians and Shia in the refugee camps. Said deplored this
development but had little to say about the rise of the Shia – or
the growing appeal of political Islam, which clearly disturbed him.
Still, there is little doubt that his distrust of identity politics
reflected the chastening lessons of Lebanon, where politicised
sectarianism had laid waste to his mother’s adopted country. The
war, he said, ‘began as a conflict over large areas of territory and
in the end was fought over individual streets and sidewalks. And where
did it lead? Nowhere.’

The disaster in Lebanon also marked the end of the revolutionary phase
of the Palestinian movement, when the PLO styled itself as a
liberation movement in the tradition of the FLN and the ANC. Arafat
and his men were now in Tunis, and the movement was adrift. Said’s
break with Arafat wouldn’t take place for another decade, but the
rift had begun. On his visits to Tunis, he later wrote, he saw former
revolutionaries who ‘drank only Black Label Scotch whisky, travelled
first class, drove fancy European cars, and were always surrounded by
aides, bodyguards and hangers-on’. In cautious, sometimes cryptic
language, he began to express doubts about the movement’s direction.
‘Our insistence on “armed struggle”’, he wrote in _After the
Last Sky_ (1986), had ‘quickly turned into a worship of fetishised
military postures, guns and slogans borrowed from theories of the
people’s war in Algeria and Vietnam’. This emphasis ‘caused us
to neglect the incredibly complex and far more important political and
cultural aspects of our struggle, and it played right into the hands
of Israel’. For all Arafat’s success in ‘connecting disparate
segments of Palestinian life’, no leader had appeared ‘so
catastrophically to be implicated in setbacks’.

But then, a year later, the first intifada broke out. The Palestinians
in the Occupied Territories were delivering a message to Israel, and
to the ‘Tunisians’ of the PLO, that could not have been more
direct. Suddenly the movement’s centre of gravity shifted from the
‘exterior’ to the ‘interior’. Caught off guard, the leadership
scrambled to impose itself on a revolt it had neither launched nor
foreseen. Said was elated, hailing the uprising (with no little
hyperbole) as ‘surely the most impressive and disciplined
anti-colonial insurrection in this century’. In November 1988, at a
meeting of the Palestine National Council in Algiers, Said and Mahmoud
Darwish co-wrote the PLO’s statement in support of a two-state
settlement. But within a year Said was complaining openly to the Arab
press about the PLO’s authoritarianism and corruption. He was
furious at Arafat’s decision to support Saddam Hussein in the Gulf
War, which nearly bankrupted the organisation and forced it to the
negotiating table prematurely. During the backchannel negotiations
between Israel and the Palestinians, Said looked on aghast as
the PLO prostrated itself before the US, the ‘big white
father’, agreeing to arrangements that condemned Palestinians to
continued occupation, even if they had a flag of their own. Not
surprisingly, betrayal was the theme of the unfinished novel he worked
on occasionally from 1987 to 1992; one of its characters was a
middle-aged Arab American professor, ‘cut off from Arabs in the
West, aware of Jews ... powerless to change, too honest to
affiliate’.

The betrayal became official in September 1993, with the signing of
the Oslo Accords – ‘an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a
Palestinian Versailles’, as he wrote in the _LRB_ (21 October
1993)
[[link removed]].
Not only had Arafat accepted a less generous plan than the
Carter-Vance offer he’d dismissed in 1978; more humiliatingly, he
had agreed to become Israel’s gendarme in the territories, policing
Palestinian resistance rather than Palestinian borders. Said never
spoke to Arafat again. He would visit Israel-Palestine and film a
documentary for the BBC, but he didn’t feel at home in the West
Bank, where political Islam was on the rise, eclipsing the secular
nationalism he had always advocated, and where the Palestinian
Authority banned his books because of his criticisms of Arafat. Exile,
he decided, was a ‘more liberated state’ than a ‘final coming
home’ – and, in any case, neither Israel nor the West
Bank _was_ home. When one of Arafat’s deputies was asked by a
journalist about Said’s critique of Oslo, he replied that Said was
an English professor whose views about Palestinian politics were as
pertinent as Chairman Arafat’s opinion of a Shakespeare production.

Said felt wounded by his falling out with the PLO, but it left him a
free man, capable of imagining a last, creative phase in the face of
fatal illness. In 1991 he had been diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic
leukaemia. Chemotherapy would leave his handsome face shrunken, an
affront to his vanity as well as his health. While shuttling back and
forth from hospital, he began to write his memoirs. _Out of
Place_ is revealing (and at times excruciatingly Freudian) in its
depiction of the Said family romance, and of Said’s teenage sexual
frustrations. Brennan compares it to Mohamed Choukri’s account of
his life as a petty criminal and prostitute in Tangiers, _For Bread
Alone_, but it’s a poor analogy. If _Out of Place_ recalls any
other work, it is _Beer in the Snooker Club_, Waguih Ghali’s novel
about a group of doomed cosmopolitan Cairenes in the early Nasser
years. As Nadine Gordimer put it, Said had finally written his novel.

But he wasn’t ready to elegise the Palestinian cause, even if he had
cut his ties to the leadership. Palestine was a symbol of justice
denied and freedom to come, rather than a piece of bitterly contested
real estate: Said wrote constantly and with furious eloquence about
Israel’s land grabs and Arafat’s strategic failures. He also
became a champion of a binational state for both peoples, an idea that
had once been promoted by ‘cultural Zionists’ such as Judah Magnes
and Martin Buber, and long since been buried by the Zionist
mainstream. Aware of this irony, Said once mischievously described
himself as the ‘last Jewish intellectual’. The ‘empty
nationalism’ that divided the land’s inhabitants into ‘camps of
Jews and non-Jews’ supplied a vocabulary equipped ‘less for
understanding than for reducing the world’. The notion that Arabs
and Jews in Palestine were condemned to hate one another contradicted
everything his own life had taught him. Precisely because Jews had
never been the ‘other’ to him, he wasn’t afraid that by
acknowledging the Holocaust he would be supplying ammunition to
Palestine’s enemies. On the contrary, the Palestinian case was
strengthened, not weakened, by recognition of the Jewish catastrophe
during the war.

Said made this argument repeatedly, without fear of what other Arabs
would say, but also without any suggestion of strategic genuflection
to Jewish or Israeli sensitivities. ‘If we expect Israeli Jews not
to use the Holocaust to justify appalling human rights abuses of the
Palestinian people,’ he wrote, ‘we too have to go beyond such
idiocies as saying that the Holocaust never took place, and that
Israelis are all, man, woman and child, doomed to our eternal enmity
and hostility.’ This statement appeared in a column
for _Al-Hayat_ in 2001, in which he compared the Arab taboo against
contact with the ‘Zionist entity’ to the taboo against performing
Wagner in Israel. Both represented a refusal of complexity – not
just a political failure but an imaginative one. In his writings in
Arab newspapers, Said continued to excoriate the crimes of Israel and
the US, but he paired these attacks with a forthright and pointed
denunciation of Arab despotism.

In his later writings on culture and education, too, Said tried to
persuade others to think ‘contrapuntally’, acknowledging the
injuries inflicted by imperialism, racism and other forms of
domination while simultaneously promoting an ethos of
interconnectedness, pluralism and academic freedom. But he found
himself increasingly embattled among the new generation of scholars of
race and empire. When he appeared at Rutgers in 1993 to talk about his
new book, _Culture and Imperialism_, ‘a black woman of some
eminence’ – a historian – asked him why, in the first part of
his presentation, he had cited only European men. That he had
mentioned C.L.R. James didn’t count, she said, because James was
dead. Said was confounded, not only because he’d been found
‘guilty of not mentioning living non-European non-males’, but
because ‘the general validity of the point made
in _Orientalism_ ... was now being directed at me.’

According to Brennan, ‘he was still grumbling’ to friends about
the Rutgers encounter months afterwards. He largely kept his distance
from the anti-PC brigade, but he struck up a correspondence with
Camille Paglia and, in speeches, issued warnings about the rise of
identity politics in universities. ‘Victimhood, alas, does not
guarantee or necessarily enable an enhanced sense of humanity,’ he
said. ‘To testify to a history of oppression is necessary, but it is
not sufficient unless that history is redirected into intellectual
process and universalised to include all sufferers.’ He went on:

It does not finally matter _who_ wrote what, but rather _how_ a
work is written and _how_ it is read. The idea that because Plato
and Aristotle are male and the products of a slave society they should
be disqualified from receiving contemporary attention is as limited an
idea as suggesting that _only_ their work, because it was addressed
to and about elites, should be read today. Marginality and
homelessness are not, in my opinion, to be gloried in; they are to be
brought to an end, so that more, and not fewer, people can enjoy the
benefits of what has for centuries been denied the victims of race,
class or gender.

The idea that education is ‘best advanced by focusing principally
on _our own_ separateness, our own ethnic identity, culture and
traditions’ struck him as a kind of apartheid pedagogy, implying
that ‘subaltern, inferior or lesser races’ were ‘unable to share
in the general riches of human culture’. Identity was ‘as boring a
subject as one can imagine’; what excited him was the interaction of
different identities and the promise – the ‘risk’ – of
universality. This vision lay at the heart of the youth musical
ensemble he helped establish, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. The
name alluded to Goethe’s _West-östlicher Divan_, a collection of
poems inspired by the Persian poet Hafez. The orchestra’s co-founder
was the conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim, an Argentine-Israeli
Said had met by chance in London in 1993, just as his relationship
with Arafat was falling apart. Said described the meeting as ‘love
at first sight’.

Said, Barenboim and the cellist Yo-Yo Ma selected the original group
of 78 Arab and Israeli musicians for a workshop in Weimar; with
Barenboim conducting, it evolved into a professional orchestra. The
idea of bringing Arab and Israeli-Jewish musicians together was –
and is – controversial. Some Palestinians, including Said’s sister
Grace, accused the orchestra of promoting ‘normalisation’ with
Israel, even treason to the cause. Among his more radical acolytes
there were complaints about his closeness to Barenboim (they spoke
every day). Since Said’s death, the orchestra has been boycotted by
parts of the BDS movement.

Brennan wonders whether Said might have ended up approving a boycott
against the orchestra he built, but has little sense of what the
West-Eastern Divan meant to him. Said’s increasing absorption in
music wasn’t a retreat from politics so much as a detour through
aesthetics. While the Palestinian Authority tried to pass off an
archipelago of bantustans as the prelude to freedom and independence,
Said was trying to show what a binational future might look (and
sound) like. In _Parallels and Paradoxes_, a book of conversations
with Barenboim published in 2002, he identified with Goethe’s belief
that art ‘was all about a voyage to the “other”, and not
concentrating on oneself, which is very much a minority view today’.
Said didn’t imagine that the ‘voyage’ would turn all the
orchestra’s members into binationalists like himself, or even lead
them to a shared understanding of the region’s history. But he had
‘become more interested in what can’t be resolved and what is
irreconcilable’. The musicians no doubt reminded him of himself when
he was studying the piano in Cairo, and he enjoyed listening to their
‘different but intertwined histories ... without necessarily
resolving them into each other’. At times, he would correct their
‘culturally limiting perceptions’. When an Arab musician told an
Albanian Jew from Israel that he had no right to play Arabic music,
Said responded: ‘What gives you the right to play Beethoven?
You’re not German.’

Although as militant as ever in his defence of Palestinian rights, he
never accepted the idea that Arabs should avoid contact with Israeli
Jews. As he put it in an article for _Al-Hayat_: ‘How many
Palestinian homes have been protected from demolition by
anti-normalisation measures?’ If Arab intellectuals wanted to do
something for Palestine, they should go there to ‘give a lecture or
help at a clinic’ rather than ‘sit at home preventing others from
doing so’. Zionism, he said, ‘has tried to exclude non-Jews and
we, by our unselective boycott of even the name “Israel”, have
actually _helped_ rather than hindered this plan’. That Said
conceived the West-Eastern Divan as a challenge to Israel’s
exclusion of Palestinians – and as a response to the cultural
isolation suffered by Palestinian musicians under occupation – was
lost on his less imaginative Arab critics, who could only see it as
making peace with the enemy.

Serving as Arafat’s man in New York for nearly two decades had been
an improbable role for a worldly, cosmopolitan man who dressed in
Burberry suits, not keffiyehs. Said himself admitted that his
relationship to the land of Palestine was ‘basically
metaphorical’. His Zionist critics cited this distance in order to
belittle or even deny his Palestinian origins. They also used his
relationship with the PLO to impugn his scholarship, insinuating
that his books, and even his essays on critical theory and classical
music, were merely subterfuges from the ‘professor of terror’:
Palestinian propaganda disguised as scholarship.

For all its crudeness, this charge has a grain of truth. All Said’s
writings were touched by his ‘affiliation’. The burden of being a
political spokesman, and his loyalty to Arafat, imposed certain limits
on what he could say about the movement and the repressive governments
of the Arab world: as Said often pointed out, affiliation could
degenerate into filiation, into a familial structure of obedience and
conformity. Only in his final decade did he express himself freely on
the movement’s failures and the region’s dictatorships. But, as
Brennan shows, the Palestinian struggle enriched Said far more than it
constrained him. The themes that echo through his writing – the
preference for exilic over rooted writing, the idea of
‘contrapuntal’ criticism, the insistence on secular humanism,
worldliness and universality – can all, indirectly, be traced to
Palestine. Not to the land itself, or to the people, but to the
metaphor, the region of the mind, that he fashioned out of them.

This was no small achievement. As Said wrote in the _LRB_ in 1984
[[link removed]],
Israel and its supporters had worked hard to deny Palestinians the
‘permission to narrate’ their experience. He helped to restore
that right, not only by describing their dispossession and oppression,
but by developing a powerful counter-myth to Zionism, which he
sometimes called ‘Palestinianism’. In his 1986 collaboration with
the Swiss photographer Jean Mohr, _After the Last Sky_, Said
described a nation of vivid fragments, rather than trying to assemble
them into a seamless whole. He had no interest in the folk nationalism
of the refugee camps, with its romance of repatriation and
reclamation: the keys to old homes, women’s embroidery, the olive
tree, the posters of Al-Aqsa mosque. Instead, he wrote of Palestinians
as witnesses to a century defined by ethnic cleansing, wars of
national liberation, and migration, in restless, nomadic pursuit of
freedom: ‘a counterpoint (if not a cacophony) of multiple, almost
desperate dramas’.

Said’s Palestinianism exemplified the qualities he admired:
open-ended and exploratory, resistant to the doctrinal and racial
fixity – the dark historical fatalism and exclusionary fear of the
other – that Zionism embodied. If Zionism was the song of a single
people, Palestinianism held out the hope of a non-sectarian future for
both peoples. Palestinian freedom, whether in the form of a sovereign
state neighbouring Israel or – the position he defended after Oslo
– a binational state, represented ‘a beginning’, a dynamic
intervention in history, rather than a return to origin. And yet his
vision also looked to the past, betraying a wistful attachment to his
childhood memories of colonial Cairo, where Arabs and Jews, Muslims
and Christians had lived beside one another.

Brennan’s title alludes to Said’s memoir, _Out of Place_, as well
as to his family’s dispossession and his own experiences of being
attacked by Israel’s apologists in the US, and later by the
Palestinian Authority. Yet the emphasis on place is misleading. What
captured Said’s imagination wasn’t place or territory so much as
time: the drama of beginnings, the defiance of late style. Nor did he
lack for a home: New York fitted him as well as his bespoke suits. He
once asked Ignace Tiegerman why he hadn’t left Cairo for Israel.
‘Why should I go there?’ Tiegerman replied. ‘Here I am
unique.’ In New York, Said was unique, and whatever loneliness he
experienced was offset by his love of a place where ‘you can be
anywhere in it and still not be of it.’ In New York he had a stage:
a professorship at Columbia, where he was the highest paid member of
the humanities faculty; access to nightly talk shows and news
stations, where he became the face of Palestine; and, not least, the
world of literary parties and salons, where ‘Eduardo’ (as friends
teasingly called him) cut an alluring profile.

For all his admiration of men of the left who threw themselves into
insurgent struggles – and although his own activism attracted the
surveillance of the FBI – Said led the life of a celebrity
intellectual. Brennan places him in the tradition of revolutionary
intellectuals, but Said doesn’t resemble Gramsci or Fanon so much as
Susan Sontag, born two years before him, and, like him, a dissident
heir of the New York intellectuals. Both were literary critics who
first made a name for themselves as interpreters of French theory for
Anglo-American audiences but later broke free of its textual games and
jargon in favour of a more readerly style. Despite a shared loathing
of American consumerism and provincialism, each was possessed of a
peculiarly American energy and drive. They were each American in their
rejection of cultural pessimism, and they shared a reverence for
traditional Western culture: they may have expressed ‘radical styles
of will’, but they also invoked the authority of canonical critics.
In their writings on photography, both drew inspiration from John
Berger, moved, if not quite persuaded, by his insistence on the
medium’s insurrectionary potential. Their best-known
books, _Orientalism_ and _Illness as Metaphor_, both published in
1978, were quarrels with oppressive systems of representation by which
they had felt personally victimised. They often wrote in praise of
Marxist intellectuals but were never Marxists themselves. Neither took
part in civil rights or labour struggles at home, devoting their
political energies to foreign causes.

But unlike Sontag, who had a thick skin, Said remembered every slight
he’d suffered, every award he’d been denied, every note he missed
when he played the piano. According to Brennan, he lived ‘in
agony’ most of the time. The life of a closeted Palestinian would
have been much easier. Sontag’s Jewishness made her an American
establishment insider. For much of his career, Said was not just the
lone Arab, but the Palestinian, liable to be portrayed as an enemy of
the Jews, as a dangerous radical who, as he put it, did
‘unspeakable, unmentionable things’ when he wasn’t giving
lectures on Conrad and Jane Austen. Eventually even those lectures
would come to be seen by his critics as a threat to Western culture,
if not an extension of his work for the PLO. Said’s insecurity, as
much as his colonial origins, may explain why, unlike Sontag, he
attached himself to institutions: Columbia, the Palestine National
Council, the Century Club, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra.
Institutional affiliation wasn’t simply a comfort: it offered an
escape from feelings of awkwardness, of being ‘not quite right’
– the original title of his memoir.

Brennan, a former student of Said’s, writes with a restrained
affection that only occasionally slips into defensiveness or
hagiography. He understands that, in private, Said could be a prima
donna, ‘a personality marked by impatience and vulnerability, by
turns angry and romantic’, playful and witty, capable of acts of
generosity but also vain, in perpetual need of affirmation, and
occasionally quite petty and vindictive. He shows us Said at home,
preparing breakfast for Mariam, practising Bach partitas, but we also
catch glimpses of his less appealing side: the vulgar gusto he
displayed in intellectual combat (before going on stage to debate
Bernard Lewis he told his friends, in Arabic, that he was ‘going to
fuck his mother’); his irrepressible competitiveness (when Mariam
was struggling to learn Hebrew he grabbed her textbook and said: ‘I
would finish this whole book in two weeks’). He was perpetually
dissatisfied, insomniac, hypochondriac. ‘If Said had a cough he
feared the onset of bronchitis,’ Salman Rushdie wrote after his
death, ‘and if he felt a twinge he was certain his appendix was
about to collapse.’

Many illustrious friends and acquaintances – Philip Roth, Nadine
Gordimer, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis – make cameos in Brennan’s
biography, but there is little sense of the texture of these
relationships. Of Said’s personal life, we learn even less. After
his second marriage in 1970, other women recede from view, with one
exception: his longtime mistress Dominique Eddé, a Lebanese novelist
who published a perceptive study of Said’s life and work, _Le Roman
de sa pensée_, in 2017.*
[[link removed]] While
echoing several of Eddé’s judgments about Said’s work, Brennan
characterises their on and off relationship of more than two decades
as a ‘brief affair’ and ridicules her discreet book as the
‘largely autobiographical tell-all’ of a scorned woman who hardly
knew the man she professed to love. This ad hominem attack injects a
bellicose note into a book that otherwise studiously ignores Said’s
private life. Brennan accuses Eddé of putting Said’s name on a
petition he had never seen. The petition, though Brennan doesn’t
mention the fact, was protesting a Holocaust denial conference in
Beirut. Said added his own signature, but withdrew it when he learned
that Eddé was the author. After the conference was banned, Said
claimed that he had removed his name on free speech grounds. According
to Eddé, he apologised to her shortly before he died.

Brennan has, however, tracked down many of Said’s early friends,
including people whose names barely turn up in his writing, such as
André Sharon, an Egyptian Jew who was at school with him in Cairo. He
is also a confident guide to Said’s work as a literary critic,
though he is on less sure ground when writing about Middle Eastern
politics or music (he includes Janáček in a list of ‘experimental
composers’).

Music​ supplied Said with more than metaphors in his writing: it
provided him with the great theme of his final years, ‘late
style’, an idea he discovered in Adorno’s writings on Beethoven.
Adorno’s belief that it was ‘part of ... morality not to be at
home in one’s home’ spoke powerfully to Said. And he was
captivated by Adorno’s argument that Beethoven’s late piano
sonatas exhibited an aesthetics not of harmony but of
‘intransigence, difficulty and unresolved contradiction’. Far from
being serene expressions of wisdom in old age, they were
‘catastrophes’.

Said’s vision of lateness differed from Adorno’s, as Brennan says,
in its emphasis on the creator’s inner struggle. Lateness spoke
directly to his own experience of exile, not just from the Palestine
he had known but from the leadership, and explained his decision to
uphold the ideals that had led him into the movement. The defiance and
intransigence it expressed were spiritual cousins of what Palestinians
call _sumud_, or steadfastness: better to accept the contradictions
of exile and dissidence than the false harmony offered by the Oslo
Accords, the ‘peace’ of permanent occupation. Although he was in a
constant state of rage and sorrow over Palestine, his fidelity to what
he called ‘Palestinianism’ grounded him.

In August 2003, I edited Said’s last piece for the _Nation_: a
review of Maynard Solomon’s book on late Beethoven. We had become
friendly over the previous few years, and he would occasionally call
me, out of the blue, to give me a scoop or to chat about the politics
of the Middle East. He seemed extremely anxious for the review to
appear and called my boss to pressure me to run it sooner than planned
(successfully, I might add). As it turned out, he had only a month to
live. In the essay he celebrated Beethoven’s late works for their
‘violence, experimental energy, and, most important, refusal to
accept any ideal of a healing, inclusive restfulness that comes at the
end of a fruitful career’. The title, ‘Untimely Meditations’,
strikes me today as an accurate description of his late writings on
binationalism, secular criticism, cross-cultural exchange and
intellectual freedom, which have been obscured in recent years by his
now canonical work on Orientalism and cultural imperialism. In his own
late style, he found a new beginning.

_Book author TIMOTHY BRENNAN, an erstwhile student of Edward Said,
 is the author of several books, including At Home in the World:
Cosmopolitanism Now; Borrowed Light: Vico, Hegel, and the Colonies;
and Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation. His
writing has appeared in The Nation, The Times Literary Supplement, and
other outlets. He teaches in the humanities at the University of
Minnesota and has received fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation
and the National Endowment for the Humanities._

_[Essayist ADAM SHATZ is the London Review of Books’  US editor,
based in New York. He is working on a book about Frantz Fanon. A
clutch of his writing for the review is available HERE
[[link removed]].]_

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