Beer in the Snooker Club (2 page)

Ghali recounts these adventures in Englishness with bittersweet comedy: the lonely London bedsits we know from the novels of Patrick Hamilton and Muriel Spark are suffused here with the hopefulness and energy of the deracinated colonial, who has been made to wait too long for life to begin elsewhere. To a man like Ram, conditioned by his provincial background and education to revere the metropolis, London represents all the unalloyed and thrilling glamour of metropolitan modernity; indeed, England on the whole turns out to embody the coherent world of Europe, where, unlike in Egypt, words hadn’t drifted free from their meanings: “where miners were communists and policemen fascists; where there was something called the ‘bourgeoisie’ and someone called the ‘landlady.’ ”

But the West, so seductive with its ever-renewed promise of pleasure and stability, remains a source of ambivalence to Ram. When in
1956 Britain tries, in a fit of neo-imperialist delirium, to militarily seize control over the Suez Canal, Ram is further radicalized.

Ram joins the Communist Party. But he can’t avoid the suspicion that he is not a political animal. He wonders to Edna if he is just someone who likes to “gamble and drink and make love.” Constantly remaking himself to suit other’s people expectations in London, he also comes to feel an inner incoherence—the distinctive “panic,” as the dandyish narrator of Naipaul’s
The Mimic Men
precisely defines it, “of ceasing to feel myself as a whole person” and of failing to “fashion order out of all these unrelated adventures and encounters, myself never the same, never even the thread on which these things were hung.” Ram is appalled to discover that he is developing a split: between the external doer and the inner observer, “the one participating and the other watching and judging.” More disturbing, he finds that “there is a touch of gimmick in whatever I do.” Even his professions of love for Edna are haunted by an oppressive sense of déjà vu: “a scene probably already encountered in a film or a play.” He can’t get rid of the feeling that “I have lost my natural self. I have become a character in a book.”

This loss of spontaneous feeling would seem less consequential—a personal flaw at most—if it didn’t also preclude original thinking in a postcolonial society still ruled by nostrums imported from abroad. “The revolt of the Third World,” Octavio Paz once warned, “has degenerated into different varieties of frenzied Caesarism or languishes beneath the stranglehold of bureaucracies that are both cynical and fuzzy-minded.” New nation-states had become prone to despotism largely because the revolt against the West had “not discovered its proper form”—ideas and institutions suited to indigenous realities. Its political and intellectual leaders suffered from a “ ‘split personality,’ or in moral terms, ‘inauthenticity.’ ” They invoked “modern ideas”—revolution, freedom, democracy, socialism, industrialization, mass literacy—but “these ideas in many cases have been mere superficial borrowings: they have not been instruments of liberation but masks. Like all masks, their function is to
shield us from the gaze of others, and, by a circular process that has often been described, to shield us from our own gaze.”

Ram is aware that he must find a life for himself; but, sunk in the taint of colonial fantasy, and obscured by the masks of modern ideas, this basic task of self-definition is harder for him than for the Egyptian people he seeks to represent. Yes, he has joined the Communist Party, but, as he admits, only because he can’t do anything else with his knowledge of suffering and injustice. Returning to Egypt, where the parasites, it turns out, “hadn’t been dealt a heavy blow by the revolution,” the fellaheen remain exposed to exploitation, communists have been imprisoned, and Edna has become victim to the bigotry that would soon rid Cairo of most of its Jewish, Greek, and Armenian population, Ram and Font drift into another kind of playacting: this time, as superfluous intellectuals.

Font finds a job “brushing the snooker tables with the Literary Supplement.” Ram tries his hand at human-rights activism. But no newspaper wants to publish his evidence of torture in Egyptian prisons. Furthermore, Ram has “the terrible feeling that some of the pictures wouldn’t be so gory if we didn’t pay for them.” His most sincere act seems to be drinking homemade “Bass”—a cocktail of the Egyptian beer Stella, vodka, and whisky—in a snooker club, or trying to
épater le bourgeois
by pushing Mounir, the slick America-phile, into the swimming pool of the Gezira Sporting Club. Even the anti-Americanism is now a brittle affair, undermined by the irrecoverable colonial’s self-pity: “We’re so English it is nauseating. We have no culture of our own.” “The mental sophistication of Europe,” Ram concludes, “has killed something good and natural in us, killed it for good … for ever.” He even longs for the “blissful ignorance” of the time before he met Edna. “Wasn’t it nice to go to the Catholic church with my mother before I ever heard of Salazar or of the blessed troops to Ethiopia?”

“I never realized I had made you so lonely,” says Edna, and this impossible love between a radical Jewish woman and a Coptic intellectual manqué, both abandoned by history as well as by their gods, is the aching heart of this novel. However psychologically damaged and denuded of genuine emotion, Ram achieves a tragic intensity in his feelings for Edna: “I saw her bullied by nationalities and races and political events and revolutions and dictatorships and particularly by her own
vague idealism. I held her tenderly in my arms and also saw my own shallowness and unworthiness in contrast to her deepness and sincerity.”

But Ram is also aware that he is “never really natural” with Edna, and she knows he won’t be happy with her. As the novel ends, Ram moves to marry a rich heiress he has flirted with previously. He confesses he wants to live in a “beautiful house with lots of books bound in leather.” “You know me better,” he finds himself saying, “than to think I’d sacrifice my comfort or life or anything.” This may seem an excessively cynical and dramatic conversion to bourgeois ease. But Ram is acting out what to us in the early twenty-first century is a demoralizingly well-known script. How often have we met the Western-educated scion of a wealthy or powerful family in the postcolonial world, who speaks with beguiling passion of democracy and human rights and women’s education, and then at the first sign of any threat to his privileged lifestyle retreats quickly into the prejudices of his class?

Recent years have also made many of us familiar with the “polished products of the English ‘Left’ ” or their contemporary version, the adepts of Western social media and digital radicalism, who are “lonely and without lustre in the budding revolution of the Arab world.” Ghali and his generation of westernized intellectuals were the first to confront the brute reality that the budding revolution they passionately supported could not bloom. Ghali, pitilessly anatomizing the dilettante upper-class activist, seems to have also understood the reasons behind his political impotence and despair: Egypt, like many countries damaged by colonialism, was condemned to decades of economic subordination and geopolitical compromise abroad, as well as a futile circulation of ruthlessly self-serving elites at home. Not surprisingly, Ram chooses, like the hero of Albert Cossery’s last novel,
The Colors of Infamy
(1999), “merely to survive in a society ruled by crooks, without waiting for the revolution, which was hypothetical and continually being put off until tomorrow.”

“By hiding us from others,” Ocatvio Paz had warned the Third World’s intellectuals, “the mask also hides us from ourselves.” But such self-deception wasn’t Ghali’s burden. In his ability to see through private and political impostures, and to violate the genteel protocol of much fiction produced by the postcolonial bourgeoisie, he has no peers, not even Naipaul and the great Cossery, who had intuited early the curse of underdevelopment in Egypt. Rather, Ghali’s cruel fate was to pay in his own life the devastating psychic costs of a near-permanent political impasse.

Threatened with arrest for being a communist, Ghali had been forced to leave Egypt in 1958. His passport expired in London. Unable to return to Egypt or stay in England, he went into exile in Germany, where he wrote
Beer in the Snooker Club
while working in a factory. He began a second novel, ostensibly about the misery of being a “guest worker” in Europe’s greatest postwar “miracle” economy, on his return to London in 1966; but he never finished it. Whatever happened in Egypt—and by the late 1960s, the spell of Nasser over the Egyptian masses had broken—or Europe, history was going to remain a nightmare for him; his attempt to awaken from it would never succeed. All he could hope to do was douse the ferociously warring impulses inside him.

“What are you, Ram?” Edna asks at one point in
Beer in the Snooker Club
. He replies, “I am insincere, but honest.” The confession—substituting authenticity for sincerity—is the key to the novel, its author’s tormented life, and the manner of his death. On the night of Boxing Day 1969, Ghali wrote in his diary:

A scrupulous observer to the last of his innermost turmoil, Ghali swallowed twenty-six sleeping pills, then wrote: “And the most dramatic moment of my life—the only authentic one—is a terrible let-down.” But Ghali knew, in this terrible instant of perfect lucidity, that he finally had his only chance of moving out of the stalled dialectic of insincerity and honesty, and into a much-longed-for peace. “I have already swallowed my death,” he added. “I could vomit it out if I wanted to.” But:

Pankaj Mishra
2014

I watched my aunt signing papers. Three hundred or more in a neat pack in front of her, her secretary standing behind her taking one sheet at a time as it was signed, and forming another neat pack of signed sheets. She gave me a look in between signatures. I must have disturbed her.

She was giving away three acres of land at each signature, and an acre of land in our country is a lot of money. Her name would be in the papers next day for kindness and generosity to the poor. And it should be, too, when she was giving all that away.

I had a cigarette but no matches. I put it in my mouth and tried to attract the secretary’s attention. I waited, my courage increasing. I decided to wait until she had signed another ten thousand pounds’ worth before asking for a match. One … two … three … four … about five thousand pounds; five … six … seven … ‘May I have a light, Hassan Effendi?’

She didn’t hear me, neither did Hassan Effendi. He didn’t even look round. There on the table was a lighter, a big silver Ronson – Aladdin’s lamp. I edged towards the table. One step and I was there. In another instant it was in my hands. Tick tick. It didn’t work. She murmured something to Hassan Effendi. He put his hand in his pocket and gave me a new box of matches.

I looked at the clock. Twenty past nine. In another ten minutes I would have been there for an hour and a half. I smoked. The pack of signed sheets increased, the other pack decreased. About fifty more, I estimated. She must be tired, poor woman, signing a thousand papers a day and this her third day. I felt for her; a woman with ten thousand acres to look after – but happily the régime allowed her only two
hundred now. I remembered how, once, in Europe, she gave me a five-pound note.

Then Marie came in. She is a good soul, Marie, a good friend of the family: helps here and there during receptions, always present during illness, always remembering birthdays. She doesn’t know when my birthday falls, or that of my mother, but then we have never told her.

‘Hello, Ram,’ she said, sitting beside me, ‘what are you doing here?’

‘Come to borrow money.’

She didn’t say anything. She has money of her own, and when you are in my situation, it’s best to speak out, specially to those who have money. It makes them feel closer knit to each other and all that, and then, of course, you can never tell.

I felt sorry for Marie. She wants to speak very much; to tell me she hopes I get the money and to ask me why I want it – particularly to ask me that. But her position is delicate. She bought a new Cadillac two days ago and it would be vulgar to mention money right now. I looked at her and smiled.

‘How is your mother?’ she asked.

‘She’s very sick,’ I lied.

This was bound to keep her quiet for another ten minutes at least. I was more interested in my paper-signing aunt. The way I looked at it, if she was giving away a million pounds’ worth of land to no matter whom, she’d give me a thousand pounds. Particularly if I hinted that I’d leave the country if I had that much.

I looked at my aunt, then at the clock, and finally at Marie.

‘Hello, Marie,’ I said. ‘You’re-looking-very-well-how-is-your-new-car?’

She looked at me with tenderness. ‘You’re so thoughtful, my sweet. It’s not bad. The other one was costing me so much in petrol, I simply couldn’t afford it. Had to buy a new one.’

A small commotion at the desk. The signing had ended for the day.

‘
Tiens
,’ said my aunt. ‘I didn’t notice you come in, Marie. Ouf! I am fed up with this signing. You must be tired too, Hassan Effendi. But it is the least we can do for these poor devils, the fellaheen.’ That was good. I tried to look as much fellah as possible.