Out of Place: A Memoir (46 page)

Apart from the company of a few unusually brilliant and gifted fellow students, like the composer John Eaton, Arthur Gold, Bob Miles, and a few others, my immersion in reading and writing was the only antidote to Princeton’s poisonous social atmosphere. I became a major not in literature but in the humanities, an honors program that allowed me to take as many courses in music, philosophy, and French as in English; all were systematically chronological, crammed with information, tremendously exciting to me, so far as the reading was concerned. There were two professors of distinction there (only one of whom I actually knew and studied with) who have made a lasting impression on me. One was R. P. Blackmur, the literary critic and (despite the fact that he didn’t have a doctorate or even a high school diploma) English professor, a lonely, difficult-to-follow writer and lecturer, whose sheer genius in uncovering layer after layer of meaning in modern poetry and fiction (despite his gnarled and frequently incomprehensible language) I found utterly challenging. His example for me opened the secret delight of interpretation as something more than paraphrase or explanation. I never took a course with him or met him, but apart from reading him avidly I intermittently used to go to his lectures on poetics and modern fiction. He was one of the two readers of my senior
thesis on André Gide and Graham Greene—a tortured affair, alas—who in his written comments praised my “great powers of analysis.” He died in 1965.

The other figure of distinction was (and indeed still is) Professor of Philosophy Arthur Szathmary, a spritely, energetic little figure who was everyone’s gadfly, whether student, colleague, or great writer. For a number of disaffected outsiders, Szathmary came to represent, and even embody, the intellectual life. He was intensely skeptical, asked irreverent questions, and generally made one feel that the accurate articulation of objections and flaws were activities of the highest order. There was nothing of the Princeton “tweedy” ethos about him or anything that suggested careerism and worldly success. No one could place his vaguely European accent. Later he admitted to us that he was a Massachusetts boy who had never left the country, although during the war he had been an interrogator of Japanese prisoners of war. His brother was the writer and comedian Bill Dana, whose celebrated TV character was José Jimenez.

My humanities courses were unreflectingly historical in organization, taught by men of the utmost competence and philological rigor. My readings in the history of music, of literature, and of philosophy formed the foundation of everything I have done as a scholar and teacher. The sedate comprehensiveness of the Princeton curriculum gave me the opportunity to let my mind investigate whole fields of learning, with at that time a minimum of self-consciousness. Only when that learning came into contact with the energizing criticism of Szathmary or the visionary empowerment of Blackmur did I find myself digging deeper, beyond the level of formal academic accomplishment, and beginning somehow to fashion for myself a coherent and independent attitude of mind. I was conscious during the first few weeks of my second year of further developing an early fascination with complexity and unpredictability—especially, and lastingly, in the multiple complexities and ambiguities of writing and speech. Paradoxically, this was stimulated by some of the more conventional professors in approach and temperament, including Coindreau in French, or Oates in classics, and Thompson, Landa, Bentley, Johnson, in English. In music, I forced myself through the obstacle course of harmony and counterpoint, then on to rigorously historical and positivistic seminars
on Beethoven and Wagner in particular, where Elliot Forbes and Ed Cone were models of musicianly and scholarly pedagogy.

I was very aware of myself as intellectually underdone, especially in comparison to someone like Arthur Gold, the most brilliant student in my class, who possessed a superb talent for reading as well as writing literature. To survive as he did intellectually, and to a lesser extent as I did, in the Princeton atmosphere of those days was almost miraculous. We both contemplated transferring to Harvard in our junior year, and were both at odds with the casual, pipe-smoking, tweedy anti-intellectualism of many teachers and students alike. During my last two years at Princeton, hating my club—where one had to go for meals, since no other facility except expensive restaurants existed—and feeling no connection with the weekend social life of house parties, raccoon-skin coats, and endless drinking, I became quite isolated, though exhilarated intellectually. Princeton had set in motion a series of deep currents, most of which were in conflict with each other, pulling me in different, radically irreconcilable directions. I could not give up the idea of returning to Cairo, nor of taking over my father’s business, yet I wanted to be a scholar and academic. I was going more and more seriously into music, even to the point of doing nothing else despite my years of unsatisfactory piano lessons.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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