(Nice take-down of Tim Brennan's book. I used to chat with Brennan when
he was in the Young Socialist Alliance in 1970. Very smart but very
arrogant.)
A Study of Edward Said, One of the Most Interesting Men of His Time
By Dwight Garner
March 22, 2021
Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said
By Timothy Brennan
Illustrated. 437 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $35
The subtitle of Timothy Brennan’s new book, “Places of Mind: A Life of
Edward Said,” is somewhat misleading. “A Life” implies an honest attempt
at portraiture — a stab at wrestling a blood presence onto the page. In
other words, a proper biography.
In his preface, Brennan refers instead to his book as an “intellectual
biography,” which is a subtly different animal. In this case, the result
is a dry, dispiriting volume, one that frequently reads like a doctoral
dissertation. It’s an uninspired parsing of academic texts and agendas.
What the large print giveth, the small print hath taketh away.
It hardly seems fair to fault an author for not writing a book he didn’t
intend to write. Yet a sense of missed opportunity lingers over “Places
of Mind.” Said (1935-2003) was an especially complicated and vivid human
being, one of the most interesting and engagé men of his time.
Born in Jerusalem and educated in the United States at Ivy League
schools, he was a debonair polymath, among our last true public
intellectuals. The book that put him on the map, “Orientalism” (1978),
is a foundational work of post-colonial studies.
Veterans of the 1980s and ’90s will recall that Said (pronounced
sah-EED) was omnipresent. An urbane spokesman for the Palestinian cause,
he appeared on “Nightline,” “Charlie Rose,” the BBC and anywhere else he
found a perch.
Said taught literature at Columbia. His lectures were forceful; so much
so that attendees would approach afterward wanting to touch him. He
wrote for elite and mass publications. He was a gifted pianist who
sometimes played publicly, and he wrote music criticism for The Nation.
He served as president of the Modern Language Association and played a
vital role in the translation and publication in America of the Egyptian
novelist Naguib Mahfouz’s books, before Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize in
Literature in 1988.
The flow of Said’s personality helped make him who he was. He was
seductive, ineluctably charming, impeccably dressed. “Can you imagine a
man,” he was heard to say, “too busy to go to his tailor?”
A gifted mimic, he seemed to have memorized the entirety of “Monty
Python.” “When he laughed,” Christopher Hitchens wrote of him, “it was
as if he was surrendering unconditionally to some guilty pleasure.”
Brennan does not entirely avoid the details of Said’s life. He’s
thorough, in fact, on the childhood. But in the final two-thirds of the
book, the life is skimped; it’s an afterthought, pushed into corners.
Brennan teaches humanities at the University of Minnesota and writes
often about comparative literature and cultural theory. His most recent
book before this was “Borrowed Light: Vico, Hegel, and the Colonies” (2014).
A great deal of “Places of Mind” is spent situating Said in a firmament
of thinkers that includes Marx, Freud, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault
and Noam Chomsky. This positioning matters, but the philosophical and
psycho-sociological overlay rather swamps the book.
Brennan seems to be speaking to others in his fields of expertise, not
to an eager and curious general reader. A typical sentence, and let me
pause to find a short one, is: “There is little doubt, though, that
Said’s spatial view of music was negatively influenced by the
Schenkerian method.” This book has not merely dead nodes but entire dead
zones.
It’s ungainly in other ways. Its chronology is a jumble. Events that
sound important — an “intellectual mugging” that Said underwent at
Skidmore College — are hinted at but not unpacked. The author is a poor
quoter of Said’s work.
Said’s family moved to Cairo in 1947 after the United Nations divided
Jerusalem into Jewish and Arab halves. Said’s family was Christian. He
was baptized in the Church of England. He attended elite schools in
Cairo. His classmates included, though Brennan leaves out this
information, the actor Omar Sharif and the future King Hussein of Jordan.
Said’s family was wealthy; his prosperous father ran an office equipment
store. For the rest of his life, Said liked Montblanc and Diplomat
fountain pens and excellent stationery.
In 1951, his parents sent him to an American prep school, the Mount
Hermon School in Massachusetts. He was accepted at both Princeton and
Harvard but chose Princeton, Brennan writes, because it was thought to
be more congenial to foreign students. He later earned a Ph.D. from
Harvard in English literature.
Shortly before entering Harvard, while attending the Bayreuth music
festival in Germany, Said’s Alfa Romeo rounded a turn in a mountain road
in Switzerland and collided with a young man on a motorcycle, fatally
injuring him.
Said gave an oddly detached account of this event in his memoir, “Out of
Place” (1999), Brennan writes. “It was apparently too agonizing to
discuss, and he never came to terms with it.”
While at Harvard, Said tried to write a novel. He did complete a short
story, but The New Yorker rejected it in 1965 and he didn’t write
fiction again for the next 25 years.
At Columbia, where he began teaching in 1963, Said was the best teacher
many had ever seen. He was a walking liberal education. Woe to those,
however, who were ill-prepared. In Columbia’s student paper, a reporter
wrote that Said commanded “the telekinetic powers necessary to eject
unwanted students from his seminar rooms by sheer force of irate facial
expression.”
He didn’t believe in politicizing his classrooms, he said. He taught
courses on literature; Joseph Conrad, especially, was an endless
fascination to him. Exile was the central knot of his being, yet he
never taught on the Middle East.
Said was a member, from 1977 to 1991, of the Palestine National Council,
a parliament in exile. He was heckled for being in the P.L.O. camp, for
being close to Yasir Arafat until the two men fell out after the Oslo
peace accords.
Said was threatened with assassination. His office was firebombed.
“Apart from the president of the Columbia,” Brennan writes, “only Said’s
office had bulletproof windows and a buzzer that would send a signal
directly to campus security.”
He was married twice, and had two children. Women were said to find him
irresistible. Brennan writes about Said’s brief affair in 1979 with the
Lebanese novelist Dominique Eddé. If Said had other affairs they are
unexplored here, though about his many female friends the writer Marina
Warner remarks, “there were waves of them.”
Salman Rushdie, in his memoir, “Joseph Anton” (2012), spoke of Said’s
hypochondria, writing that “if Edward had a cough he feared the onset of
serious bronchitis, and if he felt a twinge he was certain his appendix
was about to collapse.”
In 1991, Said learned he had chronic lymphocytic leukemia, which would
kill him 12 years later. He lived long enough to rail against the
Patriot Act after Sept. 11; he called the legislation “the Israelization
of U.S. policy.”
There has been so much good writing about Said’s thinking and about his
way in the world — in Rushdie’s memoir, in Christopher Hitchens’s
“Hitch-22,” in essays by friends and colleagues such as Tony Judt,
Michael Wood and Tariq Ali, among others — that perhaps my hopes for
“Places of Mind” were simply too high.
Follow Dwight Garner on Twitter: @DwightGarner.
.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group.
View/Reply Online (#7472): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/7472
Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/81561627/21656
-=-=-
POSTING RULES & NOTES
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
-=-=-
Group Owner: [email protected]
Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/21656/1316126222/xyzzy
[[email protected]]
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
