I first met Edward Said when the BBC asked us to give the Reith Lectures in successive years and held a press reception to announce the forthcoming series. He was surprisingly American at first impression, especially in his voice and his colourful, informal and pithy turns of phrase. But this response soon faded because, as he wrote in his honest and poignant memoir, Out of Place, Edward Said was a child of the old eastern Mediterranean, and he had the manners, the warmth, the courtesy, and the generosity of that culture.
At that press reception, he immediately revealed personal qualities of mind and feeling that I came to recognise ran very deep inside him and were not assumed simply to impress or charm for the passing moment: when Edward showed interest in someone, in their work and well-being, he followed through with humour, affection, and irrepressible energy. He could be vehement, even scornfully abrasive, but that was part of his impetuous and fierce goodness of heart. I was sometimes scared of him, all the same, but I was one of many, many people whom he fostered spontaneously, whom he invited to give talks, whose books he commented on, whose struggles he followed.
My last conversation with him when he was still well and full of vigour was about an introduction to The Arabian Nights I had written. Acerbic, tough, but still loyal, he took the trouble to ring me from New York, roughed me up over some aspects but praised me generously for others: when I put down the telephone, he had given me the exhilarating sense that writing something, even something small like that piece, was worth doing, and worth doing well. He was a beloved teacher at Columbia University, and the news of his death has indeed spread grieving throughout the campus.
In all his numerous activities, with all the frenetic scheduling of his travels and appearances, Edward gave his supreme energies to the ideal of cultural richness, to the polyglot, multiple, heterogeneous communities that had once flourished in the Middle East, first in classical times and then under the Ottomans. His beloved wife, Mariam, was born a Christian, as he was, and her mother was the headmistress of the National Secular Girls School in the Lebanon, and a pioneering emancipationist; Edwards mother read Shakespeare with him aloud in Cairo as he was growing up. Both Edward and Mariam embodied the cultural complexity of the Middle East in their life stories as well as in their struggles to withstand condescension and ignorance about its history. Edwards breadth of reading, his engage candour and stringency, and the visionary restlessness of his hopes, turned him into a secular prophet of our times, a public intellectual, and the scourge of many parties and groups.
But to read his literary criticism is to encounter arguments far more subtle, complex and fascinating than some of his advocates let alone his many enemies ever represented. His famous analyses of the relations between colonialism and literature, for example, in both Orientalism and Culture & Imperialism cant be summed up easily for political purposes, and he was infuriated by his interpreters expedient use of them. His work overwhelmingly communicates his love of novels, thinking, poetry, and music: Joseph Conrad is defended, Jane Austen savoured, Wagner regained, Freud refreshed.
The obituaries, especially in Le Monde and The Guardian, give thorough and appreciative accounts of his lifes work. But The New York Times disgracefully rehearses ancient grudges and slurs, not recognising that the secular polity Edward so fearlessly and honestly struggled for in Israel/Palestine resembles the life of its own polyglot and multi-ethnic Manhattan rather more closely than Sharons Israel. This newspaper, in his home town of forty years, managed to be mean-spirited about one of the finest representatives of some ideals of the old United States (now so grievously being flouted): freedom of speech, independence of mind, civil conscience and humanist sympathies across all borders of ethnic and political identity.
But to leave Edward Said in America would be to miss many other sides to his unique, mercurial, multifaceted character: he was an evident Anglophile, and not just for its literature, but for its tailoring, its elegance of tweed and shirt fabrics, of ties and shoes and its pipes. He had converted the convivial smoking of the Middle East into a more English delight in briars, and he kept a rack of them by his reading chair (though for a long while his illness had prevented him indulging).
The leukaemia which ravaged him for the last twelve years marched cruelly and inexorably with the ever-exacerbated violence in Israel/Palestine. This of course ranked high among the great sorrows of his approaching death. But at least, when the East-West Divan Orchestra with Daniel Barenboim played the Eroica and other pieces at the Proms last month, and it was broadcast on the BBC, Edward witnessed the fulfilment of part of his vision : an impassioned and consummate rendering of Beethovens thrilling, liberating music, played together by young men and women who have been raised in enmity, joining forces in an orchestra named after Goethes poem, itself written in tribute to Hafiz, lyric poet born in Shiraz, Iran, in the 14th century. Edward heard the concert on the radio, but his last illness prevented him traveling to London, and then to Rabat as he had planned, to hear the first Arab-Israeli orchestra ever to play in North Africa.
I shall miss him: he was a rare, true friend; and the whole world will miss his forthright voice for secular ideals and the liberty of intellectual life.
