Memory Palace

I

We live in an age of testament: more of it written than spoken. Everywhere in the Western world, women and men, moved by the now commonly held belief that every life signifies, are sitting down at computers to bear witness to themselves. It is a powerful impulse--to tell a tale drawn from the writer’s own unsurrogated experience--that has overtaken the talented and the untalented alike.

But testament is not memoir. A memoir is a work of sustained narrative prose that, though it originates in actuality and not invention, bears the same responsibility as does all writing: to shape a piece of experience, transform a set of events, deliver a bit of wisdom. True, one vital difference does abstain between the fictional and the nonfictional narrative. The “I” in a fiction can be, and often is, an unreliable narrator; in nonfiction it can never be. The reader of nonfiction must always be persuaded that the narrator is speaking truth, that she or he is honestly working hard to get to the bottom of the experience at hand in order better to understand one’s own self. That, finally, in memoir, is the bottom line. A novel has many agendas, a memoir only one: self-definition.

From Augustine on, the memoir is controlled by an idea of self that is being worked out on the page. That idea, almost always, is served through a piece of self-awareness that clarifies only slowly in the writer, gaining strength and definition as the narrative progresses. In a bad memoir, the line of clarification remains muddy, uncertain, indistinct. In a good one, it becomes the organizing principle; the thing that lends shape and texture to the writing, drives the narrative forward, provides direction and unity of purpose. From Augustine to Rousseau, from Edmund Gosse to J.R. Ackerley and Marguerite Duras, the question clearly being asked in an exemplary memoir is: “Who am I?” Who, exactly, is this “I” upon whom turns the significance of this story-taken-directly-from-life? On that question, the writer of memoir must deliver. Not with an answer but with depth of inquiry.

II

Edward Said is a university professor by choice, an American by default and a public intellectual by virtue of the mean accidents of political history. Born in 1935 to wealthy Palestinians living in Cairo, Said grew up in Egypt, spent family vacations in Jerusalem and Lebanon, was sent to boarding school and college in the United States and has felt at home nowhere throughout his 64 years. Except perhaps in teaching and writing about literature and music: an occupation at which he has spent his entire adult life distinguishing himself.

Until he was in his mid-30s, the dispersal of the Palestinian people after 1948 made flare in Said as a generalized anger, an occasional distress--his life, after all, was very far from the front--but the 1967 Six-Day War threw him back on himself in ways that took him by surprise. That war burned itself into his soul and, thereafter, the struggle between the Arabs and the Jews became central to his being. Out of this centrality, Said’s great subject articulated itself. To declare the large meaning of the humiliated East at the hands of the imperial West became--in book after book after book--the work that had clearly been waiting for him.

Said is an academic through and through. Inevitably, his thesis is overdetermined and over-argued, the writing characterized by sentences so overloaded that, as you read, you must excise from your mind half the qualifiers and all the adjectives simply to get the gist of the sentence first time around. Nevertheless, books like “Orientalism” and “Culture and Imperialism” are compelling. The reader is in the presence of a formidable intelligence passionately engaged. It is the engagement that does it: that angry, sparking engagement that has by now excited the content of a few thousand pages of print with its heat, its insistence, its sheer force of will. Out of this angry engagement, Said has made an organizing principle, produced work of originality and persuasion, work that in fact, feels--in the very best sense--driven by a need for self-definition.

Six years ago Said was diagnosed with chronic leukemia. From that moment he had no future; he had only the ongoing present: a settling position to find oneself in. This, he decided, was the time to make sense not of Arab history at large but of his own in particular. He sat down to write the book we now have in hand.

“Out of Place” is not a political memoir. True, there are a few brief sections that speak directly to the loss of Palestine and its consequences for the extended Said family, but these sections are peripheral, not integral to the concern that dominates this book, a concern that is wonderfully narrow and concentrated: what it was like to grow up the son of Wadie and Hilda Said.

Both parents came from large, prosperous Christian Arab families in Jerusalem. In 1929, Wadie, then a man in his early 30s, went to Cairo to open a branch of the family business (stationery and office supplies). His success was phenomenal; he grew rich and stayed rich. Edward and his four sisters were raised in colonial Egypt like children of the bourgeoisie all over the world. His parents subscribed to Victorian notions of propriety, the absolute goodness of their own prosperity and total control within the family. What looked like privilege--piano lessons, riding lessons, English school, swimming school--amounted, essentially, to an unrelenting exercise of will on the part of two people whose imprint on the young Edward had far-reaching consequences:

“My father [was ruled by] the practice of self-making . . . which he exploited in what he did and what he made others around him, chiefly me, do. . . . [He] came to represent a devastating combination of power and authority, rationalistic discipline, and repressed emotions; and all this . . . has impinged on me my whole life. . . . [In me remains] his relentless insistence on doing something useful, getting things done, ‘never giving up,’ more or less all the time. I have no concept of leisure or relaxation and, more particularly, no sense of cumulative achievement. . . .

“My mother was my closest and most intimate companion for the first twenty-five years of my life. Even now I feel imprinted and guided by her perspective and habits: a paralyzing anxiety about alternative courses of action, a deep-seated restlessness . . . a profound interest in music and language . . . an over-elaborate sense of the social world . . . and a virtually unquenchable cultivation of loneliness as a form both of freedom and affliction. . . . [S]he had the most deep-seated and unresolved ambivalence toward the world, including me, I have ever known. Despite our affinities . . . she could turn away quite suddenly, producing in me a metaphysical panic I can still experience with considerable unpleasantness and even terror.”

These paragraphs are the essence of Said’s memoir. They are repeated--if not verbatim, then in paraphrase--throughout the book. They speak directly to the central situation of his inner life: that of an intelligent, willful, emotionally ambitious boy growing up in a bourgeois, self-divided family that, in spite of the material comfort it provided, made him feel perpetually cut off from his “real” self, the self that read, fell in love with movies, listened seriously to music and found in its middle teens that it had a considerable gift for making large connections between ideas and different kinds of books. This discovery--of “a deeper level of awareness of [a] life of beautiful, interrelated parts”--gave the young Edward not only pleasure and solace, it gave him strength; the strength to draw closer to the man he would eventually become: the intellectually accomplished Edward Said in whom still resides an outraged yearning for the family that would, from the very beginning, have recognized and valued the “real” him.

This is the history that Said is meaning to track in “Out of Place.” In service to this intention, we are given a full record of the English and American schools that Edward attended (how treacherous they were), the clubs the family belonged to (how insulating they were), the summer vacations in Lebanon (how stifling they were) and the ways in which the father was unreachable and the mother unreliable.

This record, however, comes to us in the form of summary descriptions that fail to draw us into the situation. As intelligent as the summaries are, they provide neither the drama nor the reflection necessary to build sensory knowledge. We never actually see or hear these people, never come to know why they act as they do. By the same token, although we are told repeatedly of his abiding sense of internal exile, we are not made to feel the process of struggle and separation whereby Edward is being made into the man who is writing the memoir. From where we sit, it’s all hearsay.

“Out of Place” suffers strangely from an absence of engagement at the level required to achieve revelation. Because it does not engage, it repeats itself, producing page after page of observation that neither varies nor deepens. The work maintains a uniformly unbroken surface. For the writer of memoir, this is fatal. A novelist can make a successful work out of a beautiful or interesting surface; a memoirist cannot. Inevitably, the lack of texture leads to opacity, ensures an absence of the clarifying self and makes the reader feel acutely an insufficiency of effort on the part of the author. In a man like Said, an insufficiency of effort may result in those dissatisfactions with oneself that are most easily projected outward. Which is perhaps why the tone of voice throughout this book is faintly sullen, faintly petulant, faintly depressed.

I thought, as I was reading, that Said, in fact, wanted badly to do well by all concerned (himself, his parents, everyone) and that, troubled by the vagaries of his own internal investigations, he was driven to supply explanations that led him into the few moments of dishonesty this book contains. Here are two out of a handful:

In describing a major family quarrel over the business--one easily ascribable to any family dynamic--he writes: “I felt then that the disappearance of Palestine itself was at the bottom of this, but neither I nor any other member of my family could say exactly how or why. . . .”

Berated by a camp counselor in Maine for a breach of manners he might have been called to account for in Egypt, he writes: “I felt myself to be a shameful outsider to [a] world that wished to exclude me. . . . Nationality, background, real origins, and past actions all seemed to be sources of my problem.”

In each instance the reader draws back, thinking: What? Where did this come from? To explain these experiences in terms of the misfortunes of war or cultural discrimination is simply not persuasive.

III

We all grow up feeling that within the family, our real selves are forced into exile while our made-up selves are put to work in service to an enterprise not of our own design. Then, to the bargain, many of us discover that we have been born into a condition of life that actually mimics our internal sense of exile out in the larger world; that as blacks or gays or women we are destined to live “made-up” lives in service to a set of interests definitely not our own. The situation is a double whammy. It’s only natural to want to complain. The question is, how--in writing--to do it successfully.

For Said the writing of polemic and the writing of memoir are both efforts at self-definition. In each genre, the legitimate cry at the center of his work is, “I am not as you describe me! See me as I see myself!” But it is only as a polemicist that Said makes us know something important about what it means to be imprisoned in an image of the self not of one’s own making; as a memoirist he doesn’t know where to begin. Writing on culture and empire, Said engages with the prose to such a high degree that the reader feels a line being thrown straight down into the depths of the writer’s real situation, his true issue. But here, in a tale of personal history--one that is fueled by another aspect of the same grievance--the line eludes him; he cannot leave the shallows. We are presented only with a bill of complaint.

All this is to say that absorbing questions are raised when a writer of consequence comes up against a genre that is only rarely given its due.