Out of Place: A Memoir, Page 30

  Alexander’s behavior proved the sagacity of my father’s minatory observation that in the United States one should stay away from the Arabs. “They’ll never do anything for you and will always pull you down.” He illustrated this by putting out his hands flat and bringing them down to two feet from the floor. “They’ll always be a hindrance. They neither keep what’s good about Arab culture, nor show any solidarity with each other.” He never gave examples, but the graphic figure he made with his hands and the definitive way he said it suggested no exception or qualification to the aperçu. Both Alexander’s reaction to my banal overture and Silk’s disciplinary iron fist–velvet glove approach turned out to be a more subtle form of moral pressure than what I had encountered in years of often brutal confrontations with British authority in my Egyptian or Palestinian schools. There, at least you knew that they were your enemies. At Hermon, the going currency was “common or shared values,” care and concern for the student, interest in such intangibles as leadership and good citizenship, words of encouragement, admonishment, praise administered with a kind of fastidiousness I never dreamed of in VC, where war was a constant feature of daily life, with no palliatives either offered by the authorities or accepted by us, the students. Judgment in the Unites States was constant but concealed under a teasing fabric of softly rolling words and phrases, all of them in the end borne up by the unassailable moral authority of the teachers.

  I also soon learned that you could never really find out why or on what basis you were judged, as I was, inadequate for a role or status that relatively objective indicators like grades, scores, or match victories entitled you to. While I was at Mount Hermon I was never appointed a floor officer, a table head, a member of the student council, or valedictorian (officially designated as number 1 in the class) and salutatorian (officially number 2) although I had the qualifications. And I never knew why. But I soon discovered that I would have to be on my guard against authority and that I needed to develop some mechanism or drive not to be discouraged by what I took to be efforts to silence or deflect me from being who I was rather than becoming who they wanted me to be. In the process I began a lifelong struggle and attempt to demystify the capriciousness and hypocrisy of a power whose authority depended absolutely on its ideological self-image as a moral agent, acting in good faith and with unimpeachable intentions. Its unfairness, in my opinion, depended principally on its prerogative for changing its bases of judgment. You could be perfect one day, but morally delinquent the next, even though your behavior was the same. For example, Silk and Alexander taught us not to say things like “Good shot!” to our tennis opponents. Never give them anything or concede anything; make your opponent work extra hard. But I recall that once during a close match against Williston Academy I was taken aside and reprimanded for having made my opponent pick up a ball that may have been closer to me. “Take the extra step,” I was told, and was made silently furious at the shifting grounds for judgment. But what developed in my encounters with the largely hypocritical authority at Mount Hermon was a newfound will that had nothing to do with the “Edward” of the past but relied on the slowly forming identity of another self beneath the surface.

  It soon became clear to me in my homesick disorientation that except for the words of advice in my weekly letter from my mother I had to deal with the daily routine at Hermon entirely on my own. Academically, the going was relatively easy and sometimes actually enjoyable. Whereas in VC we had only the dry material itself to deal with, none of it prettified or packaged, at Mount Hermon much that was required of us was prepared for by elaborate, simplifying instructions. Thus, our forceful and articulate English teacher (also the golf coach), Mr. Jack Baldwin, took us through one month of reading and analyzing Macbeth by minute studies of character, motivation, diction, figural language, plot pattern, all of the topics broken down into subgroups, steps, progressions that led cumulatively to a notebookful of short essays capped by a summary paragraph or two on the meaning of the play. Altogether more rational and thoughtful than in previous schools, this system invigorated and challenged me, particularly by comparison with the Anglo-Egyptian style of studying literary texts where all we were required to do was to articulate the very narrowly defined “correct” answers.

  During the first weeks Baldwin assigned us an essay topic of a very unpromising sort: “On Lighting a Match.” I dutifully went to the library and proceeded through encyclopedias, histories of industry, chemical manuals in search of what matches were; I then more or less systematically summarized and transcribed what I found and, rather proud of what I had compiled, turned it in. Baldwin almost immediately asked me to come and see him during his office hours, which was an entirely novel concept, since VC’s teachers never had offices, let alone office hours. Baldwin’s office was a cheery little place with postcard-covered walls, and as we sat next to each other on two easy chairs he complimented me on my research. “But is that the most interesting way to examine what happens when someone lights a match? What if he’s trying to set fire to a forest, or light a candle in a cave, or, metaphorically, illuminate the obscurity of a mystery like gravity, the way Newton did?” For literally the first time in my life a subject was opened up for me by a teacher in a way that I immediately and excitedly responded to. What had previously been repressed and stifled in academic study—repressed in order that thorough and correct answers be given to satisfy a standardized syllabus and a routinized exam designed essentially to show off powers of retention, not critical or imaginative faculties—was awakened, and the complicated process of intellectual discovery (and self-discovery) has never stopped since. The fact that I was never at home or at least at Mount Hermon, out of place in nearly every way, gave me the incentive to find my territory, not socially but intellectually.

  The Browsing Room in the library basement provided me an escape from the often insufferable daily routine. It housed a record player (33 rpm records had just been introduced) and several bookshelves of novels, essays, and translations. I listened to a heavy three-record album of The Marriage of Figaro conducted by von Karajan, with Erich Kunz, Elisabeth Schwartzkopf, George London, and Irmgaard Seefried, over and over again; I read some of the many sets of American literary classics (Cooper’s The Leatherstocking Tales, Twain’s travels and novels, Hawthorne and Poe stories) with considerable excitement, since they revealed a complete, parallel world to the Anglo-Egyptian one in which I had been immersed in Cairo.

  But the major breakthrough for me was in music, which, along with religion, played a substantial role in the school’s programs. I tried out for and made the chapel choir, as well as the entirely secular glee club. We were all required to go to chapel services four times a week (including Sunday), where the organist, one Carleton L’Hommedieu, played a robust prelude and postlude, generally by Bach, but occasionally by second-rate American composers such as John Knowles Paine and George Chadwick. During one of these early services I found myself impulsively driven to go to speak to L’Hommy, as everyone called him behind his back, about piano lessons. My wasteful years at VC had taken the life out of my piano career, but listening to records and L’Hommy’s playing inspired me to begin again.

  L’Hommy was about five feet eight inches and cadaverously thin, given to plaid bow ties and striped shirts, always very well put together (no one ever saw him tieless or in shorts). He had a disconcertingly mincing walk, with his two exceptionally fine and slender hands often held out (like a rabbit’s) as he tripped along, but at the keyboard he cut a very confident, even authoritative figure. I owe him the fact that he took me seriously and was never impatient with me as a pianist. Still, L’Hommy typified the cautious, often pedantic kind of teacher who would constantly try to hold the student back. His teaching style notwithstanding, his superb playing and music history teaching filled me with enthusiasm. Soon music was an all-consuming knowledge as well as experience: I listened, played, read, and read about it systematically (in the library’s Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Mus
icians) for the first time in my life, and I have never stopped. But there had to be, I now realize, a L’Hommedieu figure for me to react against, someone whose competence gave him the right to an on-the-whole “measured” (not wildly enthusiastic) judgment. We rarely saw eye to eye, but at least I had a hard taskmaster’s ear to prod me on my way, against his, always held in check, as, for example, by his excessively polite “Oh yes, Ed! That was very nice. But don’t you think that the insecurities of the opening could be fixed up,” etc., after my playing the gavotte of the Bach G-minor English Suite for him, and toned down a bit. I remember one steamy Sunday afternoon practicing the gavotte with the windows open, and after working meticulously on the little things that my teacher had caught me with, I decided to let out all stops, playing the piece through passionately, the way I felt it. At that moment L’Hommy and Mr. Mirtz, an elderly English teacher, walked by the very window and obviously heard and saw me. “Hey, that’s great Ed,” was Mirtz’s unbuttoned expostulation. “Uh-uh,” was L’Hommy’s own rather disapproving response. I played on, giving myself even more steam. I remember that on the next meeting we switched abruptly from the Bach to (in my view) a dinky, tinkly C-major Haydn Sonata: “Solomon, the very fine British pianist, played it in his last recital.” So there it was, his Solomon versus my Rubenstein.

  The abrasive rough and tumble of my daily life in the six-hundred-student boarding school was nonetheless unpleasant and sometimes intolerable. There was no cultural background for friendship of the kind I had experienced at VC. I roomed with Bob Salisbury (who was one class below me) for two years, but we were never close in any but superficial ways. I felt that there was no depth, no ease, to the Americans, only the surface jokiness and anecdotal high spirits of teammates, which never satisfied me. There was always the feeling that what I missed with my American contemporaries was other languages, Arabic mainly, in which I lived and thought and felt along with English. They seemed less emotional, with little interest in articulating their attitudes and reactions. This was the extraordinary homogenizing power of American life, in which the same TV, clothes, ideological uniformity, in films, newspapers, comics, etc., seemed to limit the complex intercourse of daily life to an unreflective minimum in which memory has no role. I felt myself to be encumberingly full of memories, and the best friends I made at Mount Hermon were recent immigrants like Gottfried Brieger, an extremely ironic German student, and the socially awkward but intellectually curious Neil Sheehan.

  The mythology of D. L. Moody dominated the school and made it the not-quite-first-rate place it was. There was the “dignity of manual labor” part, which seemed to me totally silly. There seemed to be unquestioned assent to the man’s incredible importance: it was my first encounter with enthusiastic mass hypnosis by a charlatan, because except for two of us, not one teacher or student expressed the slightest doubt that Moody was worthy of the highest admiration. The only other dissenter was Jeff Brieger, who cornered me in the Browsing Room and said, “Mais c’est dégoûtant,” pointing at one of the many hagiographical studies we were meant to read.

  And so it was with religion—the Sunday service, the Wednesday evening chapel, the Thursday noon sermon—dreadful, pietistic, nondenominational (I disliked that form of vacillation in particular) full of homilies, advice, how-to-live. Ordinary observations were encoded into Moodyesque sturdy Christianity in which words like “service” and “labor” acquired magical (but finally unspecifiable) meaning, to be repeated and intoned as what gave our lives “moral purpose.” There had been nothing of that at V.C.; now it was a full load of the stuff. And no beatings, or bullying prefects. We were all Hermon boys, six hundred of us marching on after Moody and Ira Sankey, his faithful sidekick.

  Clothes were a problem for me. Everyone wore corduroys, jeans, lumber jackets, boots. While in London my father had taken me to a Dickensian establishment next door to the Savoy called Thirty Shilling Tailors and bought me a very dark gray suit. I also had the VC assortment of gray slacks, a blazer, and a few dress shirts, all of them packed into two gigantic beige leather suitcases, along with a stamp collection, two albums of family photos, and a mounting pile of my mother’s letters, each of which I preserved carefully. I had to write my parents to get permission to buy a more appropriate wardrobe and by October I was almost but not quite like everyone else. It took me another month to master the academic system completely, and by late November I was (to my surprise) astonishing my classmates with my intellectual performances. Why or how I did well I do not really know to this day, since following my mother’s injunction not to be blue or alone I was both, and alienated from the extended stag sessions in the Blue Cloud (the smoking and pool room), or the little cliques that formed in Crossley, or around the various athletic teams. I longed to be back in Cairo; I kept calculating the time difference of seven hours (leaving my bedside alarm set on Cairo time), missing our family’s Cairo food during school meals, an unappetizing regime that began with chicken à la king on Monday and ended with cold cuts and potato salad on Sunday night—and above all missing my mother, each of whose letters deepened the wound of abandonment and separation I felt. Sometimes I would pull out one of my massive suitcases from under the bed, leaf through the albums or letters and begin gently to cry, quickly reminding myself of my father’s “Buck up boy; don’t be a sissy. Pull your back up. Back, back.”

  I experienced the changing of seasons from fall to winter with dread, as something unfamiliar, having come from a basically warm and dry climate. I have never gotten over my feelings of revulsion for snow, which I first saw on my sixteenth birthday, November 1, 1951. Since that time, try as I might, I have found little to enjoy or admire about snow. For me snow signified a kind of death. But what I suffered from was the social vacancy of Mount Hermon’s setting. I had spent all my life in two rich, teeming, historically dense metropolises, Jerusalem and Cairo, and now I was totally bereft of anything except the pristine woods, apple orchards, and the Connecticut River valley and hills stripped of their history. The nearest town of Greenfield has long symbolized for me the enforced desolation of middle America.

  On the other hand, a small number of teachers and students, as well as subjects like literature and music, gave me moments of great pleasure, normally somewhat tinged with guilt. “Don’t forget how much I miss and love you; your absence has made everything seem so empty,” my mother would repeat down the years, making me feel that I couldn’t, mustn’t feel all right unless she was with me, and that it was a serious betrayal for me to do something that I liked doing if she wasn’t present. This gave my American days a sense of impermanence, and even though I spent three quarters of the year in the United States, it was always Cairo to which I accorded stability.

  The authorized school social life was with the Northfield Seminary for Young Ladies, six miles across the river. One could have football, movie, or dance dates on Saturdays only, but being an incredibly shy sexually inexperienced newcomer I could only look wistfully at the others holding hands, petting, kissing, and generally feeling each other up. This was like China to me, since Cairo had never provided anything like this practically sanctioned adultery (as my feverishly repressed mind represented the practice of necking to me), and without any acquaintance at Northfield I was the weekly wallflower, along with Brieger and one or two other forlorn souls. When I was eventually introduced to one or two girls, a second date rarely followed. It was only in my second and final year that I had any kind of limited success with girls.

  To my increasing sadness, by early December 1951 I had become Americanized as “Ed Said” to everyone except Brieger, whose unbridled irony and polyglot wit seemed more precious to me every day, as more and more of my past seemed to slip away, worn away slowly but ineluctably by the American modalities of our routinized days and evenings. Even Tony Glockler, an early acquaintance who had grown up in Beirut, had gone through the changing machine. We used to speak Arabic and French to each other, but that soon stopped and we drifted apart. With
no close friends, I battled my way through, trying more and more successfully to hold on to and develop the sensibility that resisted the American leveling and ideological herding that seemed to work so effectively on so many of my classmates.

  It wasn’t nostalgia for Cairo that kept me going, since I remembered all too acutely the dissonance I had always felt there as the non-Arab, the non-American American, the English-speaking and -reading warrior against the English, or the buffeted and cosseted son. Instead it was the beginning of a new independent strength that I sensed as I swam fifty laps during swimming practice, feeling my arms were going to fall off with leaden fatigue, my breath coming harder and harder, my legs dragging heavier still as I pumped them desperately, a germ that helped me think about how I was going to make a radio script out of “The Cask of Amontillado” for Baldwin’s class, with me regulating the voices, volume, music (third movement of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, where I wanted my audience to hear the courtly dance rhythm against the poor immured hero’s weakening voice). Independent strength or nascent will: it marked the beginning of my refusal to be the passive “Ed Said” who went from one assignment or deadline to the next with scarcely a demurral.

  Most of the school went home for Thanksgiving, a holiday that still means very little to me, even though my father had imposed a turkey dinner on us in Cairo for what he called “traditional reasons.” For the three-week Christmas break, my father contacted his oldest brother’s sons Abie and Charlie in New York, who together with their widowed mother, Emily, and sister, Dorothy, had moved to Queens shortly after Asaad’s death in 1947. No Washington vacations after all.

  Abie was fair-haired, gregarious, an open, kind man about ten years my senior; my mother thought that he most resembled my father in generosity, loyalty, and transparency. There was what was considered a problematic strain in my uncle Al’s family that came through Emily—she was a Saidah from Jaffa—and only Abie seemed to have been spared that much-remarked hereditary defect, which was a certain deviousness allied with a somewhat cretinous cackle that emerged disconcertingly for no particular reason.