Out of Place: A Memoir, Page 34

  My father’s long decline over the last ten years of his life marked the end of a period in our Lebanese experience as the seismic shifts rocking the Middle East began to register on our microcosm in Dhour, irrevocably altering the world we lived in. During the early period of the Egyptian revolution (July 1952) we were still resident in Cairo, but except for my father, who bided his time, we were all infected with the spirit and rhetoric of what Gamal Abdel Nasser said he was doing for his people. My mother especially became an ardent supporter of his nationalism; yet it was in Dhour, amid the humdrumly conventional visits she courted and paid, that she gave vent to her enthusiasm, with a flamboyance and fervor that alarmed her listeners. Unbeknownst to us, the political alignments in Lebanon—sectarian, byzantine, and often invisible—were beginning to respond to Nasser’s stature as Arab superperson, and although we did not realize it, to our little Christian circle in Dhour, he began to seem like an emanation from not Cairo but Mecca, a pan-Islamist with evil designs not only on Israeli Jews but on Christian Lebanese.

  In the summer of 1958 a small civil war erupted in Lebanon between partisans of Camille Chamoun, the incumbent Maronite president, who wished (unconstitutionally) to renew his term, and those of the largely Muslim Arabist parties, who quickly gathered the extremely strident support of Cairo’s “Voice of the Arabs” radio station. That was the only summer after 1943 that we did not go to Dhour as usual. The hills just before the town were full of American troops sent there by John Foster Dulles to bolster the “pro-Western” forces of Chamoun’s supporters, whose opponents, it was alleged in the overwrought rhetoric of the day, were reported to be Moscow’s Marxist-Leninist agents. During prior summers my parents and I had easily determined that despite blood ties with our Lebanese relatives, the Badrs, we felt neither the Muslim-Christian animosities that haunted them, nor the Arab-versus-Lebanese conflict that made them so defensive. In addition, and to make the issues even more convoluted, there was the (to them) abrasive fact that we too were Christian, but our pan-Arabism and absence of prejudice constituted at least disloyalty if not betrayal.

  In this unstable and often uncomfortable set of currents my mother soon acquired the status of a true, believing Nasserite, a mirror image of her no less doctrinaire cousins and friends in the ultraright Christian factions. She would occasionally irritate even me with her often preachy disquisitions on Nasser’s socialist pan-Arabism, and to make matters worse I saw one of her cousins in an unguarded moment giving her a look of dismissive contempt. I think that for her it was partly social, this carrying on a heated conversation while insulated from politics in a life of ease, but her stance also revealed a fairness of mind and an ability to think beyond “our” minority interests: “We don’t count for very much,” she would always say. “It’s the porter, the driver, the worker for whom Nasser’s reforms have changed their lives and given them dignity.” It took courage to go against her upbringing and family. After 1958 Dhour felt even more alien, our friends less secure, the fault lines clearer, and our strangeness more evident. By 1962 and partly because of my father’s slow recovery my parents and sisters had taken a furnished flat in Beirut, leaving Cairo to recede along with the slowly disappearing world of our childhood.

  The polarizing, charismatic figure of Charles Malik also emerged during this period. He was not just the former ambassador to the United States from Lebanon, nor just the husband of my mother’s first cousin Eva, but also foreign minister under Chamoun, a position that involved him directly in the decision to call on Dulles for U.S. troops for the country. Not very big in size, he conveyed an impression of extraordinary gravity and massiveness that he exploited during his years as teacher, diplomat, and politician. He had a booming voice, an unmistakable confidence, an assertive bearing, and an extraordinarily overpowering personality, which I found attractive initially but later increasingly saw as troubling. By the 1970s he had turned himself—with the support of my mother’s (and his wife’s) Dhour relatives and friends—into the symbol and the outspoken intellectual figurehead of everything most prejudicial, conflicted, and incompatible with the Arab and largely Islamic Middle East. He began his public career during the late 1940s as an Arab spokesman for Palestine at the U.N., but concluded it as the anti-Palestinian architect of the Christian alliance with Israel during the Lebanese Civil War. Looking back at Malik’s intellectual and political trajectory, with all that it involved for me as his youthful admirer and companion, relative, and frequenter of the same circles, I see it as the great negative intellectual lesson of my life, an example which for the last three decades I have found myself grappling with, living through, analyzing, over and over and over with regret, mystification, and bottomless disappointment.

  I first became aware of Malik in wartime Cairo where his widowed mother lived. He was then a professor of philosophy at the American University of Beirut, and was married to Eva, my mother’s cousin. He was quite attached to my parents; my father, Malik once told me, gave him his first typewriter. Eva, who had spent her vacations in Nazareth at my mother’s house, was an affectionate, handsome woman of considerable personality with whom I quickly made a close friendship, despite the great disparity in our ages. There was something ingenuous and rough-hewn about the couple then, he with his strong north Lebanese village (Kura) accent affixed to a sonorously European English redolent of his rich and for me transfixing educational experience. A student of Heidegger’s at Fribourg and Whitehead’s at Harvard during the thirties, Malik had already acquired the sobriquet “the divine Charles,” as much for his brilliance as for his religious penchant. Greek Orthodox by birth, he was Roman Catholic (and by association Maronite) by predilection; Eva, the granddaughter of a staunchly Protestant pastor, converted to Catholicism during her marriage to Charles, as did her younger sister Lily, my mother’s closest friend among her relatives.

  After becoming Lebanon’s U.N. ambassador at Lake Success, Malik assumed the additional role of Lebanese minister plenipotentiary in Washington, and later ambassador. When Eva’s father, Habib, and some of his children started summering in Dhour, the Maliks also found a house there and came for a few weeks from Washington. I was very attracted to their presence. In the unforgiving sparseness of Dhour, their home, Charles’s conversation, and my aunt’s evident liking for me further provoked my thirst for ideas, for the great issues of faith, morality, and human destiny, and for a whole gamut of authors. “During the summer of 1930-something,” Malik once said to me, “I used to sit by the banks of the Nile and I read through all of Hardy and Meredith. But I also read Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Aquinas’s Summa.” No one else I knew then spoke of such things. When I was twelve I remember finding Malik sitting on his veranda overlooking the misty Shweir valley with a large tome in his hands. “John of Chrysostom,” he said, holding the book up for inspection, “a marvelous, subtle thinker, not unlike Duns Scotus.” It was at about that time that I felt the curiously teasing quality of his remarks on books and ideas. He had a tendency (then welcomed by me) to drop names and titles, which I would later ferret out and go into, but also to resort to one-liners, rankings, and reductive questions. “Kierkegaard was very great, but did he really believe in God?”; “Dostoyevsky was a great novelist because he was a great Christian”; “To understand Freud you must visit the Forty-second Street pornography shops”; “Princeton is a country club where Harvard sophomores spend their weekends.” Perhaps he felt I was too callow, too unprepared for the bracing arguments he had alluded to in dealing with Heidegger and Whitehead at their universities, but I also sensed some condescension mixed in with the teacher’s vocation to guide and instruct.

  During the early Nasser years Malik encouraged me to tell him about my enthusiasm for the popular leader’s reforms. He listened to everything I had to say, and then he said deflatingly, “What you’ve said is interesting. Egypt’s per capita income is now eighty dollars per annum: Lebanon’s is nine hundred. If all the reforms work, if every resource is marshaled, then Eg
ypt’s per capita will be doubled. That’s all.” From Uncle Charles, as we all called him, I learned the attractions of dogma, of the search for unquestioning truth, of irrefutable authority. From him I also learned about the clash of civilizations, the war between East and West, communism and freedom, Christianity and all the other, lesser religions. In addition to telling us about it in Dhour, he played a central role in formulating all this for the world stage. Along with Eleanor Roosevelt he worked on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; names like Gromyko, Dulles, Trygve Lie, Rockefeller, and Eisenhower were the common currency of his conversation, but so too were Kant, Fichte, Russell, Plotinus, and Jesus Christ. He had a dazzling command of languages—English, Arabic, German, Greek, and French were all excellent working instruments, though of the first three he had a mastery that was positively remarkable. With his huge shock of black hair, piercing eyes, aquiline nose, substantial width, and great hiking feet he commanded the room without a trace of hesitation or crippling self-consciousness. During the forties and early fifties Malik’s comforting moral certainty and granitic power, his inextinguishable faith in the Eternal, gave us hope and reminded me of Gorky’s remark that he slept better knowing that Tolstoy was alive in the same world.

  Malik rose and rose in the public world of nations, but he and Eva always returned to Dhour: the village was like the Heimat, homeland, of which Heidegger spoke, but for Malik the place also embodied an earthy Lebanese simplicity. He always retained what seemed to be an enduring admiration and affection for my father: “No one I’ve ever known,” he once told me with a certain amount of amazement and condescension, “no one is so purely a businessman as he. He has the business instinct to an astonishing degree.” I later thought that he had meant to suggest that my father was really an excellent businessman but wasn’t much else; perhaps I got it wrong. I enjoyed, however, a memorable exchange between Charles and my father on our Dhour balcony one scintillatingly bright night. “How can they [presumably scientists] determine the distance of those stars from earth?” my father wondered out loud. “Charles, do you know?” “Oh,” the philosopher said, “it’s quite easily done. You take a fixed point on earth, deduce the angle, then calculate the distance” was the prompt, somewhat off-putting reply. Child’s play. My father was not satisfied, his phenomenal gifts for calculation—or at least the principles behind the calculations—stirred into excited demurral. “No, no: I meant exactly. Which angle? Where? Surely there must be more to it.” Everyone else present quieted down: it seemed like an unaccustomed challenge to authority that my father had launched. I saw confusion on Malik’s face, and an unattractive impatience, as if he were trying to gather what the little businessman was all about. But clearly he couldn’t produce the answer that my father’s genuinely puzzled interest had provoked. Bluster was no good. Better to change the subject to Berdayev. On the morning of my father’s funeral fifteen years later he came to our Beirut house to pay his respects but not to attend the actual service. “I have a very important lunch with the papal nuncio,” he said to me by way of explanation.

  But it was his spiritual force, which had once moved people to conversion, that as he became more political deviated into prejudice and resentment against those who could neither accept the idea (it could only be an idea, since Lebanon was multiconfessional) of a Christian Lebanon nor of Lebanon as an Arab country entirely within the American camp. He must have been a superb teacher and lecturer in his early days at the university. Lily, his sister-in-law, once told me how after he returned from Harvard to Beirut he singlehandedly elevated the discourse into discussions of truth, the ideal, beauty, and the good. One of his students in the forties was my first cousin George, who, destined at first for a business career, a full decade later quit everything to convert to Catholicism and move to Fribourg, Switzerland, with a few like-minded Malik disciples, there to found a colony of devout men and women who would ready themselves to return to the Muslim world in order to convert people to Christ. All of these people, who remain in Switzerland to this day, their grandiose mission sadly unfilled, are testimony to the depth of Malik’s influence as an intellectual whose goals were, in the Bible’s sense, not of this world. And I, too, felt that influence, not only in the perspectives and ideas he introduced me to but in the dignity of the kind of moral-philosophical inquiry he had engaged in, which was so lacking either in my formal education or in my environment. Malik’s informal quasi-familial presence in Dhour made me realize that I had never before had a teacher of intellectual distinction. When did that invigoration end, to be replaced instead by an antithetical force so exactly the opposite of what had once been openness, courage, originality of thought?

  I have sometimes speculated that Dhour, with its insidious but ultimately false embodiment of bucolic authenticity, had corrupted us all into believing that its unfertile sparseness, policed simplicity of life, enforced Christian unanimity, played some role in its own and Malik’s later political extremism. But at the same time I think the sleepy withdrawal from the world that it promised for the summer months was also a negation of its own Arab context. Well past the colonial period, we collectively thought of ourselves as being able to lead an ersatz life, modeled on European summer resorts, oblivious to what was going on around us. My parents tried to reproduce our Cairo cocoon in the Lebanese mountains: who could blame them for that, given our peculiarly fractured status as Palestinian-Arab-Christian-American shards disassembled by history, only partially held together by my father’s business successes, which allowed us a semifantastic, comfortable, but vulnerable marginality. And when the disturbances of postmonarchical Egypt led the country to fall in pieces about us we carried their effects wherever we went, including Dhour. There Malik represented our first symbol of resistance, the refusal of Christian Lebanon to go along with Arab nationalism, the decision to join the Cold War on the United States’s side, to fight and turn intransigent rather than to enthuse about and accommodate Nasser’s rousing exhortations.

  I all too uncomfortably remember the shock of the total Arab defeat of 1967, and how in late December of that fateful year I drove up to Uncle Charles and Aunt Eva’s imposingly large, monolithic house in Rabiyé, a hillside suburb northeast of Beirut. In this house they had finally been able to deposit the books, furniture, and papers accumulated during years spent in rented houses, embassies, and temporary quarters, including their various Dhour residences. Fresh snow lay on the road, the sky was dark, the wind sharp, and the whole atmosphere glowering and inhospitable. I was not too sure what my errand was, except in some vague way to ask Charles to come out, so to speak, and help guide the Arabs out of their incredible defeat. A stupid idea perhaps, but at the time it seemed plausibly worth pursuing. What I was not prepared for was his uncharacteristically passive answer: that this was not his time, that he did not feel he had a role to play anymore, and that a new situation would have to arrive for him to reenter politics. I was stunned by this, astonished that what I had assumed was a common need to resist and rebuild was not shared by a man whose views and commitments I still had faith in. During the Lebanese Civil War, Malik became an intellectual leader of the Christian Right, and long after his death in 1988 I still feel profound regret at the ideological gulf that came to separate us, and at the enormous, complicated maelstrom of Arab politics that ultimately divided us, leaving us both with very little positive history and experience to show for it.

  It is difficult now not to read back into our Dhour years elements of the wasteful desolation of the Lebanese Civil War, which began in 1975 and officially ended about seventeen years later. Insulated from the depth of the antithetical communal and political currents that had riven Lebanon for decades, we lived a pseudoidyllic life that teetered on the edge of a very deep precipice. Stranger yet was the sense my father had that Dhour was a refuge from the growing travails of business life in Nasser’s Egypt. In early 1971 when he was near death he told us that he wished to be buried in Dhour, but that was never possible, since n
o resident was willing to sell us land for a little plot on which to grant his wish. Even after his years of devotion to it, his many material contributions to its communal life, his love for its people and locale, he was still considered too much of a stranger in death to be allowed in. The idealized pastoral existence we thought we were enjoying had no real status in the town’s collective memory.