Columbia is not a pretty campus: still even more

     Columbia is not a pretty campus. With the gothic spires of Yale and the Georgian red brick of Harvard, it's as though two Ivy Leagues schools had a child whom they wanted to attend an Ivy League school.

 Another way of looking at Columbia is that it is a New Yorker's impersonation of an Ivy League: combining what it thinks to be the best parts of each school in order to create something that advertises perfectly that it doesn't belong among its colleagues: like New York intellectuals among the cosmopolitan. 

Every day I step onto campus and teach European literature to Jewish students. I then go to meetings among Jewish teachers. Occasionally I'm supervised by Jewish administrators. I publish in journals with Jewish editors. Then I go to dinners where everyone speaks of one topic and only one: Israel. 

They all seem to operate under a de facto assumption I'm one of them until I inform them otherwise: I don't know how I give the impression but they're always eager to let me into their club. I remind them my name is Said and they always protest they thought it was Sephardic. I point to my accent and they say that Professor Trilling sounds like a transatlantic Brahmin, why can't a Jew of our generation too? What they're really saying is "you speak pretentiously" because I don't round my r's and aw's.

Once they realize I'm an Arab, the racism comes later. First class resentment plays its part. They hear the boarding school in me and naturally assume they're dealing with the privilege of an Arab prince. My father was a successful merchant of the upper-middle class, much like most of their fathers. Only their fathers had all of New York to ply their wears. My father had to travel the Middle East so he gave the appearance of aristocracy he did not possess.

And that's when they hear that I grew up in Jerusalem before my family was thrown out, and I hear the  inevitable next sentence: 

'You weren't thrown out.'   

Exile takes on many, many forms. There is the forced exile of displacement, there is the internal exile of the discriminated, then there's the internal exile of the assistant professor, who bars his dignity from a series of classrooms, meetings and dinner parties to which no one there has desire to go. Other exiles are forced, this one is entirely self-generated. 

I suppose one should be grateful one is not over there. Being Protestant one is born in station over Palestinian Muslims who have suffered endlessly: before the Jews there were the Ottomans, the Syrians, the British, the French, even the Arabians. If anyone here knew the details of my biography, they would tell me I'm Egyptian and American, not Palestinian. They would call our family home in Jerusalem a mere vacation home and call it entirely typical of Palestinians to claim this land from the river to the sea as their inherent right when they're nothing but tourists. To be perfectly frank, I don't even know if I'm Palestinian. I've always felt out of place among Palestinians, Egyptians, the English and Americans. I am a nationality of one, possessing an internal passport shared not even by my sisters. One cannot deny it is an exile of extreme material comfort, but it is an exile of the self in perpetuum. 

But my reality is a world of un-reality--shared not even by other Saids, let alone by all the Awads, Al-Najars, El-Masrys and Odehs of the Gaza camps. I am merely marginalized, they are forgotten. It is far more convenient to forget them: to the world and to me; to the professional life I want, to the social life I loathe, to the life of an assistant professor people predict will be one of the great thinkers of our time, but care not at all for the person beneath the thought. 

I go to class and all the Jewish students mispronounce my name: Sed, Sayd, Sa-yed, Sa-yaad, Sah-eed, Saud, Soud, Sa-oood, in four years I think I've heard every malapropism on my name only for a student to find a new way of disfiguring it. Even the smart ones do it: especially the smart ones. I've tried to figure out whether this is a passive aggressive trait: unconscious hostility toward me lain beneath a person whose performance I have to judge. Or perhaps the students are smart enough to sense what faculty members never do: and their mispronunciation is a conscious code of reminding me that I'm not one of them. Or having their own names mispronounced so often by gentiles they unconsciously mispronounce mine as a kind of initiation ritual to make me feel at home among them. Or perhaps it's my own unconscious hostility toward them that I take it so personally. 

Nevertheless, they're generally very friendly, cooperative, good students, sometimes even solicitous of my welfare to a point that I find intrusive. Some of even shown signs of romantic interest: a number of whom display a number of features prized by the more debased among my colleagues. I, however, try not to indulge that time-honored tradition of dating my students as a matter of policy, though a few graduate students have made their interest in me quite plain. One even was male: I've been mistaken for a homosexual since Northfield Mount Hermon. One cannot simply be a dandy in the twentieth century. Instead I'm going with a business school Lebanese girl named Mariam who refers to herself as "Wall Street Friends of SDS."

Here at Columbia, they treat me as a new literary luminary, perhaps THE new literary luminary. They treat me as their child, their successor, the talking head of immaculate coif who pontificates complexity on television shows America's women have on in the background while they're vacuuming to remind themselves they once were allowed to use a brain rather than a body. They treat me as a curious melange of friend and son when all I want is to send them to hell, gahennim and jahannam as it were. Maybe I truly am the child of these obnoxiously combative semites, but if I am, I'm an Oedipal child and all I ever feel toward them is murder. 

I sit there, at yet another party not even they want to go to, glass of wine in hand that's expensive but not too expensive, as they pontificate to each other and particularly to me as the young man to whom they pass their great pearls of wisdom: Boswell to a series of Johnsons. They all seem to view me as the epilogue to their golden era that will make a career of remembering them to a public that never truly cared what they had to say any more than they care what I have to say. 

I suppose I will always recall that first meeting with Professor Trilling. I don't remember what he said, only that I was in the presence of a walking talking manifestation of combover with cigarette lined wrinkles: holder ever present in his yellow mouth, Brahmin affectations interrupted by spontaneous combustions of nervous excitement. He looks ever the same when he's excited and when he's agitated. The great Lionel Trilling: this purveyor of the academic perversion that is 'the world is too complex to not excuse the American imperium'. To all too many men like him of too many affectations and too few commitments, their scholarship is without value or values. With him comes that dual act with Diana, the supposed model of a progressive marriage for all America, but a double act in which Lionel begins a sentence and Diana interrupts, inevitably sauced in too much wine as Lionel copes with his terror of his wife by chain-lighting another Sobranie. 

It wasn't a day before this writer of The Liberal Imagination introduced me to Daniel Bell: writer of The End of Ideology who quite literally looks like that American toy, Mr. Potato Head; with a mustache that announces 'please don't take me seriously.' He plays the avuncular jocularity and kindness of a Flatbush cousin, but dryly advocates policies through statistical analysis that dehouse tens of thousands. He would of course exonerate himself for collaborating on that magazine of infamy, Public Interest, with those human pustules Irving Kristol and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, inevitably claiming his colleagues' ideology is not his own; a trait which, of course, he claims to not have. And yet the magazine somehow finds a way to clothe the repugnant ministrations of men like Robert Moses in high minded civil necessity. Everyone talks about his progressive marriage of equals with Diana, but in four years I have yet to encounter her for more than two minutes. What is this cerebral mole hiding from me? 

And then we move over to Jacques Barzun's office: the 'court goy', for a Claret and Armagnac. That ridiculously mummified ultraroyaliste of the 19th century for whom the world stopped the year he was born. He says nothing but every move poses for an invisible mental photograph of a statue frozen in disdainful hauteur. He simply sits there as Trilling provides the speciously high-minded verbiage Bell provides the amusing anecdotes, to which I have to provide the laughter and Barzun inevitably responds with a mere chortle.

Soon I meet their other collaborators: Hofstadter, McCarthy, Wilson... occasionally Hannah Arendt deigns to grace them with her chain-smoking presence, apparently Nabokov used to join this club when he visited from Ithaca or Switzerland until he and Wilson had their famous fight two years ago. We get graced with other ill-mannered presences: Kazin, Lipset, Fiedler, Glazer... everyone says there is complete freedom to disagree, but the danger of a fight feels ever present as the voices grow raised. Apparently it grew so rancorous a few years ago that the group 'moving right' stopped coming to their gatherings: as though nobody could tell what a walking homicide bomb like Norman Podhoretz would become from the moment he walked into the room for his first day of kindergarten. 

In our era of university unrest for which their status quo was the cause, they play their parts as the cold water on the hot coffee of the new radicalism inflaming the world after a generation of self-satisfied complacency which they enabled. These Jews play court historians and philosophers to WASPS who want nothing more than to solidify their position for an eternity of descendants. And in exchange for their blessing of the establishment, these Jews are solidified as the very next social class down: the bankers to their government, their academic foreign policy advisors, doctors and lawyers to the rich, with the prize that this government of Anglo-Saxon Protestant provides a secure Israel amid a sea of Arab enemies; barbarian hordes whom they inevitably allege to loathe democracy, loathe equality, and want nothing but declare holy war so as to impose sharia upon the entire world. 

These rough men in suits bloviate complexity and nuance, liberal internationalism, peace and understanding between nations and peoples, but they are Jewish nationalists to their blood, rams clothed in the wool of lambs. And for their mortared position amid the establishment, they throw Muslims to lions and pretend the lion will lie down amid the lamb. 

-----------------------------------

Dinner at Barzun's: The Trillings, Richard Hofstadter, Jacques Barzun, Hannah Arendt and Daniel Bell are there. 

Dianna Trilling: Edward, we understand the delicate position you're in. Don't worry, we will support you, we will protect you, we will make sure you don't have to answer any awkward questions. We will make sure Palestine doesn't come up for you. 

Edward Said: Well thank you so much Diana. I am moved by your solicitude. Let me assure you thus far Palestine has not come up for me, nor do I expect it to come up so often that it requires the protection of anyone. 

DT: These are wolves Edward. You haven't seen how brutal they can be yet but at some point you will find them breathtaking in their audacity to humiliate. 

Lionel Trilling: Now now, Mary, nobody here is a true Diogenes. Surely there are moments of discomfort, but 

Daniel Bell: (interrupting) We're not a school of sharks looking for kosher meat. 

(everyone laughed) 

ES: I should think you'd be searching for Hallal in my case but nevertheless I suppose some small pang of anxiety stands. 

Lionel Trilling: We've invited you to this dinner to alleviate that anxiety. You're one of us now. (raises a glass) To Edward, the future of American letters! 

Jacques Barzun: L'chaim I suppose. 

(everyone laughed again) 

Hannah Arendt: Nevertheless Edward, it would be edifying to get your sense of the Six Day War. 

(Trilling and Barzun exchanged a look) 

LT: Hannah, the whole point of this dinner is to ensure he doesn't have to talk about it. 

(I'd already had a few to get through the evening.) 

HA: He's a man of deep substance like any of us, he deserves to have his views heard and respected. Doesn't he? 

LT: Well he certainly deserves our respect. Jacques, would you object? 

JB: If this is the way we best pay tribute to Edward, please let him be heard.  

*(I give a cultural explanation that turns the subject back to literature: how Mahfouz and Adonis portray exile, how Darwish portrays war in his poetry, but that was apparently too close)  *

Edward's defenses drop, he becomes comfortable as conversation turns to Arab literature and Mahfouz, which leads to Adonis and Darwish, which leads back to the Palestinian problem. Said now says what he thinks. Arendt goads him on as interlocutor, but everybody else exchanges awkward looks. 

As Mary McCarthy says goodbye, she says "I'd like to discuss ways of neutralizing hostile parties who will try to inquisition you. There's a cafe across from my apartment." She grabs his arm and moves up to his forearm. He knows what this means. 

---------------------------

A flank within SDS heard about the dinner. Wants Said to come to a meeting to take a stand to speak for Palestine. Student named Samuel Berkowitz who brings up Palestine during discussion of Conrad and sees it as part and parcel of the struggle against the Vietnam War. Said is extremely reluctant to bring it up and asks students to confine the discussion to literature "But literature is political!" the student exclaims. After class Berkowitz stays and says "Professor Sed there are more of us than people think who see what's happening to you." "It's not happening to me, I'm over here." "Somebody needs to give the Palestinian perspective. So many students think your struggle is our struggle. Jewish students too!" Said still refuses: "It's not necessarily my strugle."

-------------------------------------------------

Said honestly thinks about going through with it. But his girlfriend has an emergency at the last moment, and he has to go see her. Word doesn't get to McCarthy. 

---------------------------------------------

Literary Party at the Trillings in honor of Jean-Paul Sartre. 

McCarthy tracks him down. Accepts his apology but notes her disappointment that he didn't show up. 

Include line: "Hemingway called literary New York a bottle of tapeworms trying to feed on each other." 

Diana invites Edward to give his opinion on the Six Day War: "Lionel speaks of you every day as our brightest new light. He says Edward could be the scholar of the age and people will quote your literary criticism for generations." 

Edward gives a careful answer through the lens of Conrad and Goethe.

Wilson begins questioning him seriously as literature with a slight political bite. 

Edward says one sentence that surprises everyone.

Wilson: "I had no idea you were such a pan-Arabist. Surely nationalism is something someone with your bildung would outgrow." 

Said: "Isn't Zionism a form of nationalism?" 

It just slipped out and the room went silent immediately. 

Room goes silent. 

L. Trilling: "I think what Edward is saying is that Palestinians only want the same dignity Jews want. Even if he's misunderstood it slightly." 

Mary McCarthy: "Please correct me if I'm wrong Edward, but isn't that operating on the oft-disputed assumption that Palestinians are their own people." 

Said: "Well, I'm no expert on orientalism but I would think I know my own people." 

MM:* (laughs)* "Edward, please, you're among friends. You can tell us. Did anybody call themselves Palestinian twenty years ago?" 

Said: (pauses) "Not often, I'll concede, but there had to be a name for us. We weren't quite Syrian, not quite Lebanese, not quite Egyptian." 

MM: "But surely, your people could have been Israeli had they cooperated!" 

Said: *(longer pause, micro-expression of annoyance then back to smiling) *"I don't think that was possible." 

MM: "Please don't be angry with me Edward. I just mean that surely there was a moment of possible cooperation before the Mufti allied himself with Hitler." 

Said: "al-Husseini was perfectly willing to cooperate with Ben-Gurion until he realized that the Yishuv meant to resettle Jews as a majority on Palestinian land." 

Edmund Wilson: "Surely you're not telling us that the Mufti was a perfectly reasonable man until he decided to annihilate all the Jews." 

Said: "Not at all, but I believe one has to consider the point of view of the other side however objectionable one finds it." 

EW: "Even when the other point of view is repugnant and murderous?" 

Said: "Especially when the other point of view is repugnant and murderous." 

Diana Trilling: "Oh, Edward." 

Said: "Everyone, you must understand that it's just as important for Palestinians to consider the Israeli point of view." 

EW: "Why would there even be a question of the Jewish point of view after the Holocaust?" 

Said: "Please, you must understand that Palestinians view Israeli settlers on the land as thieves and sometimes even murderers." 

DT: (looks incredulous) "I'm... truly... truly shocked to hear you say that. What could Israel possibly have done to make the Palestinians think so badly of them?"

Said: "Diana, I'm sorry, this is a very personal issue for Palestinians. My people were thrown off the land by Israeli soldiers." 

EW: "Edward! That was disproven a hundred times." 

Said: "I've heard so many eyewitness testimonies." 

MM: "Were you there?" 

Said: (getting visibly annoyed) "I wasn't." 

EW: "And you trust the testimony of a totalitarian pan-nationalist movement?" 

Said: "The people themselves are not totalitarians." 

EW: "Well I've seen them with my own eyes in Israel, and they subscribe to totalitarianism every bit as much as any Soviet." 

Said: "My people are not Nazis!" 

EW: "I said Soviet. They may not believe it, but please entertain Edward that they may be coerced by their leadership into giving false testimony." 

Said: "They're not being coerced. How could anyone coerce? No Palestinian leadership is that powerful!" 

Daniel Bell: "Wasn't it the dictators of other Arab countries who told Palestinians to leave their towns and they could resettle when the war was won?" 

Jacques Barzun: "Pardon me, Diana, if I may."

D. Trilling: "Of course, Jacques." 

Barzun: "There was credible eyewitness testimony at De'er Yassin that Israeli soldiers threw Palestinians out of their town: a requisition for military necessity. But afterward there was a mass panic that caused thousands of Arabs to leave their homes and head for territory held by Jordan and Egypt." 

Said: "That is not what happened." 

Wilson: "Indeed that is not what happened. Edward, grievance is not fact. You are asking the world to make Palestinians into pure victims at the expense of Jewish suffering."

Said: "I'm just asking people to recognize Palestinian suffering with the attention they pay to Jewish suffering." 

Cynthia Ozick: "As though there is any comparison between what you've endured and what we've endured." 

McCarthy: "What grievances does Edward have? Listen to yourself, Edward. You're not Palestinian, you're pure Andover-Exeter! You're more a gentile than any of us!" 

Said: (sets wineglass down on the table) "My friends, I thank you so much for this invitation, but I do have a Conrad article to finish on deadline." 

Everyone: "NO NO NO! PLEASE STAY! PLEASE STAY!" 

Diana: This is the sort of hazing we all went through Edward. I apologize, truly. This was not meant to be an ambush. There's just so much to talk about on this subject, but I realize now this issue means a great deal to you, probably more than it does to us. We will be mindful of what you think in the future. 

Ozick: "It does mean a great deal to him. Norman told me what you said at the SDS meeting." 

Said: "Norman?" 

CO: "Yes, you know Norman Podhoretz I'm sure. He told me you made a speech in which you declared that the struggle of Palestine against Israel is the struggle of Vietnam against the US." 

(silence) 

CO: "As it happens, Norman agrees with you, even if his orientation is reciprocal, but he thought we should know." 

L. Trilling (awkwardly turns to Sartre sitting in the corner): Jean-Paul, what do you think of all this?" 

Sartre: "(pauses to gather his thoughts...) It is truly the choice of being in itself, after being becomes irrelevant." 

(everyone nods: Wilson says "Outstanding.")

Sartre: "The facticity is undeniable, but one must be careful that the look is not bad faith."

(general murmurs of approval) 

After the exchange is over and the circle breaks up Lionel whispers to Said: "Edward, please stay to the end of the party. I'd like to speak to you. Please don't mind Diana, she says terrible things when she's intoxicated. She's already gone to the back to lie down." 

-------

later

Ozick takes my hand in both of hers. "It must be terrible to undergo an interrogation like this, get paced identity pasted They may not recognize you for you, but I know what you are."  What... I had to keep my smile: pasted and frozen as this Mount Holyoke lesbian in the garb of a Jewish mother dared call me an antisemite. 

D. Trilling: "Edward, please try to understand, we're terrified. I know we don't look it but there's not a single Jew who doesn't know someone lost." 

Said: "And that is equally true of my people." 

D. Trilling: "Is it?" 

L. Trilling: "This is not getting us anywhere. Tonight was supposed to be about literature and philosophy. This is where our new breed of student gets us: a weltanschauung where not a single idea is above politics, and it permeates us all. Now one can't even talk Conrad without conversation drifting to Israel and Vietnam." 

Said: "Is it so hard to believe Conrad would provoke that?" 

L. Trilling: "Edward, we need scholars more than ever to speak up for the complexity of the written word and liberal humanism." 

Said: "I was under the impression that's what I've tried to do so far in my whole academic life."  

L. Trilling: "My boy, I thought you were that voice and speaking up as you do so well you could do your small part to lower the temperature of this country's discourse." 

Said: "But Lionel, does the temperature truly need lowering?"  

L. Trilling: "My dear Edward I still think you can be that voice. You're young, you have a lot of the world to see yet and a lot of folly in which you will be both observer and participant as we all are. But it would be a terrible disappointment if we lost you to Fanon and Gramsci." 

I know what this means. Never bring up Palestine again or I don't get tenure. 

end of story 

Columbia is not a pretty campus: still more

   Columbia is not a pretty campus. With the gothic spires of Yale and the Georgian red brick of Harvard, it's as though two Ivy Leagues schools had a child whom they wanted to attend an Ivy League school.

 Another way of looking at Columbia is that it is a New Yorker's impersonation of an Ivy League: combining what it thinks to be the best parts of each school in order to create something that advertises perfectly that it doesn't belong among its colleagues: like New York intellectuals among the cosmopolitan. 

Every day I step onto campus and teach European literature to Jewish students. I then go to meetings among Jewish teachers. Occasionally I'm supervised by Jewish administrators. I publish in journals with Jewish editors. Then I go to dinners where everyone speaks of one topic and only one: Israel. 

They all seem to operate under a de facto assumption I'm one of them until I inform them otherwise: I don't know how I give the impression but they're always eager to let me into their club. I remind them my name is Said and they always protest they thought it was Sephardic. I point to my accent and they say that Professor Trilling sounds like a transatlantic Brahmin, why can't a Jew of our generation too? What they're really saying is "you speak pretentiously" because I don't round my r's and aw's.

Once they realize I'm an Arab, the racism comes later. First class resentment plays its part. They hear the boarding school in me and naturally assume they're dealing with the privilege of an Arab prince. My father was a successful merchant of the upper-middle class, much like most of their fathers. Only their fathers had all of New York to ply their wears. My father had to travel the Middle East so he gave the appearance of aristocracy he did not possess.

And that's when they hear that I grew up in Jerusalem before my family was thrown out, and I hear the  inevitable next sentence: 

'You weren't thrown out.'   

Exile takes on many, many forms. There is the forced exile of displacement, there is the internal exile of the discriminated, then there's the internal exile of the assistant professor, who bars his dignity from a series of classrooms, meetings and dinner parties to which no one there has desire to go. Other exiles are forced, this one is entirely self-generated. 

I suppose one should be grateful one is not over there. Being Protestant one is born in station over Palestinian Muslims who have suffered endlessly: before the Jews there were the Ottomans, the Syrians, the British, the French, even the Arabians. If anyone here knew the details of my biography, they would tell me I'm Egyptian and American, not Palestinian. They would call our family home in Jerusalem a mere vacation home and call it entirely typical of Palestinians to claim this land from the river to the sea as their inherent right when they're nothing but tourists. To be perfectly frank, I don't even know if I'm Palestinian. I've always felt out of place among Palestinians, Egyptians, the English and Americans. I am a nationality of one, possessing an internal passport shared not even by my sisters. One cannot deny it is an exile of extreme material comfort, but it is an exile of the self in perpetuum. 

But my reality is a world of un-reality--shared not even by other Saids, let alone by all the Awads, Al-Najars, El-Masrys and Odehs of the Gaza camps. I am merely marginalized, they are forgotten. It is far more convenient to forget them: to the world and to me; to the professional life I want, to the social life I loathe, to the life of an assistant professor people predict will be one of the great thinkers of our time, but care not at all for the person beneath the thought. 

I go to class and all the Jewish students mispronounce my name: Sed, Sayd, Sa-yed, Sa-yaad, Sah-eed, Saud, Soud, Sa-oood, in four years I think I've heard every malapropism on my name only for a student to find a new way of disfiguring it. Even the smart ones do it: especially the smart ones. I've tried to figure out whether this is a passive aggressive trait: unconscious hostility toward me lain beneath a person whose performance I have to judge. Or perhaps the students are smart enough to sense what faculty members never do: and their mispronunciation is a conscious code of reminding me that I'm not one of them. Or having their own names mispronounced so often by gentiles they unconsciously mispronounce mine as a kind of initiation ritual to make me feel at home among them. Or perhaps it's my own unconscious hostility toward them that I take it so personally. 

Nevertheless, they're generally very friendly, cooperative, good students, sometimes even solicitous of my welfare to a point that I find intrusive. Some of even shown signs of romantic interest: a number of whom display a number of features prized by the more debased among my colleagues. I, however, try not to indulge that time-honored tradition of dating my students as a matter of policy, though a few graduate students have made their interest in me quite plain. One even was male: I've been mistaken for a homosexual since Northfield Mount Hermon. One cannot simply be a dandy in the twentieth century. Instead I'm going with a business school Lebanese girl named Mariam who refers to herself as "Wall Street Friends of SDS."

Here at Columbia, they treat me as a new literary luminary, perhaps the new literary luminary. They treat me as their child, their successor, the talking head of immaculate coif who pontificates complexity on television shows America's women have on in the background while they're vaccuming to remind themselves they once were allowed to use a brain rather than a body. They treat me as a curious melange of friend and son when all I want is to send them to hell, gahennim and jahannam as it were. Maybe I truly am the child of these obnoxiously combative semites, but if I am, I'm an Oedipal child and all I ever feel toward them is murder. 

I sit there, at yet another party not even they want to go to, glass of wine in hand that's expensive but not too expensive, as they pontificate to each other and particularly to me as the young man to whom they pass their great pearls of wisdom: Boswell to a series of Johnsons whom they view as the epilogue to their golden era that will make a career of remembering them to a public that never truly cared what they had to say any more than they cared what I had to say. 

In our era of university unrest for which they were the cause, they play their parts as the cold water on the hot coffee of the new radicalism, inflaming the world after a generation of status quo that they enabled. Jews who play court historians and philosophers to WASPS who want nothing more than to solidify their position for an eternity of descendants. And in exchange for their blessing of the establishment, these Jews are solidified as the very next social class down: the bankers to their government, their academic foreign policy advisors, doctors and lawyers to the rich, with the prize of their government affixed to every unholy blessing they pronounce: a secure Israel amid a sea of Arab enemies; barbarian hordes who loathe democracy, loathe equality, and want nothing but declare holy war so as to impose sharia upon the entire world. 

These rough men in suits bloviate complexity and nuance, liberal internationalism, peace and understanding between nations and peoples, but they are Jewish nationalists to their blood, rams clothed in the wool of lambs. And for their mortared position amid the establishment, they throw Muslims to lions and pretend the lion will lie down amid the lamb. 

Small dinner at Mary McCarthy's: Trillings, Hofstadter, Barzun, Arendt and Daniel Bell there. 

"Edward, we understand the delicate position you're in. Don't worry, we will support you, we will protect you, we will make sure you don't have to answer any awkward questions. We will make sure Palestine doesn't come up for you. 

Edward's defenses drop, he becomes comfortable as conversation turns to Arab literature and Mahfouz, which leads to Adonis and Darwish, which leads back to the Palestinian problem. Said now says what he thinks. Arendt goads him on as interlocutor, but everybody else exchanges awkward looks. 

As Mary McCarthy says goodbye, she says "I'd like to discuss ways of neutralizing hostile parties who will try to inquisition you. There's a cafe across from my apartment." She grabs his arm and moves up to his forearm. He knows what this means. 

---------------------------

A flank within SDS heard about the dinner. Wants Said to come to a meeting to take a stand to speak for Palestine. Student named Samuel Berkowitz who brings up Palestine during discussion of Conrad and sees it as part and parcel of the struggle against the Vietnam War. Said is extremely reluctant to bring it up and asks students to confine the discussion to literature "But literature is political!" the student exclaims. After class Berkowitz stays and says "Professor Sed there are more of us than people think who see what's happening to you." "It's not happening to me, I'm over here." "Somebody needs to give the Palestinian perspective. So many students think your struggle is our struggle. Jewish students too!" Said still refuses: "It's not necessarily my strugle."

-------------------------------------------------

Said honestly thinks about going through with it. But his girlfriend has an emergency at the last moment, and he has to go see her. Word doesn't get to McCarthy. 

---------------------------------------------

Literary Party at the Trillings in honor of Jean-Paul Sartre. 

McCarthy tracks him down. Accepts his apology but notes her disappointment that he didn't show up. 

Include line: "Hemingway called literary New York a bottle of tapeworms trying to feed on each other." 

Diana invites Edward to give his opinion on the Six Day War: "Lionel speaks of you every day as our brightest new light. He says Edward could be the scholar of the age and people will quote your literary criticism for generations." 

Edward gives a careful answer through the lens of Conrad and Goethe.

Wilson begins questioning him seriously as literature with a slight political bite. 

Edward says one sentence that surprises everyone.

Wilson: "I had no idea you were such a pan-Arabist. Surely nationalism is something someone with your bildung would outgrow." 

Said: "Isn't Zionism a form of nationalism?" 

It just slipped out and the room went silent immediately. 

Room goes silent. 

L. Trilling: "I think what Edward is saying is that Palestinians only want the same dignity Jews want. Even if he's misunderstood it slightly." 

D. Trilling: "Please correct me if I'm wrong Edward, but isn't that operating on the oft-disputed assumption that Palestinians are their own people." 

Said: "Well, I'm no expert on orientalism but I would think I know my own people." 

D. Trilling:* (laughs)* "Edward, please, you're among friends. You can tell us. Did anybody call themselves Palestinian twenty years ago?" 

Said: (pauses) "Not often, I'll concede, but there had to be a name for us. We weren't quite Syrian, not quite Lebanese, not quite Egyptian." 

D. Trilling: "But surely, your people could have been Israeli had they cooperated!" 

Said: *(longer pause, micro-expression of annoyance then back to smiling) *"I don't think that was possible." 

D. Trilling: "Please don't be angry with me Edward. I just mean that surely there was a moment of possible cooperation before the Mufti allied himself with Hitler." 

Said: "al-Husseini was perfectly willing to cooperate with Ben-Gurion until he realized that the Yishuv meant to resettle Jews as a majority on Palestinian land." 

McCarthy: "Surely you're not telling us that the Mufti was a perfectly reasonable man until he decided to annihilate all the Jews." 

Said: "Not at all, but I believe one has to consider the point of view of the other side however objectionable one finds it." 

Edmund Wilson: "Even when the other point of view is repugnant and murderous?" 

Said: "Especially when the other point of view is repugnant and murderous." 

D. Trilling: "Oh, Edward." 

Said: "Everyone, you must understand that it's just as important for Palestinians to consider the Israeli point of view." 

Wilson: "Why would there even be a question of the Jewish point of view after the Holocaust?" 

Said: "Please, you must understand that Palestinians view Israeli settlers on the land as thieves and sometimes even murderers." 

D. Trilling: (looks incredulous) "I'm... truly... truly shocked to hear you say that. What could Israel possibly have done to make the Palestinians think so badly of them?"

Said: "Diana, I'm sorry, this is a very personal issue for Palestinians. My people were thrown off the land by Israeli soldiers." 

Wilson: "Edward! That was disproven a hundred times." 

Said: "I've heard so many eyewitness testimonies." 

McCarthy: "Were you there?" 

Said: (getting visibly annoyed) "I wasn't." 

McCarthy: "And you trust the testimony of a totalitarian pan-nationalist movement?" 

Said: "The people themselves are not totalitarians." 

Wilson: "Well I've seen them with my own eyes in Israel, and they subscribe to totalitarianism every bit as much as any Soviet." 

Said: "My people are not Nazis!" 

Wilson: "I said Soviet. They may not believe it, but please entertain Edward that they may be coerced by their leadership into giving false testimony." 

Said: "They're not being coerced. How could anyone coerce? No Palestinian leadership is that powerful!" 

D. Trilling: "Wasn't it the dictators of other Arab countries who told Palestinians to leave their towns and they could resettle when the war was won?" 

Jacques Barzun: "Pardon me, Diana, if I may."

D. Trilling: "Of course, Jacques." 

Barzun: "There was credible eyewitness testimony at De'er Yassin that Israeli soldiers threw Palestinians out of their town: a requisition for military necessity. But afterward there was a mass panic that caused thousands of Arabs to leave their homes and head for territory held by Jordan and Egypt." 

Said: "That is not what happened." 

Wilson: "Indeed that is not what happened. Edward, grievance is not fact. You are asking the world to make Palestinians into pure victims at the expense of Jewish suffering."

Said: "I'm just asking people to recognize Palestinian suffering with the attention they pay to Jewish suffering." 

Cynthia Ozick: "As though there is any comparison between what you've endured and what we've endured." 

McCarthy: "What grievances does Edward have? Listen to yourself, Edward. You're not Palestinian, you're pure Andover-Exeter! You're more a gentile than any of us!" 

Said: (sets wineglass down on the table) "My friends, I thank you so much for this invitation, but I do have a Conrad article to finish on deadline." 

Everyone: "NO NO NO! PLEASE STAY! PLEASE STAY!" 

Diana: This is the sort of hazing we all went through Edward. I apologize, truly. This was not meant to be an ambush. There's just so much to talk about on this subject, but I realize now this issue means a great deal to you, probably more than it does to us. We will be mindful of what you think in the future. 

Ozick: "It does mean a great deal to him. Norman told me what you said at the SDS meeting." 

Said: "Norman?" 

Ozick: "Yes, you know Norman Podhoretz I'm sure. He told me you made a speech in which you declared that the struggle of Palestine against Israel is the struggle of Vietnam against the US." 

(silence) 

Ozick: "As it happens, Norman agrees with you, even if his orientation is reciprocal, but he thought we should know." 

L. Trilling (awkwardly turns to Sartre sitting in the corner): Jean-Paul, what do you think of all this?" 

Sartre: "(pauses to gather his thoughts...) It is truly the choice of being in itself, after being becomes irrelevant." 

(everyone nods: Wilson says "Outstanding.")

Sartre: "The facticity is undeniable, but one must be careful that the look is not bad faith."

(general murmurs of approval) 

After the exchange is over and the circle breaks up Lionel whispers to Said: "Edward, please stay to the end of the party. I'd like to speak to you. Please don't mind Diana, she says terrible things when she's intoxicated. She's already gone to the back to lie down." 

-------

later

D. Trilling: "Edward, please try to understand, we're terrified. I know we don't look it but there's not a single Jew who doesn't know someone lost." 

Said: "And that is equally true of my people." 

D. Trilling: "Is it?" 

L. Trilling: "This is not getting us anywhere. Tonight was supposed to be about literature and philosophy. This is where our new breed of student gets us: a weltanschauung where not a single idea is above politics, and it permeates us all. Now one can't even talk Conrad without conversation drifting to Israel and Vietnam." 

Said: "Is it so hard to believe Conrad would provoke that?" 

L. Trilling: "Edward, we need scholars more than ever to speak up for the complexity of the written word and liberal humanism." 

Said: "I was under the impression that's what I've tried to do so far in my whole academic life."  

L. Trilling: "My boy, I thought you were that voice and speaking up as you do so well you could do your small part to lower the temperature of this country's discourse." 

Said: "But Lionel, does the temperature truly need lowering?"  

L. Trilling: "My dear Edward I still think you can be that voice. You're young, you have a lot of the world to see yet and a lot of folly in which you will be both observer and participant as we all are. But it would be a terrible disappointment if we lost you to Fanon and Gramsci." 

I know what this means. Never bring up Palestine again or I don't get tenure. 

end of story 

Columbia Is Not a Pretty Campus: Beginning to come together

  Columbia is not a pretty campus. With the gothic spires of Yale and the Georgian red brick of Harvard, it's as though two Ivy Leagues schools had a child whom they wanted to attend an Ivy League school.

 Another way of looking at Columbia is that it is a New Yorker's impersonation of an Ivy League: combining what it thinks to be the best parts of each school in order to create something that advertises perfectly that it doesn't belong among its colleagues: like New York intellectuals among the cosmopolitan. 

Every day I step onto campus and teach European literature to Jewish students. I then go to meetings among Jewish teachers. Occasionally I'm supervised by Jewish administrators. I publish in journals with Jewish editors. Then I go to dinners where everyone speaks of one topic and only one: Israel. 

They all seem to operate under a de facto assumption I'm one of them until I inform them otherwise: I don't know how I give the impression but they're always eager to let me into their club. I remind them my name is Said and they always protest they thought it was Sephardic. I point to my accent and they say that Professor Trilling sounds like a transatlantic Brahmin, why can't a Jew of our generation too? What they're really saying is "you speak pretentiously" because I don't round my r's and aw's.

Once they realize I'm an Arab, the racism comes later. First class resentment plays its part. They hear the boarding school in me and naturally assume they're dealing with the privilege of an Arab prince. My father was a successful merchant of the upper-middle class, much like most of their fathers. Only their fathers had all of New York to ply their wears. My father had to travel the Middle East so he gave the appearance of aristocracy he did not possess.

And that's when they hear that I grew up in Jerusalem before my family was thrown out, and I hear the  inevitable next sentence: 

'You weren't thrown out.'   

Exile takes on many, many forms. There is the forced exile of displacement, there is the internal exile of the discriminated, then there's the internal exile of the assistant professor, who bars his dignity from a series of classrooms, meetings and dinner parties to which no one there has desire to go. Other exiles are forced, this one is entirely self-generated. 

I suppose one should be grateful one is not over there. Being Protestant one is born in station over Palestinian Muslims who have suffered endlessly: before the Jews there were the Ottomans, the Syrians, the British, the French, even the Arabians. If anyone here knew the details of my biography, they would tell me I'm Egyptian and American, not Palestinian. They would call our family home in Jerusalem a mere vacation home and call it entirely typical of Palestinians to claim this land from the river to the sea as their inherent right when they're nothing but tourists. To be perfectly frank, I don't even know if I'm Palestinian. I've always felt out of place among Palestinians, Egyptians, the English and Americans. I am a nationality of one, possessing an internal passport shared not even by my sisters. One cannot deny it is an exile of extreme material comfort, but it is an exile of the self in perpetuum. 

But my reality is a world of un-reality--shared not even by other Saids, let alone by all the Awads, Al-Najars, El-Masrys and Odehs of the Gaza camps. I am merely marginalized, they are forgotten. It is far more convenient to forget them: to the world and to me; to the professional life I want, to the social life I loathe, to the life of an assistant professor people predict will be one of the great thinkers of our time, but care not at all for the person beneath the thought. 

I go to class and all the Jewish students mispronounce my name: Sed, Sayd, Sa-yed, Sa-yaad, Sah-eed, Saud, Soud, Sa-oood, in four years I think I've heard every malapropism on my name only for a student to find a new way of disfiguring it. Even the smart ones do it: especially the smart ones. I've tried to figure out whether this is a passive aggressive trait: unconscious hostility toward me lain beneath a person whose performance I have to judge. Or perhaps the students are smart enough to sense what faculty members never do: and their mispronunciation is a conscious code of reminding me that I'm not one of them. Or having their own names mispronounced so often by gentiles they unconsciously mispronounce mine as a kind of initiation ritual to make me feel at home among them. Or perhaps it's my own unconscious hostility toward them that I take it so personally. 

Nevertheless, they're generally very friendly, cooperative, good students, sometimes even solicitous of my welfare to a point that I find intrusive. Some of even shown signs of romantic interest: a number of whom display a number of features prized by the more debased among my colleagues. I, however, try not to indulge that time-honored tradition of dating my students as a matter of policy, though a few graduate students have made their interest in me quite plain. One even was male: I've been mistaken for a homosexual since Northfield Mount Hermon. One cannot simply be a dandy in the twentieth century. Instead I'm going with a business school Lebanese girl named Mariam who refers to herself as "Wall Street Friends of SDS." 

--------------------------------

Small dinner at Mary McCarthy's: Trillings, Hofstadter, Barzun, Arendt and Daniel Bell there. 

"Edward, we understand the delicate position you're in. Don't worry, we will support you, we will protect you, we will make sure you don't have to answer any awkward questions. We will make sure Palestine doesn't come up for you. 

Edward's defenses drop, he becomes comfortable as conversation turns to Arab literature and Mahfouz, which leads to Adonis and Darwish, which leads back to the Palestinian problem. Said now says what he thinks. Arendt goads him on as interlocutor, but everybody else exchanges awkward looks. 

As Mary McCarthy says goodbye, she says "I'd like to discuss ways of neutralizing hostile parties who will try to inquisition you. There's a cafe across from my apartment." She grabs his arm and moves up to his forearm. He knows what this means. 

---------------------------

A flank within SDS heard about the dinner. Wants Said to come to a meeting to take a stand to speak for Palestine. Student named Samuel Berkowitz who brings up Palestine during discussion of Conrad and sees it as part and parcel of the struggle against the Vietnam War. Said is extremely reluctant to bring it up and asks students to confine the discussion to literature "But literature is political!" the student exclaims. After class Berkowitz stays and says "Professor Sed there are more of us than people think who see what's happening to you." "It's not happening to me, I'm over here." "Somebody needs to give the Palestinian perspective. So many students think your struggle is our struggle. Jewish students too!" Said still refuses: "It's not necessarily my strugle."

-------------------------------------------------

Said honestly thinks about going through with it. But his girlfriend has an emergency at the last moment, and he has to go see her. Word doesn't get to McCarthy. 

---------------------------------------------

Literary Party at the Trillings in honor of Jean-Paul Sartre. 

McCarthy tracks him down. Accepts his apology but notes her disappointment that he didn't show up. 

Include line: "Hemingway called literary New York a bottle of tapeworms trying to feed on each other." 

Diana invites Edward to give his opinion on the Six Day War: "Lionel speaks of you every day as our brightest new light. He says Edward could be the scholar of the age and people will quote your literary criticism for generations." 

Edward gives a careful answer through the lens of Conrad and Goethe.

Wilson begins questioning him seriously as literature with a slight political bite. 

Edward says one sentence that surprises everyone.

Wilson: "I had no idea you were such a pan-Arabist. Surely nationalism is something someone with your bildung would outgrow." 

Said: "Isn't Zionism a form of nationalism?" 

It just slipped out and the room went silent immediately. 

Room goes silent. 

L. Trilling: "I think what Edward is saying is that Palestinians only want the same dignity Jews want. Even if he's misunderstood it slightly." 

D. Trilling: "Please correct me if I'm wrong Edward, but isn't that operating on the oft-disputed assumption that Palestinians are their own people." 

Said: "Well, I'm no expert on orientalism but I would think I know my own people." 

D. Trilling:* (laughs)* "Edward, please, you're among friends. You can tell us. Did anybody call themselves Palestinian twenty years ago?" 

Said: (pauses) "Not often, I'll concede, but there had to be a name for us. We weren't quite Syrian, not quite Lebanese, not quite Egyptian." 

D. Trilling: "But surely, your people could have been Israeli had they cooperated!" 

Said: *(longer pause, micro-expression of annoyance then back to smiling) *"I don't think that was possible." 

D. Trilling: "Please don't be angry with me Edward. I just mean that surely there was a moment of possible cooperation before the Mufti allied himself with Hitler." 

Said: "al-Husseini was perfectly willing to cooperate with Ben-Gurion until he realized that the Yishuv meant to resettle Jews as a majority on Palestinian land." 

McCarthy: "Surely you're not telling us that the Mufti was a perfectly reasonable man until he decided to annihilate all the Jews." 

Said: "Not at all, but I believe one has to consider the point of view of the other side however objectionable one finds it." 

Edmund Wilson: "Even when the other point of view is repugnant and murderous?" 

Said: "Especially when the other point of view is repugnant and murderous." 

D. Trilling: "Oh, Edward." 

Said: "Everyone, you must understand that it's just as important for Palestinians to consider the Israeli point of view." 

Wilson: "Why would there even be a question of the Jewish point of view after the Holocaust?" 

Said: "Please, you must understand that Palestinians view Israeli settlers on the land as thieves and sometimes even murderers." 

D. Trilling: (looks incredulous) "I'm... truly... truly shocked to hear you say that. What could Israel possibly have done to make the Palestinians think so badly of them?"

Said: "Diana, I'm sorry, this is a very personal issue for Palestinians. My people were thrown off the land by Israeli soldiers." 

Wilson: "Edward! That was disproven a hundred times." 

Said: "I've heard so many eyewitness testimonies." 

McCarthy: "Were you there?" 

Said: (getting visibly annoyed) "I wasn't." 

McCarthy: "And you trust the testimony of a totalitarian pan-nationalist movement?" 

Said: "The people themselves are not totalitarians." 

Wilson: "Well I've seen them with my own eyes in Israel, and they subscribe to totalitarianism every bit as much as any Soviet." 

Said: "My people are not Nazis!" 

Wilson: "I said Soviet. They may not believe it, but please entertain Edward that they may be coerced by their leadership into giving false testimony." 

Said: "They're not being coerced. How could anyone coerce? No Palestinian leadership is that powerful!" 

D. Trilling: "Wasn't it the dictators of other Arab countries who told Palestinians to leave their towns and they could resettle when the war was won?" 

Jacques Barzun: "Pardon me, Diana, if I may."

D. Trilling: "Of course, Jacques." 

Barzun: "There was credible eyewitness testimony at De'er Yassin that Israeli soldiers threw Palestinians out of their town: a requisition for military necessity. But afterward there was a mass panic that caused thousands of Arabs to leave their homes and head for territory held by Jordan and Egypt." 

Said: "That is not what happened." 

Wilson: "Indeed that is not what happened. Edward, grievance is not fact. You are asking the world to make Palestinians into pure victims at the expense of Jewish suffering."

Said: "I'm just asking people to recognize Palestinian suffering with the attention they pay to Jewish suffering." 

Cynthia Ozick: "As though there is any comparison between what you've endured and what we've endured." 

McCarthy: "What grievances does Edward have? Listen to yourself, Edward. You're not Palestinian, you're pure Andover-Exeter! You're more a gentile than any of us!" 

Said: (sets wineglass down on the table) "My friends, I thank you so much for this invitation, but I do have a Conrad article to finish on deadline." 

Everyone: "NO NO NO! PLEASE STAY! PLEASE STAY!" 

Diana: This is the sort of hazing we all went through Edward. I apologize, truly. This was not meant to be an ambush. There's just so much to talk about on this subject, but I realize now this issue means a great deal to you, probably more than it does to us. We will be mindful of what you think in the future. 

Ozick: "It does mean a great deal to him. Norman told me what you said at the SDS meeting." 

Said: "Norman?" 

Ozick: "Yes, you know Norman Podhoretz I'm sure. He told me you made a speech in which you declared that the struggle of Palestine against Israel is the struggle of Vietnam against the US." 

(silence) 

Ozick: "As it happens, Norman agrees with you, even if his orientation is reciprocal, but he thought we should know." 

L. Trilling (awkwardly turns to Sartre sitting in the corner): Jean-Paul, what do you think of all this?" 

Sartre: "(pauses to gather his thoughts...) It is truly the choice of being in itself, after being becomes irrelevant." 

(everyone nods: Wilson says "Outstanding.")

Sartre: "The facticity is undeniable, but one must be careful that the look is not bad faith."

(general murmurs of approval) 

After the exchange is over and the circle breaks up Lionel whispers to Said: "Edward, please stay to the end of the party. I'd like to speak to you. Please don't mind Diana, she says terrible things when she's intoxicated. She's already gone to the back to lie down." 

-------

later

D. Trilling: "Edward, please try to understand, we're terrified. I know we don't look it but there's not a single Jew who doesn't know someone lost." 

Said: "And that is equally true of my people." 

D. Trilling: "Is it?" 

L. Trilling: "This is not getting us anywhere. Tonight was supposed to be about literature and philosophy. This is where our new breed of student gets us: a weltanschauung where not a single idea is above politics, and it permeates us all. Now one can't even talk Conrad without conversation drifting to Israel and Vietnam." 

Said: "Is it so hard to believe Conrad would provoke that?" 

L. Trilling: "Edward, we need scholars more than ever to speak up for the complexity of the written word and liberal humanism." 

Said: "I was under the impression that's what I've tried to do so far in my whole academic life."  

L. Trilling: "My boy, I thought you were that voice and speaking up as you do so well you could do your small part to lower the temperature of this country's discourse." 

Said: "But Lionel, does the temperature truly need lowering?"  

L. Trilling: "My dear Edward I still think you can be that voice. You're young, you have a lot of the world to see yet and a lot of folly in which you will be both observer and participant as we all are. But it would be a terrible disappointment if we lost you to Fanon and Gramsci." 

I know what this means. Never bring up Palestine again or I don't get tenure. 

end of story 

The Tenth Muse: 60%? 70%?

  What does it mean, this tale we are about to read? How shall we understand it, ladies and gentlemen? Soon the music will begin, a movie will unfold. Where is the screen? Within? Without? It tells of matters both bitter and sweet. It tells of the world's conflicts and the soul's mysteries. Who knows where this tale came from? We can only read... and wonder.  

 Music sounds, the film begins. 

You may applaud when it's over, ladies and gentlemen. An old castle, an old story.  

 Read now... 

 ------------------ 

 This, with a few changes, was the prelude I wrote for the libretto of Bluebeard's Castle. Isn't it just perfectly awful? Perfectly cliche? I have never written a more exquisite bit of poetry or prose in my life, but the exquisiteness of this passage is agony: of a banality entirely worthy of Bela Balasz's place in world culture.  Sadly it was saved by Bartok's magnificent score, the other Bela, the real Bela who never used more than seven words a day. He was the one with inspiration, I just lifted the deliberately functional words I wrote to describe the plot in the outline and put it into the libretto.  It is truly amazing how opera can be so compelling while having no literary merit whatsoever.

Here is the most humiliating part: it was entirely deliberate. I wanted to write bad drama and I completely succeeded. The more insipid the script, the more flights permitted the composer of imaginative leaps that defy all rational consideration. One chord can provide a thousand implications where a mere sentence provides five.  

And if music is liberated by bad writing, how much more liberated by it is film? We had thought there to be no art work more total than opera--a combination of all nine muses. But cinema is the tenth muse: all nine muses work together in opera, but cinema provides the portal through which we may encounter the muses themselves.  

  

 And what better subject is there to inspire ten muses to sing than the women themselves who inspire such flights? Opera is the realm of Violetta, Aida, Isolde, Mimi, Susanna, Pamina: operas through which heterosexual composers pour their longings--whether requited, unrequited, seduction or lament, it never matters. What matters is the longing, the pedestal, the sehnsucht, the desire to memorialize an ineffable longing forever in a sculpture of stone and ice. Until the emergence of this new composer, Britten, there has not been an unquestionably great homosexual operatist. The rest is all female heroines to whom the men fall in love, onstage and in the audience, even when the soprano needs to lose 50 kilograms. Yet homosexuals too identify with these heroines as though themselves. 

Given the ability to see women in closeup, I thought movies would be entirely straight. Then I saw The Blue Angel, and the homosexuals were as in love with Marlene Dietrich as we were. I met Lena back in '24, noticing her on a movie set when no one else seemed to. She was magnetic even when she was an extra and knew just who she was. Within five minutes of introducing myself I said I would write her a script. The exchange was implied, but even then she was determined. She announced to me that one day she would be a star and we'd work together, 'I would hate to ruin the sexual tension between us.' We did not work together, the tension was as one-sided as what she shared with a hundred million men. 

And yet it was a mystery to me how one day I would become Professor Unrat. 

We all know the woman who gave me horns by a different name, but her first name was Helene, and this Helene so bewitched that the Fuhrer himself went to war with her image in his mind. 

There were the almond eyes of a mesmerist, narrowing at the slightest hint of a joke and lids melting at the slightest erotic attention. What's in the eyes is pure adventure: mischief upheld by utter control and self-assertion. What's behind the eyes is a Neuchatel clock: look closely and within a second of anything explained to her one sees the eyes dart and the head jolt. Behind the laughs and wit is a person whom the very eyes told you would do everything, go everywhere, and master it all with determination of iron and concrete. Whatever the world is for other women, the world was built for her will. The world is built for those who master all to which they take upon themselves and do so so agreeably that no one is aware of her mastery's extent until the work is done; and therefore, look closely. You know that one day the world will stand at her attention. 

 I have always been fascinated by the rare such woman, that woman who climbs from the pits of Tartarus to which the fairer sex is always hurled: women like Bluebeard's Judit with the determination to fight with Bluebeard's entire armory. Some are moral giants like that Scholl girl; others, like Marlene Dietrich, become the toast of the earth. Others? Others are like Leni.

Like any great work of art, Leni is a work of a thousand interpretations. There is the story of her evil, there is the story of her ambition, there is the story of her spite and seduction. None of these are true. 

I do not know the truth behind Leni, I doubt even Leni truly knew the person in herself, but as I choose to tell this story: I tell you my Leni. My Leni was the nicest, most generous, gemutlicher woman in Germany. She was oh so generous with time, money, favors, sociability, and beneath it all, I had the sense she would send it all to hell had she a democrat's choice. This relentlessly ambitious mind took upon herself every task she was offered: every task offered everyone else too, and she so hated the extent of it that she took on herself responsibilities precisely so she could destroy herself. 

It was neither ambition nor evil that seduced Leni, it was danger. So preoccupied was she with mastering the world's newest, greatest art that she grew to hate the very thing she mastered. This mistress of cinema deliberately lodged herself into history as its greatest villain. On the surface she was Lola Lola from The Blue Angel, but there was no killer from M beneath the surface, beneath the surface was a Brunnhilde driven to ride herself into Siegfried's funeral pyre, a Faust (Fausta) who made a deal with Mephistopheles to inherit a world she never wanted. 

The name is Balazs Bela: international socialist, Hungarian exile, editor of fairy tales, Bluebeard's librettist, film theorist who puts readers to sleep; but film reviewer of renown who strikes fear in producer's hearts, and therefore bribed into being a film writer of mediocre distinction. These are all my hobbies: my profession, my calling, my place in history, is seduction. As an artist I'm no candidate for greatness, as a critic I am cliche, but as a seducer, I am the Magyar Byron without a pfennig of his dashing looks. No, my seduction is entirely through words, listening, wit, persistence and good taste in wine. I pity the era when women achieve their long delayed liberation and an ugly Jew must seduce women purely by virtue of his merit. 

Great artists like Bartok and Kodaly, Pabst and Korda; life doesn't matter to them. All that is their lives, they put into art. To me, only life matters. Always give me more life, and more, and more. Art is there so crafty men like me may live better. Who is the greater artist: the art-maker who sacrifices everything so he may create, or the aesthete who hears their opera, looks at their art, eats their meal, walks through their garden with women so charming they are artworks unto themselves? Art is a gift to us, a blessing from the Gods. As the man who takes joy in the result, am I not the greater artist than the artist who suffers for it? 

But I knew better than consider myself an active candidate for Leni. Most beautiful women are lonely, housebound creatures of intelligence who might as well be spinsters. Leni is a man deposited in the body of a wonderbeauty, and because she speaks their language, forty men of intellect were in love with her at any given time and so were their forty wives. Every city of Europe must have these great women imprisoned by the salon whom but for accident of birth would be great men. Rather, the great men in their midst achieve greatness by the muses they play. Vienna has Alma Schindler, Paris had Georges Sand, but Berlin is Europe's greatest city of all because it teems with these creative women: Marlene Dietrich, Lotte Lenya, Lou Salome and Leni Riefenstahl. But Leni alone escaped the confines of salon, sex and submission to become the maestra herself who sets the tempo, balances the harmonies and calibrates the dynamics. 

I had no reason to believe she would choose me, and having no end of occupations I happily resigned myself to a gentleman's friendship of exemplary company: exhibiting patience and pleasantness as she took home men of twice my brawn and artists of twice my brain. But knowing that I must be magnanimous to gain entree to her good grace, I offered to write my mediocre dialogue for her directorial debut, free of charge. This hits on the great unmentioned secret of film: only the Jews are willing to pay real money so they may combat their reputations; everyone else is cheap. 

Once I got onto her filmset, I happened on the idea of seducing her co-star, Martha Mair. Every night, a new club, every day, a new bottle of champagne. All of cultural Berlin saw us together within a week, yet I never took her home: never much more than a kiss between us. The next week, Leni barged into my office genially with a brilliant idea. Let's scrap Martha's part, write her out of the script and make her part into a man's. She set those almond eyes on me and what could I possibly do but accede?

When Martha found out she barged into my office ferociously first thing in the morning. She told me I sold her out to a more powerful woman who wasn't as beautiful as her: "it's because Leni's a goi! Isn't it?!" 

I assured her Leni was no Aryan goddess and Jews like us have to stand up for each other in this business of vampires. What was shameful was that I believed it. She told me I was just another Jewish film executive using his power to get forbidden women and sell out his own landsleit. I told her this wasn't true and she was the only one for which I had eyes, and I would write her a movie that made her a star as big as Leni or Lena. Suddenly her eyes turned into the smoldering bonfire of Theda Bara's Salome. She pulled down my trousers and revived me in the office with the door half ajar. What could I do but promise that Leni and I would restore her part?

That day, the rest of us had to fly to the Italian Dolomites. I threw up on the fight. It was Leni who insisted on cleaning me up herself and ordered me a change of clothes from the costumes. And from 12:30 we spoke for 17 1/2 hours without a stop, until 5 the next morning before a 6 AM call. She offered me Scottish whiskey and Cuban cigars, which I accepted happily. She poured and lit for herself too, but I never did I see her put the drink or cigar to her mouth. I have only vague memories of what we discussed, but when we finally arrived at her cottage her face became obscured by darkness I felt as though for the first time I appreciated her crainioscopy in action: a mind moving with the speed of lighting, synthesizing all concepts of the world into order tightly enough for Kant: I don't remember her theories, but I remember things mentioned: Max Reinhardt and ballet, classical sculpture and Wagner, silent film and dance: especially dance. She enacted all the movements she wished to put in a musical film like Love Me Tonight or One Hour With You, only taking place in the days before the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and the songs set to the music of Tchaikovsky: and as moonlight bathed her silhouette, she acted a whole ballet from her mind with the grace of Pavlova and the voice of Lilli Lehmann. And then she demonstrated the end: the hero marched off to the Great War, and you saw our hero disappear among a cadre of a thousand marchers: and in the moonlight she stepped in time with the ending march of Sleeping Beauty. 

That morning Martha was officially reinstated. She never revived me again. 

But 130 minutes later, at 7:10, Leni showed me a perfect sketch of a waterfall shot. A shot we needed by eight in the morning to get the proper sunlight with a 7.5 focal lens, R-stock filmstock with a red filter so that the palette comes out a darkest blue. No one else was there and we couldn't wait for the production team. I asked our driver where might be a good waterfall facing east and he drove us to the waterfall like the madman. When I saw the shot, I told her it couldn't be done, so did the driver. The mountains were much too steep and neither of us were willing to climb all that way to man equipment we thought ourselves sure to drop or fall. She threw her hands up, climbed one of the mountains alone with the camera and placed it herself. She lodged it in the dirt at an angle that could have destroyed the camera if it so much as dropped let alone fell. Then, production cost be damned, she kept the film rolling, descended the mountain, then climbed a second mountain so she could film herself next to the waterfall. With no one even to watch the camera, she got that shot in one take. 

--------------------------

Martha was right about one thing: movies are a business that only works by someone looking out for you. We call it a capitalist enterprise, but it's a business determined by an aristocracy for which every creator requires a Medici. My patron was Harry Sokal; as it turned out he was Leni's patron too. I only had chance to work with her because he recommended his lover to me as an actress, a soon to be bankable starlet, and a piece of arsch: but I knew what it was--offering a chance at his mistress as yet another bribe. But I had nothing like Harry Sokal's power, and by 1931 long knew better than think I had enough influence to win a starlet soon to fill a movie house. I contented myself with Sokal's wife, with his full knowledge of course, a woman whose ideas for films were better than Sokal's but left alone in a giant Charlottenburg villa. 

This is the moment I should probably concede I'm married too. We have an open marriage and she understands that beneath these foppish cravats lurks a primitive animal whose Magyar heart she cannot satisfy any more than I hers. In those days of my forties I spent days I should have written plays smoking in the beds of their producers, served a late lunch fixed by their wives as I read their newspapers while smoking in their bathrobes: those wives were usually actresses themselves, withdrawn from the stage when they hit thirty like milk feared spoiled before its smelled. The stupidest of these actresses married other actors: actors who could bestride the floorboards as leading men into their sixties and in ten years would leave their wives of ever so slight wrinkles for a younger actress. The smartest actresses married producers: a specimen smart enough themselves to know that sex is disposable but reputation is not. The producers would come to parties with their wives, striking and ageless in form fitting gowns like velvet wrapped ivory, but so preoccupied are the producers with the newest models that they don't realize that beneath their ivory statues lurk wolverinas who have not been fed properly in years. 

Leni would seem to be properly fed every day since she was twenty: men, women, men who thought they were women, women who thought themselves men; stars, directors, producers, stuntmen, cameramen, athletes, military men. Weimar Berlin was a place of sex without precedent or succession. Yet I believe there was one place she was not fed. 

As a screenwriter, there is very little to do in post-production. I had yet to receive a new assignment, and tried to read Narcissus und Goldmund: the latest Hesse. I did not get more than five pages before I heard sobbing from a few offices over: I would not recognize the weeping had I not heard the same voice sing: it was Leni. 

I seized my chance and went to attempt consolation. 

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Leni: (between sobs) The film's no good.

Bela: It isn't? 

Leni: It's furchtbar. 

Bela: How can it be furchtbar?

Leni: You didn't see it!

Bela: I saw the rushes, what I saw was everything we hoped it would be. 

Leni: Then I ruined it (starts crying again).

Bela: You didn't ruin anything. 

Leni: How could this film turn out this way? 

Bela: How did it turn out? 

Leni: The studio hates it! The test audiences hate it! I watched the movie on my own, now I hate it! 

Bela: They don't see what I see. 

Leni: What do you see?

Bela: A beautiful woman who's also a genius. 

Leni: GET OUT! 

Bela: I'm sorry? 

Leni: LEAVE MY SET! 

And she threw the movie cannister at me. 

Bela: What did I say?

No member of the fairer sex ever dared speak to me like this.

Leni: I am not one of your schlampes who falls for easy praise! 

Bela: I think you misunderstood me. 

Leni: All Berlin knows the great Bela Balazs! The mediocrity who writes Hungarian chicanery in German newspapers that derides the achievements of German artists and technicians who work seventeen hours a day to create the films you so deride then gets to sleep producers' wives so their films get good reviews! 

Bela: Well you certainly misunderstand my job. 

Leni: Critics are parasites! We have no need for you! 

Bela: I'm not a critic. I'm a man of film: reviewer, theorist, screenwriter, and friend to talent. If I thought I had any talent myself I would direct. 

Leni: What friend? 

Bela: In the beginning of my career I was friend to the talent of composers: Bartok, Kodaly, they needed a man who would listen to their ideas, occasionally provide a piece of commentary, then promote their work to the intelligentsia and even the masses should the occasion arise. It's true, I'm Hungarian. Think for a moment how many poor gypsy musicians might have been great composers if they had the education or the money. 

Leni: Why did you go to film then? 

Bela: Beacuse film is democratic. Film is art for the age of the worker. A great artist of film needn't be an aristocrat or bourgeois, they just need to show up to work with a camera. A great artist of film may even be a Jew, or even, God beware it, a woman. 

Leni: There are enough great Jewish directors. 

Bela: We had no way of knowing that twenty years ago. How do you think the Wiene brothers became as great as they are? They had their talent but they needed opportunities, and they needed writers to champion them. Without writers like me, Robert Wiene would have been done after Dr. Caligari and we wouldn't have Raskalnikow or IMRI or Hands of Orloc. 

Leni: So you came to film to promote talented Jews in the press?

Bela: I promote talented people, not Jews. I championed Metropolis when people hated it. I wrote about Pandora's Box and Faust when no one saw them. I was one of the first critics to tell people to see Nosferatu. I wrote about why Conrad Veidt and Werner Krauss were actors as great as anyone acting in Brecht. I wrote about Lena Dietrich when she was a bit player and I certainly never slept with her! 

Leni: Then why did you never write about me?

Bela: Because we had the same patron: Harry Sokal, and even a corrupt lusting like me has some ethics. 

Leni: But you'll write for me? 

Bela: I made a point of writing for you, even for free. I got to all these men when they were already artists, but I wanted to see the birth of a genius at its inception and watch as it mastered film in embryo. 

Leni: This is quatsch! 

Bela: This is genius! But it needs help! 

Leni; Genius doesn't need help. 

Bela: This is what I've tried to tell you. Nothing needs more help than genius! Genius is fragile, genius blows away at the slightest setback. But an artist becomes a genius because he disregards the setback and keeps working until the work of genius appears!

Leni: This is not a work of genius. 

Bela: You don't know that yet! Why don't we recut the movie together. 

Leni: But I...

Bela: Let's watch the movie...

Leni: It's terrible. 

Bela: It's not terrible. Even if it's terrible, it's not terrible. 

Leni: I can't bare to let you watch it. 

Bela: You will let me watch it! After seeing your temper I'm convinced you're the strongest woman in Germany and you can survive letting someone see a movie that isn't up to the standards of a genius. 

Leni: Do you promise not to tell people about the cut you saw here? 

Bela: I swear. 

Leni: You'd never go behind my back like that? 

Bela: Your secret is safe here. You're safe here. I promise. 

She embraced me and did not leave my arms. 

Leni: A great artist would make a great film. 

Bela: You HAVE made a great film. But a film is born three times, once in script, once in filming, once in editing. 

Leni: This film is still born. 

Bela: Such a thing does not exist.

Leni: I have no idea how to make it better.  

Bela: Do you know why I offered to work for you free of charge? 

Leni: You came to me because you wanted to sleep with me. 

Bela: Yes, but I heard you were the most talented, intelligent young artist in Germany, and the reports were true.

Leni: I'd only be the most talented if Lang and Sternberg leave. 

Bela: You're the most talented now! What would Sternberg be without Lena Dietrich? What would Lang be without Thea von Harbou? 

Leni: They are geniuses!

Bela: They are geniuses because women inspire them to be geniuses! Without the muse there is nothing! 

Leni: Then I'm just a muse. 

Bela: No you're not. You're the rare muse who has stepped out from stone to become the poetess herself! You are your own muse and need no man. 

Leni: (looks at me) I need men very badly. 

Bela: You're right. People only call me Berlin's best scriptwriter because they're afraid how I might review them otherwise. But since people call me that, I can offer my services to anyone I want. I could go to Sternberg or Lang or Wiene or Pabst, get a lot of money and try to bed their stars: it would be a lot easier. But here was a beautiful woman kissed by genius. I chose you. Germany's chosen you.

And she kissed me. 

For the first time in my life, I was faithful. 

---------------------------

We cut the movie. It was good. Not as good as the dailies, but I knew it would be a hit. 

But then when it was time to show the movie to Harry, she'd recut the movie completely and it was the movie of a genius. 

And then we retired to the waterways of Spreewald, and we were happy. 

----------------------------

We came in the spring, we stayed until winter. There was no money in film for the sorts of films she wanted to make. 

Leni didn't care much about politics, but she was a good socialist like us all. Just like Brecht made plays, she wanted to make films that exposed the injustices of the world so we could not look away. Her heart was set on a project filmed on location in Africa to expose the modern day slave trade. While the plot would be filmed in studio, it would be surrounded by a full half-hour's footage of the slaves themselves in all their appalling conditions. Every day I'd hear her on the phone explaining her vision to another producer: all of whom told her the same mantra--there isn't the money for it. 

It was true. This was the Great Depression. There was barely money for a trip to Africa, let alone a movie on location, where lives of entire crews would be endangered in attempts to get the proper footage. But Leni was a woman of implacable resolve. This was the movie she wanted to make, and she waited all too patiently. When there was no money in Germany, she tried producers in France, Italy, Great Britain, all of whom told her the same. She would not be deterred, and attempted to find the numbers of adventurous Hollywood producers like Irving Thalberg and David O. Selznick: known for taking at least mild risks. 

Yet you would never know: you never saw her upset. Every day, she simply hung up the phone after speaking with yet another producer, went back to her drawings, her mountains, her rivers, passed the days in perfect harmony with the surroundings, and then we went to bed. 

She canoed. We canoed. I finished a screenplay, called The Visions of Hildegard. She photographed our property every day then moved onto photographing the property of neighbors. I read my books. She climbed the Krausnicks, and when she reached the mountain's peak, drew everything she saw. We played tennis. She taught me to dance. We played four-hand piano duets. We swam in the waterways together. She was happier than she'd ever been; or so she claimed. I was happier than I'd ever been, but I knew better than to say it out loud. We planned on returning to Berlin in the winter, ready to sell the movie to whomever held pursestrings at that moment with a pitch I helped plan for her as though it were a screenplay itself. 

But we loved the country so much that we decided to stay through the winter, play in the snow and keep each other warm. 

And we discussed what happens in the unlikely event a certain Uncle Wolfie takes power. We didn't want to think about it, but she forced me to. I had contacts in Russian film, I'd visited the Soviet Union just last year. I'd previously corresponded with Dziga Vertov at length for years, met Alexander Dovzhenko a number of times in the studio. Post filming he'd lock the door to his studio and next to the camera we'd discuss film and art over copious vodka. Vertov even arranged dinner with Czar of Cinema himself: Sergei Eisenstein. 

Such an enlightened country was surely looking for a woman of genius, and would crow to the west about giving her the chance to make her masterpieces while the West was still caught in the chauvinism of old. 

But even Leni tabled that discussion whenever she could. 

Then Uncle Wolfie was elected. We didn't even vote. 

When she heard the news, Leni was utterly firm in her instant decision. 

Leni: We're not going back to Berlin. We'll never go back if we have to. 

Bela: You have contracts. 

Leni: Everything changes now. Contracts mean nothing. 

Bela: But what about your career?

Leni: NOTHING GOOD CAN COME FROM RETURNING! You will not return to Berlin! I'm staying with you until we go to Moscow and I will tie you to the bed if I have to! 

Bela: But what about your artworks, your cameras, your 

Leni: NOTHING GOOD WILL COME FROM BERLIN! 

Three weeks later, she off-handedly brought up the idea of having a child after the move to Moscow. 

The day before she brought it up, we had the most unlikely visit I'd ever had in my life. Fritz Lang: film's Kaiser himself, there in our cottage with his monocle and pursed lips: maker of Metropolis, the most expensive movie ever made and possibly the best. Nobody saw it, no friend saw it no matter how often I mentioned it. And just when everyone was ready to declare this Kaiser deposed, he'd made M: a movie that perfectly reflected of the Fatherland itself--poor, bruised, deacdent, awash in crime and murdering the future of its children. Of course, he wasn't there to visit me, he was there for Leni, and asked to speak to her alone. 

My crest fell to the floor. I knew he was there to take Leni away from this paradise. I could never have known what he offered her: abscond with him to Hollywood. Goebbels had just offered him to run the German film industry, and he was taking the next train out of Germany for as long as the Nazis were in power, knowing that saying no to Hitler may forfeit his life and Thea's.  

He wanted Leni to come with him: run away with him practically. I have no idea if Lang had any erotic designs on Leni: he looked as though he'd never even heard of eros and his ultra-violent movies always looked similar. But Sternberg had Lena Dietrich, and even if Lang had his wife Thea to write his screenplays, he needed a German star to work with him and tap the European markets where German movies were the brand of the highest quality. 'You are Marlene's exact opposite" He told her. "Apollo to her Dionysus." Dancing where Lena sang. Naive where Lena was stophisticated. There would be plenty of young starlets to compete with, but a beautiful woman with a foreign accent who learns good English would go everywhere in that town. And if she wanted to direct, Hollywood may not allow it but Broadway would, the Metropolitan Opera would, and a Ballet Russe choreographer named Balanchine is trying to found a national ballet company for America and would require a second choreographer. 

Leni left the meeting. Lang boarded the train for Switzerland. Leni threw up. 

-----------------------------------------------

The Tenth Muse: Halfish

 What does it mean, this tale we are about to read? How shall we understand it, ladies and gentlemen? Soon the music will begin, a movie will unfold. Where is the screen? Within? Without? It tells of matters both bitter and sweet. It tells of the world's conflicts and the soul's mysteries. Who knows where this tale came from? We can only read... and wonder.  

 Music sounds, the film begins. 

You may applaud when it's over, ladies and gentlemen. An old castle, an old story.  

 Read now... 

 ------------------ 

 This, with a few changes, was the prelude I wrote for the libretto of Bluebeard's Castle. Isn't it just perfectly awful? Perfectly cliche? I have never written a more exquisite bit of poetry or prose in my life, but the exquisiteness of this passage is agony: of a banality entirely worthy of Bela Balasz's place in world culture.  Sadly it was saved by Bartok's magnificent score, the other Bela, the real Bela who never used more than seven words a day. He was the one with inspiration, I just lifted the deliberately functional words I wrote to describe the plot in the outline and put it into the libretto.  It is truly amazing how opera can be so compelling while having no literary merit whatsoever.

Here is the most humiliating part: it was entirely deliberate. I wanted to write bad drama and I completely succeeded. The more insipid the script, the more flights permitted the composer of imaginative leaps that defy all rational consideration. One chord can provide a thousand implications where a mere sentence provides five.  

And if music is liberated by bad writing, how much more liberated by it is film? We had thought there to be no art work more total than opera--a combination of all nine muses. But cinema is the tenth muse: all nine muses work together in opera, but cinema provides the portal through which we may encounter the muses themselves.  

  

 And what better subject is there to inspire ten muses to sing than the women themselves who inspire such flights? Opera is the realm of Violetta, Aida, Isolde, Mimi, Susanna, Pamina: operas through which heterosexual composers pour their longings--whether requited, unrequited, seduction or lament, it never matters. What matters is the longing, the pedestal, the sehnsucht, the desire to memorialize an ineffable longing forever in a sculpture of stone and ice. Until the emergence of this new composer, Britten, there has not been an unquestionably great homosexual operatist. The rest is all female heroines to whom the men fall in love, onstage and in the audience, even when the soprano needs to lose 50 kilograms. Yet homosexuals too identify with these heroines as though themselves. 

Given the ability to see women in closeup, I thought movies would be entirely straight. Then I saw The Blue Angel, and the homosexuals were as in love with Marlene Dietrich as we were. I met Lena back in '24, noticing her on a movie set when no one else seemed to. She was magnetic even when she was an extra and knew just who she was. Within five minutes of introducing myself I said I would write her a script. The exchange was implied, but even then she was determined. She announced to me that one day she would be a star and we'd work together, 'I would hate to ruin the sexual tension between us.' We did not work together, the tension was as one-sided as what she shared with a hundred million men. 

And yet it was a mystery to me how one day I would become Professor Unrat. 

We all know the woman who gave me horns by a different name, but her first name was Helene, and this Helene so bewitched that the Fuhrer himself went to war with her image in his mind. 

There were the almond eyes of a mesmerist, narrowing at the slightest hint of a joke and lids melting at the slightest erotic attention. What's in the eyes is pure adventure: mischief upheld by utter control and self-assertion. What's behind the eyes is a Neuchatel clock: look closely and within a second of anything explained to her one sees the eyes dart and the head jolt. Behind the laughs and wit is a person whom the very eyes told you would do everything, go everywhere, and master it all with determination of iron and concrete. Whatever the world is for other women, the world was built for her will. The world is built for those who master all to which they take upon themselves and do so so agreeably that no one is aware of her mastery's extent until the work is done; and therefore, look closely. You know that one day the world will stand at her attention. 

 I have always been fascinated by the rare such woman, that woman who climbs from the pits of Tartarus to which the fairer sex is always hurled: women like Bluebeard's Judit with the determination to fight with Bluebeard's entire armory. Some are moral giants like that Scholl girl; others, like Marlene Dietrich, become the toast of the earth. Others? Others are like Leni.

Like any great work of art, Leni is a work of a thousand interpretations. There is the story of her evil, there is the story of her ambition, there is the story of her spite and seduction. None of these are true. 

I do not know the truth behind Leni, I doubt even Leni truly knew the person in herself, but as I choose to tell this story: I tell you my Leni. My Leni was the nicest, most generous, gemutlicher woman in Germany. She was oh so generous with time, money, favors, sociability, and beneath it all, I had the sense she would send it all to hell had she a democrat's choice. This relentlessly ambitious mind took upon herself every task she was offered: every task offered everyone else too, and she so hated the extent of it that she took on herself responsibilities precisely so she could destroy herself. 

It was neither ambition nor evil that seduced Leni, it was danger. So preoccupied was she with mastering the world's newest, greatest art that she grew to hate the very thing she mastered. This mistress of cinema deliberately lodged herself into history as its greatest villain. On the surface she was Lola Lola from The Blue Angel, but there was no killer from M beneath the surface, beneath the surface was a Brunnhilde driven to ride herself into Siegfried's funeral pyre, a Faust (Fausta) who made a deal with Mephistopheles to inherit a world she never wanted. 

The name is Balazs Bela: international socialist, Hungarian exile, editor of fairy tales, Bluebeard's librettist, film theorist who puts readers to sleep; but film reviewer of renown who strikes fear in producer's hearts, and therefore bribed into being a film writer of mediocre distinction. These are all my hobbies: my profession, my calling, my place in history, is seduction. As an artist I'm no candidate for greatness, as a critic I am cliche, but as a seducer, I am the Magyar Byron without a pfennig of his dashing looks. No, my seduction is entirely through words, listening, wit, persistence and good taste in wine. I pity the era when women achieve their long delayed liberation and an ugly Jew must seduce women purely by virtue of his merit. 

Great artists like Bartok and Kodaly, Pabst and Korda; life doesn't matter to them. All that is their lives, they put into art. To me, only life matters. Always give me more life, and more, and more. Art is there so crafty men like me may live better. Who is the greater artist: the art-maker who sacrifices everything so he may create, or the aesthete who hears their opera, looks at their art, eats their meal, walks through their garden with women so charming they are artworks unto themselves? Art is a gift to us, a blessing from the Gods. As the man who takes joy in the result, am I not the greater artist than the artist who suffers for it? 

But I knew better than consider myself an active candidate for Leni. Most beautiful women are lonely, housebound creatures of intelligence who might as well be spinsters. Leni is a man deposited in the body of a wonderbeauty, and because she speaks their language, forty men of intellect were in love with her at any given time and so were their forty wives. Every city of Europe must have these great women imprisoned by the salon whom but for accident of birth would be great men. Rather, the great men in their midst achieve greatness by the muses they play. Vienna has Alma Schindler, Paris had Georges Sand, but Berlin is Europe's greatest city of all because it teems with these creative women: Marlene Dietrich, Lotte Lenya, Lou Salome and Leni Riefenstahl. But Leni alone escaped the confines of salon, sex and submission to become the maestra herself who sets the tempo, balances the harmonies and calibrates the dynamics. 

I had no reason to believe she would choose me, and having no end of occupations I happily resigned myself to a gentleman's friendship of exemplary company: exhibiting patience and pleasantness as she took home men of twice my brawn and artists of twice my brain. But knowing that I must be magnanimous to gain entree to her good grace, I offered to write my mediocre dialogue for her directorial debut, free of charge. This hits on the great unmentioned secret of film: only the Jews are willing to pay real money so they may combat their reputations; everyone else is cheap. 

Once I got onto her filmset, I happened on the idea of seducing her co-star, Martha Mair. Every night, a new club, every day, a new bottle of champagne. All of cultural Berlin saw us together within a week, yet I never took her home: never much more than a kiss between us. The next week, Leni barged into my office genially with a brilliant idea. Let's scrap Martha's part, write her out of the script and make her part into a man's. She set those almond eyes on me and what could I possibly do but accede?

When Martha found out she barged into my office ferociously first thing in the morning. She told me I sold her out to a more powerful woman who wasn't as beautiful as her: "it's because Leni's a goi! Isn't it?!" 

I assured her Leni was no Aryan goddess and Jews like us have to stand up for each other in this business of vampires. What was shameful was that I believed it. She told me I was just another Jewish film executive using his power to get forbidden women and sell out his own landsleit. I told her this wasn't true and she was the only one for which I had eyes, and I would write her a movie that made her a star as big as Leni or Lena. Suddenly her eyes turned into the smoldering bonfire of Theda Bara's Salome. She pulled down my trousers and revived me in the office with the door half ajar. What could I do but promise that Leni and I would restore her part?

That day, the rest of us had to fly to the Italian Dolomites. I threw up on the fight. It was Leni who insisted on cleaning me up herself and ordered me a change of clothes from the costumes. And from 12:30 we spoke for 17 1/2 hours without a stop, until 5 the next morning before a 6 AM call. She offered me Scottish whiskey and Cuban cigars, which I accepted happily. She poured and lit for herself too, but I never did I see her put the drink or cigar to her mouth. I have only vague memories of what we discussed, but when we finally arrived at her cottage her face became obscured by darkness I felt as though for the first time I appreciated her crainioscopy in action: a mind moving with the speed of lighting, synthesizing all concepts of the world into order tightly enough for Kant: I don't remember her theories, but I remember things mentioned: Max Reinhardt and ballet, classical sculpture and Wagner, silent film and dance: especially dance. She enacted all the movements she wished to put in a musical film like Love Me Tonight or One Hour With You, only taking place in the days before the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and the songs set to the music of Tchaikovsky: and as moonlight bathed her silhouette, she acted a whole ballet from her mind with the grace of Pavlova and the voice of Lilli Lehmann. And then she demonstrated the end: the hero marched off to the Great War, and you saw our hero disappear among a cadre of a thousand marchers: and in the moonlight she stepped in time with the ending march of Sleeping Beauty. 

That morning Martha was officially reinstated. She never revived me again. 

But 130 minutes later, at 7:10, Leni showed me a perfect sketch of a waterfall shot. A shot we needed by eight in the morning to get the proper sunlight with a 7.5 focal lens, R-stock filmstock with a red filter so that the palette comes out a darkest blue. No one else was there and we couldn't wait for the production team. I asked our driver where might be a good waterfall facing east and he drove us to the waterfall like the madman. When I saw the shot, I told her it couldn't be done, so did the driver. The mountains were much too steep and neither of us were willing to climb all that way to man equipment we thought ourselves sure to drop or fall. She threw her hands up, climbed one of the mountains alone with the camera and placed it herself. She lodged it in the dirt at an angle that could have destroyed the camera if it so much as dropped let alone fell. Then, production cost be damned, she kept the film rolling, descended the mountain, then climbed a second mountain so she could film herself next to the waterfall. With no one even to watch the camera, she got that shot in one take. 

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Martha was right about one thing: movies are a business that only works by someone looking out for you. We call it a capitalist enterprise, but it's a business determined by an aristocracy for which every creator requires a Medici. My patron was Harry Sokal; as it turned out he was Leni's patron too. I only had chance to work with her because he recommended his lover to me as an actress, a soon to be bankable starlet, and a piece of arsch: but I knew what it was--offering a chance at his mistress as yet another bribe. But I had nothing like Harry Sokal's power, and by 1931 long knew better than think I had enough influence to win a starlet soon to fill a movie house. I contented myself with Sokal's wife, with his full knowledge of course, a woman whose ideas for films were better than Sokal's but left alone in a giant Charlottenburg villa. 

This is the moment I should probably concede I'm married too. We have an open marriage and she understands that beneath these foppish cravats lurks a primitive animal whose Magyar heart she cannot satisfy any more than I hers. In those days of my forties I spent days I should have written plays smoking in the beds of their producers, served a late lunch fixed by their wives as I read their newspapers while smoking in their bathrobes: those wives were usually actresses themselves, withdrawn from the stage when they hit thirty like milk feared spoiled before its smelled. The stupidest of these actresses married other actors: actors who could bestride the floorboards as leading men into their sixties and in ten years would leave their wives of ever so slight wrinkles for a younger actress. The smartest actresses married producers: a specimen smart enough themselves to know that sex is disposable but reputation is not. The producers would come to parties with their wives, striking and ageless in form fitting gowns like velvet wrapped ivory, but so preoccupied are the producers with the newest models that they don't realize that beneath their ivory statues lurk wolverinas who have not been fed properly in years. 

Leni would seem to be properly fed every day since she was twenty: men, women, men who thought they were women, women who thought themselves men; stars, directors, producers, stuntmen, cameramen, athletes, military men. Weimar Berlin was a place of sex without precedent or succession. Yet I believe there was one place she was not fed. 

As a screenwriter, there is very little to do in post-production. I had yet to receive a new assignment, and tried to read Narcissus und Goldmund: the latest Hesse. I did not get more than five pages before I heard sobbing from a few offices over: I would not recognize the weeping had I not heard the same voice sing: it was Leni. 

I seized my chance and went to attempt consolation. 

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Leni: (between sobs) The film's no good.

Bela: It isn't? 

Leni: It's furchtbar. 

Bela: How can it be furchtbar?

Leni: You didn't see it!

Bela: I saw the rushes, what I saw was everything we hoped it would be. 

Leni: Then I ruined it (starts crying again).

Bela: You didn't ruin anything. 

Leni: How could this film turn out this way? 

Bela: How did it turn out? 

Leni: The studio hates it! The test audiences hate it! I watched the movie on my own, now I hate it! 

Bela: They don't see what I see. 

Leni: What do you see?

Bela: A beautiful woman who's also a genius. 

Leni: GET OUT! 

Bela: I'm sorry? 

Leni: LEAVE MY SET! 

And she threw the movie cannister at me. 

Bela: What did I say?

No member of the fairer sex ever dared speak to me like this.

Leni: I am not one of your schlampes who falls for easy praise! 

Bela: I think you misunderstood me. 

Leni: All Berlin knows the great Bela Balazs! The mediocrity who writes Hungarian chicanery in German newspapers that derides the achievements of German artists and technicians who work seventeen hours a day to create the films you so deride then gets to sleep producers' wives so their films get good reviews! 

Bela: Well you certainly misunderstand my job. 

Leni: Critics are parasites! We have no need for you! 

Bela: I'm not a critic. I'm a man of film: reviewer, theorist, screenwriter, and friend to talent. If I thought I had any talent myself I would direct. 

Leni: What friend? 

Bela: In the beginning of my career I was friend to the talent of composers: Bartok, Kodaly, they needed a man who would listen to their ideas, occasionally provide a piece of commentary, then promote their work to the intelligentsia and even the masses should the occasion arise. It's true, I'm Hungarian. Think for a moment how many poor gypsy musicians might have been great composers if they had the education or the money. 

Leni: Why did you go to film then? 

Bela: Beacuse film is democratic. Film is art for the age of the worker. A great artist of film needn't be an aristocrat or bourgeois, they just need to show up to work with a camera. A great artist of film may even be a Jew, or even, God beware it, a woman. 

Leni: There are enough great Jewish directors. 

Bela: We had no way of knowing that twenty years ago. How do you think the Wiene brothers became as great as they are? They had their talent but they needed opportunities, and they needed writers to champion them. Without writers like me, Robert Wiene would have been done after Dr. Caligari and we wouldn't have Raskalnikow or IMRI or Hands of Orloc. 

Leni: So you came to film to promote talented Jews in the press?

Bela: I promote talented people, not Jews. I championed Metropolis when people hated it. I wrote about Pandora's Box and Faust when no one saw them. I was one of the first critics to tell people to see Nosferatu. I wrote about why Conrad Veidt and Werner Krauss were actors as great as anyone acting in Brecht. I wrote about Lena Dietrich when she was a bit player and I certainly never slept with her! 

Leni: Then why did you never write about me?

Bela: Because we had the same patron: Harry Sokal, and even a corrupt lusting like me has some ethics. 

Leni: But you'll write for me? 

Bela: I made a point of writing for you, even for free. I got to all these men when they were already artists, but I wanted to see the birth of a genius at its inception and watch as it mastered film in embryo. 

Leni: This is quatsch! 

Bela: This is genius! But it needs help! 

Leni; Genius doesn't need help. 

Bela: This is what I've tried to tell you. Nothing needs more help than genius! Genius is fragile, genius blows away at the slightest setback. But an artist becomes a genius because he disregards the setback and keeps working until the work of genius appears!

Leni: This is not a work of genius. 

Bela: You don't know that yet! Why don't we recut the movie together. 

Leni: But I...

Bela: Let's watch the movie...

Leni: It's terrible. 

Bela: It's not terrible. Even if it's terrible, it's not terrible. 

Leni: I can't bare to let you watch it. 

Bela: You will let me watch it! After seeing your temper I'm convinced you're the strongest woman in Germany and you can survive letting someone see a movie that isn't up to the standards of a genius. 

Leni: Do you promise not to tell people about the cut you saw here? 

Bela: I swear. 

Leni: You'd never go behind my back like that? 

Bela: Your secret is safe here. You're safe here. I promise. 

She embraced me and did not leave my arms. 

Leni: A great artist would make a great film. 

Bela: You HAVE made a great film. But a film is born three times, once in script, once in filming, once in editing. 

Leni: This film is still born. 

Bela: Such a thing does not exist.

Leni: I have no idea how to make it better.  

Bela: Do you know why I offered to work for you free of charge? 

Leni: You came to me because you wanted to sleep with me. 

Bela: Yes, but I heard you were the most talented, intelligent young artist in Germany, and the reports were true.

Leni: I'd only be the most talented if Lang and Sternberg leave. 

Bela: You're the most talented now! What would Sternberg be without Lena Dietrich? What would Lang be without Thea von Harbou? 

Leni: They are geniuses!

Bela: They are geniuses because women inspire them to be geniuses! Without the muse there is nothing! 

Leni: Then I'm just a muse. 

Bela: No you're not. You're the rare muse who has stepped out from stone to become the poetess herself! You are your own muse and need no man. 

Leni: (looks at me) I need men very badly. 

Bela: You're right. People only call me Berlin's best scriptwriter because they're afraid how I might review them otherwise. But since people call me that, I can offer my services to anyone I want. I could go to Sternberg or Lang or Wiene or Pabst, get a lot of money and try to bed their stars: it would be a lot easier. But here was a beautiful woman kissed by genius. I chose you. Germany's chosen you.

And she kissed me. 

For the first time in my life, I was faithful. 

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We cut the movie. It was good. Not as good as the dailies, but I knew it would be a hit. 

But then when it was time to show the movie to Harry, she'd recut the movie completely and it was the movie of a genius.