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 into a perverse neoclassical bouillabaisse of aesthetic identities and creates a perfect advertisement that it doesn't belong among its colleagues: like American 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 the fathers of German Jews. Only their fathers had all of New York to ply their wears. My father had to travel the Middle East so he had to present 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. How dare they do so, I am Palestinian if I'm anything at all, but to be perfectly frank, I'm not even certain I'm Palestinian. I've always felt out of place among Palestinians, Egyptians, Americans, English and continentals. 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, Sa-geed, Si-geed, Say-geed, 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 even show signs of romantic interest: a number of whom display 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 whom I refer to as "Wall Street Friends of SDS," but that is so paltry next to the ribbings she gets when in class. She is an extraordinary woman: bright and brave, a rare woman in Columbia's Business School, and an Arab woman no less. Allah and Christ only know the fortitude of character such burdens demand.
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 these men 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'. 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-smoking another Sobranie. Diana worships Lionel's high polish, but underneath hers lies the sort of middle class Emily Post sensibility that reviews books by the virtues of their propriety. Her reviews feel like nothing so much as a nun slapping with a ruler on the wrist.
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 Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Irving Kristol, 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. Yet another explosion of Jewish genius that looks for their own and ignores those they climb over.
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 and Bell provides the amusing anecdotes, to which I have to provide the laughter and Barzun inevitably responds with a mere chortle. A man of culture so impeccable he cannot bear to embrace the validity of any idea at all.
To all too many men like them of too many affectations and too few commitments, their scholarship is without value or values. To what end is all this genius? To sit with men like them is like to sit at a gathering of the Second Continental Congress, yet they seem ever like the new slaveholders. There is no one in all the world for whose approval I'd plead more, yet for all their silent protests to the contrary, they never ever would give it. In me they see a blessing for their ignorance of who the rest of us are: an 'hechsher' perhaps they'd call it, but their exoneration comes at the price of everyone upon whose backs my success was made.
Soon I meet other collaborators: Hofstadter, Lipset, Howe, Glazer, occasionally Hannah Arendt deigns to grace them with her ashy, mouth-ticing presence, apparently Nabokov used to join this club when he visited from Ithaca or Switzerland until he and Edmund Wilson had their famous fight two or three years ago. We get graced with other ill-mannered presences: Kazin, Fiedler, MacDonald, Mailer... once Saul Bellow dropped by when he was in town, two other times he was supposed to but had other commitments--everyone looked at each other in that way which understands 'other commitments' means another woman. Not that these men are strangers to adultery. Upper middle class New York is full of bored late thirties housewives going to lectures, looking for a man who can explain what's been going on in the world since they disappeared behind their now teenaged children. And yet by far the most famous for his affairs is Edmund Wilson, who is my mind's-eye opposite of an Apollo, and the hollow-eyed Mary McCarthy who frankly looks as though cigarettes have barbecued whatever diminutive Irish-faced appeal she may have once had. It would seem that even in this epoch of Jewish supremacy, the true Don Juans are still the gentiles.
Everyone says there is complete freedom to disagree at these soirees, but the dangers of an unforgivable fight feel ever present as the voices grow raised and these alleged lions of intellectual composure stand up in alarm and pace the room rather than look their antagonists in the face. Apparently these gatherings grew so rancorous that a few years ago the group 'moving right' stopped attending: as though nobody could tell what cerebral kamikaze pilots like Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz would become from the moment they walked into the room for their first days of kindergarten.
It is September 1967, Israel conquered the Middle East three months ago, tripled its size, took over the entire Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza, and I have been counting the days to my return in dread. I stay in bed until after noon, I don't go to concerts or shows for fear of whom I run into, I don't go to the Columbia practice rooms to play the piano, I don't even walk the parks. Instead I ride the subway to places like Flatbush and Midwood, watching anonymous Jews walk the streets, orthodox and assimilated alike. I look into the brownstone windows to watch families sitting at Friday night dinner, watch the children leave their schools and go in groups to the soda fountains. I go to the restaurants and sit at the bar to eavesdrop the Yiddish peppered conversation: more often than they'd allege I hear the word 'schvartes' and once or twice I could even pick out the compound word: 'sand-schvartzes.' I can pick out lots of talk about 'the Arabs', 'Sinai', 'Nasser', 'Kibbutzes' and 'Kibbutzim', but never have I heard the term 'The Palestinians.'
I typed up a resignation letter seven times and unplugged my phone all summer. I had no real intention of resigning, nor have I any intention of discussing Palestine at Columbia. I realized very quickly that any dread of the question is an irrational dread, yet the dread remains every night as sleep in my too hot apartment is disturbed by carhorns and rock music and the occasional screaming homeless man. I thought of returning to my family in Cairo, at least for a visit or sabbatical, I fantasize of moving to Palestine so I might stir up agitation against Israel, I fantasize about the Jewish girls sitting in the front of my classes, and I fantasize both of telling Lionel and his mafia'd minions to go to hell, and also fantasize of making them understand the plight of a young man they think has no plight.
-----------------------------------
(The half-shell oysters are collected, everyone is seated at their placards, the vichysoisse is served. You can hear the clink of the spoons against the crystal bowls and Dwight MacDonald has a slurping noise that would make a mild misophone lose his appetite.)
Dwight MacDonald: As I was starting to say, I'm reading this new anti-colonialist who's the rage among my students: an Arab Algerian named Fanon.
Daniel Bell: Ochen vey.
Lionel Trilling: He's not Algerian, he's Caribbean.
Dwight: You know him?
Jacques Barzun: Another fashionablist who thinks building a civilization will be as easy as destroying it.
Diana Trilling: He has some interesting things to say about Algeria.
Lionel: They all have interesting things to say!
Seymour Martin Lipset: All of them?
Lionel: Of course!
Danny: So you, Lionel Trilling, who made America think Princess Cassamassima is a readable book, think Peanuts has interesting things to say?
(This is simply the way they talk. They think Trilling writing about Princess Cassamassima will make America read it, but even if they try to read The Liberal Imagination they'll just drop it after page 30 and remember 'Trilling hates Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson'.)
Diana: Careful Danny, you'll have to explain to him what Peanuts comics are.
(Everyone laughed. I suppose it's relieving: any laugh at a dinner hosted by Jacques Barzun is as unlikely as a mention of The Rolling Stones. The food is inevitably delectable, but Allah forbid any of us use the wrong salad fork or Barzun may remind us of it in eighteen months. Lionel told me that my presence at this dinner would be much appreciated, Arendt would be there and wants to talk to me about my new Conrad book. Of course, this means 'your presence is mandatory.' It seemed fairly innocuous, Arendt wrote about Conrad in Origins of Totalitarianism, but I have a feeling of dread that something more purposeful is afoot.)
Lionel: I've read the Peanuts.
Marty: If Lionel's read them he probably has them memorized from the first column to last week.
(everyone laughed again)
Lionel: They're not without entertainment value either!
Jacques: I agree.
Danny: My god, the Columbia common core is praising Peanuts!
Dwight: Next Jacques will be telling us The Beatles are a cultural achievement to place next to Wagner.
Lionel: I've come to realize that there isn't a single cultural artifact from which one can't gain insight.
(And that's the most he'll think of us. Cultural artifacts to be discovered by an archeologist: an unevolved society no different in the present than it was ten thousand years ago.)
Jacques: I would not go so far Lionel.
Dwight: What sort of insight?
Lionel: Human, cultural...
Dwight: I hope you don't mean aesthetic.
Lionel: Of course there's aesthetic insight!
Danny: This is the most shocking historical moment since Molotov-Ribbentrop.
Diana: Then you don't know Lionel.
Lionel: Popular mediums are completely new mediums. We can't dismiss them simply because they have no precedent.
(We have precedents in the East. Many.)
Danny: No precedent? Newspaper cartoons have been around for three generations!
Lionel: All I'm saying is that there are all sorts of mediums our generation will never be able to understand and we'll have to leave them for new generations to sort out.
Marty: Suit yourself. But I'm twenty years younger than you and I don't understand them.
Diana: Edward, you're the strapping youngling here, what do you think of newspaper cartoons.
(all eyes turned towards me)
Edward Said: I never had much use for them.
Marty: You see?
Lionel: There are so many sources from which one can gain enlightenment, more and more I believe we vastly underestimate it.
(And this is what is supposed to satisfy the rest of us.)
Jacques: So what do we do about the transcendent sources? Do we just file them away under no better than Family Circus?
Lionel: Not at all, there is still aesthetic/intellectual hierarchy, but one should not dismiss the value of popular sources.
Dwight: Alright, well Lionel, since until Peanuts I was under the impression that you thought nothing transcendent's been done since 1930, whom do you think is writing actual transcendent work in our time?
Lionel: Isaiah Berlin?
Marty: Isaiah Berlin?
Lionel: You object?
Marty: Who would know?
Diana: Everyone knows about Isaiah!
Marty: He doesn't publish!
Dwight: He's published!
Marty: His whole reputation is based on how good he is at dinners like this!
Lionel: Nonsense! Have you read his Marx biography?
Marty: It's a small one volume thing from the thirties! What's he done since then?
Lionel: He wrote those briefs about America for the British foreign office during World War II. They amount to a new Federalist Papers!
Danny: Lionel I think Berlin's as good as it gets but that's pushing it...
Lionel: And he wrote that book on 18th century thinkers.
Marty: Come on, Lionel, those are obviously lecture transcriptions from some graduate student. And at the speed he talks who knows if that's actually what he said?
Diana: Then he must be even better than his lectures if not everything was taken down.
Marty: Who would know?
Danny: So you think Isaiah Berlin's overrated? The greatest liberal philosopher of our time save Hannah?
Hannah Arendt: I think he's the most overrated philosopher of our time.
Jacques Barzun: He thinks the same of you.
(again everyone laughed, including Arendt)
Marty: My point is just that his reputation is as much based on word of mouth and how well he talks, not on anything he's written. Who knows if we even remember correctly what he has to say?
Lionel: Fair. Well, whom do you all think is doing transcendent work today?
Dwight: Well I'd say Saul.
Danny: Let's put some guidelines here. I think he means who's doing intellectual work with political implications. Saul is not a political writer, and I think if you talked to Saul about politics these days you'd be appalled.
Marty: He's gone back to Trotsky?
Diana: Quite the opposite. He makes Irving Kristol sound like Stalin.
Marty: Oy...
Dwight: Alright, who's a transcendent figure who affects political discourse? Lionel says Isaiah Berlin, I'll say Marshall McLuhan.
Marty: Raymond Aron.
Danny: Can I say Orwell or Camus?
Diana: Unfortunately not, we're in a different era now.
Danny: Alright, I'll say Gershom Scholem.
Marty: Not political enough.
Lionel: I think we ought to allow it. Hannah?
Hannah: You know I'll say myself.
(again, everyone laughed)
Hannah: Very well. Karl Popper.
Marty: Diana?
Diana: ...I'm going to go with Arthur Koestler.
Danny: How unenlightened of you...
(everyone laughed again)
Marty: Jacques?
Jacques: No one.
Hannah: Quelle surprise...
(everyone laughed again)
Lionel: Please don't forget Edward. I'm sorry my boy...
Edward...: Frantz Fanon?
(everyone went quiet.)
Danny: Well that was a much bigger surprise than Jacques.
(everyone laughed again)
Diana: Well, it makes perfect sense that Edward would find resonance in him.
(Oh really? Of course it does. It doesn't matter that I think he's greatness, it matters that their little monkey from the east would respond to him... and pray tell... what do they think I respond to?)
Marty: I agree, but that doesn't make him the greatest thinker of our time.
Dwight: I was saying, his work has some fascinating insights. He says that racism forces the colonized and men of color to adapt the thoughts and manners of the colonizer.
Jacques: That's hardly an original insight. The idea that people rebel using the language of people against whom they rebel goes back through Nietzsche, goes back to Hegel and Marx in the dialectic,
Diana: It goes back to Shakespeare in Caliban.
Danny: It goes back to the Talmud!
Jacques: It goes back to Heraclitus.
(And I suppose an anti-Western thinker ought be satisfied by being subsumed by the Western tradition?)
Edward: But there is no guarantee that the oppressed can ever rebel.
Dwight: Can you elaborate Edward?
Edward: There is always a chance that the oppressed will remain oppressed in perpetuity.
(everyone stopped eating in that moment)
Jacques: That's very bleak, and a little unfair I believe, but sound. There is not a single achievement in early man that could have been achieved without slave labor.
(Of course, all that matters is the achievements, not the people who make them possible.)
Edward: It's not just about achievements. The condition of mankind has doubtless been slave and master for literal thousands of years before there was any achievement of which to speak, and continued for thousands of years after there were.
Diana: Well if you're going to bring Hegel into this we should concede that he was a bit more optimistic than you're portraying him.
(I'm speaking of thousands of years of oppression and she thinks I talk of Hegel)
Edward: It's not necessarily Hegel that I mean.
Diana: Well Hannah is obviously the expert here but if I understand Hegel correctly, he believes that in spite of the master-slave dialectic, history is a means toward a well-defined end, and the end is self-understanding and freedom.
(Jacques's valet collected the soup bowls, they were followed by the fish course: quenelles de brochet with Sauce Nantua. Sole veronique with grapes for Diana since she never liked Nantua sauce. The sauce flavor was fascinating and must have taken hours: god only knows where you can find crayfish butter in New York but if anyone would spend days trying to find it it's Jacques. His valet probably put together a taste test for each butter in a hundred different recipes for Nantua sauce.)
Edward: Well as I said, I mostly wasn't speaking of Hegel, but Hegel believes the Oriental is the primitive condition of man that only one master is free and everyone else is his slave.
Diana: Well Edward, surely you have to concede that with the exceptions of certain centuries conditions in the West were just a little bit freer than they were in the East.
Edward: Why should we generalize in that way?
Danny: Generalizing is all there is. You do the best you can to collect a sample set but the conditions are always incomplete.
Edward: I don't accept that.
Marty: Why not?
Edward: We can aspire to better.
Marty: Edward, please, show your work.
Edward: (I grew a bit flustered) I have no work of which to show on this matter, but it is only when people aspire to better that there is any chance for improvement of conditions.
(Why should I show my work when they don't?)
Jacques: I utterly disagree with that. Respectfully, of course.
(...of course)
Edward: Is it so objectionable to ask for higher ethical standards?
Jacques: I completely agree with you that generalizations are to be avoided in all situations and possibilities, but if one looks at the trajectory of history: to say there is paltry evidence that higher standards are effective would be an understatement.
(the paltry evidence sits right here)
Edward: What about the line from Martin Luther King? 'The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.'
Marty: You don't really believe that, do you?
(not anymore...)
Edward: Why not?
Marty: You just said the oppressed remain oppressed in perpetuity! Why would you then think the moral arc bends toward justice?
Edward: It only bends when we choose to bend it.
Danny: Edward I think you're getting a bit sentimental about human capacities.
Edward: Why?
Danny: Because if people have been slaves for thousands of years without a change in their circumstances, why would the future be any different than the past?
(And they expect me to just sit here?...)
Edward: Because we can choose to create better circumstances.
Hannah: He's right.
(everyone froze for a split-second, much shorter than when they froze for me but still noticeable)
Hannah: The entire point of political life is to change circumstances.
Lionel: Elaborate Hannah please.
Hannah: One cannot change circumstances without political engagement, and it is in the interests of citizens to use politics to improve their circumstances.
Danny: But don't people disagree savagely on what the circumstances are?
Dwight: You're the one who wrote ideology was over Danny.
Marty: I'll agree with Danny here. Bad actors fight all the time to change circumstances for the worse.
Hannah: That is why change happens at such a slow pace.
Danny: I'm sorry, I can't accept those circumstances.
Marty: I agree.
Diana: I'm with Hannah and Edward.
Danny: Change does not happen because powerless actors insist on it, it happens when unpredictable circumstances allow for it.
Hannah: One more thought about Hegel. Yes, he specifies a master/slave dialectic, but (and she turned to me), it is the slave who comes to understanding first and thereby attains freedom. Not the master.
(there was another pause, I was shocked and for the first time that night, I breathed.)
Dwight: Can we get back to Fanon?
Danny: You were saying he's an Arab...
Marty: Seriously Dwight? All that stuff about the West being anti-Black didn't clue you in that he isn't Arab?
(I'm right here.)
Lionel: He's from Martinique.
Dwight: I'm sorry, I was too focused on the substance of his arguments.
Marty: What substance?
(I'm right here!)
Diana: I don't think there is anything served by continuing this Fanon discussion. 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.
Diana: These are wolves, Edward. You haven't seen how brutal they can be yet but at some point you will find them breathtaking.
(It can't get much worse, can it?)
Lionel: Now now, Diana, nobody here is a true Diogenes. Surely there are moments of discomfort, but
Danny: (interrupting) We're not a pack of boars looking for kosher meat.
(Everyone laughed of course. They always do at Jewish jokes...)
Edward: I should think you'd be searching for Hallal in my case but nevertheless I suppose some small pang of anxiety stands.
Lionel: 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: L'chaim I suppose.
(everyone laughed again)
Jacques: I suppose this would be the proper moment, though I had thought we agreed to make the announcement after dinner. One moment though, before we truly drink this toast I'd temporarily forgotten that I have a special Romanee-Conti '45 which I've saved for just such an occasion after Edward said that he was curious about it.
Edward: I can't even remember saying it but that's absolutely true.
Lionel: So you understand, Edward, the reason we wanted you here is to let you know that we're pre-empting your tenure track by two years. You will be a tenured professor in all but official title for the next three months, and will officially have tenure before the semester is complete.
Danny: MAZEL TOV!
(everyone applauded while Jacques's valet brought new glasses in, popped the cork and filled them)
Lionel: It's true, we have sped the process up so that there is no doubt about our position with regard to our Arab colleagues, but I want to impress how important it is that you understand this Edward, I should think this needs not even be mentioned, but in case there's any doubt at all, even without this war for which everyone in this room feels no little ambivalence except Seymour, no instructor in my nearly fifty years at Columbia has earned tenure more justly and more decisively: by the impactfulness of your teaching, the profundity of your insight, the nuance of your research, the eloquence of your oratory and the substance of your person. Bravo.
(everyone applauded again)
Jacques: Dinner is served!
Hannah Arendt: Nevertheless Edward, it would be edifying to get your sense of the current condition in the Middle East.
(Trilling and Barzun exchanged a look. One could feel a bit of a pause.)
Lionel: Hannah, the whole point of this dinner is to ensure he doesn't have to talk about it.
(I was grateful for the Romanee Conti but I'd already forgotten what it tasted like.)
Hannah: He is a man of deep substance like any of us, he deserves to have his views heard and respected. Doesn't he?
(If you only knew...)
Lionel: Well he certainly deserves our respect. Jacques, would you object?
Jacques: If this is the way we best pay tribute to Edward, please let him be heard.
Lionel: Edward? Would you object?
(I did my best and gave a long-winded cultural explanation that turned the subject back to literature: how Adonis portrays exile and Mahfouz internal exile, how the exciting young poet Darwish dramatizes war, it wasn't a very convincing explanation, and Arendt wasn't having it.)
Hannah: Dr. Said, if I wanted a lecture on literature, I would sit in your class, which I'm sure would be very compelling. Please answer the question: what do you think of the Six Day War?
(and there it came)
"That is an evasion, Doctor Said. You have still not given your opinion."
(My answers to her doctoral-like examination aren't important, but even without this record I remember every question which followed like a rubber bullet to the sternum.)
"You are not answering the question. You are speaking of the Suez Crisis which was eleven years ago. This Six Day War happened three months ago. Please tell me your opinion on that."
"Why do you think Israel should not answer the PLO activity with activity of its own? Please answer the question directly."
(I began sipping the Romanee-Conti just to interrupt my anxiety. The Romanee-Conti began to taste like a Ruffino-Chianti with the bottle straw-wrapped)
"But the reports from the Soviet Union to Nasser were false."
"Why would Nasser trust the Soviet Union's reports when Khrushchev lied to Nasser ten years before?"
"Khrushchev was repeatedly shown to be more trustworthy than Brezhnev. Why would Nasser trust Brezhnev who's already been shown to be unreliable with regard to Vietnam, China, Nigeria and Ghana?"
(The Romanee-Conti now tasted like a table wine)
"Even if he trusted the intelligence, Nasser did not have to close the straits. Israel made clear the consequences years ago."
"But Nasser knew that even if all six allies invaded simultaneously, they would be no match for the Israeli army. If the Israeli army could defeat these countries twenty years before when they were hardly a country, how much more easily could they now?"
(I'd finished my glass. I pretended to take Diana's next to me, everyone laughed and Jacques poured me whatever little was left of the bottle. We still have to get through the main course, the salad, the cheese and the dessert.)
"The IDF's training is so much famously better than nearly any country on earth: surely the heads of state realized that even an army of a million could not overwhelm Israeli soldiery."
"Soviet weaponry is notoriously unreliable. Israel's weaponry was French, most of their weapons scientists trained in Germany, whose munitions are famously effective. And they surely realized Israel may drop a nuclear weapon."
(It now tasted like Carlo Rossi)
"Yes but if it's true that French munitions were unreliable you still have not accounted for the difference in training between Israeli soldier and Arab."
"The pre-emption of the Israeli army can be accounted for by the massive presence on all their borders. There is no justification for not acknowledging the unusualness of Arab activity."
(Hannah, please inform, what is 'usual Arab activity?')
"Egypt killed their own unarmed soldiers too rather than risk them telling Egyptians of the extent of their defeat."
"There is little means by which the West could assist when the Soviets were patrolling the entrances to Middle Eastern waters."
"So you are accusing Israel of destroying USS Liberty at the same time that you allege covert American support of Israel?"
(It now tasted like next year's Gallo)
"Many of the Palestinians could have gone to Jordan where they knew they would be better received, they chose to go to the refugee camps."
"Even if it's true about Jordanian mistreatment of Palestinians, many Jews were mistreated in Arab countries and had to immigrate to Israel rather than suffer at their hands."
"Why is the burden upon upon Israel when they are surrounded by 22 Arab countries?"
(Because I was thrown out of my house you hausdrachener bitch.)
"Israel was the victor and they sued for peace and the Arab countries refused: when else has that happened in human history."
(This is the last time I sue for peace...)
"Dr. Said, you are complaining about the unfairness of your treatment but you agreed to let us hear what you think. You complain of being singled out yet here you are, drinking wine with us and being toasted as America's intellectual future."
"You claim you are singled out and classified for being an Arab, yet this answer displays a profoundly monolithic view of Jews."
"This determination, as you say, to simplify Arabs to a monolithic force is reciprocated by a view of Jews that seems profoundly simplifying as well of Jewish opinions."
"Yes, we may be disproportionately powerful for the moment, but the power and privilege did not assist us when it was time to prevent Hitler's annihilation."
To which I replied, and I remember this very clearly:
"Perhaps it is that very power and privilege that invites revolt against Jews."
This was the moment Diana finally stepped in:
Hannah Arendt: You do realize that this might be construed as an a...
Diana Trilling: I don't think anything is served by this discussion. Edward, I'm sorry we let this go on as long as we have without stopping it.
(I had to fight back tears, which I'm sure they saw. The rubber bullet was my panic, not the questions themselves, but I spent a week reading periodicals in the Columbia library to answer them)
Lionel Trilling: We should have stepped in earlier.
Hannah Arendt: Not at all, he acquitted himself well. Most Jews would have retreated to victimhood five questions earlier.
Daniel Bell: Jacques, let's pour the boy a stronger drink.
Diana Trilling: That was nothing compared to how personal things can get from some of the others. I'll call off Irving and Philip and Nathan, but not even we can call off Edmund. Thank god Mary lives in Paris now...
(I have this transcript because I hid a tape recorder in my pocket square. I repeatedly asked Diana over the years and she vehemently denied that the Trillings set up this dinner to make me questioned by Arendt. I don't believe her.)
My students will miss the Great Books culture when it's over. I'm sure of that; they'll be wrong to, but the ignorance of their children will stun them after they take a hatchet to the common core ideas of Lionel and Jacques.
But all one has to do is look at the students, only ten years my junior, to see a future when rock music is thought equal to Beethoven, science fiction equal to Shakespeare, while movies and television are what pass for great literature, past civilizations forgotten, history a structural chimera. In fifty years they will look at their children who view the world as an eternity of present and have nothing to talk with them about.
Such is the way of progress: there is no progress without regress, without trial and error, without millions dying for it and no progress if we keep going with this common core of Western books that refuses to include any writers east of Athens and Petersburg.
I look at my students, I see the coming terrible crisis, and I feel the only teacher in America who welcomes it. I don't just welcome it, I relish it. This Western-centric core deserves to die and it is precisely the populism of these students that will kill it: the long hair, the lack of hygiene, the long discursions on The Beatles and Who, the drugs, the willingness to be intoxicated in class, the resolute refusal to self-improve, the desire to see authoritarianism in every standard, this is the generation of nihilism the world desperately needs. It is a generation that will destroy the West for all time and endow the rest of the world a chance to become the elite class from which they're eternally excluded.
I teach the way I think any great teacher would: what else can I do? It is neither my job nor my ability to start the revolution for which I long, yet it will come, the readiness is all.
In a mere ten years I see the difference between my peers' quality and my students: my peers all seemed slum raised Jews or Jews' friends and neighbors, terrified of poverty, terrified of debt, terrified of return to the conditions of their parents, committed to achievement, committed to social mobility, committed to self-improvement and Bildung and Wissenschaft, seizing what was always theirs by right as whites, and their character was formidable enough to stretch to zenith any country shrewd enough to assimilate them. Today's students, Jew and gentile alike, are products of their parents GI bill and the suburbs, inevitably middle class at least, unaware of poverty's terrors, indolent, spoiled and rebellious yet completely unaware of that against which they rebel. What can this be but a trajectory that will continue my entire lifetime and long else besides?
Whispers are afoot that students are planning protests for something they've termed 'Gym Crow.' Columbia is building the gym that displaces... how many? A hundred? A thousand? Morningside Heights becomes yet another neighborhood to displace the indigenous of New York to margins so that whites can live unimpeded: the irony being that no whites will want to move in. Why distance yourself one mile from the urban element when you can put forty miles between you? Construction continues apace for neighborhoods nobody wants. Manhattan will eventually become a ghost city: a fourth house for the superclass: its skyscrapers occupied merely by corporations, Chinese food, black box theaters, highways and urban renewal projects that remain pristine because nobody lives in them.
Meanwhile the students: I know I should treat them as individuals, each with their own soul and journey, but who can look at these hundreds against hundreds and not see two undifferentiated masses. At least the pro-war demonstrators are open about their narcissism, the anti-war demonstrators clothe their carnal desire and quest for fame in a performance of care that shifts no attention to any but themselves. The anti-Vietnam demonstrations put not a single eye upon Vietnam, only upon the demonstrators. It ought go without saying that not a single one would show up to protest were there no danger of the draft. These great revolutionaries are the same spoiled American generation as any other: akin perhaps to the post-Napoleon romantics of Germany and England but with worse music and poetry. All the romantics did was provoke the reactionaries of 1848, all this generation will do is provoke Repub... need I really say it?
It will be a turbulent few years, but I simply can't imagine the edifice of civilization crumbling from the rocks of these gag revolutionaries. It can't crumble from them, it can simply atrophy as they lazily dismantle what their parents built, careless brick by brick until the edifice unintentionally falls in their dotage. Say what you will about Stalin and Lenin, they were committed to their praxis. These revolutionaries are the epitome of the white shelter, and after college they will return home to it: secure as or more than their parents that their cup in life runneth over.
Nevertheless, I fall somewhere between amused and delighted when one of the few students who deigns to notice me on the quads tells me that my kind is obsolete, that they will dispense with me, that I am r 'the establishment', proverbially called 'the man' to to be overthrown. Sadly, if they overthrow me it won't be until spring, when the gold-barred prison that is university grows uninterruptedly passionate from a schoolyear's momentum.
