A son of Palestine, a citizen of the US; respected by academe, demonised by Zionists; embroiled in a nine-year battle with leukaemia, Edward Said's life has been marked by uncertainty. Here he tells Karl Sabbagh how writing about his childhood brought purpose at a time of crisis.
Last week, on a warm New York evening, Edward Said looked across the Hudson River from his Columbia University apartment and meditated on the unpredictability of life, an unpredictability he has been conditioned by childhood to expect.
This month, one unpredictable event, the publication of a new book by Said that makes only indirect references to Palestinian politics, was accompanied by another even more unpredictable event - the allegation by a Jewish academic that Said's Palestinianness has been greatly exaggerated. More unusual still was the repetition of those allegations in national newspapers in Britain and the United States, as if they carried some sort of credibility when the original article was in a small-circulation, right-wing Zionist publication, Commentary, whose affection and respect for Said are as strong as Ian Paisley's for the pope. (An earlier article about Said was headed "The professor of terror".) The two events - the publication of Said's book and the political attack on him in Commentary - might seem unconnected. Out of Place is a memoir of Said's childhood, a book it gave him pleasure to write because it was not overtly political. "I'm so tired of being thrust into this political niche," he says, "where people are expected to find in everything that I write a message about the PLO or secret instructions about terrorism, and I thought, 'Well here's a chance to write about something remote from politics'."
The book describes his childhood in three Middle East countries - Palestine, Egypt and Lebanon - and his university education in America in the 1950s (he was at Princeton when the Suez crisis provoked his first piece of political writing). The difficulties created by Palestinian politics were mitigated for his father and siblings, he says "by our talismanic US passports". His mother, however, never had one - a source of humiliation and worse throughout her life.
Out of Place is honest about Said's emotional turmoil, growing up with a Christian name that represented his parents' Anglophilia and a surname that revealed his Arab origins. Although not directly political there are anecdotes and asides - perhaps most shocking the description of the murder by Egyptian state security staff of Farid, a Communist doctor and family friend, "a casualty of the prevailing unrest and roiling nationalism of the early Nasser years", Said writes.
For the young Edward, English schooling during the daytime was followed by Arab family life at night. He still carries that dual burden, as both a distinguished American academic, professor of comparative literature at Columbia University, New York, and a key figure in the convoluted world of Palestinian politics.
Although Middle East childhood and American academe are 60 years apart, Said's expectations of life are as wary today as they were when, as he says in the book, he never knew when he was going to get a kiss or a smack from his parents.
His analysis of what was going on in his childhood looks at remembered feelings through the lens of an accurate adult perception. "My mother was a very manipulative person," he says, "she had nothing else to do - it was her occupation, really. With my mother, affection was always mortgaged to some other purpose."
In the book he describes his father as coming to represent "a devastating combination of power and authority, rationalistic discipline and repressed emotions; and this I has impinged on me my whole life".
While Said is sometimes harshly critical of his parents he does not spare himself. "I have no concept of leisure or relaxation and, more particularly, no sense of cumulative achievement. Every day for me is like beginning a new term at school, with a vast and empty summer behind it and an uncertain tomorrow before it."
This kind of writing is very different from Orientalism or The Question of Palestine, two of his best-known books. "It's not a book you can read for revelations about my political life," he says, "but it was an attempt to be extremely honest in a considered way."
Ironically, the content of the book is willy-nilly playing a political role in the current attack on Said's credibility. The Commentary article complained that in articles and books Said had exaggerated the connections between his family and Palestine and therefore somehow disqualified himself from the right to speak for Palestinians.
The attack reinforces the "uncertain tomorrow" Said feels he faces every day. It came out of the blue, triggered by no specific event and with no warning. Said was searching for an English newspaper in Salzburg one Sunday morning when he saw the Daily Telegraph with his name under the masthead. He read the three articles that the Telegraph felt the allegations merited, and then put it in his luggage to prevent himself brooding during an eight-hour journey back to the US.
The attack is a mish-mash of quotes from past articles by or about Said and does not even attempt to knock holes in what most of us would see as the principal determinants of nationality - birthplace and parentage. Out of Place will leave no unbiased reader with any doubt that Said is Palestinian - born in Palestine of Palestinian parents. Indeed, the whole business would be trivial but for the number of burdens and uncertain tomorrows Said has had to face in recent years. Despite his apparent energy, he has spent the past nine years suffering from leukaemia - another unpredictable and unpleasant intervention in his life.
Before Said was diagnosed with the illness, he combined teaching and university administration in New York with a whirlwind of travel around the world to lecture, appear on television, attend conferences, and receive honours. Astonishingly, it was only when the effects of his treatment made it impossible to leave his bed, this frenetic pace slackened. Even while he responded to invitations that never decreased, he had to find a way to alleviate some of the emotional distress that came with the diagnosis. Writing Out of Place proved to be a surprisingly effective solution. "It was a hedging against the pain, discomfort and anxiety I felt," he says.
The past few years in the life of Edward Said have been complex, tortuous and eventful, and coming to terms with illness played a major role. "One thing I discovered early on, although I don't say it explicitly in the book, is that I wasn't afraid of death. I was at the very beginning, but after a while when I was near death quite often and I began to discover that the chemotherapy wasn't working, I really wasn't afraid of dying. I remember a passage in Down and Out in Paris and London when Orwell is working on the lowest rung of the ladder in a restaurant. He realises that he has gone to the dogs, and he says, 'All your life you worry about going to the dogs and when you finally get to the dogs it's not that bad, really'."
As he says this, Said raises his voice with an almost triumphal note and laughs.