21 - 27 March 2002
Issue No.578
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 21 - 27 March 2002 Issue No.578 |
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Plain talk
Memories can be triggered by small incidents: a musical refrain, an old photo, or even, as in this case, newspaper articles that one has clipped and kept.
The first article that brought back memories as I went through press cuttings is an obituary of the American-English actress Irene Worth. The name might not ring a bell to most readers, but to me it brings back an important memory: my first ever visit to the English theatre, when, back in 1946, I went to see William Saroyan's The Time of Your Life. at the Lyric, Hammersmith. But it was in 1949, at the Edinburgh Festival, when she starred in T S Eliot's The Cocktail Party that Worth achieved real greatness.
I was so impressed by Irene Worth that I tried not to miss any of her appearances. I saw her playing Helena with the Old Vic in Tyron Guthrie's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, then as Desdemona in Othello. The last play I saw her in she was playing a supporting role in A Day by the Sea at the Haymarket Theatre. The play was directed by and starring John Gielgud, with a cast including Dame Sybil Thorndike and Sir Ralph Richardson. Those were the golden days of the English theatre.
The second article is about Arthur Miller's new play Mr Peter's Connections which was shown at the Almeida Theatre. I have not seen the play but reviews have described it as quasi-elegiac, and, to quote David Benedict, as a "shift towards autobiography." The article brought back the memory of my two meetings with Arthur Miller. The first was in Cairo in the 1970s when he came with the Agha Khan and when we met in the office of the president of the Academy of Arts then, Rashad Rushdi who had invited a small number of so-called intellectuals to exchange ideas with the great playwright. The second time I met Miller was in a PEN Congress that convened in New York. For a whole week we stayed in the same hotel, having meals and drinks together, attending meetings and discussion groups, and, of course, going into lengthy discussions about everything from drama, to poetry, to the Palestinian- Israeli conflict. Those two occasions are indelibly imprinted in my mind.
The third article that brought back memories is an interview with Norman Mailer on the occasion of his receiving a British award. In the interview Mailer mentions that back in 1948 he lived in the same Brooklyn apartment building as Arthur Miller. "He was writing Death of a Salesman and I was writing The Naked and the Dead," he recalled. Interestingly, both Miller's play and Mailer's novel were their gateway to fame and success.
I met Mailer at the same New York PEN Congress at which I had met Miller the second time. Mailer was the president and one shall always remember the big gaffe he made. The American women writers complained that none of them had been put on a discussion panel and Mailer's reply was that maybe there are some good creative women writers, but there are no women thinkers. All the American women writers walked out of the Congress in protest and did not return until Mailer publicly apologised.
Being together for a whole week gave me a unique opportunity of talking to Mailer. He was writing Ancient Evenings at that time, a novel set in Egypt, and so availed himself of the opportunity of meeting Egyptians (my wife and I) and bombarded us with questions about ancient Egypt. When the novel was finished he sent me a copy asking whether it would go down well in translation. My answer was that it would not and that was the last I heard from him.
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