Memorabilia: D J Enright
Azza Kararah* remembers British poet and critic D J Enright, her former teacher at Alexandria University, whose first book, Season Ticket, was published in Alexandria in 1948
Two books lie in front of me on the desk as I summon up memories of Dennis Enright who passed away on the last day of 2002, the 31st of December. As we approach the anniversary of his death, his image becomes more and more vivid in my mind and I see him as he was then, when the first of these two books was published in 1948 in Alexandria by the "Aux Editions du Scarabée" press under the title of Season Ticket, priced PT30 (with three pen and ink illustrations by different Egyptian hands).
This slim volume with its Cambridge blue paper cover was never published again and has never taken its legitimate place as Enright's first brainchild in any of the lists of books he later published. It is dedicated to his mother and encompasses 33 poems. How old was he then? Born 11 March 1920, he arrived in Alexandria in the Autumn of 1947 fresh from Downing College, Cambridge, to take up his first job as a "mendicant professor" of English literature at the then Farouk I University at the age of 27.
British poet Blake Morrison in his obituary in the British newspaper The Guardian in January 2003 said that "by default as a disciple of Leavis he could not get a job in British universities." F R Leavis was one of the most important and most controversial literary critics of the 20th century who considered himself to be "persecuted" by British academia. It was Enright who introduced me to Scrutiny, a literary journal edited by Leavis and his "disciples" to which he had contributed while still an undergraduate. But "for a candidate for home university posts...to have appeared in the pages of Scrutiny was considerably more disadvantageous than to have appeared in no pages at all," as he quizzically remarks in an essay in his Conspirators and Poets (1966).
In reply to a question that, in his poems in Season Ticket, he seemed to be obsessed by the Alexandria Ramleh tram, Enright replied: "I have a season ticket, and the tram is warmer in winter and cooler in summer than my apartment. Besides, I pass most of my time either going into town or coming back from town. These journeys are practically the only time when I can write poems, and it is difficult to write a poem in a tram without putting the tram in a poem!" (Interview with Emile Assaad, Le Journal D'Egypte, 13 February 1949)
The Lost Abonné
Living in Ramleh, one spends so much time in trams,
Travelling into the dubious city, to the places of work,
the bars, nightclubs and the cinemas,
That one's thoughts and feelings, lost and yet never lost,
seem carelessly left in tram after tram.
And at last life itself seems to be there: you
are the tram,
And its little officious bells and jeering whistles and
the sudden darkness
At night when the light fails and one fears for one's wallet,
And the different aura of stations, Egyptian and Greek and
politer European,
And the helpful conductor and suspicious inspector,
and the pathetic old fellaha
As she panics into the first-class coach and is loudly ejected.
And the pretty girl. And the embarrassing baby. And
the ferociously noisy intercourse.
And the intense horror of the last tram out of town,
With the dozing bodies, tarbush askew, the shameful accidental
couple, wrangling in harlot's English,
The patriot nasty with drink, and the obvious Jew,
Desperately hidden under an Arabic newspaper, wishing he were
home.
Home, but one hardly notices the passage between tram and home:
Ibrahimieh, Sporting, Mustapha, Rouchdi, bathroom and bed,
and from dream to dream
To the morning rattle of the servant's key. But where is one going?
For the same stations are never the same: tinged with moonlight
Or stark under the sun, polyglot as the newsvendor's cries,
Sometimes watched with dread or love, sometimes passing
unperceived
between the jolting stop and jolting start --
And yet, they tell you, all lines lead somewhere certain:
you know
Which service you have taken, and what its terminus is --
But what of the gleaming line that sinks into unpeopled sand,
the promising journey
That ends in a premature shed, behind the darkened hulks
of other trams?
Short trips into long disasters, bright tickets to an empty house.
And yet there is that which drives us on, forwards or backwards,
if only a shudder,
But always moving again: that current which fades and is renewed,
Shocking us out of blind sidings, through shade or sunlight,
seawards or into the desert,
Clutching that ticket we hardly dare to throw away,
our agony, our joy.
(Season Ticket, p.22-3)
Some of Enright's poems written at that time reflect a mixture of sadness ... or of bitterness (?), due probably to the heavy blow he suffered when his first wife "attached herself " (as one of the characters in Academic Year cynically says about his own fictitious spouse) to an older, more sophisticated colleague of his at the University (Gwyn Williams). More than half a century has passed since this event took place. At the time, we, the students could not fail to see how utterly broken Enright was. One of them said, "the English are cold-blooded, they do not feel," but another retorted, "O friends! I saw the poet yesterday in a restaurant, drinking. His eyes were filled with tears, and he held a handkerchief in his hand!" But Enright continued to read Eliot and Gwyn Williams to lecture on Shakespeare.
Beware of Memory
Luckily I have no memory, and cannot be saddened now
By thinking of frost-lively mornings in England
When the still air burns in the nostrils and horses snort
Like magic dragons,
Or remembering the balanced beauty of English gardens
When a hot summer's day suddenly delights the guarded flowers.
Luckily I have no memory, and later will not long too keenly
For the conscienceless beauty of Alexandria, where her silver flank
Sprawls between sea and slums,
Or the magnificent blessing of an evening's coolness in Egypt,
In Nouzha Gardens, when the light at last is gentle, and
The distant frogs are like grown-ups' chatter, half-heard by
Tired children.
Happy the man whose home is where he lives. O do not remember
The Elsewhere too well: for even Here is so swiftly dissolving!
The second book on my desk, Selected Poems 1990 (Oxford University Press), was given to me by Dennis in September 1997 when we met at King's College, London, on the last day of a conference on "Images of Alexandria". More than 45 years had passed since we had last met when I was a student at Girton College, Cambridge, in the early 1950s and had visited him and Madeleine (the teacher of French literature and painter he had married in Alexandria in 1949) in Birmingham, when Dominique, their daughter was only a few months old.
The years simply slipped away, and I was a student all over again. I read out some of his Alexandria poems and tears welled up in his eyes. Though weak and sick, he mounted the rostrum and read out some of his more recent poems. It was a memorable occasion.
The three years Enright spent in Alexandria bore fruit in Season Ticket, a slim book of poems mainly about Alexandria, Academic Year, a novel about his life in Alexandria (in which each chapter heading is a relevant verse from the Qur'an), and...a PhD from the then Farouk I University (now Alexandria University). The title of the dissertation he presented was "In Search of God: Hölderlin, Rilke & Stefan George". I remember how packed the amphitheatre was on the day of his "Viva"; all his loyal disciples were of course present: Tewfik Saleh, Alfred Farag, Esmat Walli, Aida Mansour and many more from the different departments. This was an occasion not to be missed!
The British poet and critic Anthony Thwaite in an essay on Academic Year recalls that when the novel was first published it was greeted in England with "genial praise, but almost wholly as a comedy, if not actually a farce". But on rereading it 30 years later he discovered that "among the jokes and the flippant observations, the book has a strong vein of melancholy, disgust, and even tragedy." (in Life By Other Means: Essays on D J Enright ed. Jacqueline Simms, OUP, 1990).
That, to my mind, is exactly the impression one gets when reading Academic Year. The three central characters in the novel are Bacon, a middle-aged lecturer at the university who has lived 20 years in Egypt and speaks Arabic; Packet, a young lecturer who has spent one or two years in the country and knows a smattering of Arabic, and Brett, newly arrived and employed at the English Cultural Centre with no Arabic at all. Critic William Walsh considers these individuals as representing "the experienced, the ardent, and the intolerant in the English character ... their separate views, wittily and sensitively articulated, together make a wholeness of vision and construct a place complete and human in its life, suffering and comedy." (D J Enright: Poet of Humanism, Cambridge University Press, 1974) Yes, a wholeness of vision with three facets that speak with the voice of the author whose chief concern was with "feeling" -- "the feeling of living in a particular place at a particular time" (Figures of Speech, 1965).
The period after WWII was a very difficult time in the history of Egypt; momentous events in the Middle East were beginning to take shape and a monstrous phantasmagoric apparition was raising its head. Foreign writers sensed the unease that prevailed and dealt with it, each in his/her own way, but it was left for native writers like Naguib Mahfouz to give an Egyptian aspect to those restless days.
"The four novels I have published are all really travel books, I am afraid" is Enright's own comment on his fiction (Contemporary Novelists, ed. James Vinson, London, 1972). This sounds rather apologetic and Academic Year certainly does not deserve such a disparaging judgement. It is a travel book, but through time. The past comes to life, at least one aspect of it as seen and experienced by a "thoughtful person" like Packet, Enright's mouthpiece, whose "chief interest was ...amateur sociology". In Academic Year, Enright realises that "Egypt is not so simple as she seems..." It is natural that an objective onlooker should feel anger and rage at the paradoxes and inconsistencies that abound and the illogicality of everything.
"Packet's servant arrived half an hour late one morning in a state of great excitement. There was trouble in the streets ... What was it about this time? Hassan's explanations were very confused; he came out with some sensational story about the police struggling with the army. The army had risen then? That was really exciting; a coup d'état, at last! Packet had a vision of slim intellectual lieutenants occupying the palace at Mountazah, while in the capital the monstrous king was hauled before a firing squad of cannons."
But on further investigation from neighbours, it appeared that the Alexandrian police, men and officers alike, had decided that their rates of pay were ridiculously insufficient, and that their best course was to strike. The populace would rise, there would be burning, looting and killing, and the just demands of the police would be met without delay. But rumours of their intention had reached the government a little in advance, and martial law had been proclaimed at once. Most of the police force preferred to sit quietly at home while, "rioting in town, all accounts agreed, was extremely serious... Characteristically the mob had destroyed its own little cinemas ... the places of entertainment into which no European would dream of entering...If only they would stream into the local West End ... and burn down the palatial picture-houses where the latest American and English and French and Italian films were shown -- that would at least be logical! But they left such places alone: they were not at home there ..." (Academic Year, pp. 143-148)
In this same bantering, half-serious, half-mocking, tragic-comical style we move on from place to place in Alexandria, seeing the city as it was 50 years ago. However, Academic Year also abounds in discussions about literature and teaching, two subjects dear to Enright's heart and of vital importance in his life. One should not forget that besides being a writer he was also a first-class teacher whose students always think of him with gratitude and affection.
I here present a translation of a verbal picture, written in Arabic by Alfred Farag, one of Enright's students and now a well-known playwright, that first appeared in Al-Ahram on 13 July 2003. Farag does not mention the teacher's name, but he refers to Enright as "the poet" and shows him lecturing to Egyptian students on T S Eliot's poem Four Quartets.
"The poet would read two or three or four lines then pause for a few moments that we considered too long...whereas he, in his silence would gaze up at the ceiling or out of the window, contemplating the clouds in their slow motion across the sky. With fixed eyes, he saw what we could not see and listened in silence to the dialogue aroused by the verse of Eliot, with phantoms or angels. During these moments of short/long silence while a yoga-like hush reigned in the classroom, some students tried to create a commotion, but he remained immobile, oblivious of their uproar, and the strange thing was, that he always won.
"His silence was far more eloquent than their noise and it carried us back to Eliot's verse...it was the poet who made me appreciate the value of the pause in writing and in the performance of drama.... Students used to argue about him when he recited poetry; some said he was drunk, 'yes' I replied, 'drunk with the sound of words ...enthralled with the verse of Eliot'. Once, after a lecture, I asked him about his magical way of reading poetry, and he said, 'poetry is not mere words and phrases ...poetry also throbs between the lines, its meaning has shades that are felt by the senses and perceived by the soul. To write it is an experience, and to read it is also one. Do not ask me about poetry. Read it and ponder!' "
Children, Beggars, And Schoolteachers
Careless of the future, tolerant of today,
Gay in their frozen moment, and so warm:
Flat feet buffet the pavement:
things fear them,
They have no fear. And these are children,
For whom, they say, all is intimidating, mysterious,
unknown.
Bent in ugly balls against the wall,
The past forgotten, a dim and distant present,
the reckoned future unresented:
Only a stump of arm, a withered leg --
that is
Their sedentary occupation. The quiet beggars
Sleeping with their hands held out.
All mysteries solved for them, no possible fears.
In nervous transit from tram to tram,
A present past, a dubious present, and a future
full of fears.
Feet that mistrust the slithering earth; we,
The teachers, bearers of diplomas
and mysteries still unsolved.
We who should guide the children,
lest they
Should later come to begging.
(Season Ticket, p16; Academic Year, p107-8)
Once, when asked if he had ever seen the phrase "obsessive humanity" applied to his work, Dennis Enright replied that he had not. "But I wouldn't object to it. What else is there to be obsessed about ?"
* The writer is professor emeritus of English literature at Alexandria University.
