Plain Talk
By
Mursi Saad El-Din
One of the most interesting experiences I've recently been through is that of watching a new television series about the late author and army officer Youssef El- Sebaie. At the same time, by sheer coincidence, I have been reading a book about him. El-Sebaie was a leading literary voice who became minister of culture under President Anwar El-Sadat, only to be assassinated in Cyprus in 1978. The series is particularly interesting because I had the good fortune of knowing El-Sebaie personally for over 30 years.
To say that I knew him hardly communicates the extent to which I was close to this kind and interesting man, however, for our families had known each other for many years prior to my working with him on coming back from London in 1956 -- the start of an intense and immensely rewarding collaboration that went on till the end of his life. Having been a colleague of both Gamal Abdel- Nasser and Anwar El-Sadat, he was universally respected and trusted. And as I worked with him at the Supreme Council of Art and Literature, an institution he helped establish in 1955, I came to realise why more than ever before. Happily I continued working with him, becoming undersecretary of state for foreign cultural relations while he was minister of culture. We worked together in Afro-Asian Solidarity and were fellow associates of the international PEN club, travelling together as far as China and Tanzania...
Watching the series and turning the pages of the book has made me think about the art of biography, wondering how, from my own experience, I would have rendered the same episodes of El-Sebaie's life. Choosing between the meticulously researched, comprehensively referenced biography and the more impressionistic kind, based on personal contact with the subject, I have realised, I prefer the latter by far.
I shall not mention the names of the authors of the series and the book. Suffice it to say that the author of the series has produced a biography of the first, scientific kind, while the author of the book provides one of the second kind. And of the two, notwithstanding the colourful world of the televised image -- a pleasure of which the reader is deprived -- it is the impressionistic biography that steals the limelight.
This must not be understood as a criticism of the television series, which is an expertly executed, well performed, eminently competent work. And yet, despite the effort that went into it and the best intentions of all those involved, the series lacked credibility -- at least in the eyes of those of us who knew El-Sebaie in person. We could not help comparing the characters to their real-life counterparts, and so they didn't feel sufficiently real. Not so in the book, which, even when it provides a different account of a particular event or episode from one's memory of it, merely comes across as someone else's perspective -- in an insight into the ongoing interpretation of what that episode or events could have meant, all things considered. Reading it has thus been a rewarding experience.
Remembering the uproar generated by the publication of the biographies of both Iris Murdoch and Sylvia Plath, both of which turned out to be far more controversial than their authors intended, I thought of the difficult business of writing a biography of a contemporary figure, whose personal acquaintances are still alive. Inevitably, their memories of the figure in question will differ from the authors' accounts of their lives, and sometimes this results in endless trouble.
Be that as it may, however, my most persistent thought when I follow El-Sebaie's life on screen, or on the pages of a book, is that, however clever or honest the biographers, it is impossible to convey even a fraction of what it was really like to know such a man, to spend time in his company, to receive a phone call from or engage in discussion with him -- so valuable was the experience of knowing him in real life.
