Plain Talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

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Normal Mailer, the famous American writer, has passed away, leaving behind a wealth of literary works and a controversial history.

I first met Mailer during a PEN congress held in New York in 1986. In that congress he made himself unpopular with women writers when he said, "There may be some good women writers, but there is no such a thing as female intellectual." Women participants of the Congress just left.

During that congress I had many opportunities to spend time with him. He insisted on calling me Said, not Saad, and on many occasions he talked about Egypt. Indeed his most ambitious novel, Ancient Evenings (1983), is about ancient Egypt -- and it was the subject of a discussion I had with him. It was only natural that my first question to him should be why he chose ancient Egypt as a setting for his novel and he referred me to an interview he gave to Harvard Magazine in which he expressed his ideas and views.

It took mailer ten years to finish writing what he called his Egyptian novel. He announced his intention of writing that novel in 1972 and it was not published until 1983. It started as an excursion into Egypt, he said: "I was going to dip into Egypt for a chapter or two, then get out, move on to Greece and Rome, then the Middle ages. I was thinking sort of a picaresque novel. That was in the first half year of working on it. But I began to realise that I was in Egypt for a long haul. So I started studying and I've learnt about Ancient Egypt these ten years."

Mailer admitted that he took great risks by writing about Egypt, but, he says, "I think I have used every bit of inspiration I've had on this book. If the book is not good enough, then I'm not good enough. I feel that kind of peace about it." Reading about ancient Egypt gave Mailer an understanding of certain things. He came to know more about the wealthy, by dealing with Egypt, its gold and Pharoahs. On another occasion when he was asked, "Why Egypt", he replied, "I don't know enough about history to be able to answer that. Egypt was one of the places -- I think it was definitely one of the places where magic was being converted into social exchange."

But there was more to his interest than that. He made one assumption, which was that "Egyptians had minds which are easily as complex and interesting as our own. They had an intellectual discipline that was highly unscientific from our point of view. But I suspect no farther off the mark than ours." Mailer expresses some brave ideas about the Gods of Ancient Egypt. It was before the Judeo-Christian era, it was a pagan era more or less. But while writing the book he found that the ancient Egyptians had a tremendous influence over the Hebrews. Much of the Old Testament, he says, you find in Egyptian prayers. "Some of it's startling. The early pages of Genesis, the first page of Genesis could be taken from certain prayers to Ammon and the ways in which he created the universe."

When asked whether his novel bears any resemblance to the Egypt of today, or what was in it for the modern reader, Mailer answered, "Well, I will have failed if we start reading the book that way, and I think that is going to be one of the difficulties for people, because most historical novels pretend to teach something about today. And I will have failed if that's the way people react to my book. I want people to realise, my God, there are wholly different points of view that can be as interesting as our own and as thorough-going as our own. In other words probably a social evening in Egypt -- and this is one of the reasons why I ended by calling the book Ancient Evenings -- in that period 3,000 years ago was as interesting as an evening in New York today."