Plain talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

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When I think of George Sutherland Fraser, I remember what Lawrence Durrell wrote about him in his introduction to Return to Oasis, an anthology of the poetry of the Second World War. Durrell describes a visit by Fraser:

"I recall George Fraser visiting me in the press department of the embassy to deliver some poems of his for Personal Landscape. I was horrified to see that, though in uniform, he was wearing tennis shoes and dirty scarf while his trousers were fastened with strings. I asked with concern whether he wasn't reprimanded for such wear and he said that he never had been, probably because his boss was a writer too."

This is how I remember Fraser too, but also with his steel-rimmed glasses and the way he used literally to grope his way, having been very short sighted. George and I shared the same room, with John Waller in the British Ministry of Information, where he was working in Parade, a magazine published for the troops, and I was the head of the Arabic department. We became good friends and Fraser showed great interest in the poems I used to write and often corrected their metre and rhyme. He even got three of them published in three of the many literary magazines which appeared in Cairo, Personal Landscape, Salamander and Citadel.

Fraser was a talented writer with many interests. He wrote poetry, essays, criticism and travel books. Later he wrote some academic books on poetry. He was always writing something and was never seen without being crouched on his portable typewriter, enfolding his left arm around it, as if fondling a lover, and with only one finger he typed at such speed that would put professional typists to shame. Apart from writing for Parade, broadcasting for the Forces' Programme and publishing dozens of poems, Fraser used to sit at his desk and concoct stories of bravery and valour of the resistance movement of Europe. From his small office trains were made to blow up, by French resistance, Nazi military cars overturned by Greek guerrillas and bridges exploded by Norwegians. He always did this with a permanent sarcastic smile that never vanished from his lips.

I have previously talked about the two main literary groups which had been formed in Cairo, Salamander, which consisted mainly of writers in khaki and Personal Landscape whose members were civilians.

Apart from the many poems Fraser wrote about Egypt, he devoted a large section of his autobiography to his Cairo days. Typically of Fraser his autobiography is called Stranger and Afraid, with the subtitle Autobiography of an Intellectual. Both titles sum up Fraser. He was not only a poet, but an intellectual with a searching mind, mature opinions about the arts and a deep critical sense. And in Cairo, as in Bannares and Asmara where he served, he was always a stranger and afraid.

Fraser was, in a way, overwhelmed by Cairo. It created in him a sense of fright. Maybe it was the size of the great city or the squalor he saw and decried, or the dozens of nationalities that milled around the streets. Like most of the writers in exile, as they called themselves, Fraser felt out of his depth in Cairo: different culture, different people, different language. It was against this background of Cairo that he met his British friends.