Plain talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

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Under the Egypt spellThe first American writer I shall present is Norman Mailer. He should come towards the end of my list, but having met him relatively recently I am still under the influence of the time we spent together. He is probably the most controversial, one might even say the most scandalous of all the writers on my list. It was in New York, at a PEN Congress in the late 1980s, that I met him. As President of the American PEN, he directed the Congress, in which over 400 writers from all over the world participated. PEN represents poets, playwrights, essayists and novelists, but since its initials make up the word for "pen", the organisation's name in Arabic is Al-Qalam. This international organisation claims almost 10,000 members from over 70 countries. Egypt was one of the first countries to join, with the late Taha Hussein, followed by Tewfik El-Hakim as presidents, and Youssef El-Sebai and myself as secretaries. PEN was the brainchild of the English post-war writer Mrs Catherine Dawson Scott, a novelist well-known in the 1920s. Mrs Dawson's idea was that if writers got together and forged some kind of an international order, that would help build up a world based on justice and peace. She took her idea to John Galsworthy, the well-known English writer; and together with H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw and others established the English PEN.But to go back to Mailer, during the Congress I had many opportunities to speak with him. He insisted on calling me Said instead of Saad but on many occasions he talked about Egypt. As we know his most ambitious novel Ancient Evenings, published in 1983 is about Ancient Egypt, which was the subject of a discussion I had with him.

It was natural that the first question I asked him was why he chose ancient Egypt as a setting for his novel, and he referred me to an interview he gave to the Harvard Magazine in which he gave vent to his ideas and views.It took Mailer ten years to finish writing what he called his Egyptian novel. He announced his intention of writing it in 1972 but 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 onto Greece and Rome, then the Middle Ages. I was thinking sort of a picaresque novel. That was in the first six months of working on it. But I began to realise that I was in Egypt for the long haul. So I started studying and I have learnt about ancient Egypt these ten years."There was a lot to interest him. One assumption he made was essential: that Egyptians had minds 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 had an eloquent answer: "Well I've 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 perform a service or 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."