Plain talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

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When I think of G S Fraser, George Sutherland, 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 a dirty scarf while his trousers were fastened with strings. I asked with concern whether he was reprimanded for such wear and he said that he never had been, probably his boss was a writer too."

This is how I remember George Fraser too, but also with his steel-rimmed glasses and the way he used literally to grope his way, having been very short sighted. 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 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 English literary magazines which appeared in Cairo at the time: Personal Landscape, Salamander and Citadel. I had another four sonnets published in ESFAM, the magazine of the English Section, Faculty of Arts.

George Fraser was a talented writer with many interests. He wrote poetry, criticism and travel books. Later he wrote some academic books on poetry. He was always writing something and was only ever seen crouched over his portable typewriter, enfolding his left arm around it, as if fondling a lover, and with one finger he typed at a speed that would put professional typists to shame. Writing for Parade, broadcasting for the Forces' Programme and publishing 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 be blown up by French Marquis, Nazi military cars overturned by Greek guerrillas and bridges blown up.

I have previously talked about the two main literary groups which had been in Cairo: Salamander, which consisted mainly of writers in khaki; and Personal Landscape, whose members were civilians, mostly university professors. Fraser belonged to the first, but his poems were published in both magazines.

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 sum up Fraser. He was not only a poet, but an intellectual with a searching mind and opinions on the arts and a deep critical sense. And in Cairo, as in Banna, or Asmara where he served, he was always a stranger and afraid.

I can talk only about Fraser in Cairo, where I had the daily opportunity of meeting and listening to him, going to parties with him and at times disagreeing with him. He could never feel settled or at ease. He always fretted and showed apprehension. In my opinion he was the embodiment of alienation, the feeling of exile experienced by the writers who made of Egypt their wartime abode. For soldiers who spent most of the time in the Western Desert where battles were raging, Cairo was a holiday haven, with its glittering lights, its bars, its cinemas and nightclubs. But with writers, it was what Durrell describes as "a sense of alienation and distance which was made more marked by the apparent normality of every day life."

Fraser was, in a way, overwhelmed by Cairo. It created in him a sense of apprehension, maybe it was the size of the great city or the squalor he saw and decried, or the nationalities that milled around the streets. Of this he wrote:

"But who can possess a city? Who can possess it as he possesses his own so that a vague consciousness of its proportions is always in his mind."