ONE EVENING IN the summer of 1963 I ran downstairs to answer the door with special pleasure. The dinner party was supposed to be for an American couple passing through London, but privately I was looking forward to it because of someone else: a man whom I had never met. He had turned up unexpectedly, and when he telephoned I thought ‘Lucky I’m giving a party—it’s something I can ask him to naturally, without seeming to make too much of our first meeting.’
I wanted to meet him because I loved a book he had written. I had seen in it that when he was funny, as he often was, it was not because he was trying to entertain but because he himself was enchanted by the comedy in the incident he was describing. Getting this incident, these people, this quirk of human behaviour down, and getting it down right—that was what he had been enjoying, rather than ‘expressing himself’ and while books written in this way are not necessarily great books, this is the way the great books I love best are written. It is the real thing.
We had exchanged a good many letters about his writing, and I had heard something about him from other people. He was an Egyptian whose passport had been withdrawn because he was a Communist, and he had been living for some years as an exile in Germany. He hated that country. He was very poor, supporting himself by working in factories and docks. From his book it was possible to deduce what his early youth had been like, and to see that this hard exile’s life was a dramatic reversal of his circumstances. A German acquaintance had described him as ‘a modest, tender and gazelle-like being,’ which went with the personality suggested by his writing. I was a sucker for oppressed foreigners, and an oppressed foreigner who was a gazelle-like being and who could shrug off hardship in order to look at things with the humour and perceptiveness shown in his book was one whom I would certainly like. He would be more than an interesting new acquaintance. He would be a friend.
When I opened the front door I was, for a moment, disappointed. He looked more like a goat than a gazelle: arched eyebrows, long nose, long upper lip, small neat beard but no moustache—a sardonic face. And he was stiff, a small man in a trim and conservatively cut blue suit with a fraction of white handkerchief at the breast pocket, white shirt, dark tie, answering my greeting with formality from behind a bunch of carnations wrapped in tissue paper. Perhaps he didn’t click his heels and bow, but it would not have been surprising if he had done so—and I had come downstairs with both hands out, so to speak, ready to cry ‘Hurrah! We’re meeting at last!’
I recognized that I had gone further in anticipation of friendship than he had because I knew more about him than he knew about me—I had read his book. As we went upstairs I thought that he would soon relax.
He was gravely courteous on being introduced to my other guests, and then silent, choosing to stand or sit on the edge of the group; the size of the room didn’t allow him a position outside it, but that was what he would have preferred. He was watching and listening. If a cigarette needed lighting or a glass had to be disposed of he was quick to notice and to act. His movements were calm and economical: a deft, graceful man, not a bumper or a stumbler. Might he be bored? He was clearly not much interested in the kind of small talk which goes on at the beginning of a party, but he was interested in observing the talkers. His attentive brown eyes made the smallness of the small talk more apparent.
Soon after we had sat down to the meal someone said something more interesting, which related directly to the speaker’s experience, and instantly the sardonic goat-face changed. The eyes actually appeared to light up, melancholy gave way to animation. He began to describe something which chimed with what had been said, and he was funny. Everyone laughed. People began asking him about Germany and someone expressed admiration of a Jewish friend who now went back there on business trips. ‘He wouldn’t do that if he could get into an Egyptian skin from time to time,’ he said, and told us how often, when he was in a German bar among strangers, someone would mark the discovery that he was an Egyptian with a look of complicity or a nudge, and would say: ‘Ah, you will understand, then, that Hitler knew what he was doing.’ He was good on Germany, apparently well-informed on politics and trends in public opinion, emphatic on how he disliked the country but fair about its achievements.
When he was questioned about his life as an exile he dodged sympathy by being matter-of-fact, or amusing, or sometimes impatient. The part of this experience he was willing to use in talk was made up of comic predicaments and ingenious devices for survival. When, harking back to his book, I asked about Egypt, he became even more entertaining because the impulse moving him was so obviously one of pleasure. He described things because he was amused or outraged by them, his audience was of secondary importance—he was doing in conversation what he did in writing.
Halfway through dinner I noticed that he didn’t like one of his fellow-guests, a pretty woman who had published two novels. I had expected him to enjoy meeting a writer, considering how far he had to live, usually, from people who shared his concerns, but it wasn’t working. She was a clever woman, but self-conscious, seeing herself as one who practised an art and had difficulty reconciling its demands with those made on her by ordinary life. Sometimes I had felt that she became rather pompous, almost absurd, in this attitude, but this evening it wasn’t showing much. She did, however, contradict the Egyptian quite sharply once or twice about Germany, with which she felt an affinity, and I suspected that she was not enjoying the way he was becoming the centre of attention. He was being elaborately polite to her, with an underlying irony which came at times uncomfortably near the surface.
After dinner he helped me take things into the kitchen, and stacked dishes while I made coffee. My hunch had been right: he was already behaving as an old friend would have done.
‘You’re being a bit naughty,’ I said. ‘What have you got against that poor woman? Do leave her alone—she’s very nice really.’
‘I’m sure she is,’ he said, ‘but I can’t bear that kind of thing—that “being a writer,” that taking one’s “art” so seriously and all.’
‘But you’re a writer and you take it seriously.’
‘I am not a writer.’ He sounded quite fierce.
‘What do you mean? You are—and a very good one.’
‘If I thought I was trying to “make literature,” to “write beautifully,” I’d never write another word.’
I remembered our correspondence about his book, and how he had always known exactly what he wanted and why he wanted it that way. He was ready enough to accept suggestions which arose from the fact that English was not his first language, but if an alteration changed a nuance of meaning by a hair’s breadth, he was intransigent. Every sentence of his seemingly casual prose had been weighed and worked over—he was as careful in his craft as ever this woman had been.
But I knew what he meant. ‘She does rather carry a sacred flame about,’ I said, and we both started to giggle.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’ll go and sit on the other side of the room by that sweet fat man. I really like him.’
Two of the people who were there that evening asked him to visit them. They were somewhat taken by his exoticness: here was a man to whom things had happened which would never happen to them, things that commanded interest and sympathy. But it was the way in which he took it that charmed his new friends: the humour, the ironic understatement, the lack of self-pity, the undiminished relish for life. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever met a more elegant man,’ my lover said to me one day, and that was indeed the impression he made: someone in whom a sense of style came from the centre and was nearer to being a moral quality than an adornment.
I felt elated when I went to bed that night. One can make plenty of new acquaintances in middle-age, but it is not often that one sees the possibility of knitting a new person into one’s life as one did in youth, and that had just happened.
Five years later this man killed himself in my flat. He swallowed twenty-six sleeping pills, and then telephoned a friend. The two most common reactions to this are (from the loving) horror at the thought of his last-minute panic, and (from the knowing) the conclusion that he didn’t really mean to die. I believe both these reactions are mistaken. From the message he left me, and from what the friend he called has said about the way he spoke, I think he was needing a witness. It is bad enough merely to collapse in grief when alone; other people’s ignorance of what is happening soon makes the tears seem foolish. How much worse to be performing what he called ‘the one authentic act of my life’ in a vacuum. ‘A terrible let-down’: he used those words in his last note. Terrible indeed, to be doing something so important as dying by one’s own decision without anyone’s knowing. He picked up the telephone to make the act real. He himself would feel, I believe, that in writing his book and in choosing his death he did the only two things in his life which belonged to the man he could appear to be, and whom he might, in different circumstances, really have been.