Beer in the Snooker Club WAGUIH GHALI Waguih Ghali was born in Cairo on February 25, most likely in 1930. He attended high school in Alexandria and then studied abroad in Europe. Fearing political persecution, he fled Egypt in 1958 and lived in London, also spending time in France, Sweden, and Germany. Ghali authored several personal essays, which appeared in The Guardian between 1957 and 1965. He also spent time as a freelance journalist, reporting for the Times of London and the BBC. Following a battle with depression, Ghali committed suicide in London, at the home of his friend and editor Diana Athill, in 1969. Beer in the Snooker Club is his only finished novel. FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, JUNE 2014 Copyright © 1964 by Waguih Ghali Introduction copyright © 2014 by Pankaj Mishra All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House LLC, NewYork, a Penguin Random House company. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, NewYork, in 1964. Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House LLC. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows: Ghali, Waguih. Beer in the Snooker Club/Waguih Ghali.—ist American edition. p. cm PZ4.G425 Be 1964 64012296 Vintage Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8041-7074-1 eBook ISBN: 978-0-80417075-8 www.vintagebooks.com Cover design by Isabel Urbina Peña, based on a design by Muriel Nasser v3.1 Contents Cover About the Author Title Page Copyright Introduction Part I Part II Part III Part IV Part V INTRODUCTION “History,” Stephen Dedalus says in Ulysses, “is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” By the 1960s, this plangent cry was being echoed by many sensitive men and women in Asian and African countries that had only recently entered modern history as sovereign nation-states. The passionate idealism of anti-imperialist movements and the longing for justice and dignity that went into the making of many new nations had been compromised by the corruption and ineptitude of the first generation of rulers. The futile cycle of coups and countercoups, and the long game of musical chairs between military strongmen and civilian politicians, had already begun. “The politics that came,” writes the disenchanted Caribbean narrator of V. S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men (1967), “made people aware of their pain. Later they came to see their helplessness.” Few people felt more vulnerable to this postcolonial chaos than members of the property-owning classes. These local elites had prospered during European rule, often as collaborators in a system of exploitation. Educated in Western or Western-style institutions, they had become emotionally and spiritually, as well as materially, dependent on the European metropolis, all the while growing aloof from the rest of their compatriots. After independence, they tended to see their often expensive lifestyles, no less than their power, menaced by newly assertive political movements of peasants, factory workers, and ambitious military officers. And even the most altruistic and perceptive of these native aristocrats found themselves thwarted by their remoteness from ordinary lives. Alienation was, for them, more than a pose cheaply borrowed, along with black turtlenecks, from French existentialists. It stultified private life—a realm often defined by quietly desperate love affairs with European men and women—as well as political gestures. The Mimic Men, detailing a career “sunk in the taint of fantasy,” was among the extraordinary spate of novels and films in Asia, Africa, and Latin America—from Driss Chraïbi’s Heirs to the Past and Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North to the film Memories of Underdevelopment by Cuban Tomás Gutiérrez Alea— that diagnosed the failure and premature exhaustion of the most privileged and talented young men and women before the arduous challenges of revolution, nation building, and self-renewal. But the work of art from this era that has effortlessly assumed the authority of a classic, and has actually felt more prescient and moving since the Arab Spring, is Waguih Ghali’s Beer in the Snooker Club. Little is known about Ghali except that he was born into a well- off family of Coptic Christians and seems to have known intimately the radical postures and precarious bohemianism that his only novel describes with perfectly balanced harshness and solicitude. His true literary predecessor, in many ways, is Albert Cossery, who was from a Greek Orthodox bourgeois family in Cairo and who wrote in French. Cossery denounced the modern world altogether in fictions that upheld a strategic indolence as the correct response to its imperatives to think and work hard. Even the most politicized Egyptian in Cossery’s 1948 novel, Laziness in the Fertile Valley, wonders, “Why did [men] have to struggle, always vicious and discontented, when the sole wisdom lay in a careless, passive attitude?” But Ghali belonged, like his first-person narrator, Ram, to a generation of listless youth that had been galvanized by the overthrow of Egypt’s cravenly pro-British monarch Farouk in 1952 and the advent of the pan-Arab nationalist Gamal Abdel Nasser. “The only important thing,” Ram says, “which happened to us was the Egyptian revolution.” Yet, as his account goes on to show with unsentimental insight and acid humor, this was yet another revolution that—as Milan Kundera wrote in Life Is Elsewhere, another 1960s fiction about the fantasies of the romantic intellectual—had “no desire to be examined or analyzed, it only desires that the people merge with it; in this sense it is lyrical and in need of lyricism.” Revolution may have been the opiate of the brighter demimonde, but Egypt in the 1950s did possess its conditions. Its cities, especially Cairo, were overwhelmed by a massive influx of people who had fled rural subsistence economies only to face unemployment and the degradation of life in slums. The national economy was dominated by a large class of coldhearted landlords, rent seekers, and businessmen who ferreted their profits abroad rather than reinvesting them in the country. One of the wonders of Beer in the Snooker Club is the delicacy with which Ghali sketches a background of deprivation and anger into the confusions of a parochial elite. In what is essentially an account of drift and futility, Ghali—a card-carrying Communist—is always clear about the fate of the insulted and injured people he wanted to care for. The novel opens with Ram’s aunt, a member of the “cosmopolitan” feudal class, or “parasites,” as Ram’s friend Font calls them, selling surplus land to the fellaheen and “pretending to the government she was giving the land to the poor.” These are the Cairenes who, having migrated spiritually to the European metropolis, won’t bother to learn Arabic and despise the celebrated singer Umm Kulthum. Ram himself is shown to be initially indifferent to the inequities of his society. “I was neither Red, Pink, Blue, nor Black. I had no politics in me then.” His political—and sentimental—education is initiated by Edna, a Jewish member of Cairo’s upper class. Unlike Ram, Edna has successfully rebelled against her comprador origins. “I hate Egyptians of your class as much as I do my parents,” she tells Ram. “It was Edna who introduced me to Egyptian people,” Ram writes, adding, “it is rare, in the milieu in which I was born, to know Egyptians.” He and his close friend Font hungrily start to read the books she suggests. She initiates them into the cruelties of European imperialism, and the struggles for freedom waged across the postcolonial world. “Gradually, we began to see ourselves as members of humanity in general and not just as Egyptians.” One symptom of political awakening in the postcolonial world during the 1950s was anti-Americanism: Ram and Font share a “vehement phobia towards Egyptians who read the American Time Magazine.” When Ram’s America-returned cousin Mounir claims that “American Democracy is the thing” and pontificates about the “Red Menace,” he finds himself violently challenged by Edna’s intellectual protégé Ram, who has since picked up a lot of information about the plight of blacks and Native Americans in Freedom’s Land. Yet Ram can’t help sense some falsity in his new role as a firebrand, and his exposure to the big world outside Egypt also breeds a different kind of appetite for life elsewhere. The world of ice and snow in winter and red, slanting roof-tops was beginning to call us. The world of intellectuals and underground metros and cobbled streets and a green countryside which we had never seen, beckoned to us. The world where students had rooms and typists for girl-friends, and sang songs and drank beer in large mugs, shouted to us.… I wanted to live. I read and read and Edna spoke and I wanted to live. I wanted to have affairs with countesses and to fall in love with a barmaid and to be a gigolo and to be a political leader to win at Monte Carlo and to be down- and-out in London and to be an artist to be elegant and also to be in rags. Some of these exuberant and contradictory desires are actually fulfilled as Edna helps Ram and his friend Font travel to England —“Jesus, Font; here we are, London and everything”—and Ram turns out to have a better time of it than most other people from the colonies. As an exotic, he finds himself quickly adopted by a left-leaning English family in Hampstead. His superior class and education and fair skin help him transcend the racism that most other colonials are subjected to. So he can pity rather than despise the uneducated former soldier in Kilburn who calls Egyptians “wogs,” and even find it “natural” to sleep with the Englishman’s fiancée. He has the upper hand on the condescending white woman who tries to pigeonhole him as one of the “intelligent Egyptians … at the Gezira Sporting Club.” Worried that he is turning into a “phoney” like his shiftless compatriots, “the Cairo arties, who if not slumming in Europe, are driving their Jaguars in Zamalek,” he imagines being “down-and-out” in the East End before deciding against the idea. He ends up with a compromise in Battersea, living with a working-class man and his Irish stepfather. Ghali recounts these adventures in Englishness with bittersweet comedy: the lonely London bedsits we know from the novels of Patrick Hamilton and Muriel Spark are suffused here with the hopefulness and energy of the deracinated colonial, who has been made to wait too long for life to begin elsewhere. To a man like Ram, conditioned by his provincial background and education to revere the metropolis, London represents all the unalloyed and thrilling glamour of metropolitan modernity; indeed, England on the whole turns out to embody the coherent world of Europe, where, unlike in Egypt, words hadn’t drifted free from their meanings: “where miners were communists and policemen fascists; where there was something called the ‘bourgeoisie’ and someone called the ‘landlady.’ ” But the West, so seductive with its ever-renewed promise of pleasure and stability, remains a source of ambivalence to Ram. When in 1956 Britain tries, in a fit of neo-imperialist delirium, to militarily seize control over the Suez Canal, Ram is further radicalized. In spite of all the books we had read demonstrating the slyness and cruelty of England’s foreign policy, it took the Suez war to make us believe it. Of course the