The Objective Form of the Object

Abstract

The Objective Form of the Object H. Aram Veeser (bio) Review of Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said, New York Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021. 464 pp. The new biography of Edward W. Said, based on the now-public Said papers and many interviews, is rich in detail. The biographer, Timothy Brennan, a literary scholar and professor, describes Said's intellectual accomplishments incisively and for the most part fairly. Brennan's deep interest in music assumes great importance toward the end of the book when Said's musical turn afforded him a revitalizing outlet. The biography is somewhat severe, and it avoids the worldly realm of love, money, and sports. The facts of Said's early life are cataloged here, including many that were not covered in Out of Place, Said's popular 1999 memoir, which the present book—Places of Mind—echoes faintly in its own title. In those days long ago, his four sisters were goaded, for example, by his "lordly magnanimity" and mocked the way he would permit them "a glimpse of [his] room and even, on rare occasions, the right to cross the threshold of the sacrosanct place and gasp at his books and, in pride of place, his piano" (14). His former students will learn of Said's last report card at his expensive Cairo prep school ("A minus in English, C in biology, C plus in physics, C plus in chemistry, and a surprising C minus in French") (36). At this point, he was sent to an American boarding school to be "'educated abroad,' a phrase oft repeated," by those left behind, "in hushed, awestruck voices" (10). His fellow students at Mount Hermon considered him "aloof" and "a disgruntled know-it-all" (39), and he hated the school's would-be democratizing policy of assigning menial tasks like potato peeling to students. Vague suspicions of ethnocentrism, in Said's memoir, are now confirmed by William Spanos, then a Mount Hermon teacher and later the founder of theory journal boundary 2, who is quoted as saying that he himself was called "'spic' behind his back because of his Greek heritage." Nevertheless, Said's class rank improved at this remote Massachusetts boarding school; he graduated second in his class, with [End Page 367] his lowest grades in English and his highest in Bible studies and music appreciation (44). In places the biographer struggles to situate Said accurately in his class milieu. He mentions "Said's chronicle of the exotic world of the upper classes" (325), but in Cairo he was surrounded by hardworking middle-class intelligentsia (like his aunt Melia, a headmistress) and well-to-do merchants (like his businessman father). He had one very influential relative, by marriage, Charles Malik, a philosophy professor who held important posts in Lebanon and served as Lebanese ambassador to the United States. True, Said developed expensive tastes, favoring Burberry suits and Rolex watches. The biography affirms that, by the time Columbia hired him as an instructor, age twenty-seven, "Said the apprentice gave off the air of a man whose life was well lived, the indelible image being of him and his colleague Michael Rosenthal, his old acquaintance from grad school days, walking up Broadway smoking cigars in long winter coats" (96). Brennan adds that "he fit in well with the gentlemanly ease of the college" (123) but omits supporting details. We are never told, for example, that Said played tennis regularly with W. J. T. Mitchell, editor of Critical Inquiry. Said the social genius remains obscurely in the background of this biography. Said had his office in the undergraduate college, which he favored over the graduate English Department's amped-up professionalism, which was already gaining ground in literary studies. His second marriage, to Mariam Cortas, gave him a new set of Lebanese relatives, and as he became famous he received attention from international celebrities that, Brennan says, "made him feel like a starstruck child" (326). He had important friends among the editors and producers of left-liberal media (Jean Stein, Mary Kay Wilmer), and they in turn introduced him to Shelley Wanger, who as his agent got him to expand his reach and...