EW YORK - The shelves that line the walls of Edward W. Said's spacious Columbia University office hold the sorts of books one would expect to find surrounding a man who is both one of America's most eminent literary critics and its best-known advocate of the Palestinian cause.
But it wasn't a work of literature or politics that Said (pronounced sigh-EED) was searching his shelves for one recent afternoon to show a visitor. It was a copy of the 1947 annual directory for Jerusalem.
No stranger to conflict, Said, 63, finds himself embroiled in what is surely the oddest controversy of a consistently controversial career. At issue aren't his present views but past whereabouts. An article in the September issue of Commentary, a leading neoconservative journal published by the American Jewish Committee, charges that Said, a US citizen of Palestinian extraction, has misrepresented the facts of his upbringing [Story, Page C6].
The article cites a range of documents and interviews to argue that Said spent most of his first 12 years in Cairo rather than Jerusalem.
Said, who counters that he has never concealed his time in Egypt or claimed to have grown up exclusively in Jerusalem, angrily dismisses the Commentary article as ''misinformation and noninformation.'' He cites several factual errors in Justus Reid Weiner's piece and questions his motives.
The question of where Edward Said was, and was not, during his formative years might appear peripheral, at best, to such momentous issues as peace and sovereignty in the Middle East. Yet the very terms of such a debate - with the questions they raise about identity, authenticity, and even something so seemingly straightforward as physical location - serve to frame both a region and a life that have been defined by personal displacement and geopolitical struggle.
Said has just published a memoir, ''Out of Place.'' The title is at once matter-of-fact and mournful, referring not just to the dislocation of the Palestinian diaspora but also a sense of personal and ideological apartness. That sense has, if anything, deepened during the '90s.
For many years, Said was a confidant of Yasir Arafat (he helped write the Palestine Liberation Organization leader's famous speech before the United Nations in 1974). Two secretaries of state, Cyrus Vance and George Shultz, have consulted him, and during the Carter administration he served as a back-channel link between the White House and the PLO.
What has made Said out of place within the PLO is his vehement denunciation of the 1993 Oslo accords and the organization's having made peace with Israel. Instead, Said supports a one-state solution whereby Jews and Palestinians would live in a single, nonsectarian country.
''In the short run, I'm very pessimistic because of the weakness of the Palestinians and, in my opinion, the highly compromised and stupid impasse into which Arafat and his people have put themselves. ... But in the long run there are tremendous changes coming. ... Time is against this notion of ethnic separation, partition, and apartheid. There's no other way than a one-state solution. ... Neither side has a military option. Just simple logic and humanity, I think, will make it work. People [on both sides] want to protect their interests.''
An unjust peace
Said has likened Oslo to ''a Palestinian Versailles,'' a reference to the harsh treaty Germany signed after its defeat in World War I, and the PLO to Nazi collaborators in World War II, calling it ''a Vichy government serving Israel.''
As such words suggest, Said is a master of rhetoric both harsh and eloquent. It has won him many enemies. They contend he personifies Third World radical chic: an expensively tailored man who is equally at home lunching at New York's exclusive Century Association (of which he is a member) and castigating Israel before the Palestinian National Council (on which he served from 1977 to 1991). Certainly, Said's striking looks, aristocratic bearing, and suave manner have helped make him a familiar and charismatic presence on speaker's platforms and television talk shows.
Arthur Hertzberg, one of American Judaism's foremost liberal voices on the Mideast as well as a onetime Columbia colleague of Said's, recalls a joint appearance they made during the early '80s. ''When I suggested beforehand that, in this superheated atmosphere, with the Israelis in Lebanon, we should make the most peaceful noises, he agreed absolutely. So, for 45 minutes, I gave my most dovish speech. He then came on the dais and made his most fire-eating speech. Afterward, he came up to me and said, `Arthur, now we must continue our conversation at breakfast when we get back to Columbia.'
''There you have the two sides of Edward Said: He wants to be the Palestinians' fire-eater and to have a reputation in Western intellectual circles for being the most charming and civilized of the Palestinian nationalists. He wants it both ways - and he has a claque around the world to help him to have it.''
Said does, indeed, cut a global figure. He writes a twice-monthly column for the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram Weekly. His byline frequently appears in the London Review of Books and, in 1993, he delivered the prestigious Reith Lectures on the BBC.
To his admirers, Said exemplifies the intellectual as activist: a scholar who has maintained a full-time commitment to both learning and ideology despite death threats and, on at least one occasion, the vandalization of his office.
Fluent in English, Arabic, and French, Said has reading knowledge of Italian, German, Spanish, and Latin. He maintains a full teaching load at Columbia, where he holds a university professorship, the highest honor the school bestows on its faculty, and is the current president of the Modern Language Association. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard, Yale, and Johns Hopkins. A pianist of nearly concert-hall caliber, he is music critic for The Nation.
''Said is about as close as one gets in this day and age to being a Renaissance man,'' says Philip S. Khoury, dean of humanities and social science at MIT and a past president of the Middle East Studies Association. ''His talents and intellectual range are enormous.''
''There is no comparable figure, not only in the United States but Europe,'' says Richard Poirier, a friend of Said's who is emeritus professor of English at Rutgers University and chairman of the Library of America. ''Of all American [literary] critics, he is internationally the best known - certainly the most influential in anything touching upon the cultural criticism of literature.''
Said has published 17 books. He has three more ready for publication (one on opera and essay collections on literature and politics) and is deep into the writing of a book on late style in artists ranging from Sophocles to Beethoven. Befitting such a Victorian level of productivity, Said does his writing as Victorians did: in longhand, with a fountain pen.
His thought has reach
''Orientalism'' (1978), his best-known book, has been translated into 31 languages. Drawing on intellectual history, literary analysis, and political polemic, it argues that Western scholars who studied the cultures of ''the Orient'' (Said's focus is on the Middle East but his argument applies to all of Asia) were a key part of the process that saw Europe, and later the United States, dominate, or even subjugate, those cultures.
More than two decades after its publication, ''Orientalism'' still inspires often-heated debate. ''It basically initiated the cultural theory of post-colonialism,'' says MIT's Khoury. ''That theory has had enormous influence over two generations of scholars in a variety of humanistic disciplines working on the Middle East, South Asia, China, and elsewhere.''
The author of ''Orientalism'' was born on the westernmost edge of the Orient, in Jerusalem, in 1935. He grew up in a cosmopolitan milieu that included Palestinian, Egyptian, Lebanese, British, and American elements.
Said's father owned a highly successful office-supply business with branches in Jerusalem and Cairo. Thanks to several years spent in the United States and Army service during World War I, he held US citizenship. Said's mother was Palestinian and Lebanese. (The family spent every summer for nearly three decades in Lebanon, and Said's wife, Mariam, is a Lebanese Quaker.) Making the Saids all the more exotic was their Episcopalian faith.
After attending several English and American schools in Jerusalem and Cairo (the late King Hussein of Jordan and the actor Omar Sharif were among his schoolmates at one of the latter), Said spent two years at a Massachusetts boarding school, Mount Hermon. He then went to Princeton and, despite what he describes as its ''poisonous social atmosphere,'' flourished there. (Said says his alma mater has changed since those days, and both his son and daughter are Princeton alums.) At Harvard, he wrote his thesis on Joseph Conrad - not insignificantly, another literary displaced person. ''I've always had that sense [of exile],'' Said points out. ''In literary studies and writing, it gives a certain edge to one's writing. You see things in a new way.''
It was the Six Day War, in 1967, that moved Said to political activism. He had been teaching at Columbia for four years when, for the first time, he found himself publicly taking up the Palestinian cause.
''I've never regretted it,'' he says. ''My generation felt, I think, that our kind of people, the educated, privileged people, were the ones who deserted Palestine. My parents used to say that politics was for the other people, the riffraff. I think that's very wrong. The whole idea of citizenship is very important for me. I can't imagine things being any different.''
In purely personal terms, the most painful aspect of Said's political work may be the difficulties it can create with Jewish acquaintances and colleagues. ''Very awkward,'' Said says. Among his friends is Daniel Barenboim, the pianist and conductor who is music director of the Chicago Symphony. Last month, they collaborated with the cellist Yo-Yo Ma on a workshop in Germany and Austria for young Israeli and Arab musicians. Barenboim once conducted a concert on the West Bank and later remarked to Said, ''You know, it feels very funny being the only Jew in an auditorium full of Arabs.'' Said's reply: ''How do you think I feel in New York?''
Anti, but not anti-Jewish
Said is particularly sensitive to charges that being anti-Israeli is tantamount to being anti-Jewish. ''I've always argued to Arabs,'' he says, ''and I think I'm the only person who has done this, in print, on the record, in Arabic, that it's absolutely necessary for us as people - Arab and Palestinian - to understand the Holocaust. ... The fact is these people went through real suffering, and I've used the phrase `communities of suffering': that we are one and they are one.''
Friends detect an added urgency to Said's political writing in this decade. He was diagnosed as having a deadly form of cancer in 1991, chronic lymphocytic leukemia. After several years of unsuccessful chemotherapy and radiation, he began a three-month experimental treatment last year. ''They were the 12 most difficult weeks of my life,'' Said says. Constantly ill, he lost 30 pounds and saw two other participants in the trial die.
That was a little more than a year ago. He looks to be in excellent health. He swims daily and finds time for an occasional tennis match. ''The only problem,'' Said notes in a matter-of-fact tone, ''it's slowly coming back.'' He'll likely require treatment again next year, and another successful outcome is by no means certain. ''I must say it gives some anxiety if I think about it - which is why I don't particularly want to think too much about it. So I just keep going.''
In ''Out of Place,'' Said writes that his father's motto was ''Never give up.'' Might that be his also? ''There's a certain kind of tenacity,'' he replies. ''When I feel I'm going to be pushed down or overwhelmed I find I have a second wind. I'm very lucky to have that quality. There were many situations in my life when I didn't think I was going to make it, and I did.''
