Beer in the Snooker Club (Serpent's Tail Classics) Read online

  Born and brought up in Cairo, Waguih Ghali spent much of his adult life in Europe. His time in London and his suicide in 1969 were described in After a Funeral (1986) by Diana Athill. An edited extract from her book forms the introduction to Beer in the Snooker Club, Waguih Ghali’s only novel.

  ‘Beer in the Snooker Club is one of the best novels about Egypt ever written. In the protagonist, Ram, a passionate nationalist who is nonetheless an anglophile, Waguih Ghali creates a hero who is tragic, funny and sympathetic. Through him we are presented with an authentic and acutely observed account of Egyptian society at a time of great upheaval’ Ahdaf Soueif

  ‘This is a wonderful book. Quiet, understated, seemingly without any artistic or formal pretensions. Yet quite devastating in its human and political insights … if you want to convey to someone what Egypt was like in the forties and fifties, and why it is impossible for Europeans or Americans to understand, give them this book. It makes The Alexandria Quartet look like the travel brochure it is’ Gabriel Josipovici

  ‘A plainspoken writer of consummate wryness, grace and humor, the Egyptian author chronicles the lives of a polyglot Cairene upper crust, shortly after the fall of King Farouk and thoroughly unprepared to change its neo-feudal ways … This is the best book to date about post-Farouk Egypt’ Los Angeles Times

  ‘I sat on a terrace overlooking the Nile and began to read. I was so captivated that I stayed up late into the night, reading the book in one sitting. Yet while the words were quickly consumed, the world they conjured and the issues they raised – of exile and belonging – have stayed with me through the years … When I first read Beer in the Snooker Club I was struck by how different it was from any other Egyptian novel I knew. While Ghali was at work on this fresh, bright novel that wears its seriousness so lightly, Naguib Mahfouz, just a couple of years off being elected a Nobel laureate, was still trying to recreate the great nineteenth-century English novel, dressed up in Egyptian clothes … I have just read the book for the fourth time and what now strikes me is not the book’s political credentials but the pleasure to be had in the presence of its wonderful hero/narrator. In Ram, Ghali has created a very Egyptian version of a character familiar from Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye; a young man trying to square dreams and idealism with the realities of the world around him. It is impossible not to sympathise with his predicament. It is also impossible, for me at least, not to be swept along by the deceptive ease of the storytelling, by its pace and sheer skill’ Anthony Sattin, Slightly Foxed

  ‘Ghali’s novel reproduces a cultural state of shock with great accuracy and great humor’ The Nation

  ‘A fantastic novel of youthful angst set against a backdrop of revolutionary Egypt and literary London. It’s the Egyptian Catcher in the Rye’ Lonely Planet Egypt

  Introduction by Diana Athill

  A complete catalogue record for this book can

  be obtained from the British Library on request

  The right of Waguih Ghali to be identified as the author

  of this work has been asserted in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  Copyright © 1964 by Waguih Ghali

  Introduction copyright © 2010 by Diana Athill

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a

  retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,

  mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior

  permission of the publisher.

  First published in 1964 by Andre Deutsch Ltd.

  First published in 1987 by Serpent’s Tail

  First published in this edition in 2010 by Serpent’s Tail,

  an imprint of Profile Books Ltd

  3A Exmouth House

  Pine Street

  London EC1R 0JH

  website: www.serpentstail.com

  ISBN 978 1 84668 756 3

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Bookmarque Ltd,

  Croydon, Surrey

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Introduction by Diana Athill

  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 in London 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 the 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 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.

  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.

  His name was Waguih Ghali, but I called him Didi. It was inappropriate, but so was the nickname his family used. He had a strong sense of what he called ‘aristocracy’, by which he meant the essentials of good breeding whether inherited or ‘natural’, and against all the odds he made an art of elegance. It was easy for him to look well-dressed. He owned two suits, one dark blue, the other grey with a subdued check, both conservative in cut.

  Whether he was dressed up in one of his suits or not, he managed to look right. His gestures and bearing were naturally elegant, and his manners went with his appearance: a grave, formal courtesy, sometimes a shade elaborate but exceptionally winning, or a natural and responsive gaiety. No one could know Didi at all well without understanding that his capacity for loving was deep and candid, and no one could be in a room with him for fifteen minutes without realising that his pride was supersensitive.

  Didi’s passions in writing were few and profound, because he was impatient of anything but the great. The writers he loved best were Céline and the Russians, particularly Chekhov, whom he read and reread with endless joy. (‘If at times I say “Why was I ever born?” – I can answer “But to read Chekhov”.’) What he asked of writing was truth. He distrusted shapeliness, polish, story-making, although verbal virtuosity enchanted him (he loved Nabokov). He may sometimes have been prevented from seeing the good in some writing because of the presence of qualities he distrusted (though this may be
my own resentment speaking, because he didn’t like mine), but he was never taken in by anything phoney and he himself was determined to go beyond artfulness into truth.

  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.

  Didi was a hoarder. He kept many drafts of everything he wrote, every letter he received, and sometimes – when he was particularly pleased with them – copies of letters he sent. He knew that as a writer he had only one subject, himself, and he saw his life as raw material for a work of literature which he had only begun in his first novel. In hoarding this material he didn’t cheat: he kept painful things as well as agreeable ones.

  Five years after our first meeting, Didi 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 this 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.

  I am not often able to grieve fully. The watcher is usually there, noting what is incongruous, observing the unexpected, wondering at the odd. For Didi I grieved fully, though not when I most appeared to be doing so. That must have been when they were lowering him into his grave, and I wept. When I found myself unable to move forward to the edge of the grave, the tears running down my face and the sobs mounting so that I had to clench my teeth or I would have howled, it was something which was happening to me rather than something I was doing.

  The grieving came before that, not as an emotional convulsion but as a long stare at the intolerable after I had read the diary he had left me from beginning to end. It was not intolerable that he had killed himself. It was intolerable that he had been right to do so – that he had no alternative. It was intolerable that a man should be so crippled by things done to him in his defenceless childhood that he had been made, literally and precisely, unendurable to himself. He had tried to change. All through his adult life the part of him which he thought of as his ‘mental sanity’ had stood in the wings and watched the part he called ‘emotional insanity’ – watched and judged, in vain. His intelligence, his gifts – useless to him. Other people’s patience, kindness, affection, understanding – useless to him. Love? Too late, and equally useless. I for one could have loved Didi more and better than I did, but all that would have happened then would have been that he’d have had more love to disbelieve in. He was certain at too deep a level, in the very fibres of his being, that he was unworthy of love. Being unworthy of love, he must be punished; and the only way he could secure this was by plunging out to the point where he was driven to punish himself. To be murdered would be a fate much simpler, and less sad.

  Diana Athill was Waguih Ghali’s editor at Andre Deutsch when Beer in the Snooker Club was first published. This introduction is an edited extract from the book she wrote about their friendship, After a Funeral, published by Granta Books.

  BEER IN THE SNOOKER CLUB

  She looked at me with tenderness. ‘You’re so thoughtful, my sweet. It’s not bad. The other one was costing me so much in petrol, I simply couldn’t afford it. Had to buy a new one.’

  A small commotion at the desk. The signing had ended for the day.

  ‘Tiens,’ said my aunt. ‘I didn’t notice you come in, Marie. Ouf! I am fed up with this signing. You must be tired too, Hassan Effendi. But it is the least we can do for these poor devils, the fellaheen.’ That was good. I tried to look as much fellah as possible.

  ‘Wait a minute, Marie, I’m coming back in a moment.’ My aunt went out, followed by Hassan Effendi carrying a thousand sheets worth a million pounds; or perhaps not quite a million pounds, because she was selling cheap and pretending to the government she was giving the land to the poor.

  ‘Hello, hello, Marie’, I said again.

  ‘Tell me,’ she asked, ‘are you in business now?’

  I told her I had discovered a brand-new way of exploiting the fellah. All I needed was capital.

  ‘You mustn’t joke about such things, dearie,’ she said.

  My aunt came back and said the price of bread had increased by half a piastre. This affected them both very much because they buy bread every day. I tried to be as helpful as possible and told them of a baker I know who sells bread wholesale and by weight. Then I told them how to heat stale bread in the oven, but got muddled trying to deduct the price of the gas used to heat the oven from the money they would save by heating the stale bread. I was going to tell them how to jump off the tram at Abbasieh and not pay for a ticket, but thought better of it. I went outside the room for a moment and stuck my ear to the keyhole.

  ‘Be careful,’ Marie was telling my aunt, ‘he’s come to borrow money.’

  ‘I know, my dear. That’s why I telephoned you. He won’t dare ask me in your presence.’

  I left and went to Groppi’s. I drank whisky and ate peanuts, watching the sophisticated crowd and feeling happy that my aunt had refused to give me the money. I had asked simply because my conscience was nagging. It was something I vaguely had to do but had kept putting off. Soon Omar and Jameel came in, then Yehia, Fawzi and Ismail. Groppi’s is perhaps one of the most beautiful places to drink whisky in. The bar is under a large tree in the garden and there is a handsome black barman who speaks seven languages. We drank a bottle of whisky between us and I watched them fight to pay for it. Yehia paid, then we all left together. They each possess a car.

  I am always a bit bored in the mornings because they are all either at the university or working. Sometimes I go and play snooker with Jameel at the billiards’ club. You can find him there anytime – in fact he owns it. I would go there more often if it weren’t for Font. Whenever I reproach myself for drinking too much, I tell myself it’s Font who is driving me to drink. ‘Font,’ I told him once, ‘just tell me what you want me to do?’

  ‘Run away, you scum,’ he answered. So I went to Groppi’s and drank more whisky. There you are, although, of course, I still read The New Statesman and The Guardian and mine is perhaps the only copy of Tribune which comes to Egypt.

  ‘Font,’ I said another time, when I was nicely oiled and in a good mood, ‘Font,’ I said, ‘you’re about the only angry young man in Egypt.’ And I laughed. It struck me as very funny.

  ‘Go,’ he replied. ‘Go and sponge some more on these parasites.’

  It was I who made Font work in the snooker club. Jameel thought I was joking when I told him it was the only thing would keep Font off the streets. In fact I had to show him Font with his barrow in Sharia-el-Sakia. Jameel was shocked to see one of his old school-friends on the street. It was all I could do to stop him from offering Font enough money to live on for the rest of his life. Font would have spat on him and probably hit me.

  There he was then. Selling cucumbers. Cucumbers of all things. Of course I understood. He was Jimmy Porter. We had seen the play together in London and there he was, a degree in his pocket and se
lling cucumbers. There were other barrows too; lettuce, onions, sunflower seeds, beans. We stopped the car in front of Font and looked at him.

  ‘Get going,’ he said.

  I said I wanted to buy cucumbers but that I didn’t trust his weights.

  ‘Scram,’ he shouted. ‘I’ll break your rotten face if you don’t scram.’ (This is typical Font. He’ll be sarcastic to the other boys but when it’s me, he’s infuriated.) Jameel told him he needed someone to look after the snooker place for him.

  ‘He’s too much of a snob,’ I said. ‘He wouldn’t like to be seen working where his old school-friends might come in.’

  ‘Do you think I give a damn about you idiots,’ Font screamed. Jameel is a quiet fellow and told him he really needed someone. Font might have accepted if I had not been there, so he looked at me with his ‘you dirty traitor’ expression instead.

  ‘Font,’ I asked in English, ‘what do the other barrow boys think of Virginia Woolf?’

  He fell into the trap and answered in English.

  ‘You making fun of them? They never had a chance to go to school, you scum. Has that parasite beside you ever read a book in his life? With all his money he’s nothing but a fat, ignorant pig.’

  Jameel is so docile he doesn’t mind being called a fat, ignorant pig at all. However, by then the other barrow boys were approaching. Font, dressed in Arab clothes, looking after a barrow and speaking in English, awoke their curiosity. ‘What’s that? What’s that?’ they asked.

  ‘He’s a spy,’ I told them and they immediately became threatening. ‘We’ll deal with that son of a dog,’ they shouted. Font became incoherent with rage. We pulled him into the car and drove away quickly.

  I had to leave the car soon afterwards to escape Font’s wrath, but a week later he was brushing the snooker tables with the Literary Supplement.