Portraits of Egypt's Big Fish:
MORRIS, JAMES
Portraits of Egypt's Big Fish The Boss. By Robert St. John. McGraw-Hill. 325 pp. $5.95. Behind the Egyptian Sphinx. By Irving Sedar and Harold Greenberg. Chilton. 171 pp. $4.00. Reviewed by...
...Secondly, although he is the outstanding Arab politician of his time, he is only the most remarkable of an unremarkable lot: He is a big fish in a little pond, and by the standards of great men he is really rather ordinary...
...He rightly tells us all that Nasser has done for his country, notably in the metaphysical spheres of dignity and self-respect-achievements only a fool or a bigot would sneer at...
...One cannot be sure that everything he records is true-he is presumably as vulnerable as anyone else to the deceptions, false memories, self-justifications and after-heroics that are common among revolutionaries - but he offers us such a mass of circumstantial detail, introduces us to such a gallery of characters, displays such a mastery of minutiae and incidentals that we are left in the end with the best popular account of the Egyptian revolution, and the most convincing portrait so far of its undoubted but oddly unconvincing leader...
...He traces Nasser's life in detail-too much detail, perhaps-from its family origins in upper Egypt to its triumphs of power in Cairo, and on the way he tells us a great deal about Egypt itself, its gifts, glories, violence, endless troubles and unchanging streak of pathos...
...annihilation by a Genghis Khan would have been in character with their history, but humiliation by a Nasser was hard to stomach...
...Behind the Egyptian Sphinx is a less impressive book...
...The Boss is not a work of art, nor is it a definitive biography, factual, untramelled and unembellished...
...Correspondent, Manchester "Guardian" If there is one area of the world that requires the balanced, objective approach, free of chauvinism, damaged pride, spite, envy or superiority, one region that demands absolute honesty of its observers and historians, it is the Middle East...
...John can do no more than report the truth...
...His portrait of the Egyptian leader is fair but never fulsome, astringent but not waspish...
...We can no longer aspire to manipulate the region: We can only do our best to help it...
...but he has written, nonetheless, an instructive, industrious, always interesting book about an unusually dimcult subject...
...Our puppet states have mostly collapsed, our hegemony has disintegrated, our best-laid schemes have gone astray...
...He does not descend to crude abuse about Nasser's autocracy, but he cannot mask the threadbare opportunism of Nasser's ideals, the lack of any consistent principle beyond nationalism...
...And when this quest is conducted from no firm basis of aspiration, but simply from the always changing opportunities of circumstance, it makes for a shapeless life and an inconclusive character...
...John, in his long and conscientious biography of President Nasser, breathes such a spirit of rational and detached restraint...
...John successfully copes with the conspiratorial...
...Certainly there are ex-Nazis about...
...We of the West have tried real-politik in the Middle East, and have failed...
...John's book weakens toward the end, when it falls into a familiar maw of newspaper cuttings and speculations, it is scarcely the author's fault...
...John is a journalist, and often descends to glib journalese and imaginary dialogue...
...First, he is a conspirator, his past shrouded in legend and intrigue, his present veiled in despotic uncertainty...
...We must rely now upon attitudes more straightforward...
...He has mirrored faithfully his subject's abilities and failings, warts and all, and where Nasser seems to flounder, so does St...
...John's powers that, while he does not try to disguise Nasser's essential mediocrity, he yet manages to make these pages unfailingly readable...
...A dull revolutionary is not easy material for the biographer, and it is a tribute to St...
...since then, it has lost its shape and some of its meaning, and the man's undeniable energies have been frittered away in too many fits, starts and setbacks...
...As for Nasser's lack of personal splendor, intellectual originality, heroic consistency and grandeur, St...
...He does not rise to the tragic irony of Nasser's storythe victories this bold second-rater has won over all the ancient prides and pomps of empire-but between the lines at least he lets us glimpse this wry paradox of history...
...It is so racked by rivalries of its own, so scarred with antipathies, so pitifully handicapped by complexes and inhibitions, that if we are to understand its anxieties at all, we can afford no self-delusions...
...Until his accession to power, Nasser's life was clear-cut and resolute...
...Reviewed by James Morris Author, "Islam, Inflamed," "Sultan in Oman...
...If St...
...Still less is it fair to suggest that West Germany's economic penetration of the Arab countries, the result of tireless salesmanship and excellent technique, is a sinister portent of revived German expansionism...
...He declares explicitly that Nasser likes to "play things by ear" and admits implicitly that the President's career has progressed in a series of lurches-from climax to climax, from affront to affront, from rebuff to reconciliation...
...This is unpleasant and discreditable, and the list of names presented by Sedard and Greenberg will make your spine chill or your blood boil, according to your temperament...
...If the English were mortified by the denouement of Suez, it was by the nature of their defeat...
...Everyone knows that the Egyptians, first under Farouk, now under Nasser, have employed many ex-Nazis in official positions...
...President Nasser is an awkward biographee for two reasons...
...And in the Middle East it is the truth, always and only, that should matter...
...It scarcely warrants, however, the authors' assertion that the Germans and the Egyptians between them are plotting a new Drang nach Osten, intended to dominate half the earth...
...but this book is so loaded with excess and extravagances, not to speak of split infinitives, that after a chapter or two one begins to doubt the truth itself...
...certainly some Germans harbor deep-rooted national ambitions...
...If he has prejudices-national, social, racial or esthetic-he keeps them resolutely in check...
...Its authors have seized upon one of Nasserism's nastier aspects-its readiness to sup with any kind of devil, with the shortest of spoons-and have fastened upon it a hysterical and unconvincing thesis...
...If there is a consistent motive to Gamal Abdel Nasser's policies, it is a perpetual quest for power-if not power personal, at least power national...
Vol. 44 • February 1961 • No. 8
