When the world's at stake,
go beyond the headlines.

Waguih Ghali, Beer in the Snooker Club (Vintage International, 2014)

The noise, the noise, the unrelenting noise of the world: How is any writer with an interest in the long view supposed to escape it, if only for a couple hours to work, let alone maintain their sanity in the remainders of a day? It’s an old dilemma, for certain, but little digital town criers in our pockets bring instant, constant news about slaughter and ruin in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, and beyond — grim notices against the background of those chronicling the state of domestic American politics. Perhaps one could forgive the hyperbolic conclusion that the literary minds of yesteryear did not have to deal with all this fuckery.

So one reads, of then and now, because we can, and must. And then one remembers that writing has always been something of a defiant act against the world’s ceaselessness, even when it is scrutinizing the very same. To wit:

In late December 1968, an Egyptian writer and political exile named Waguih Ghali swallowed 26 sleeping pills at the London home of his friend and occasional lover, editor Diana Athill. Rushed to a nearby hospital, Ghali died 10 days later, believing himself an abject failure and leaving behind a miscellany of essays, diaries, and journalism, along with one well-regarded novel published five years prior to his suicide: Beer in the Snooker Club.

There’s plenty of both beer and snooker in Beer in the Snooker Club, but the juvenility carried in the title deceives. It’s a political book, and a serious one, centered on the aftermath of Egypt’s 1952 revolution and military coup, and succeeds largely because its narrator goes out of his way to be anything but, well, political. Young Ram Bey enjoys women, gambling, booze, and his family’s privileged social station, though he is intelligent and sensitive enough to know these things cannot square with the change he believes in notionally.

A lesser book would have followed Ram’s friend, Font, an angry, devout socialist who has never seen a protest he wouldn’t join. But Beer in the Snooker Club is a book of ambivalence and disappointment. It is as critical of those forces who seek upheaval, without a vision for what comes after, as it is of the old, entrenched Cairo elite. Ram and Font are Copts, members of Egypt’s indigenous Christian minority. Six years prior to the events chronicled in the book, they joined the uprising of the Suez Crisis, filled with brimstone clarity. For his efforts, Font gets shot in the thigh, while Ram cannot shut off his inner voice, asking questions that tend to prove unwelcome in the moment of sweeping ideological movements.

A later trip to London, the center of empire, further strains their friendship and diverging beliefs. By the time we meet them in postcolonial and post-revolution Cairo, the two friends still care for one another, even while being baffled by what the other has taken from their shared journey.

In the West, the 1956 Suez Crisis often marks the end of British might and global reach. In Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser’s political strength solidified with the triumph, his authoritarian regime now able to do much more than nationalize a canal. Replacing a king with a military dictatorship had not been the goal of young idealists such as Ram and Font, but they weren’t part of the Free Officers movement that led the coup. Ram and Font are just a pair of angry kids willing to fight for a better tomorrow — fuzzy on the details, smarter than many but not influential enough to do much, and caught against historical forces far beyond them.

Though Ram goes to great lengths to pretend otherwise, he’s maintained a sense of the cause. Deep in the novel, he reveals to the reader (while concealing from Font) his work cataloguing prison abuses to help undermine the new military regime:

I drive once a week to those places to visit police officers supposed to be friends of mine. They hand me an envelope containing pictures and reports written by the inmates, and in return, I pay them a certain sum of money. I have the terrible feeling that some of the pictures wouldn’t be so gory if we didn’t pay for them.

What beautiful ambiguity. What damning self-awareness. Though he is modest about them, Ram’s actions are brave and dangerous. If caught sending those photographs to newspapers, he’ll join those detained. Yet there is a knowing irony and sense of complicity to his voice and worldview as he details it. Mentioned almost as an aside, it completely transforms our understanding of our narrator. This is not the firebrand absolutist from six years earlier, but someone else. All of a sudden, his superficial detachment becomes a front. All of a sudden, his cynicism reads more like disillusionment. All of a sudden, the spoiled party boy who enjoys the good life becomes a man of hidden ideals he’s guarded from the world. His country and beliefs have wounded him. Yet he endures, because he must.

That he cannot bring himself to share what he does with Font, who would be proud, supportive, and envious, makes it all the more wrenching.

Then there is Edna Salva, and the love-lost story that shadows the plot of Beer in the Snooker Club. Edna comes from “one of the richest Jewish families in Egypt — our Woolworths,” and makes for a poor pairing with Ram. Even beyond their religious, cultural, and social divides, he’s confounded by her activism, and she, by his bystanding. He wonders why she betrays her class. She wonders why he betrays himself. There’s also her political union with a deported communist to consider. But Ram and Edna love one another, deeply, ferociously, and they find it difficult to keep away even as they both know they should. After a night together at the Giza pyramids, Ram muses, “Two bodies and two brains and two lives clasped together, and nothing else mattered. To be loved by, and to possess the person we love is why we were born.”

Ah, yes, he’s a closet romantic, buried under layers of scorn and sarcasm. No one could ever mock Ram for this quite as snidely as he does himself.

But love can only ever transcend so much. When Ram discusses Edna with his modish and class-conscious mother, she tells him, “[s]he didn’t care whom I married as long as she knew I was happy . . . if [Edna] would accept me, that is; because they were multi-millionaires. She was also older than me, my mother said. Suddenly she told me to marry for love and started weeping.”

These are not tears of joy, but of parental fears and worldly awareness.

Over the course of the story, it becomes clear that Edna and her family may soon have to leave Egypt, as Ghali himself already had by the time he wrote Beer in the Snooker Club. The pan-Arabism of the Nasser regime has taken hold of the country. While that means certain things for Copts (the novel opens with Ram observing an aunt pretending to be glad about selling off acres of land at markdown — a gift, she suggests, made out of generosity and not because the government has instituted new restrictions on land ownership), it means altogether other things for the old Jewish families of Cairo.

“Why don’t you go away, Edna?” Ram advises, after seeing a fresh scar on her face, “a thick line of raw flesh” from a regime officer’s whip, her punishment for traveling to an Israeli kibbutz and then returning. “Why don’t you go to Israel or South Africa or France or anywhere else and live and be happy?”

“Because I am Egyptian,” she says. Egypt’s ancient and often prosperous Jewish population largely left in the 1950s and 1960s due to mounting persecution overseen and encouraged by the Nasser regime.

The year prior to Ghali’s death, the Six-Day War broke out in the Middle East. He wrote in his diary that “There is something nauseating about someone living here, far away from it all, and permitting himself to judge.” So he traveled to Israel as a journalist in the war’s aftermath to cover the devastating impact on civilians, including expelled Palestinians. He criticized Egypt’s authoritarian regime and the policies of the Israeli government alike, according to Ghali biographer Susie Thomas, which led to him angering most everyone. His home nation would soon claim he’d committed treason.

A return to Egypt likely meant death. Ghali was devastated, branded a traitor and cautionary tale. His already shaky mental health declined further. In the diary he left for Athill to read, he described his suicide as “The one authentic act of my life,” a cry of pain, certainly, and also an echo of young, jaded Ram Bey from his novel, who refused to be anything but himself when pressed about the nature of his political allegiances:

“I am insincere,” Ram said, and Ghali wrote. “But honest.”

Through that honesty and ambivalence, and embittered courage, too, emerges Ghali’s most authentic creative rendering. The world broke him. So what. It breaks us all, eventually — at least anyone who ever tries to do something meaningful. Revolutions, counterrevolutions, uprisings, incremental change, they all leave believers in their wake. Ghali managed to capture something that matters long past his own death, not in spite of confusion and the world’s terrible ceaselessness, but because of them.

Matt Gallagher is the author of four books, including the novels Daybreak and Youngblood, a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

Image: ChatGPT