End Notes

On Late Style
Edward Said Bloomsbury, 208pp, £16.99
ISBN 074758365X

Hanif Kureishi laments the passing of a supremely humane intellectual

There is an ironically amusing moment early on in Edward Said's last, unfinished, but intriguing book, On Late Style. Said was in Beirut when a friend brought Jean Genet - a keen supporter of the Palestinians - to meet him. Genet, with his Beckett-like silences, clear-eyed stares but definitely unBeckett-like penchant for revolutionaries, is described by Said, quoting Raymond Williams, as "a resource of hope". After this stirring affirmation, Said begins to wonder about the sexual basis of Genet's revolutionary spirit, about his erotic attraction to the Arabs. Can it be that Genet is, of all things, an "orientalist"?

Said, fascinated by Genet, concludes - he can only conclude - that Genet isn't an orientalist because "one never felt he tried to go native". What Said doesn't go into is what he thinks Muslims, particularly those in power or seeking it, would make of Genet's homosexuality as well as his writing, and how Said would defend him. Would Genet, a man tempted more than most by blasphemy, have received a fatwa? This initial probe would perhaps have opened the way to further questions. What sort of Islam was it that Said wanted to promote in the Middle East? What kind of rebellion against a closed system such as political Islam would he have encouraged or wanted?

Many intellectuals run with the left, and many, such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir - about whose Zionism Said has some severe criticisms - have found themselves in serious moral difficulty. Those who have picked the Muslims as revolutionary exemplars have, like Michel Foucault in Iran during the late 1970s, tended to find themselves in ethical chaos.

There are both politics and ethics in this book, but mostly the subject is death and its effect on an artist's life and work. Does the apprehension of decay and death bring more meaning to an artist's work, or less? Does "the ultimate knowledge" mean wisdom and serenity, or fury and despair? Said suggests that most of us are keener to avoid pain than enjoy ourselves, which is perhaps why we envy and traduce artists and writers who live more extreme lives. What can they teach us? To be more circumspect, or to be more committed in our pleasure-seeking?

Certainly, as Said explains it, many artists, as they get older, come to care less for the public and seem interested only in their mental states. This was true of Beethoven, whose late quartets are so inward, painful and beautiful. In Moz-art's late work, by contrast (Said considers Così fan tutte), it is the composer's theatricality and fondness for role-playing that become marked. Mozart's interest in what we might describe as plastic identities reveals him as particularly modern for an age in which both psychic and physical make-overs are common.

Said's musings on endings and death are necessarily incomplete; they sometimes read more like a series of notes rather than finished essays, but they are fascinating and stimulating all the same. Said, as with the best writers, is someone you like to spend time with, to hear properly. He is at his best when he allows himself to follow the spontaneous movement of his thought rather than staying within the constraints of the ostensible subject. On Late Style is most engrossing when Said appears to be saying whatever interests him, follow-ing Montaigne's notion of the essay as an "attempt" to clarify one's thoughts about a particular subject for oneself.

However, his musings on Genet aside, it is unfortunate that Said neglects one of the most interesting aspects of his theme: the relation between an artist's sexuality and his or her work, and what happens when desire diminishes (if, indeed, it does). This is a subject with which Philip Roth is comfortable, but is not something for which Said is known. I'm not sure how he can write a book such as this without considering the question of diminishing potency. I would have loved to have read him on Ibsen, Picasso and Tanizaki, as well as various female artists, rather than Adorno and Richard Strauss.

In fact, Said does begin on something like this when considering Benjamin Britten's version of Death in Venice, but retreats again without considering (or perhaps even noticing) that most of his book's subjects - Cavafy, Britten, Genet, Mann, Visconti, Lampedusa - are homosexual, celibate or repressed. Sadly, Said's late loves and the possibility of his own Aschenbach-like decline, with its longing and despair, are not where he wants to go. Yet, by the end, I wanted more of Said and less of everyone else. It is not often that one reproaches a writer for not speaking more about himself.

Said's virtue as an intellectual was that he was a natural teacher; he was considered dangerous not only because he advocated "speaking the truth to power", but because he could break out of academic discourse and appeal to the general reader, joining the higher and lower intellectual worlds without losing intelligence or accuracy.

As Said emphasises, the death of a significant artist represents the passing of an era as well as a life. I wonder what Said's passing means, and whether we will continue not only to produce such cultured, cosmopolitan figures but to value and encourage them as stubborn antidotes to the tide of junk in which we seem to want to drown ourselves. If it is, indeed, getting late for the west - and as our deepest values are attacked not just by radical Islam but by our own leaders - will figures such as Said continue to emerge from our literary and political culture? What Said stands for - critical intelligence, high art and the preservation of the language - must be at the centre of our lives. This book is a fine monument to his life and work.

Hanif Kureishi's recent books include My Ear at His Heart and The Word and the Bomb