Dialogues of Naguib Mahfouz: Hidden somewhere By Mohamed Salmawy During his literary career, Naguib Mahfouz compiled ideas for future novels or recorded dramatic situations in three notebooks, now unfortunately lost. The first was one that he kept during the early phase of his career, when his novels were based on ancient Egyptian history. "I was planning to write the history of ancient Egypt in fiction, just as Sir Walter Scott did with Scottish history. I would read and take notes about anything that could be turned into a novel. I collected enough material for about 40 novels in a notebook, but suddenly I turned -- as you know -- from history to reality. So I put my notebook somewhere, and don't know where it is now," Mahfouz once told me. His second notebook contained ideas that eventually gave birth to the famous Cairo Trilogy. In this notebook, he fully described each of the main characters. "I used to refer to this notebook for the entire period I was writing the Trilogy, so as to keep the characters consistent and maintain the flow of events. The story of the three novels runs across a long span of time, and there are many characters. So without this notebook, I would have been lost. Having finished the Trilogy, I no longer needed that notebook, so I didn't keep it," Mahfouz said. "The presence of such a notebook by my side became essential to me. I found myself writing in a third notebook the ideas that would come to my mind and that I intended to use in the future. The last notebook I gave to Abdel-Rahman Al-Sharqawi, because he liked an outline for a novel I had in it. It was called Al-Ataba Al-Khadra, and was about the personal stories of the pedestrians passing through the well-known square. Al-Sharqawi told me that the idea would be great for the stage, and asked me for permission to write it himself. I gave him the notebook, but he didn't write the play, and I didn't ask him to return the notebook. So in the end, I lost the notebook and he didn't benefit from it," Mahfouz added. "You know that those three notebooks could have been of great help to critics and researchers specialised in your work. The world's museums are full of personal papers of novelists. These show the world the method of their work and the evolution of the creative process, which differs from one writer to another," I said. "Perhaps these notebooks still exist," the great novelist said. I wonder if one of those notebooks may appear one day out of the blue, perhaps from Al-Sharqawi's papers, or with a salesman of used objects. In England, a letter George Bernard Shaw wrote to his publisher about his play Arms and the Man cropped up a few years ago, causing a stir in literary circles. You never know.
