By Mursi Saad El-Din I am sometimes surprised at the specialised interests of writers on Egypt. Some of them go into the minutest of details concerning music in ancient Egypt, the art of Mashrabia, the production of glass. John Cromer's interest in modern Egyptian literature began during World War II when he was in Egypt with the British forces. Cromer is a poet and his poetry collections contain many poems about Egypt, but he has also written about Egyptian literature. Until the twentieth century, Cromer contends, Egyptian literature had been rooted in the Arabic tradition of story-telling, with the accent on form and beauty rather than realism. Stories would be told in the villages and in the crowded cafes of Cairo and provincial towns. It needed the overwhelming effect of the European, including Russian, literary cornucopia of the nineteenth century to bring a new art to the novel, the short story and drama. It did not find favour in the entrenched literary world. The emerging literature was criticised as being a corruption of the classical Arabic language and form, and was accused of ruining the taste and morals of readers, particularly girls and young women. The country that most influenced the writing, as distinct from the reading, of literature, initially at least, was France, not least through the establishment of the French Institute and the use of French as the diplomatic language. Educated Egyptians tended to be sucked into literary Paris when they went to finish their degree courses. The predominance of French carried through to the 20th century and even today some writers of Arabic novels also write in French. Yet it would be difficult to find an Egyptian writer of any standing who has written a novel in English: this despite the great influence that English writers have exerted and the avidity with which English Literature has been studied by Egyptians in colleges and universities. We have to rely on translations to appreciate the nature and content of those novels which have given their authors an international reputation. For it is on the world scene that the true stature of a writer must be measured. The really great are translated into the major languages of the world, and even minor writers will earn the accolade of translation into three or four European languages. English, of course, opens up the markets of Australia and Canada, as well as the bookshops and universities of the United States. The first Egyptian novels were not written in Egypt but in Europe. The first was the eponymous Zeinab, subtitled 'Scenes and Manners of Egyptian Country Life', published in 1914. The author, Mohamed Hussein Heikal, wrote the book in Switzerland, where he went during the holidays while studying law in Paris immediately before the First World War. Very much in the French romantic style of Alexandre Dumas, the novel pictures the Egyptian countryside in all its seasons and divides its characters into three clearly distinguishable classes: the poor peasants of whom Zeinab and her family form a part; the small farmers who have some land of their own and the landowners, from which class the author himself came. He was able to portray, with great accuracy, life in the fields along the narrow green strip beside the Nile. This pioneering novel set the tone of many to follow, particularly in its emphasis on the problems facing the individual within rigid social norms. Yet it was for some time a lonely trail-blazer. Not until the '30s was there another novel to challenge it in the hierarchy of Egyptian letters. Admittedly, there was one early book which reflected the idiosyncrasy of the Egyptian poet Beiram Al-Tunisy but this curious work, "Sayed and his Wife in Paris", sprang from the travails of the author. He had been banished to Tunis by King Fouad and thence by the authorities to Paris, where he spent the 30s as a hack journalist. His book is in the form of a dialogue between Sayed and his wife, written in colloquial Cairene Arabic. The traditional Egyptian sense of humour is given edge by Beiram's own bitterness. Tawfik Al-Hakim was born in Alexandria in 1898 and died in Cairo in 1987. After studying law in Cairo he, too, went to Paris to continue his studies for his doctorate, which he never achieved. He seems to have spent much of his time in and around the Odeon Theatre, Montparnasse and the Latin Quarter, often attending plays by Ibsen, Shaw and Pirandello. He wrote his first novel, Audat al Roh, or "Resurrection", in 1927, but it was not published until 1933 and has yet to be translated into English. He dedicated the novel to Saad Zaghloul and it was an immediate success. The character Mohsen barely disguises Hakim himself and the novel struck a chord in Egypt because, as in Zeinab - though in a very different way - it asserted individuality, stressing the national character of the country as it emerged from the 1919 Revolution. Mohsen appears again in "A Bird from the East", published in 1938 and translated into English in 1966. The Odeon Theatre comes into the novel, for it is the French girl in the box- office with whom the Egyptian falls in love. Cromer then goes on to analyse works by Ibrahim Abdel-Kader Al-Mazny, Mahmoud Teymour, Abdel-Rahman El-Sharkani, Youssef Edris and others. In all his writings, he shows a real understanding of the country, the writers and their sources of inspiration.
