By Mursi Saad El-Din The first time I met DJ Enright was in Singapore in 1965, where he was professor of English at the University of Singapore. When he knew I was Egyptian, he invited me to his place where we talked about Egypt and his job as lecturer of English at Farouk University, now Alexandria. He gave me a signed copy of his collection of poems called The Old Adam and told me he had also written a novel about life in Alexandria. I began to read his poems, trying to see how far had his living in Alexandria affected his writings. And sure enough, I found what I was looking for, two poems, one entitled Alexandrian and the other To Old Cavafy from a New Country. Like Lawrence Durrell when Enright wrote about Alexandria, it was to him an extension of Greece. But, unlike Durrell his Alexandria was not a Greek city, but an Egyptian one with Greek flavour. Enright, as a university lecturer dealt with Egyptians, but could not help thinking in terms of Greek history. He worked in Egypt for three years, from 1947 until 1950. Egypt became the setting for his novel Academic Year. Those were the last years of King Farouk's regime. The country was astir with indignation and rebellion and in his novel Enright could sense this. Egypt was according to him "a mixture of anarchy and repression, nihilism and nerves, riots and rumours of riot and coups d'état, as well as the more customary students' strikes." In this respect I would like to further quote what Enright writes about his students' attitude towards these strikes. It also reflects the affability of Egyptians and their inherent respect for their teachers. When the students decided to go on strike one of his students goes to him and says: "We all honour you, sir, you are our teacher. But we cannot work today -- it is down with Britain day, if you will excuse it, sir." The years 1947-1950 when Enright was in Egypt saw the end of the British mandate in Palestine in 1948 and the foundation of the State of Israel which resulted in the first Arab- Israeli war. "It was a time of apprehension and of a different kind of scrutiny from which Enright had experienced at Cambridge." writes Anthony Thwaite says in his introduction to Enright's novel When we talk or write about English writers who lived in Egypt and wrote about it, we invariably think of Lawrence Durrell and his Alexandria Quartet. It is true that Durrell lived in Egypt during the second world war and Enright did not go there until 1947, and yet Enright published his novel in 1955 while Durrell's first volume of the quartet Justine came out in 1957, two years after Academic Year. Nothing could be more different than these two poets' treatment of Alexandria. Enright, like EM Forster, is more sympathetic, more understanding and more interested in the city and its people. Like all novels written by English writers who lived in Egypt, Academic Year deals with the lives of Englishmen and English institutions in Egypt. Egyptian characters are secondary and they are there only in as much as they have something to do with the main English characters. Academic Year central performers are three, Bacon, an oldish lecturer at the University, an Egyptianised pagliacco, as he is described, an affable and boozy cynic; Packet, a younger lecturer and in some sense the mouthpiece of Enright and Brett, a newly arrived young man employed at the Cultural Centre, presumably the British Council. These three characters according to William Walsh in his book Enright: Poet of Humanism, are "embodiments of the experienced, ardent and the intolerant in the English character, and present a kind of English solidarity in the face of the impalpable Egyptian sensibility." The novel is about the lives of these three characters. Packet is coming back from England after passing his annual holiday. He was the first to run down the gangway of the ship that brought him from England, when it arrived at the Alexandria docks. He asked himself: "should he go straight to his flat? No first of all let him say hello, with a new and unexpected appreciation, to Alexandria." Packet walked happily up and down, dropping at the book shops to announce his return, beamed at a student who had given him inordinate trouble the previous year, scattered a few piastres among the familiar beggars and stared appreciatively at the girls in their pretty summer frocks, they were all, he felt sure, either past or future students of his. And then, in this state of mild intoxication, he strolled towards the sea. Home? he asked himself. Well, it would do nicely for the time being." This paragraph reflects the kind, charitable and loving attitude of Enright towards Alexandria and its people. Even Brian Brett, the new comer, nurtures good and kind feelings towards this new city. Walking out of his hotel, he says: "The air was full of fantastic good will, the sun forebore to oppress, there was a gentle motion of warm breath. The streets were pleasantly moist, the little shops neat and tidy." All through the novel Enright shows genuine understanding of Egypt of the manners and customs and the idiosyncrasies that govern the lives of Egyptians. This is why his Egyptian characters are real. In fact in many faces one can discover the actual people he writes about.
