Edward Said saved my life. And I don’t mean that the work of the late American intellectual and Palestinian activist rescued me when I needed intellectual or emotional or moral sustenance. Sure, at one point in my political odyssey, Said’s work was important to me. Even now, though my ideas about the Middle East have changed a great deal since my graduate school days when I met Said, I believe that Orientalism, his most famous book, offers valuable, if skewed, insights into that volatile region. When I say Said saved my life, I mean it literally. You see, one snowy afternoon in the late ’90s, Susan Sontag was going to kill me.
I was working at Talk magazine, founded by the former editor of the New Yorker, Tina Brown, who had the staff on 24-hour call looking for what was hot and what generated buzz. As the editor of the book section, I was competing with celebrity wranglers who promised, for instance, a cover shot of Tom Cruise—in the nude, more or less. There’s not a lot of buzz with poets, novelists, and biographers. Even if their books are hot and buzzy, their lives and looks are rarely glossy magazine material.
But Said, one of New York’s best-known intellectuals right then and a dramatically photogenic guy, had just published a memoir, Out of Place. Was this buzzy enough? I consulted with my friend and colleague Jim Surowiecki, who suggested that we do a story pairing Edward Said with another writer, a woman—how about Susan Sontag? She’d published a novel recently, and here’s the hook—they were both suffering from illnesses! Wouldn’t that be a great story—putting two New Yorkers in their 60s together to discuss not feeling well!
In retrospect I don’t know why Tina let me do it. Maybe nothing else matters if you have Tom Cruise nearly naked on the cover of your magazine. I probably could’ve gotten away with a celebrity profile of Immanuel Kant. “Here in the Grill Room, Henry Kissinger walks by us and nods at the author of the Critique of Pure Reason, who puts another forkful of arugula in his mouth .  .  .”
Tina green-lighted the interview with the two unwell writers, and I arranged for a hotel suite in midtown Manhattan, a caterer, and the photographer to capture what would no doubt be stunning and dramatic black-and-white images of the two major intellectual figures of the moment.
Said was the first to arrive. A blizzard was starting to take shape outside and as he shook the snow out of his hair, it occurred to me I’d dragged a sick man through the biggest snowstorm of the year. I asked if he wanted some tea. We talked about his memoir, which soon turned into a conversation about his father, whom he remembered very fondly.
Soon after, Sontag arrived. She and Said exchanged greetings. They had indeed known each other a very long time. I’d never met her before. The photographer was setting up his camera and lights. Sontag asked where the stylist was. Pardon me, I asked. The person who is going to take care of my makeup and hair, said Sontag.
This wasn’t going to end well for me. Sontag knew a lot about photography—the art, she’d written a book about it, and the profession, she was in a long relationship with the famous celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz. Sontag was a very attractive woman whose casual beauty won her the adoration of several generations of followers. I suspect both age and illness had understandably made her more protective of her appearance, especially now that she was going to be photographed alongside a man whose countenance age and illness seemed to have made finer, sharper, tragic. Sontag was right to be angry. I believe she screamed at me.
Eventually, Said rose from his chair, unfolding his tall frame. “Susan,” he said, and took her arm and walked her into the other room in the suite. I don’t know exactly what he said, but I like to imagine it was something along the lines of, “Susan, you are beautiful. God, you’ve always been gorgeous, and are more beautiful now than ever. The photographs will be fine because you are beautiful.”
That’s what I imagine he said—along with blaming me for being such a dolt. They came out a couple of minutes later and sat for the pictures and then we started the interview. It was terrible, but when I turned off the tape-recorder after an hour of two intellectuals performing for each other, a stillness settled over them both. Now they were really talking, and listening to each other. The part not on tape was fabulous. He talked about music, and she explained how and why her idea of novels had changed since she was a young essayist. They were wonderful together. I could’ve listened to them all afternoon but eventually of course they had to go, and walked back out into the cold blizzard.
