Said the Fisherman, by Marmaduke Pickthall

Since the days of Lady Hester Stanhope and her romantic pranks, down to the exploits of Colonel T. E. Lawrence in the late war, there seems always to have been some more or less fantastic Englishman, or woman, Arabizing among the Arabs. Until we feel we know the desert and the Bedouin better than we know Wales or our next- door neighbour.

Perhaps there is an instinctive sympathy between the Semite Arab and the Anglo-Saxon. If so, it must have its root way down in the religious make-up of both peoples. The Arab is intensely a One-God man, and so is the Briton.

But the Briton is mental and critical in his workings, the Arab uncritical and impulsive. In the Arab, the Englishman sees himself with the lid off.

T. E. Lawrence distinguishes two kinds of Englishmen in the East: the kind that goes native, more or less like Sir Richard Burton, and takes on native dress, speech, manners, morals, and women; then the other kind, that penetrates to the heart of Arabia, like Charles M. Doughty, but remains an Englishman in the fullest sense of the word. Doughty, in his rags and misery, his blond beard, his scrupulous honesty, with his Country for ever behind him, is indeed the very pith of England, dwelling in the houses of hair.

Marmaduke Pickthall, I am almost sure, remained an Englishman and a gentleman in the Near East. Only in imagination he goes native. And that thoroughly.

We are supposed to get inside the skin of Said the Fisherman, to hunger, fear, lust, enjoy, suffer, and dare as Said does, and to see the world through Said’s big, dark, shining Arab eyes.

It is not easy. It is not easy for a man of one race entirely to identify himself with a man of another race, of different culture and religion. When the book opens, Said is a fisherman naked on the coast of Syria, living with his wife Hasneh in a hut by the sands. Said is young, strong-bodied, and lusty: Hasneh is beginning to fade.

The first half of the novel is called: The Book of his Luck; the second half: The Book of his Fate. We are to read into the word Fate the old meaning, of revenge of the gods.

Said’s savings are treacherously stolen by his partner. The poor fisherman wails, despairs, rouses up, and taking a hint about evil genii, packs himself and his scraps on an ass, and lets Hasneh run behind, and sets off to Damascus.

The Book of his Luck is a curious mixture of Arabian Nights and modern realism. I think, on the whole, Scheherazade’s influence is strongest. The poor fisherman suddenly becomes one of the lusty Sinbad sort, and his luck is stupendous. At the same time, he is supposed to remain the simple man Said, with ordinary human responsibilities.

We are prepared to go gaily on with Said, his sudden glory of impudence and luck, when straight away we get a hit below the belt. Said, the mere man, abandons the poor, faithful, devoted Hasneh, his wife, in circumstances of utter meanness. We double up, and for the time being completely lose interest in the lucky and lusty fisherman. It takes an incident as sufficiently realistic and as amusing as that of the missionary’s dressing-gown, to get us up again. Even then we have cold feet because of the impudent Said; he looks vulgar, common. And we resent a little the luck and the glamour of him, the fact that we have to follow him as a hero. A picaresque novel is all very well, but the one quality demanded of a picaro, to make him more than a common sneak, is a certain reckless generosity.

Said is reckless enough, but, as shown by Mr. Pickthall, with impudence based on meanness, the sort of selfishness that is mongrel, and a bit sneaking. Vet Mr. Pickthall still continues to infuse a certain glamour into him, and to force our sympathy for him.

It is the thing one most resents in a novel: having one’s sympathy forced by the novelist, towards some character we should never naturally sympathize with.

Said is a handsome, strong, lusty scoundrel, impudent, with even a certain dauntlessness. We could get on with him very well indeed, if every now and then we didn’t get another blow under the belt, by a demonstration of his cold, gutter-snipe callousness.

One almost demands revenge on him. The revenge comes, and again we are angry.

The author hasn’t treated us fairly. He has identified himself too closely with his hero: he can’t see wood for trees. Because, of course, inside the skin of Said, Mr. Pickthall is intensely a good, moral Englishman, and intensely uneasy.

So with an Englishman’s over-scrupulous honesty, he has had to show us his full reactions to Said. Marmaduke Pickthall, Englishman, is fascinated by Said’s lustiness, his reckless, impudent beauty, his immoral, or non-moral nature. We hope it is non-moral. We are shown it is immoral. Marmaduke Pickthall loathes the mean immorality of Said, and has to punish him for it, in the Book of his Fate.

All very well, but it’s a risky thing to hold the scales for a man whose moral nature is not your own. Mr. Pickthall’s moral values are utilitarian and rational: Said’s are emotional and sensual. The fact that Said’s moral values are emotional and sensual makes Said so lusty and handsome, gives him such glamour for Mr. Pickthall. Mr. Pickthall resents the spell, and brings a charge of immorality. Then the Fates and the Furies get their turn.

The two charges against Said are his abandonment of the poor Hasneh, and his indifference to his faithful friend Selim.

As to Hasneh, she had been his wife for six years and borne him no children, and during these years he had lived utterly poor and vacant. But he was a man of energy. The moment he leaves the seashore, he becomes another fellow, wakes up.

The poor lout he was when he lived with Hasneh is transformed. Ca-Ca-Caliban. Get a new mistress, be a new man! Said had no tradition of sexual fidelity. His aim in living — or at least a large part of his aim in living — was sensual gratification; and this was not against his religion. His newly released energy, the new man he was, needed a new mistress, many new mistresses. It was part of his whole tradition. Because all Hasneh’s service and devotion did not stimulate his energies, rather deadened them. She was a weight round his neck. And her prostrate devotion, while pathetic, was not admirable. It was a dead weight. He needed a subtler mistress.

Here the judgment of Marmaduke Pickthall is a white man’s judgment on a dark man. The Englishman sympathizes with the poor abandoned woman at the expense of the energetic man. The sympathy is false. If the woman were alert and kept her end up, she would neither be poor nor abandoned. But it was easier for her to fall at Said’s feet than to stand on her own.

If you ride a mettlesome horse you mind the bit, or you’ll get thrown. It’s a law of nature.

Said was mean, in that he did not send some sort of help to Hasneh, when he could. But that is the carelessness of a sensual nature, rather than villainy. Out of sight, out of mind, is true of those who have not much mind: and Said had little.

No, our quarrel with him is for being a fool, for not being on the alert: the same quarrel we had with Hasneh. If he had not been a slack fool his Christian wife would not have ruined him so beautifully. And if he had been even a bit wary and cautious, he would not have let himself in for his last adventure.

It is this adventure which sets us quarrelling with Mr. Pickthall and his manipulation of our sympathy. With real but idiotic courage Said swims out to an English steamer off Beirut. He is taken to London: falls into the nightmare of that city: loses his reason for ever, but, a white-haired handsome imbecile, is restored to his faithful ones in Alexandria.

We would fain think this ghastly vengeance fell on him because of his immorality. But it didn’t. Not at all. It was merely because of his foolish, impudent leaping before he’d looked. He wouldn’t realize his own limitations, so he went off the deep end.

It is a summing-up of the Damascus Arab by a sympathetic, yet outraged Englishman. One feels that Mr. Pickthall gave an extra shove to the mills of God. Perfectly gratuitous!

Yet one is appalled, thinking of Said in London. When one does come out of the open sun into the dank dark autumn of London, one almost loses one’s reason, as Said does. And then one wonders: can the backward civilizations show us anything half so ghastly and murderous as we show them, and with pride?