Places of Mind by Timothy Brennan

Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said
By Timothy Brennan
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021

There’ve been anthologies and snippet-connections of the great academic and cultural critic Edward Said, but apart from the man’s own memoir Out of Place, there’ve been precious few biographical treatments until this book, Timothy Brennan’s full-dress biography Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said.

Readers who ignore Brennan’s peripheral personal comments will nevertheless get the gist of them before they’ve gone 30 pages into this book: Brennan was Said’s friend and former student. This is not a bar to the writing of a biography, of course, but it can present an obstacle to writing an unbiased one. But it’s only an obstacle if you’re trying to overcome it.

Brennan is uniformly excellent in presenting the phenomenon of Edward Said, and in many senses that’s a more fundamental approach than presenting the man. The man, after all, made a nearly life-long career out of being a phenomenon, and a book that didn’t take that square on would be almost as unsatisfying as one that did. Brennan is powerfully eloquent on this fundamental Said paradox:

With Said, Palestinians had their urbane spokesman probing the manias of the metropolis; supporters of Israel found their malignant charlatan and terrorist; scholars of the Orient saw a well-armed foe in the rearview mirror; a non-white diaspora in the universities thanked him for blazing the trail of their own multicultural emergence; leftists within the university scratched their heads wondering how someone with his views managed to be so rewarded by the powerful. 

Brennan summarizes things succinctly: “A Palestinian American critic, intellectual, and activist, Edward Said is now considered one of the most transformative thinkers of the last half century.” Brennan calls his old friend and former teacher “the best-known U.S. public intellectual of the postwar period,” right alongside Noam Chomsky, Hannah Arendt, and Susan Sontag. 

And the missing names? Christopher Hitchens? A traitor to Said’s friendship. Lionel Trilling?  “A conservative with an ethereal taste for the liberal arts, diagnosing social mores and psychology from a distant literary perch.” Gore Vidal? The whole description runs: “Subversive patrician.” Brennan laments that it’s become very easy “to turn Said into a series of placards without depth or nuance.” But he keeps his hand in just the same; sixty years of public commentary and several dozen books across several dozen genres, but Vidal’s nothing more than a “subversive patrician.” Said - or should we simplify him as a “contrarian immigrant”? - would have chuckled, and just maybe approved.

The brilliance of Brennan’s book is the way it so consistently turns the glare of the spotlight into flattering mood lighting. This is, of course, also its besetting flaw. His Said is the beleaguered humanist in every room of low-browed ideologues and closet (or cloak room) Zionists. When he’s misunderstood, he’s slandered; when he’s thwarted, he’s wronged. In his account, Said is a Caesar (when comes such another?) and it’s always the Ides of March. 

Brennan is likewise brightly convincing on all of Said’s written works, although even on that heading, where it seems least justified (even most of his dedicated enemies would hardly have denied that Said’s writing was often brilliant), Brennan is, shall we stay, strenuous in stressing that there was a method to Said’s madness. “Said’s overstatements were designed to unleash a purifying indignation in his readers,” Brennan writes. “Close friends observed that Said knew he ought to qualify his statements more, but he felt he had to be strong and definite for political reasons.” 

Purifying indignation. Even in the annals of valet biographies, that’s a herniating stretch. Readers may decide to conclude that, rather than intentionally writing errors in order to smelt his critics, Said was instead simply wrong-headed (or just wrong) sometimes. It happens. Even that old subversive patrician Gore Vidal had his howlers. 

Places of Mind is unlikely to strike many readers as the final biographical word on somebody as mercurial and multi-faceted as Edward Said - an encomium seldom can be. Said’s seminal 1978 book Orientalism has been a bone of intellectual contention since the moment of its publication and will continue to be as long as East is East and West is West, so the occasion for biographies is evergreen. This one is a flag planted by a friend, and it provokes a smile when read in such a register. The counterblasts - and some Olympian removes - will come in time.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.