Setting the Record Straight

Photo: Diana Athill with Waguih Ghali

Comments by Peter Dreyer on Vivian Gornick’s review (“In Lieu of Love,” New York Review of Books, February 27, 2025) of the NYRB reprint of Instead of a Letter by Diana Athill (London: Chatto & Windus, 1963)

The late Diana Athill was the editor of my first novel, titled A Beast in View (London: André Deutsch, 1969). When I went to meet her in London in 1968, she introduced me to a fellow André Deutsch author, Waguih Ghali. We quickly hit it off. Waguih was a Copt, a member of an oppressed minority in Nasser's Egypt, the descendants of the ancient Egyptians, and felt he could never go back there, while for my part I imagined I would never go back to my native South Africa, where my novel was immediately banned (although I eventually did, of course). I felt I had made a friend. The next day, I returned to Athens, where I then lived, and Diana told me shortly afterwards that Waguih had killed himself.

      Diana’s memoir Instead of a Letter makes no mention of Waguih, whom she met for the first time in the summer of the year it was published, 1963. Twenty-three years later, she would tell his story in a book titled After a Funeral (London: Cape, 1986).

Waguih was an alcoholic, a compulsive gambler, a hoarder, a cadger—but a charmer, too. Diana had permitted him to move into her flat (“I was a sucker for oppressed foreigners,” she says).

Putting up with his increasingly outrageous behavior, she became, willy-nilly, his co-dependent. They were not lovers—the only time they had sex, he crept into her bed when they were both drunk, and the next day he bought a bolt to put on her bedroom door to prevent himself from ever doing so again.

      In her review of the new NYRB edition of Instead of a Letter, Vivian Gornick calls Waguih “a colossally bad character” and “a beguiling deadbeat who exploits every connection he makes.” I have not seen the reprint myself and don’t know where she found the quoted comments—Athill surely never made them!

      Gornick’s review depicts Diana as a woman who, after being cruelly jilted in her twenties, “went permanently off love: never again would she risk the kind of rejection that told her she was not a real woman. Sex was a different matter. She didn’t go looking for men, but if they turned up she slept with them.”

“I already had a lover of five years’ standing who suited me perfectly and was more profoundly valuable to me than any other man could be,” Diana writes in After a Funeral. “It would be impossible for me to love little goat-face better than I loved Luke.”

Friends had asked why she continued to let the improvident Egyptian live with her. “If you are sure you don’t want him there any more, you must kick him out,” Luke told her. “If Luke had become an expert on Didi [her pseudonym for Waguih],” she comments wryly, “he was even more an expert on me.”

In the habit of leaving his diaries—since been published in several volumes by the American University in Cairo Press under the title The Diaries of Waguih Ghali: An Egyptian Writer in the Swinging Sixties—“in a pile on the table . . . [Waguih ] shows us parts of them and knows that from time to time we leaf through other parts.” He admires Luke’s writing, but loves them simply as “characters”—“lovable Luke and sweetheart Diana: dear, gentle, funny, trusting people,” she thinks.

A diary entry comments sardonically on them: “They jump . . . into bed at once, make love, or rather just fuck, and an hour later they are in the sitting room again.” Unamused, Diana tells Luke: “He’s got a nerve!”

Gornick seems to conflate Waguih with Ram, the feckless protagonist of his novel Beer in the Snooker Club (1964), which Diana had edited.

Although I knew him only for an afternoon and evening, to me he was no more like Ram than, say, the shiftless Basil Seal in Black Mischief (1932) and Put Out More Flags (1942), Evelyn Waugh’s satirical glimpses from the other side of the imperial pier glass, ought to be seen as Waugh’s alter ego.

Beer in the Snooker Club brilliantly satirizes the love-hate relationship of many formerly subaltern colonials with England, the land of Shakespeare and Mathew Arnold, of Biggles and Billy Bunter.

Ram speaks upper-class British English without an accent, having matriculated from the Egyptian equivalent of a British public school, but when he and his friend Font apply for British visas, they are refused. His old headmaster explains: “You two are Copts, and as the ruling power is entirely Moslem now, they do not bother to give you visas. . . . Go to the Swedish consulate . . . and apply for a visa to Sweden. Then apply for a transit visa through England. They cannot refuse you that.” This works. They get their transit visas for ua stay of no more than ten days in England. “I’ll stay ten years if I wish,” Font whispers behind the clerk’s back.

The British Home Office has since taken care to block this path to entry—Third World citizens now need a visa even to change planes in the United Kingdom.

Ram is penniless, but as a member of an upper-class family, he spends his time in Cairo drinking in the garden at Groppi’s and playing snooker. He reads The Guardian and The New Statesman. Font works at the snooker club, brushing the tables with the Times Literary Supplement.

Egypt is a military dictatorship. Although Ram and Font originally supported the revolution against the monarchy, enthusiastically going to Suez to yell abuse at the occupying British troops there, they have come to realize their mistake.

In 1942, when the Deutsche Afrika Korps seemed on the point of conquering Egypt, Colonels Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat, future Egyptian presidents, were in touch with the Axis and planning a rebellion in support of Rommel. And after the war, Nasser permitted fleeing Nazi war criminals to settle in Egypt. “Do you know the number of young men, doctors, engineers, lawyers in concentration camps?” Ram demands. “Or don’t you know that we have concentration camps? . . . We have a lot of Ex-SS Germans here who know what to do with such people.”

  Beer in the Snooker Club, first published by André Deutsch in 1964, was reprinted by Penguin in 1968 and by Serpent's Tail in 1987 and 2010. It “was positively reviewed in both 'The Times' and 'The New York Times,' as well as in 'The Guardian,' the 'New Statesman,' 'The Times Literary Supplement,' and 'The New Yorker,' and elsewhere. In his contemporaneous review of the novel Martin Levin calls the book ‘a small masterpiece of a novel. . . . In a letter to the editors of the 'London Review of Books,' the novelist Gabriel Josipovici wrote, “Beer in the Snooker Club is the best book ever written about Egypt” (Wikipedia). It has been translated into French, Hebrew, Dutch, Arabic, Italian, and Spanish.

I imagine Diana and André Deutsch would have been eager to have Waguih’s next book, as would pretty much any other publisher. He is now the subject of numerous scholarly articles.

It is a complex story, which Diana herself tells with tragic economy. Waguih believed himself to be insane, and a hopeless case. The final entry in his diary reads: “I am going to kill myself tonight. . . . The time has come. I am, of course, drunk. . . . I am leaving you my diary, luv. Well-edited, it could be a good piece of literature.” Taking an entire bottle of sleeping pills, he left a note pinned to her door: “DIANA, DON’T COME IN. PHONE 999.”

He took ten days to die, just semi-conscious most of the time. “I found myself unable to move forward to the edge of the grave, the tears running down my face,” Diana writes. “It was not intolerable that he had killed himself. It was intolerable that he had been right to do so—that he had no alternative. . . . This record has been written for him, and for people who are going to have children.”

Diana and I remained friends. She visited me around 1986, when I lived in rural Carroll County, Maryland. I don’t think After a Funeral had appeared by then. She and I never spoke further about Waguih, as best I can recall.

I have little doubt that Diana would have detested Gornick’s misleading portrait of her. Book reviewing is commonly hack work, by writers who either need the pittance paid for it or have nothing better to get on with (I’ve done a fair bit of it myself). But a reviewer may at least hope to serve the truth. Infusing a book review with ideologically derived distortions, as appears to have been done in this case, is inexcusable.

The New York Review of Books, a publication to which I subscribe, and which I respect, unfortunately has not seen fit to publish my corrections. “Our critic Vivian Gornick based her review on her reading of Diana Athill’s memoirs; the representation came from Athill’s version of events, therefore, and not Gornick’s,” the NYRB's editor-in-chief responded to my letter.

I hope I have shown adequately that this is quite untrue. Diana and Waghui weren’t as depicted by Gornick at all, and neither does Athill anywhere portray him, like the NYRB's reviewer in her perfunctory dismissal of him, as practically the archetypal "wog" of overweening British imperial discourse ("Wogs begin at Calais!"), typified by Fleet Street's gloating stories about King Farouk's collection of sex toys.

That profoundly racist British mentality was the backdrop to Nasserism, the Suez Crisis (which finally sank the British Empire), and the whole tragic history of modern Egypt. Waguih Ghali nails it to a T in Beer the Snooker Club. I wonder if Gornick ever read the book.

Thursday, June 5, 2025