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| Gholam-Hossein Saedi's journey to southern Iran: People of the Air and Fear and Trembling were the fruits of this trip. |
December 2: Anniversary of the Death of Gholam-Hossein Saedi
Reza Baraheni - "To me, Saedi had neither a beginning, nor an end, nor even a proper middle to his life. A person’s life is made up of all their moments."
In Memory of a Friend: Gholam-Hossein Saedi, Storyteller, Playwright, Dreamer
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Writing about "Gholam," as his brother Akbar, my brother Mohammad Naqi, and I used to call Gholam-Hossein Saedi in our private gatherings, should be easier for someone like me, who, besides our shared literary pursuits, was close to him in non-literary matters as well. Yet, suddenly, multiple introductions, multiple texts, even multiple conclusions rush to mind when his name is spoken, leaving the tongue speechless and making it harder than ever to pick up pen and paper. I find myself tempted to decide whether I should mention this or skip that and instead reach something that emerged in the middle of our years-long connection, or even address details that his death failed to sever. Should I recall those times when the late Cyrus Tahbaz and I were entrusted, by friends and Saedi’s family, with finding a mosque in Paris to pay respects as he journeyed from this world to the next?
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| Gholam-Hossein Saedi, novelist and playwright |
Cyrus, using his relatively stooped tall frame and thick beard, introduced himself as Saedi’s father and presented me as his maternal cousin, Reza Aghnami, who resided in London. This was done so hastily and spontaneously that, when the mosque official sought permission from the relevant ministry—especially since Cyrus was introducing a man four or five years his senior as his son—neither the official nor the ministry detected that this “Dr. Saedi,” though indeed a physician, was likely the same Saedi whose screenplay for The Cow, directed by Dariush Mehrjui, was praised by authorities, but who had fled Iran over the mountains in secret and was now resting in Paris. There, having sweetened too much in exile, he found his resting place just a few steps from Marcel Proust on one side and Sadegh Hedayat on the other in the renowned Père Lachaise Cemetery—albeit underground.
A few years ago, I gathered the cast of the stage adaptation of my novella Lilith—actors, director, and assistant director—at his grave and had them focus for a few moments on the memory of Gholam, for whom a hundred masters should have stood with folded arms before his bones beneath the earth. The same official, who had inquired and obtained permission for the mourning ceremony, approached me once at the mosque’s entrance and said, “He must have truly been a great doctor to draw so many people to the mosque. May God have mercy on him. What was his specialty?” I put my finger to my temple, and he responded, “The brain! The brain! Amazing, amazing! May God have mercy on him. May this be your last sorrow.”
At another point, he drew my attention to a private spot to the left of the mosque’s entrance and said, “Sir, please, could you make sure that the late man’s mother goes upstairs to join the women? It’s my responsibility.” Glancing over, I held back laughter—the last thing one should do at a dear friend’s mourning ceremony—and controlled it with a slight smile, concealing my amusement. To wrap things up, I simply took his hand and said, “Allow me to introduce you to the late man’s mother.” The person sitting on the ground with her back to us, surrounded by a group of men, had long locks falling onto her neck and occasionally brushed them back in a flustered, nervous manner.
Leading the official to the group, I introduced him to Akhavan Thaleth. I had never witnessed such a beautifully ironic mistake, especially at a friend’s mourning ceremony. The mosque official had mistaken Akhavan, with his long locks falling from behind, for Saedi’s mother—the mother who had died heartbroken during her son’s imprisonment under the Shah.
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For me, Saedi had neither a beginning, nor an end, nor even a proper middle to his life. A person’s life is made up of all their moments. During the Shah’s era, we endured countless hardships to finally secure permission for him to leave Iran after his imprisonment. I had spoken with Robert Bernstein, president of Random House in New York.
The Association of American Publishers sent Saedi an invitation—this was after his release from the Shah's prison—inviting him to the United States to negotiate with American publishers for printing his works. Of course, this was merely a pretext. Although when Saedi arrived in the U.S., he did sign a contract for a collection of his stories, which was later published in translation by Dr. Hassan Javadi, initially, the response from the Iranian government was negative and dismissive.
At that time, Farah Pahlavi was also scheduled to visit the U.S. at the invitation of the Asia Society, and she did come. On one side, Iranian students living in New York and neighboring states gathered in front of the hotel or association where the event was being held, where Farah was to receive an award. On the other side, the Committee for Artistic and Intellectual Freedom in Iran (CAIFI), of which I was an active member, had invited prominent American writers to gather in front of the hotel at the time of the reception in Farah’s honor.
Arthur Miller, Allen Ginsberg, Eric Bentley, Kurt Vonnegut, Kate Millett, and dozens of other American writers and journalists—many of them CAIFI supporters—gathered in front of the venue with placards prominently displaying a large photo of Saedi, demanding that he be allowed to leave Iran.
The students’ chants rang out from across the street, while the police kept a close watch. Suddenly, as we stood directly across from the hotel, we saw officers—apparently FBI agents—kick someone out of the hotel. When he got up and joined us, he explained that during the reception, all the guests had raised their glasses in a toast to Farah Pahlavi. He, however, stood up and, after being given permission, raised his glass in a toast to Saedi and Iran’s political prisoners, which prompted the police to intervene and escort him out of the hotel. (Apparently, he was a priest who had once exposed U.S. war crimes in Vietnam.)
These events influenced the Shah’s policies. A few days later, I spoke by phone with Dr. Saedi, who had been released from prison. It appeared the New York protest had made an impact, and he was expected to travel to the U.S. soon. Before his trip to New York, he had asked me not to meet him at the airport, since Parviz Sabeti, a high-ranking security official, had allegedly claimed that Baraheni was behind everything. The Committee for Artistic and Intellectual Freedom in Iran (CAIFI) had invited representatives from several prominent American publishers to greet him at the airport.
I was standing with some friends on the “roof” (upper level of the airport) while the committee secretary went to meet Saedi. When Saedi came up, and we embraced, I noticed a young man staggering onto the roof and joining Saedi.
I asked, “Gholam, who’s this?” He replied, “They seated this young man beside me on the plane to ply me with alcohol and get me talking. I offered him every courtesy. He couldn’t hold his liquor. He enjoyed it and confessed that he was a SAVAK agent planted next to me to gather information and report back. As you can see, the poor guy’s completely out of it.”
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| Reza Baraheni, writer, poet, and literary critic |
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It was around that time that I noticed Saedi carrying a rather large bag, unwilling to part with it under any circumstances. I thought it might contain unpublished works that he feared losing. Months later, I found out—or rather, he confessed—that since the age of fifteen or sixteen, he had been writing letters to a girl in Tabriz, no matter where he was, and over the years he had never received any response. Yet, despite this silence, he never stopped writing.
Apparently, he had not seen the girl since his teenage years, and it seemed that she had never married. I detailed this story in my novel Elias in New York, which was published in French, though the Persian version is still unpublished. A small part of it was published as a short story titled A Close Encounter in New York by Jammedaran Publishing in Iran.
When I mentioned this story in an Iranian newspaper a few years ago, I was informed from Tabriz that the woman is still alive, has never married, and has kept all the original letters. I asked my friends to reach out to her and ask that she not give them to anyone, so they might be published in due course.
It seems that the esteemed Azerbaijani scholar, Mr. Rahim Reisnia, once borrowed the letters, read them, and then returned them all to the woman. Recently, I heard the unfortunate news, which I hope is false, that she may have passed away and the letters are now with her sister.
The woman who received Saedi's letters and never responded seemed to be his confidant, silent as a stone—silent forever. Perhaps, if published, these letters could shed a brighter, more illuminating light on the darker parts of Saedi’s life than the scattered bits of information others have.
In New York, he was terrified to sleep alone in a room. Whenever I was with him, we would sleep in the same room. Perhaps his strange kindness toward young girls, even at an older age, was due to that first love in Tabriz. But in matters like these, one can never speak with certainty.
Perhaps even Saedi himself wasn’t fully aware of this deep attachment. A few times, I asked him why he continued to write these desperate letters that led nowhere. I saw that he didn’t have the power to respond directly to such a serious question. But one time, after my persistence, when he had returned to Iran, he went into his bedroom in his apartment on Shamir Street at Takht-e-Jamshid [now Taleghani Avenue], and when he returned, he handed me a volume of Hafez, telling me to open to the folded page and read the marked couplet.
The verse read: “The garden of paradise and the shade of Tuba, and palaces and houris / I would not trade for the dust of the beloved’s street.”
A delicate incident like this—it's worth a million-dollar screenplay.
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It’s worth opening a parenthesis here: it was at Saedi’s house that Dr. Nasser Pakdaman, Dr. Saedi, the late Ali-Reza Heydari, the director of Khwarazmi Publishing, Reza Jafari, the worthy son of Abdul-Rahim Jafari, and I gathered to write a letter addressed to the Attorney General of the Islamic Republic of Iran, requesting the release of Abdul-Rahim Jafari, the director of Amir Kabir Publishing, who had been imprisoned.
The friends present entrusted me with writing the letter, and then we collected the signatures. Apparently, the logic of that letter and the credibility of its signatories led to Mr. Jafari's release.
Recently, Mr. Jafari has attributed unfounded claims to me in his book In Search of Morning: The Memoirs of Abdul-Rahim Jafari. Among other things, he claims that I once wrote an article in Payam Daneshgou published in America, which was later printed in one of the newspapers in Iran and subsequently in one of its weekly publications.
Mr. Abdul-Rahim Jafari may disagree with me for any other reason, but if he had conducted a little research—especially if he had asked some of his colleagues at Franklin and a couple of other places—it would have become clear to him that the letter was written by two people: Ahmad Shamlu and Nasser Pourqomi, both of whom have since passed away. What I wrote was merely the introduction to Zol-Allah, a collection of prison poems, which Mr. Jafari and the late Ali-Reza Heydari visited my brother’s house during the first six or seven days after the revolution to sign a contract to print fifty-five thousand copies of that book, and it was published.
If I had published anything against him, his distinguished son, Mr. Reza Jafari, knowing this, would certainly have refrained from printing three or four of my books in the Selseleh series of the No Publishing. Perhaps, on the contrary, the publication of those books is due to the very letter I wrote in defense of his father, with my signature alongside several others as one of the first signatories of that letter.
Mentioning this point is necessary because Saedi and I were among the founding members of the Iranian Writers' Association. Together with Jalal Al-e-Ahmad, Ahmad Shamlu, and others, we defended the realm of writing and advocated for the workers of printing houses and the book publishing industry before the Prime Minister, protesting censorship that led to the unemployment of printing workers and especially drove small publishers to bankruptcy, thereby placing financial burdens on writers and translators.
I have never written against publishers. What Mr. Abdul-Rahim Jafari has written about me in his book, aside from a couple of trivial points, is pure slander. It is shameful for someone to say that he has been informed that Mr. Ayaz's hellish days were cut off in the middle of printing upon realizing that the text was distressing and that all the printed copies were turned into pulp.
More than half of that book was published during the Islamic Republic in the book Madness of Writing, which is a selection of my works, with the permission of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. The main enemy of that book was not public morality, but the ethics prevailing during the reign of the monarchy. What I wrote there has since been outdone by the book Alam concerning the corruptions of the court, particularly the Shah.
I internalized the prevailing corruption in my characters. The corruption of the Shah and the series of books about the court, and even Soraya's book about the Shah's bedroom, actually validate my work. My Ayaz did not merely begin in the era of Mahmoud and Ayaz; rather, it correctly connects to the fundamental roots, when a fragmented language for the first time combined the parody of inscriptions with the common languages over the centuries and even my own mother tongue.
The translation of these passages into French has brought various scenes to life in the plays derived from the publication of Ayaz. Yes, I set aside the translation of Ulysses and wrote my own book, and there is no greater honor than having my book placed alongside the esteemed novels of the world after its publication in France, with parts of it published alongside the works of Flaubert, Kafka, Nabokov, Márquez, and others in reputable collections.
Why do you strike at your own property? Why limit your thinking to the level of the censor during the Shah's reign? Why do you not understand that, as Saedi said, I wrote that novel with my blood, that I risked my life, that I staked the faith and conviction of an Iranian writer on it? Why aren’t you proud that you were the first publisher during Mr. Ayaz's hellish days? Exposing the corrupt morals of the aristocracy and the ruling powers is the duty of a writer.
You cannot commit to exposing corrupt regimes with a mere prayer rug! It is the writer who dares—saying openly and without fear of today or tomorrow—that he writes Ayaz in the first person to articulate corruption from within. He places himself in the shoes of “Biltmore,” as if two souls become one mold to portray the brothel of Saigon under the feet of American scoundrels.
He positions the woman of his novel in the mysteries of my land in “Shahr-e No” (New City) to use the horrific fire that consumed those poor, wretched, burned, and turned to ashes women just a few days before the revolution as an excuse to write about that place, and he never boasts about personally witnessing that massacre beside those unfortunate people.
Why do you take pride in having turned my book into pulp? You who penned your declaration of freedom from prison with the same pen that sketched the misery of those burned women and their pimps—why do you stab yourself in the back? If you were my publisher in France, your reputation would have been ruined. You would have slept in prison for years. You read the book, and if you didn’t want to publish it, why did you print it down to the very last detail, with the date I put at the end? You wanted me to present the phony and thoroughly immoral ethics of the wretched and corrupt rulers wrapped in a veneer of false morality as genuine ethics for the public.
I wrote that book with my blood. Why, having gone to prison and come out, are you thirsty for the blood of someone who risked his life for your freedom? Why do you consider my blood permissible in reclaiming your property? You wanted me to be the translator of Joyce’s Ulysses. It’s a great honor, and my dear friend Manouchehr Badiei translated the book so beautifully and much better than I could have if I had attempted it. Excellent! Are you regretting having published Ayaz?
When Ayaz was published in 2000, more than thirty years after you turned it to pulp, the French publisher invited the translator and his wife to lunch at the restaurant of the hotel where he always had his lunch. We walked there. I don’t speak French. I asked the translator to ask the publisher, who was also the editor of Ayaz, which shelf he would place it on.
The publisher was himself the translator of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Márquez. He said, without a doubt, “Not with Márquez!” I became curious. He said, “Only with Joyce and Borges.” That was his statement. I disagreed. I still disagree. First, because we’ve been beaten down to the point where we fear they’ll say we’re boasting, and secondly, because our publisher takes the book, prints it, and then takes pride in having turned it to pulp, which inherently creates a sense of personal humiliation that someone has turned your book into pulp.
And then thirdly and fourthly, where did all these people who have read Ayaz find it and read it? This means the writer remains suspended among various judgments. And then suddenly, in Paris, in a grand hall, he sees several scenes created, with curtains drawn between them, and on each table stands a copy of Ayaz. One of them performs the first scene of Ayaz, without knowing who you are, addressing you among a group of thirty people around the table, and everyone knows it by heart. A year or two later, in Avignon, when several other Ayaz performances are staged, you sit there while “Touma,” a true genius of French theater, performs Ayaz. Two women in the audience feel nauseous. Reluctantly, without interrupting the performance, they guide the two out of the hall. One immediately returns to her seat, while the other remains outside for ten minutes and then comes back in tears.
And after the performance—this is "Avignon," the largest theater festival in the world—the woman starts to speak rapidly. Then my translator introduces me to her, and suddenly she does things that leave one at a loss. Believe me, at that moment, I wasn’t thinking about you at all; otherwise, I would have either had a stroke or, at the very least, a nosebleed.
You see, you, sir, have turned me to pulp. You gave me eight thousand tomans! I don’t even remember. And then you deposited it into Ayaz’s account. I don’t remember! If I had remembered, I would have been horrified by the terror that arose from this wretched nosebleed.
I, who wrote a declaration for your freedom from prison, have become the dregs that you constructed in your autobiography. Do you not feel ashamed? At least what Sultan Mahmud gave to Ferdowsi would suffice for a drunkard and a fool in the bathhouse. It’s natural that you are neither Mahmud’s pinky nor am I the little fingernail of Ferdowsi; however, I fear that history, being blind, may throw the ashes of my book in your face.
I personally apologize to you if you become infamous, because despite all this, I say that I am not greedy for anyone’s palaces. My soul still sits beside Sabalan, with that wolf that hunts foreigners. I said it exists within all of us. I have written it, but sometimes mistakenly, it may kill its own, but overall, it does not mistake its own for the foreign.
My suggestion to you is simple: please write your true autobiography. And if you wish, I will write the autobiography of Saedi and my own. If you find the courage to publish it! An autobiography is not meant to be a mere prayer rug!
Read the confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Read the autobiographical notes of Virginia Woolf. Read the first-person narratives of Jean Genet's novels. Read Freud in relation to his father and daughter. Read Dostoevsky’s journals during the writing of Crime and Punishment. Read Jean-Paul Sartre's autobiography. Read the relationships and conversations between Genet and Cocteau. Read Proust as he prepares to embark on writing his great novel. Read the madness of the character Mrs. Dalloway in Virginia Woolf’s novel. Read the Marquis de Sade, read Bataille, the French novelist and philosopher. And go back a few centuries and read Rabelais, and read him from Bakhtin's perspective. Read Western writers' works about these subjects. And read the commentaries of these people about the Ayaz you commanded to be turned to pulp, and know that as a publisher, you have broken the jar that someone had freshly crafted, and now to justify yourself, it is unclear for whom in society or against which history you are using my book, which exposed part of the past history of Iran through the confessions of a beautiful yet miserable slave, as a means of your absolution!
I forgive you because you have published Ferdowsi, Hafez, and all the others. But sir, you should have been a publisher of this era; having published me, you would have set off yourself, tossing the book freely, yes, freely, into homes so that people would understand that Baraheni has suffered a stutter, but it’s a collective stutter, and Ayaz is not just a representation of Baraheni; it also represents you, who, in order to bow to the past and future power, has been distributing from the Caliph's purse.
Ayaz is pure. It’s a book, my good man! To preserve your assets, you lie down submissively before two authorities, and then you consider Ayaz to be immoral! Are you a publisher or an accomplice of book burners? Give your answer to the future, give it today, because you do not have a literary observatory to know that every Iranian may one day have their own hellish era of Mr. Ayaz at home.
I have struck a lance into the festering sore of history, which will expose it, despite the pleasure of its prose, as long as history spins on this axis. You have published three million books. I defend you. But you have also turned my book to pulp. In the realm of the novel, anyone who equates a writer’s character with the author himself is a fool.
No one would equate Sadegh Hedayat with the first-person narrative of The Blind Owl; otherwise, they would call Hedayat a murderer twice and a pimp several times, since The Blind Owl is written in the first person. Furthermore, simply because you assumed I wrote something about you, you have slandered me in your book.
It would have sufficed for you to research and see that the piece was written against you, Mr. Franklin, Ahmad Shamlou, and Nasser Pourqumi. And this has been preempted by two people I wanted to explain things to; they have said they know who wrote that article.
That article was published by someone in America in a magazine. In that magazine, there were also writings about me. You don’t know that the piece was simply written and published in response to the preface I wrote for Zolullah.
You made a contract with me right during the revolution, either because you thought I would become important or because you thought I had rights. That article, which was published later, was printed to compete with the preface of Zolullah, which I published with Zolullah in America. You printed Zolullah and his prison poems with its preface in fifty-five thousand copies, the largest print run of a new poetry book in Iran.
Your partner at Khwarazmi had a contract with me to publish a hundred thousand copies of my hundred-page book in translation. Shall we talk about that? Why don’t you care about what you’ve done? Why did you cut me off without warning? What enmity do you have against me that when someone hits me from behind on the street, and then the policeman catches him, and after a few hours, the misunderstanding is cleared up at the police station, and he apologizes to me, you attribute it to the articles I have written in literary criticism? Is this really you?
Do you endorse the foolishness and knife-wielding of a poet in the street? Why have you tainted your book with such nonsense? Show that I have written a word against you anywhere. I am not willing to write about the root of your enmity. I won’t write it even if you give me formal permission.
You must confess yourself. I have not written a single word against you, but I have used my pen to defend you at a time when it could have posed a danger to me. Only if you confess might I write. Once you took the accusation of a slap to the level of accusing a writer of murder. Don’t you remember?
Do you know who took revenge for the slap I received from behind? Khosrow Golserkhi. When that poet had greeted a few other poets in a library in Shahabad and then left, Golserkhi stood up and followed him. The other kids were worried, and then they saw Golserkhi raise his hand and slap that poet, saying, “This is for you; I slapped him so you remember that one shouldn’t hit another poet.”
This was said to me by a poet who was sitting in that library and witnessed it. And you celebrate my slap in your book, and then you tell Ali Dehbaashi, and he calls me to say that Mr. Abdolrahim Jafari wants to call you to explain, and having read your book, I do not accept your explanation and am not willing to speak with you.
I do not taint myself with deception. The incident of the slap I received from behind is also a million-dollar scenario and has nothing to do with literary criticism. Do not let your imagination run wild.