Rencontres avec Sadegh Hedayat: Le parcours d'une initiation.

Beard, Michael

Mostafa Farzaneh describes meeting the writer Sadegh Hedayat in the 1940s, when Farzaneh was a high-school student in Tehran and Hedayat (1903-51) was an eccentric, charming, uncompromisingly skeptical presence on the Iranian intellectual scene. The friendship would continue until 1951, in Paris, where Hedayat committed suicide and Farzaneh, then a law student, had the somber privilege of being among the last friends to meet with him.

The usual questions about the personal memoir as history (is it self-serving or inaccurate? an attempt to claim Hedayat for one faction or another?) fade into insignificance as one leafs through the pages of Rencontres avec Sadegh Hedayat (translated from a longer memoir in Persian, which appeared in Paris in 1988). The effect is novelistic. Farzaneh reconstructs long conversations thoroughly enough to raise suspicions in historically minded readers; but what catches the eye is not a personal shaping force behind the narrative, molded by whatever polemic currents, so much as the little surface gestures: Hedayat's favorite cafes, the furnishings of his study, his turns of phrase and his peculiar wit. (Offering his young friend some vodka, he says "Drink this; it'll stunt your growth.") Even the literary gossip of the period has its fascination, with seemingly trivial comments likely to exert the greatest appeal.

Hedayat's recollections and esthetic pronouncements seem too specific to be fabricated and so much in character with the fiction that I find them plausible and sometimes gratifying. It matters a great deal to hear him voice his debt to Freud, his familiarity with Marie Bonaparte. To learn that he was an admirer of Virginia Woolf, that he pondered how Joyce had changed basic rules of storytelling, allows us to see him grapple personally with the shifting literary scene abroad. To learn that he read Poe and E. T. A. Hoffmann (and, interestingly, Gobineau's Cantes asiatiques) as a high-school student helps explain where his own stories of the 1930s came from.

Michael Beard University of North Dakota