Ebrahim Golestan
The following is the chapter on "Ebrahim Golestan" from Dr. Abbas Milani's book, Eminent Persians. Published by Syracuse University Press in 2008, Eminent Persians consists of two volumes, profiling 150 of Iran's most prominent figures in politics, economics, and culture between the World War II period and the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
"Ebrahim Golestan is a man of myriad talents and the quintessential intellectual of twentieth-century Iran. He has reached the apex of creativity in several genres. Even now, he continues to experiment with forging his own unique style in the genre of the memoir. He is considered one of the founders of modern Iranian cinema. He not only built the most well-equipped private film studio of its time, but his film Brick and the Mirror began a new path in Iranian cinema and helped put it on the international map. Before that time, movies made in Iran had been strictly local and were defined by mediocre scripts, repetitious and corny themes, poor acting, and primitive style.
Henceforth, Iranian cinema would gradually become the darling of critics. Golestan's Mysteries of the Treasure of Ghost Valley is arguably the most politically daring film of its era—and a veritable guide to the mangled path of modernity during the Pahlavi era. His documentaries, whether describing the crown jewels or the oil industry, combine terse and beautiful prose with stunning imagery. His attention to words has its roots in his abilities as a short-story writer.
In his youth he balanced his life as a champion runner with a highly successful career as a journalist and a photographer. Some of the most enduring images of Iran in Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq's tumultuous era were seen from his lens. Golestan is also a theater director and a highly accomplished translator. His new works, yet to be published, are a fascinating combination of memoir and history. Some critics have even suggested that he is, owing to his pervasive presence in the poetry of Forugh Farrokhzad, the archetypal beloved and easily the most cherished man in modern Persian poetry.
Golestan is a man of many contradictions. He was only twenty-two years old when, in 1943, he was named editor of a staunchly Stalinist paper. In 1945, he translated into Persian parts of the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolshevik) generally considered the most turgid of Stalin's many historical fabrications and banal theoretical gibberish. Yet in the same period, in his essays and short stories, Golestan fought dogmatism. In the days when thousands of people, including many innocent Jews, in the Soviet Union, the mecca of Iranian Stalinists, were sent to concentration camps on the flimsy charge of "cosmopolitanism," Golestan translated Hemingway and published an essay about him in Stalinist publications of the time. He read Shakespeare and translated-but never published-Macbeth into Persian.
In remembering Golestan's attachment to Marxism, we must keep in mind that during the World War II years, and even after, many writers and artists saw Marxism as an effective weapon against colonialism and the Soviet Union as the only reliable bulwark against Nazi barbarism. The stench of the gulag had not yet reached the world. A utopian aura still surrounded the idea of socialism and helped hide the calamities of the real Soviet Union. But to his credit, Golestan soon realized the vacuity of the Stalinist ideology and the depth of corruption in the ranks of its Iranian followers. He chose to steer away from his erstwhile comrades, yet he also refused to join those who in those days wrote about "the God that failed."
More important, Golestan was at the center of many of Iran's most important literary, political, and cultural movements in the second half of the twentieth century. In his private life he crossed paths with many of the more important and colorful personalities of his time. Idle or prurient curiosity about his private life, however, seems to have cast a shadow on serious analysis of his work. Except for two early enthusiastic reviews of his first collection of short stories by Massoud Farzad and Mojtaba Minavi, two of modern Iran's most erudite critics, little of substance has been written about him.
To some critics, Golestan's guilt was his wealth. Others blamed him for his relationship with Forugh Farrokhzad. One critic cast aspersions on his literary abilities because he offered his guests beer in frosted glasses! In the days when the cult of poverty was the common creed of Iranian intellectuals, Golestan was not only affluent but refused any pretense of poverty. His reputation as a distant, diffident, even arrogant man has long afforded him an aura of enigma and inscrutability. And leaving Iran before the Islamic Revolution and choosing a life of exile further undermined his image as a "committed" artist. In the cacophony of gossip and innuendo about his private life, there has been a conspiracy of silence about his work.
But Golestan's contribution to modern Iranian letters is unique. His exceptional erudition, combined with theoretical sophistication, artistic creativity, a keen eye for detail, and the poetic beauty of his prose, have combined to place him on a high perch from which to see and prescribe the contours of modern Iranian culture. Golestan is equally at home with Hafez and Shakespeare. He has delved deeply into Iranian culture and Western civilization; he has assimilated the best of both but is awed by neither. Indeed, he is duly appreciative of the accomplishments as well as the weaknesses of both cultures. He views them both from the perspective of exile.
Ebrahim Golestan was born in 1921 in Shiraz, to one of the city's most prominent families, his grandfather was an esteemed and defiant ayatollah—exiled by Reza Shah-and his father, a man of letters and politics and a member of the constitutional assembly that elected Reza Khan the king, for many years published a newspaper of liberal persuasion called Golestan. The father was at once an intellectual and a man of gargantuan appetite for the pleasures of life. Golestan's mother was a woman of traditional values and sensibility, religious and unusually erudite. Young Golestan's parental home was a veritable literary and political salon, and it was there that the young Ebrahim met, for the first time, many of the famous writers and poets of the era. Golestan also began to satisfy his insatiable curiosity about the world by devouring his father's books. At the behest of his father, he learned French and was fluent in it before he left high school. At the same time, he was an avid athlete, holding a national record in track for many years.
He was educated first in Shiraz and then, in 1939, he was sent to Tehran. But the advent of the war had changed hitherto traditional Tehran. It had more ideological fluidity. Golestan soon joined the newly formed Communist Party and rapidly rose in its rank to become the editor of the party's paper. From his early youth, he was keenly interested in photography; when he decided to leave the party, around 1946, he became a professional photographer. By then he had published his first collection of short stories. In 1954, when a consortium of Western oil companies took over the operation of the Iranian oil industry, Golestan joined the new company and was put in charge of making educational films.
In 1959, after he had severed his ties with the consortium, he negotiated the buyout of the equipment he had purchased to make the documentaries. With this equipment, his studio became the most sophisticated center for filmmaking in Iran. At the same time, well into the late 1950s, he enjoyed a near-monopoly in the lucrative market of supplying film clips and photos to the increasingly large Western media and of assuaging the endless appetite of television for images of Iran.
In the early 1940s, his articles in the party press and the publication of his collection of short stories had already established his reputation as one of the country's leading intellectuals and writers. He had married his cousin, Fakhri, and in the Iran of the time, the marriage of cousins was said to be made in heaven. His wife was an intellectual and soon became a political activist. Together they had two children. Their daughter, Leeli, became an artist and critic, and their son, Kaveh, established his reputation as a photographer and photojournalist. In 2003, tragedy struck the family when Kaveh, on assignment in Iraq with the BBC, was killed by a land mine. Golestan suffered the enormous grief in stoic silence.
His circle of friends in the postwar years included Sadeq Hedayat, Sadeq Chubak, and Fereydon Tavallali. In 1958, he began an intense love affair with Forugh Farrokhzad, which lasted until her premature death in 1966; theirs is the most celebrated love affair in all of modern Persian literature. His marriage continued in spite of the gossip that the tempestuous affair generated.
The gradual tightening of political screws in Iran convinced Golestan that he must leave Iran. All his life, he had been, essentially, an autodidact. He felt Iran could no longer satisfy his curiosity. In the late 1960s, he took a trip to France and, in his own words, spent some "six months just visiting museums and going to theaters and concerts." He is a music and opera aficionado, and one of the attractions of the West has always been its rich culture of concerts and operas. After Farrokhzad's death—friends talked of his debilitating grief —he opted for exile. The only time he returned for any length of time was to make Mysteries of the Treasure of Ghost Valley. "I felt I owed the country this film," he said." Not long after finishing the film, he sold his studio-which had accrued much value as a result of the oil boom of the 1970s—and made his permanent home in England. His wife and two children stayed in Iran.
In fact, Golestan's "exile" was first emotional and epistemological, then gradually geographical. "Iran," he says, "is not just a geographical unit; it is a cultural state." He insists, "my exile had taken place even when I lived in Tehran."7 He believes that "my country is as powerful and expansive as the culture that thrives inside me."8 He emphasizes that "cultures are not static; in fact, the realm of a culture is never a small corner of earth, or a dot on a map." He refers to the republic of letters as "the active relations between vital intelligences." He goes on to define culture as "the constant and dynamic" exploration of ideas.
At the same time, he is deeply critical of the cultural fate that has befallen Iran. "Our culture," he says, "has long since fallen into a state of decadence." It has become"warped." Iran suffers from a kind of split personality. This schism, he declares, has impacted our minds, as well as our vision of the world. In its encounter with the inevitable modern experience, Iran, according to Golestan, faces a crisis of historic propor-tions. Iranians, however, are unprepared for the implications of this encounter. Instead, they "have clung to appearances," and lulled themselves with the false comfort of facile answers. In Golestan's view, Iranians know neither their own culture nor that of the West. In trying to understand either culture, they often suffer either from silly grandiosity or poisonous self-loathing. They have forfeited the task of arriving at fair, judicious, critical, and informed judgments about themselves and the west. Golestan's emotional and geographical distance from Iran afforded him the opportunity to arrive at radically different judgments.
Golestan maintains this distance even when he is writing about his own work. He describes himself as a "normal man of normal height and average intelligence... in an avenue of dwarfs." He says of himself, "You wanted to see correctly; maybe you didn't see correctly, but you saw honestly... You knew that your attempts to see correctly, and consequently describe correctly, made you a stranger. It made you different and in your own mind it made you proud of yourself. Such pride was rueful; it was a pride that came as a result of the dwarf ish nature of your surroundings; the surroundings were short, you were not tall."
While advocates of "committed art" and of "socialist realism" defended art that was simple and bereft of formal complexity, Golestan wrote stories that were as structurally complicated as the worlds they described. He believed that invariably there is just one right way to articulate an idea and image, and it is the responsibility of the artist to "work hard and honestly to arrive at this single form; other forms are characterless, and false." Through experience, he had come to recognize that "there is no difference between the shallow views of the Left or the Right." One makes literature the tool of the party and history, the other wants it subservient to God, the king, the country, or the leader.
Golestan often pointed to the clear similarities between dogmatic Marxism and dogmatic faith. He noted that there was "a whole lost generation... [that] needed a father-figure, a Mecca." He realized that both the Left and the Right see art as an instrument of ideology and refuse to accept its autonomy. Both think content is more important than form, and both prefer "a revolutionary content" to a creative form. Golestan, on the other hand, offers a different vision of the role of politics in literature. He believes that "being a revolutionary has nothing to do with the subject you choose; it has to do with how you develop a subject... [How you] discover its essence" and give it a corresponding form.
Golestan's life and work is a good example of the principles he advocated. In deciding his attitude toward the shah and his government, he paid no heed to attacks, or to the received opinion of the day about the duties of "committed intellectuals." Instead, he took a more personal and pragmatic approach, working with those in government he liked, and criticizing those he disliked. In his view, some in the government showed considerable intellectual power and complemented that with respect for human dignity. In spite of being "caught in the strait-jacket of their time," they were "committed to the comfort and dignity of the people in their community." In the long run, they are far more effective in serving their country than "the impotent phrasemongers who, in desperation, incurable jealousy and malicious envy," do nothing other than engage in futile and nihilistic negativism.
Even though he agreed to work with some of those in power, Golestan never seems to have compromised his intellectual honesty or his rightful critical disposition. In fact, he sometimes used his privileged position to offer unusually harsh words or images in his. work. His film Mysteries of the Treasure of Ghost Valley is the best example of his unusually harsh criticism of the highest authority, the shah. But his other works are often no less blunt in their critique. His film on Iran's crown jewels is a good example of his approach. He writes of these jewels as souvenirs of closed minds "besotted by toys," and he writes of "a history of three hundred years of indifference."
The pith and parsimony of Golestan's descriptions can themselves be construed as one of his enduring contributions to Persian letters. His prose has often been praised for its beauty and precision. It is deeply democratic in nature; he uses the language of various strata of society to create polyphony in his narrative. His prose is also democratic because he demands the active participation of the reader in giving meaning to the text. He incorporates into his prose the poetry and music of a conversation, its crescendos, its omissions, and its silences. Just as the correct reading of a poem requires cognizance and command of its rhythm and meter, the correct reading and understanding of Golestan’s prose requires familiarity with its special rhythm and meter. In describing what he calls "clean prose," he emphasizes that in writing such prose, the most important thing is "to take as our model the trend of an oral conversation, that has the effervescence of a living organism, and the liveliness of effervescence." He further notes that Persian writers have been aware of this trope for a good millennium. That is why he insists that the real root of his prose must be sought not in Hemingway, but in this rich legacy of Persian literature, in writers like Sa'di and Beyhagi.
There is another aspect of Golestan's language that renders it particularly modern.
Following in the footsteps of such early masters as Nezami, Golestan infuses some of his stories and films with startlingly frank and surprisingly beautiful descriptions of erotic desire. Contrary to the claim of critics who believe that writing about carnal desire, and, indeed, genres such as the novel and the short story, are Western, Golestan is among the handful of Iranian writers and thinkers who refuse to accept this Eurocentric notion. The art of storytelling, and the desire to write about desire, he believes, have existed in Iran from time immemorial. Stories can be found in every language; in fact, Persians have an unusually rich legacy of old stories but seem ignorant of their privileged literary legacy.
Golestan is well aware of the intricate and intimate relationship between language and thought. He knows that "when the mind is not living... the stimuli and tools of the mind also fall into disuse, as they have in our case. Our language was impoverished by our mindlessness, and this poverty itself led to further mindlessness." Only by transcending the reification of our mind and language can we begin to experience genuine modernity. Many of Golestan's stories and films are explorations into the ebb and flow of this transcendence.
One of the most difficult obstacles on the way to this "transcendence" in Iran is the pervasive belief in a messiah. Disenfranchised people are commonly prone to a deep yearning for a savior who will come and lead them to a promised land. In several stories, Golestan tackles this problem and, combining his deep knowledge of Iran's history and geography, its literature and the mores and manners of different social strata with his keen writer's eye for detail, offers gripping, albeit sad, stories about the pervasive hold this kind of false hope has among Iranians. He writes, "Waiting means not living in the moment." He describes the lingering habit of some Iranians in small towns who, in anticipation of the expected Mahdi, saddle a horse "every day, early in the morning... in case the messiah arrives." In another story, one of the characters laments this long futile wait, and defiantly declares, "When the messiah forgets to arrive" on time, when he delays his arrival long enough "that the horse is no longer a means of travel," he, too, in return, reserves the right "to doubt his saving powers."
Religion has been the chief source of these kinds of messianic ideas, and Golestan offers a refreshingly bold and daring critique of its role in a short story called "Being or Being an Icon: Puppet Show in Two Acts." The subtitle is itself a defiant indication of what the author thinks of religion. In the story, two brothers named Hassan and Hoseyn are waiting in the desert. Their father is with them. After a while their mother arrives astride a camel, riding with a man. Soon we learn that the stranger is not a "dirty dog of an Armenian,"28 but a Frenchman. He turns out to be the inventor of the camera—one of the most potent metaphors of modernity. Gradually the intended identity of the other characters becomes clear.
Hoseyn, constantly complaining of thirst, unmistakably reminds us of Imam Hoseyn, one of the most venerable figures in all of Shiism and the ultimate martyr of a religion that defines itself, at least partially, by the power of its martyrs. The story of his battle with the army of the Caliph is the most powerful source of Shiism's passion plays. Hoseyn had come to Karbala to claim the mantle of the prophet, and his army of seventy-two followers was decimated by the superior force of Yazid, the ruling caliph. But in the world of Golestan's story, Hoseyn is called a "masochist" by his more rational brother. In one scene, the older Hassan tells his brother, "sometimes you make an ass of yourself, and sometimes you make an ass of others. You have passion, but you don't have brains. It's like you were born only to become a martyr; it makes no difference for what. A professional martyr. You are more of a martyr than a human being."
Golestan's Hassan, on the other hand, offers views that could certainly form the kernel of a reformation in Islam. He is against the idea, promoted by the rest of the family, of making a business out of religion. He is a true advocate of spirituality, and an individual-ist, suggesting, "you have to depend on your own mind; your own intelligence; even if does not fit with that of others."
Golestan's most controversial work was Mysteries of the Treasure of Ghost Valley.
Looking back at the film thirty-five years after it was made, one cannot but be impressed with its breathtaking bravado and prescient historical sensibility. Worried that the film and the script might be confiscated by SAVAK, Golestan published the script in book form, and before releasing the film, he sent five copies of the published work to trusted friends for safekeeping.
The film was finished in 1971, just as the shah's modernizing push was reaching a feverish pitch and oil revenues had begun their sky-high trajectory. Golestan deftly satirized the consequences of Iran's sudden wealth and predicted a revolution. In predicting the fall.of the shah at the height of his power and glory, the film was not just bold, but prophetic.
By the time he finished Ghost Valley, he was ready not only to leave Iran permanently, but to sell his studio as well. He had purchased the relatively large compound in Darous, one of Tehran's more fashionable neighborhoods, when it was still considered the "outskirts" of Tehran and therefore inexpensive. By 1975, with the sharp rise in the price of oil—and thus Iran's revenue—the price of land in Tehran skyrocketed. His studio was by then worth a fortune. In fact, in its heyday, the studio allowed Golestan to offer employment to a long list of prominent intellectuals, poets, painters, scholars, and writers. At one time, aside from Forugh, Akhavan-Sales and Esmail Ra'in worked there, and Ghassem Sa'idi used part of the building as his studio.
While Forugh began as the studio's receptionist, she soon became Golestan's favorite intellectual interlocutor and his partner in a passionate, intense, and incessantly observed love affair. Golestan was the producer for Forugh's acclaimed documentary, The House Is Black. Close friends remember their partnership as often playful, sometimes tense, and mutually challenging. Their love was no different. But with her untimely death at a tragically young age, every fact and facet of her relationship with Golestan became the subject of rancorous debate and intervention by her real, or imagined, friends and family. Golestan's aloofness, tinged with his habit of brutal honesty, came back to haunt him, in this case in the form of poisoned memories and disturbing assertions by the growing ranks of Forugh's supporters and fans. He has maintained a studied, even stubborn, silence about his side of the story, allowing these rumors and hints to grow and fester.
All his life, Golestan has been a collector of art. As a gesture of friendship to some of his friends, he purchased their work, often long before the art world came to appreciate its worth and value. His impeccable taste and cultured sensibilities allowed him to choose the most important works of each artist friend. Today, he possesses what could be considered one of the most impressive collections of masterpieces of modern Iranian art anywhere in the world.
He is a voracious reader. But whether choosing books to read or friends to keep, he is highly selective. His appetite for poetry knows no bounds. He is as enthusiastic about Sepehri, Forugh, and Hafez as he is about Shakespeare and Eliot. He can cite thousands of lines of poetry in English and Persian, and a good line unwittingly brings tears to his eyes—as does any discussion of Forugh. He is no less passionate about the world of cinema and theater. His collection of films, more than a thousand strong, includes every masterpiece of modern cinema. His photographic memory helps him conjure at will scenes and dialogue from his favorite films and plays. His strong affinity for classical music, his intimate knowledge of modern masterpieces, his no less impressive mastery of modern theater, have made him a true Renaissance man.
He is a man with a contagious appetite for life and all it offers, while remaining at least outwardly stoic in response to its tragedies. A good bottle of wine—of which he is an experienced connoisseur—a walk in the green, rainy English countryside, where he lives in an impeccably restored nineteenth-century manor house, or a moment of quiet contemplation on the balcony of his small two-bedroom apartment in Nice, where he seems serenely happy, bring out in him an ebullient joy of living that is only subtly tempered by the melancholy that comes with wisdom, and with suffering the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune." He is the highest embodiment of an eminent artist who has left an enduring and increasing impact on modern Iranian culture."