The next day it was le Carré’s turn: “Anyone reading yesterday’s letters from Salman Rushdie and Christopher Hitchens might well ask himself into whose hands the great cause of free speech has fallen. Whether from Rushdie’s throne or Hitchens’s gutter, the message is the same: ‘Our cause is absolute, it brooks no dissent or qualification; whoever questions it is by definition an ignorant, pompous, semiliterate unperson.’ Rushdie sneers at my language and trashes a thoughtful and well-received speech I made to the Anglo-Israel Association, and which The Guardian saw fit to reprint. Hitchens portrays me as a buffoon who pours his own urine on his head. Two rabid ayatollahs could not have done a better job. But will the friendship last? I am amazed that Hitchens has put up with Rushdie’s self-canonization for so long. Rushdie, so far as I can make out, does not deny the fact that he insulted a great religion. Instead he accuses me—note his preposterous language for a change—of taking the philistine reductionist radical Islamist line. I didn’t know I was so clever. What I do know is, Rushdie took on a known enemy and screamed ‘foul’ when it acted in character. The pain he has had to endure is appalling, but it doesn’t make a martyr of him, nor—much as he would like it to—does it sweep away all argument about the ambiguities of his participation in his own downfall.”
In for a penny, in for a pound, he thought. “It’s true I did call [le Carré] pompous, which I thought pretty mild in the circumstances. ‘Ignorant’ and ‘semiliterate’ are dunces’ caps he has skillfully fitted on his own head.… Le Carré’s habit of giving himself good reviews (‘my thoughtful and well-received speech’) was no doubt developed because, well, somebody has to write them.… I have no intention of repeating yet again my many explications of The Satanic Verses, a novel of which I remain extremely proud. A novel, Mr. le Carré, not a gibe. You know what a novel is, don’t you, John?”
Oh, and so on. His letters, le Carré said, should be required reading for all British high school students as an example of “cultural intolerance masquerading as free speech.” He wanted to bring the fight to an end but felt obliged to respond to the allegation of taking on a known enemy and then screaming “foul.” “I presume our Hampstead hero would say the same to the many writers, journalists and intellectuals in and from Iran, Algeria, Egypt, Turkey and elsewhere, who are also battling against Islamism, and for a secularized society; in short, for freedom from the oppression of Great World Religions. For my part, I have tried, in these bad years, to draw attention to their plight. Some of the best of them—Farag Fouda, Tahar Djaout, Ugur Mumcu—have been murdered because of their willingness to ‘take on a known enemy.’ … I happen not to feel that priests and mullahs, let alone bombers and assassins, are the best people to set the limits of what it is possible to think.”
Le Carré fell silent, but now his friend William Shawcross leaped into the ring. “Rushdie’s claims are outrageous and … carry the stink of triumphalist self-righteousness.” This was awkward, because Shawcross was the outgoing chairman of Article 19, which then had to write a letter distancing itself from his allegations. The Guardian was reluctant to let the story die and its editor, Alan Rusbridger, called to ask if he would like to reply to the Shawcross letter. “No,” he told Rusbridger. “If le Carré wants to get his friends to do a little proxy whingeing, that’s his business. I’ve said what I had to say.”
Several journalists traced le Carré’s hostility back to that old, bad review of The Russia House, but he was suddenly overcome with sadness about what had happened. The le Carré of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was a writer he had long admired. In happier times they had even shared a comradely stage on behalf of the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign. He wondered if le Carré might respond positively if offered an olive branch. But Charlotte Cornwell, le Carré’s sister, was expressing her rage to Pauline Melville, whom she ran into in a north London street—“Well! As for your friend!”—so maybe feelings in the Cornwell camp were running too high for a peace initiative to succeed just yet. But he regretted the fight, and felt that nobody “won” the argument. Both of them had lost.
Not long after this spat he was invited to Spy Central to address a bunch of British intelligence station chiefs, and the redoubtable Eliza Manningham-Buller of MI5, a woman who looked exactly like her name, halfway between Bertie Wooster’s Aunt Dahlia and the queen, was furious about le Carré. “What does he think he’s doing?” she demanded. “Does he understand nothing? Is he a complete fool?” “But,” he asked Eliza, “wasn’t he one of you lot back in the day?” Eliza Manningham-Buller was one of those rare and valuable women who could actually snort. “Hah!” she snorted, like a true Wodehouseian aunt. “I suppose he did work for us in some sort of minor capacity for about five minutes, but he never, my dear, reached the levels you’ve been talking to tonight, and let me tell you, after this business, he never will.”
Eleven years later, in 2008, he read an interview with John le Carré in which his former adversary said of their old contretemps, “Perhaps I was wrong. If so, I was wrong for the right reasons.”
He had written almost two hundred pages of The Ground Beneath Her Feet when Paul Auster’s hopes of casting him in his film Lulu on the Bridge were dashed. The Teamsters union—“Can you imagine it, the big, tough Teamsters?” he mourned—declared themselves too scared to have Mr. Rushdie in the picture. They wanted more money, of course, danger money, but this was a shoestring operation and there wasn’t any more money. Paul and his producer Peter Newman fought hard to make it happen, but in the end they had to admit defeat. “On the day I realized we couldn’t do it,” Paul told him, “I went into a room by myself and wept.”
His part went at short notice to Willem Dafoe. Which was, at least, flattering.
He went to hear Edward Said speak at the offices of the London Review of Books, and a young man named Asad came up and confessed that in 1989 he was the leader of the Islamic Society in Coventry and had been the “West Midlands convener” of demonstrations against The Satanic Verses. “But it’s all right,” he burst out in embarrassment, “I’m an atheist now.” Well, that was progress, he told Asad, but the young man had more to say. “And then recently,” Asad cried, “I read your book, and I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about!” “That’s good,” he replied, “but I should point out that you, who hadn’t read the book, were the person organizing the fuss.” He remembered the old Chinese proverb, sometimes ascribed to Confucius: If you sit by the river for long enough, the body of your enemy will float by.
Milan was seven months old, smiling at everyone, babbling constantly, alert, good-natured, beautiful. A week before Christmas he began to crawl. The police were taking down their surveillance equipment and moving out. On New Year’s Day, Frank Bishop came to work for him, and after a few weeks of “transition” they would have their home to themselves, and because of that both he and Elizabeth felt, in spite of all the year’s disappointments, that it was ending well.
At the beginning of the year of the beginning of the end, when he closed the door for the last time on the four policemen who had lived with him under many different names and in many different places for the previous nine years, and thus brought to a close the period of round-the-clock protection that Will Wilson and Will Wilton had offered him in Lonsdale Square at the end of an earlier life, he asked himself if he was regaining freedom for himself and his family or signing everyone’s death warrant. Was he the most irresponsible of men, or a realist with good instincts who wanted to rebuild, in private, a real private life? The answer could only be retrospective. In ten or twenty years he would know if his instincts had been right or wrong. Life was lived forward but was judged in reverse.
So, at the beginning of the year of the beginning of the end; and without knowing the future; and with a baby boy who was attending to the things that it was a baby’s business to attend to, the business of sitting up by himself for the first time, straight-backed, the business of trying to pull himself up to
a standing position in his crib, and failing, and trying again, until the day came when he ceased being a crawling thing and became Homo erectus, well on his way to being sapiens; and while the baby boy’s older brother was going away on a gap year adventure in Mexico, where he would be arrested by policemen and watch whales at play and swim in pools below high waterfalls in Taxco and watch the fire-torch-bearing divers plunge off the cliffs of Acapulco and read Bukowski and Kerouac and meet his mother and go with her to Chichen Itza and Oaxaca and frighten his father by staying out of touch for alarmingly long periods, his father who could not help fearing the worst, who had silently feared for his son’s safety ever since the day of the unanswered telephone calls and the wrongly identified house with the front door open nine years ago; a journey from which the eighteen-year-old boy would return so slim, so tanned, so handsome that when he rang the doorbell and his father saw him on the entry phone monitor screen he didn’t recognize him, Who’s that?, he cried in wonderment and then realized that this young god was his own child; while all the ordinariness of ordinary life continued, as it was right that it should continue, even in the midst of another, engulfing existence that continued to be extraordinary, the day came, on Monday, January 26, 1998, when they slept alone in their home, and instead of being scared by the silence around them, by the lack of security technology and the absence of large sleeping policemen, they could not stop smiling and went to bed early and slept like the dead; no, not the dead, like the happy, unencumbered living. And then at 3:45 A.M. he woke up and couldn’t go back to sleep.
But the world’s unkindness was never far away. “There is no question of Rushdie being allowed to visit India in the foreseeable future,” said an Indian government official. The world had become a place in which his arrival in a land that he loved could lead to a political crisis. He thought of the boy Kay in Hans Christian Andersen’s story The Snow Queen who has cold splinters of a devil’s mirror in his eye and heart. His sadness was that splinter and he feared it would change his personality and make him see the world as a place full of hatefulness filled with people to scorn and loathe. Sometimes he met such people. At a birthday party for his friend Nigella he had just absorbed the unbearable news that her husband, John, had a new lump, and that the signs looked bad, when he was confronted by a journalist whose name he could not bring himself to write down even a dozen years later, who, having had perhaps a glass of wine too many, began to abuse him in language so extreme that in the end he had to leave Nigella’s party. For days after that encounter he was unable to function, unable to write, unable to go into other rooms in which a man might come up to him and call him names, and he canceled engagements and stayed home and felt the splinter of the cold mirror in his heart. Two of his journalist friends, Jon Snow and Francis Wheen, told him that the same journalist had abused them too, and in very similar language, and because misery loved company he cheered up when he heard that. But for another week he was unable to work.
Maybe it was because he was losing faith in the world he was obliged to live in, or in his ability to find joy in it, that he introduced into his novel the idea of a parallel world, a world in which fictions were real while their creators didn’t exist, in which Alexander Portnoy was real and not Philip Roth, in which Don Quixote had once lived but not Cervantes; and of a variant to that world in which Jesse Presley had been the twin that survived while Elvis died; in which Lou Reed was a woman and Laurie Anderson was a man. As he wrote the novel the act of inhabiting an imagined world seemed somehow nobler than the tawdry business of living in the real one. But down that road lay the madness of Don Quixote. He had never believed in the novel as a place to escape into. He must not begin to believe in escapist literature now. No, he would write about worlds in collision, about quarreling realities fighting for the same segment of space-time. It was an age in which incompatible realities frequently collided with one another, just as Otto Cone had said in The Satanic Verses. Israel and Palestine, for example. Also, the reality in which he was a decent, honorable man and a good writer had collided with another reality in which he was a devil creature and a worthless scribe. It was not clear that both realities could coexist. Maybe one of them would crowd the other one out.
It was the night of the “A” Squad party at Peelers, the Secret Policemen’s Ball, and this year Tony Blair was there and the police brought them together. He spoke to the prime minister and made his pitch and Blair was friendly but noncommittal. After that Francis Wheen did him a great favor. He wrote a piece in The Guardian attacking Blair for his passivity in the Rushdie case, his refusal to stand beside the writer and show support. Almost at once there was a call from Fiona Millar, Cherie Blair’s right-hand person, who sounded very apologetic and invited him and Elizabeth to dinner at Chequers on the ninth anniversary of the fatwa. And yes, it would be okay to bring Milan too, it would be an informal family-and-friends occasion. Milan, to celebrate his invitation, learned how to wave.
Dear Mr. Blair,
Thanks for dinner. And Chequers! Thanks for letting us have a look at it. Nelson’s diary, Cromwell’s death mask—I was a history student, so I liked all that. Elizabeth loves gardens so she was delighted by the beech trees etc. To me all trees are “trees” and all flowers are “flowers,” but yeah, I liked the flowers and trees. I liked it, too, that the furnishings were just slightly faded, faintly genteel-dowdy, which made the place look like a house people actually lived in and not a small country-house hotel. I liked it that the staff were dressed up so much more smartly than the guests. I’d bet Margaret Thatcher never wore blue jeans when entertaining.
I remember meeting you and Cherie for dinner at Geoffrey Robertson’s house not long after you became party leader. Boy, were you tense! I thought: Here’s a fellow who knows that if he blows the next election his entire party may very well disappear down the plug-hole. Meanwhile, Cherie was relaxed, confident, cultured, every inch the successful QC with broad artistic interests. (This was the night you admitted you didn’t go to the theater or read for pleasure.) Well, what a difference getting the job makes! At Chequers your grin was almost natural, your body language comfortable, your whole self at ease. Cherie, on the other hand, looked like a nervous wreck. As she showed us around the house—“and this of course is the famous Long Room, and here, do just have a look, is the famous blah, and hanging on that wall is the famous blah blah blah”—we got the feeling that she’d rather hang herself than do this good-wife second-fiddle châtelaine-of-Chequers shtick for the next five or ten years. It was as if you’d exchanged characters. So interesting.
And at dinner your family was delightful and Gordon Brown and his Sarah, and Alastair Campbell and his Fiona, very pleasant indeed. And Cameron Mackintosh! And Mick Hucknall! And Mick’s hot girlfriend what’s-her-name! We couldn’t have asked for more. It cheered us up no end, I can tell you, because we’d had a bit of a tough day, Elizabeth and I, absorbing the annual felicities coming our way from Iran. Sanei of the Bounty offered a bonus if I was killed in the United States, “because everybody hates America.” And the chief prosecutor Morteza Moqtadaie announcing “the shedding of this man’s blood is obligatory,” and state-run Tehran radio speculating that “the destruction of this man’s worthless life could breathe new life into Islam.” A little upsetting, you know? I’m sure you can understand if my mood was a little off.
But I’m getting very fond, I must say, of Robin Cook and Derek Fatchett. It meant a lot on this unwished-for anniversary to hear the foreign secretary demand the end of the fatwa, demand that Iran open a dialogue about canceling it. There have been foreign secretaries, let me tell you!, who … but it’s best not to dwell on the past. Just wanted to say I felt grateful for the new management and its willingness to battle religious fanaticism.
Oh, I hear you’re both devoutly religious by the way, yourself and Cherie. Congratulations on doing a really excellent job of hiding that.
I remember one striking moment at dinner. Well, two. I remember you dandling
little Milan on your knee. That was kind. And then, as I recall, you began to talk about freedom and I thought, I’m interested in that, so I turned away from Mick Hucknall’s hot girlfriend to listen to you, and there you were talking about the freedom of the market as if that was what you meant by liberty, which couldn’t have been true, because you’re a Labour prime minister, aren’t you?, so I must have misunderstood, or perhaps this was a New Labour thing, freedom = market freedom, a new concept, perhaps. Anyway, quite the surprise.