The Undocumented Mark Steyn

  But even Ockrent knows when you’ve gone too far.

  “Er, no, Mark. I wouldn’t say that. I wouldn’t agree with that at all. . . .”

  1The Theatre Royal, Stratford East, is an East End theatre run by the Theatre Workshop, whose productions include Oh, What a Lovely War and A Taste of Honey.

  LOOK WHERE YOUR STORIES HAVE LANDED YOU

  On Valentine’s Day 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini took out a fatwa on a British subject for writing a novel. Here’s a near contemporary column, by way of illustrating how, at the time, I missed the bigger picture. Then again so did his defenders, who insisted on presenting this affair as one that “raised questions” about “the role of literature in society.” Phooey. It was a would-be Sharia mob hit in the cause of Islamic imperialism, and perhaps, if we’d understood it as that, we wouldn’t have seen so many others in the decades since. I’ve warmed up to Sir Salman over the years, and I’m not sure I’d write this piece this way if I were doing it today. But he’s changed too, from the Rushdie of the 1980s—reflexively leftist, anti-Thatcher, the works. The old line—a neoconservative is a liberal who’s been mugged—goes tenfold for him. He’s not just a liberal mugged by reality; he’s a liberal whom reality has spent a quarter-century trying to kill. I still have difficulties with his novels, not least the one that got him into all the trouble, but in his columns and essays he has outgrown his illusions. Anyway, here’s my thoughts on Rushdie’s first major post-fatwa interview, in October 1990 from The Independent, followed by the author’s response:

  The Independent, October 1, 1990

  A FEW YEARS back, on the street in New York, I was stopped by an opinion pollster and asked who I wanted to win the Iran-Iraq War:

  (a) Iran

  (b) Iraq

  (c) Neither of the above

  I plumped for (c). Like most people (I suspect), I feel pretty much the same way about “the Rushdie affair.” Despite Norman Tebbit’s1 best efforts, the novelist is no villain. But nor is he, as Harold Pinter,2 Fay Weldon,3 and Co. would have us believe, any kind of hero. On The Late Show last year, Michael Ignatieff4 flayed Geoffrey Howe5 for saying on the World Service that he didn’t much care for The Satanic Verses. But Sir Geoffrey, if you study his remarks in full, got it absolutely right: Rushdie is entitled to the protection of the state not because he is a “great writer” but because he is a British subject. To append to the dispute any crusade about the right to free speech or the role of literature in society is ridiculous. Rushdie is only in his present predicament because literature—or at least the metropolitan English novel—has become so remote from society that it no longer has any role. To read the original reviews of the book, in which the offending passages went without comment, is to enter a sort of strange sunlit conservatory, comfortably insulated from the real world. Unfortunately for Rushdie, it was, alas, not perfectly insulated. “The pen is mightier than the sword” is one of the most illusory refuges there is: the mob’s reaction to an articulate man’s powers of persuasion has invariably been to kill him.

  Last night, Rushdie enjoyed as close an approximation of his old Hampstead dining haunts as he’s likely to see for some time—in the form of a genial conversation with Melvyn Bragg6 on The South Bank Show. The author’s choice of interrogator for his first TV appearance and its timing—to coincide with the publication of his new book—was presumably a deliberate strategy by Rushdie to show that it was business as usual: just another author on the plug circuit. But instead it had the effect of reminding you that the world of English letters is far too trivial to be at the eye of such a great socio-historical geo-political storm. Even a man with as inexhaustible a taste for blood as the Ayatollah Khomeini should have understood that.

  In his own way, Rushdie came close to admitting as much: “You know the old Chinese curse which says, ‘May you live in interesting times.’ Well, here I am—living in interesting times. Writers shouldn’t have lives this interesting. It gets in the way of your work.” There was a wry chuckle after this—one of several self-deprecating mannerisms the author seems to have acquired in hiding—but there was no doubt that he meant it. It was an understandable plea just to be left to get on with it. Yet it was at odds with everything he, Bragg, Harold Pinter, Lady Antonia Fraser, and the other members of the 20th June Group of writers7 have been peddling for years—that the artist is an important figure in society whose views on politics and the wider world we ought to pay attention to. It is the theory which has underpinned broadcasting in this country for years: a successful businessman’s views on anything are unlikely to be sought by TV producers unless his factory closes, but if you’ve been nominated for the Booker Prize you’re apparently qualified to go on BBC2 and twitter on about Eastern Europe and the Gulf Crisis (Fay Weldon on The Talk Show with Clive James was the apotheosis of this philosophy). The notion that literature should be left alone to be literature recurred throughout the program and was, if not an absolute admission of defeat, the most telling indicator of Rushdie’s despair.

  “I feel very sad for my book,” he said quietly. “All these other languages, whether they’re political or religious or sociological or whatever, have been used to talk about what is after all a work which doesn’t respond to being talked about in those languages—I mean, not just my novel, any novel. . . .” Not surprisingly, his new book is “at one level about what is the nature of fiction.” “Look where stories have landed you now,” says one of the characters. “You’d have done better to keep your feet on the ground, but you had your head in the air.”

  Perhaps it’s unfair to have expected Bragg to press Rushdie on some of these points. After all, for someone who’s endured what he has, it must have been enormously therapeutic and reassuring to be swaddled once again in the snug parameters of arts criticism. “After your first book,” began Melvyn, “which was not particularly well-received. . . .”

  At such points, the gentility of the encounter took on a surreal quality. If only Rushdie could return once more to a world where he had no more to fear than not being particularly well-received. Chubbier and erubescent, his physical appearance could almost be some sort of political metaphor: the sinister Bombay exotic atop Mr. Tebbit’s diatribe in The Independent Magazine appeared to have metamorphosed into an amiable Julian Critchley type.8 Only those unnerving eyes gave him away—more heavily hooded than ever before, rolled upwards with the upper half of the irises permanently invisible. It was like watching some sort of intermediate stage between life and death.

  Nobody deserves to go through what Rushdie has suffered. But it seemed unclear by the end just what he had drawn from the experience. He likes his Special Branch protectors, he says, although it might have been more illuminating to know what they made of him. “I keep pointing out,” he chuckled, “that there’s not a lot of left-wing writers who find out this much about the British secret police.” It’s possible that he was using these terms ironically, but I don’t think so—and it illustrates why Rushdie is such a non-starter as an epic hero. Is “British secret police” really an accurate description of the Special Branch, or is it just cheaply emotive? Is Rushdie even “left-wing” in anything other than a sentimental socializing sense, or is he like most of his friends and confrères so far out as to be off any workable political landscape, untroubled by such trifles as mortgage rates, inflation, and the ERM of the EMS?

  Mr. Tebbit was wrong to criticize Rushdie on political grounds for his comparison of Britain with Nazi Germany and for his crude insults for Mrs. Thatcher. But they’re certainly contemptible on literary grounds. In his overheated abuse of contemporary Britain, Rushdie so devalued his own currency—language—as to render himself completely impotent. It’s a shame the angry Muslims can’t see that. But, if it hadn’t caused the deaths of so many, from Pakistani demonstrators to an imam in Belgium, the whole affair would be the reductio ad absurdum of the English novel. It may well be that the novelist’s most enduring contribution to the English language is the introduction, for
which he is indirectly responsible, of the word “fatwa.”

  A few days later, Mr. Rushdie (as he then was) wrote to our letters page. If he’d been on the ball, he’d have rightly taken me apart for downplaying the whole free speech thing. As I’ve had cause to learn myself in recent years, when some goons want to kill you over a book, the merits of the book are not the issue; the goons are. Instead, Rushdie defended himself on the charge of being “anti-British”:

  Sir: The canard about my “comparison of Britain with Nazi Germany”, repeated by your TV critic Mark Steyn (“Life in the Hampstead archipelago”, 1 October), needs to be nailed once and for all. Last year, Sir Geoffrey Howe suggested that The Satanic Verses likened Britain to Hitler’s Germany. Even though Mr. Steyn thinks that Sir Geoffrey “got it absolutely right”, there is nothing remotely resembling such an assertion anywhere in the novel. Since then, Norman Tebbit has made a similar allegation in your pages. It is important to set the record straight.

  In 1982, I gave a talk about racism in Britain on the Channel 4 programme Opinions. The text of this talk was printed in New Society, and can be checked by anyone who cares to do so.

  This is how it began:

  “Britain is not South Africa. . . . Nor is it Nazi Germany. You may feel that these two statements are not exactly the most dramatic of revelations. But it’s remarkable how often they, or similar statements, are used to counter the arguments of anti-racist campaigners. . . .”

  Later in the same talk, I said:

  “Let me repeat what I said at the beginning. Britain isn’t Nazi Germany. The British Empire wasn’t the Third Reich. But in (postwar) Germany. . . attempts were made by many people to purify German thought and the German language of the pollution of Nazism. But British thought. . . has never been cleansed of the filth of imperialism.”

  This is strong language. It may not be to the taste of Messrs Howe, Tebbit, Steyn et al. It is deliberately polemical. I did, and do, find the ideology of imperialism poisonous. Its remnants and recrudescences in present-day Britain are likewise unlovely. But it is, to say the least, bizarre that a piece in which I repeatedly distinguished between British racism and other, more extreme forms of racial prejudice should have given rise to the notion that I said the exact opposite.

  Mr. Steyn says that “in his overheated abuse of contemporary Britain, Rushdie so devalued his own currency—language—as to render himself completely impotent”. Mr. Steyn may think it bad form to get angry about racial bigotry, but he ought at least to study what a man actually said before calling him “contemptible”. When such accusations arise out of ignorance, they have a way of rebounding upon the accuser.

  Yours faithfully,

  Salman Rushdie

  The novelist mailed that in from his secure location. My editor, Andreas Whittam Smith, stopped me in the stairwell and demanded to know whether I’d sent him a reply. “No,” I said. “I don’t have his address.”

  However, I didn’t think it much of a response—and all that stuff about the “purifying” of thought sounds positively totalitarian. Indeed, wasn’t the Ayatollah merely attempting to “purify” literature of Rushdie’s “filth”? As for “the filth of imperialism,” in 2007, the novelist was knighted by the Queen, but I see he was made a Knight Bachelor, rather than a Knight Commander of the imperialistically filthy Order of the British Empire, so in that sense I suppose he’s stayed true to the position articulated in his letter.

  1Norman Tebbit, a Thatcher loyalist, had resigned from the Government to care for his wife, who was left permanently disabled by the IRA’s bombing of the Tory conference at Brighton in 1984.

  2The late Mr. Pinter was a successful playwright and ferociously anti-American.

  3Miss Weldon is an English novelist.

  4Mr. Ignatieff, now at the Kennedy School at Harvard, was formerly a BBC TV host, leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, and Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition in the House of Commons at Ottawa.

  5Sir Geoffrey was then Chancellor of the Exchequer in the British Government.

  6Lord Bragg is a longtime Brit telly and radio host, and a prominent Labour Party supporter.

  7An association of left-wing writers, roundly mocked by conservatives, formed in 1987 to protest the policies of Mrs. Thatcher’s Ministry. Rushdie was a member.

  8Sir Julian was an affable, clubbable Tory “wet,” as Mrs. Thatcher liked to say—i.e., hopeless on policy, but genial company. His memoir was called A Bag of Boiled Sweets, and is a breezier read than most of the Rushdie oeuvre.

  COVER STORY

  Syndicated column, June 23, 2012

  COURTESY OF DAVID MARANISS’S new book, we now know that yet another key prop of Barack Obama’s identity is false: His Kenyan grandfather was not brutally tortured or even non-brutally detained by his British colonial masters. The composite gram’pa joins an ever-swelling cast of characters from Barack’s “memoir” who, to put it discreetly, differ somewhat in reality from their bit parts in the grand Obama narrative. The best friend at school portrayed in Obama’s autobiography as “a symbol of young blackness” was, in fact, half Japanese, and not a close friend. The white girlfriend he took to an off-Broadway play that prompted an angry post-show exchange about race never saw the play, dated Obama in an entirely different time zone, and had no such world-historically significant debate with him. His Indonesian step-grandfather supposedly killed by Dutch soldiers during his people’s valiant struggle against colonialism met his actual demise when he “fell off a chair at his home while trying to hang drapes.”

  David Maraniss is no right-winger, and can’t understand why boorish non-literary types have seized on his book as evidence that the President of the United States is a Grade A phony. “It is a legitimate question about where the line is in memoir,” he told Soledad O’Brien on CNN. My Oxford dictionary defines “memoir” as “an historical account or biography written from personal knowledge.” And if Obama doesn’t have “personal knowledge” of his tortured grandfather, war-hero step-grandfather, and racially obsessed theater-buff girlfriend, who does? But in recent years, the left has turned the fake memoir into one of the most prestigious literary genres: Oprah’s Book Club recommended James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, hailed by Bret Easton Ellis as a “heartbreaking memoir” of “poetic honesty,” but subsequently revealed to be heavy on the “poetic” and rather light on the “honesty.” The “heartbreaking memoir” of a drug-addled street punk who got tossed in the slammer after brawling with cops while high on crack with his narco-hooker gal-pal proved to be the work of some suburban Pat Boone type with a couple of parking tickets. (I exaggerate, but not as much as he did.)

  Oprah was also smitten by The Education of Little Tree, the heartwarmingly honest memoir of a Cherokee childhood which turned out to be concocted by a former Klansman whose only previous notable literary work was George Wallace’s “Segregation Forever” speech. Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood is a heartbreakingly honest, poetically searing, searingly painful, painfully honest, etc., account of Binjamin Wilkomirski’s unimaginably horrific boyhood in the Jewish ghetto of Riga and the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. After his memoir won America’s respected National Jewish Book Award, Mr. Wilkomirski was inevitably discovered to have been born in Switzerland and spent the war in a prosperous neighborhood of Zurich being raised by a nice middle-class couple. He certainly had a deprived childhood, at least from the point of view of a literary agent pitching a memoir to a major publisher. But the “unimaginable” horror of his book turned out to be all too easily imagined. Fake memoirs have won the Nobel Peace Prize and are taught at Ivy League schools to the scions of middle-class families who take on six-figure debts for the privilege (I, Rigoberta Menchú). They’re handed out by the Pentagon to senior officers embarking on a tour of Afghanistan (Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea) on the entirely reasonable grounds that a complete fantasy could hardly be less credible than current NATO strategy.

  In such a world
, it was surely only a matter of time before a fake memoirist got elected as President of the United States. Indeed, the aforementioned Rigoberta Menchú ran as a candidate in the 2007 and 2011 presidential elections in Guatemala, although she got knocked out in the first round—Guatemalans evidently being disinclined to elect someone to the highest office in the land with no accomplishment whatsoever apart from a lousy fake memoir. Which just goes to show what a bunch of unsophisticated rubes they are.

  In an inspired line of argument, Ben Smith of the website BuzzFeed suggests that the controversy over Dreams from My Father is the fault of conservatives who have “taken the self-portrait at face value.” We are so unlettered and hicky that we think a memoir is about stuff that actually happened rather than a literary jeu d’esprit playing with nuances of notions of assumptions of preconceptions of concoctions of invented baloney. And so we regard the first member of the Invented-American community to make it to the White House as a kinda weird development rather than an encouraging sign of how a new post-racial, post-gender, post-modern America is moving beyond the old straightjackets of black and white, male and female, gay and straight, real and hallucinatory.

  The question now is whether the United States itself is merely the latest chapter of Obama’s fake memoir. You’ll notice that, in the examples listed above, the invention only goes one way. No Cherokee orphan, Holocaust survivor, or recovering drug addict pretends to be George Wallace’s speech-writer. Instead, the beneficiaries of boring middle-class western life seek to appropriate the narratives and thereby enjoy the electric frisson of fashionable victim groups.

  And so it goes with public policy in the west at twilight.

  Thus, Obama’s executive order on immigration exempting a million people from the laws of the United States is patently unconstitutional, but that’s not how an NPR listener looks at it: To him, Obama’s unilateral amnesty enriches stultifying white-bread America with a million plucky little Rigoberta Menchús and their heartbreaking stories. Eric Holder’s entire tenure as Attorney-General is a fake memoir all by itself, and his invocation of “executive privilege” in the Fast & Furious scandal is preposterous, but American liberals can’t hear: Insofar as they know anything about Fast & Furious, it’s something to do with the government tracking the guns of fellows like those Alabama “Segregation Forever” nuts, rather than a means by which hundreds of innocent Rigoberta Menchús south of the border were gunned down with weapons sold to their killers by liberal policymakers of the Obama Administration. If that’s the reality, they’ll take the fake memoir.