Fame & Folly (30 page)

He was attending a seminar of the Académie Universelle des Cultures, the brainchild of then President François Mitterrand. The Academy’s president, appointed by Mitterrand, is Elie Wiesel, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, and there are nine other Nobel-winning members, among them Wole Soyinka of Nigeria (in Literature), and the Americans Joshua Lederberg (in Medicine and Physiology) and Toni Morrison (the 1993 laureate in Literature). The official meeting place of this newborn organization—it is still in the process of formulating its by-laws and refining its overall aims—is in the Richelieu apartments. Unlike the twilight majesties of the Gallery of Apollo, the Academy’s space is brightly warmed in sun from immense windows. Peering out, one sees a bit of courtyard, but mainly the long line of an encircling balcony, ranged with mammoth stone figures in plumed Monte Cristo headgear and buckled eighteenth-century pumps, the very soles of which seem mountainously tall. It is as if hallucinations can inhabit even daylight. A low door—low in relation to the ceiling—opens into what might pass for a giantess’s pantry, a series of closets white with plaster dust and smelling of an unfinished moistness, and then a sort of gangway leading to just-installed toilets. On the day Rushdie came, it was up to an armed guard to decide whether or not to let one through to the plumbing.

The other end of this vast sanctum is the threshold to salon after palatial salon, magnificence serving as vestibule to still more magnificence, everything freshly gilded everywhere: the Napoleonic dream re-imagined for the close of a century that has given new and sinister vitality to the meaning of absolutism. The gas chambers and the ovens; the gulag; and finally the terror that invents car bombs, airplane hijackings, ideological stabbings of civilians
at bus stops, the murder of ambassadors and Olympic athletes and babies in their cribs, the blowing up of an embassy in Buenos Aires, the World Trade Center in New York, the financial district of London, a restaurant in Paris, a synagogue in Istanbul. Under the shadow of this decades-long record, the setting of a price on a novelist’s head is hardly a culmination, though it is surely, in an era of imaginative atrocity, a new wrinkle, a kind of hallucination in itself. Hallucination, after all, is make-believe taken literally; dream assessed as fact.

Long before he dreamt himself the imperial Napoleon ordering the rehabilitation of the Louvre, Henry James had a dream of limitless terror. The dream was of the Gallery of Apollo—but now those inhalations of absolutism were wholly altered: what had been seen as the potency of fame and the absolute rule of beauty and art turned away its sublime face to reveal absolutism’s underside, a thing uncompromisingly deadly, brutal, irrational. Artist and dreamer, James in his nightmare is being pursued down the length of the Galerie d’Apollon by an “appalling” shape intent on murdering him. (Note the dreamer’s pun: Apollo, appalling. Supremacy transmogrified into horror.) A door is shut against the powerful assassin; the assassin—“the awful agent, creature, or presence, whatever he was”—presses back. And then, all at once, in a burst of opposing power, the dreamer defends himself: “Routed, dismayed, the tables turned upon him by my so surpassing him for straight aggression and dire intention, my visitant was already but a diminished spot in the long perspective, the tremendous, glorious hall,… over the far-gleaming floor of which, cleared for the occasion of its great line of priceless
vitrines
down the middle, he sped for
his
life, while a great storm of thunder and lightning played through the deep embrasures of high windows on the right.”

Not far from the Gallery of Apollo, the Richelieu apartments of the Louvre do not quake with the storm of nightmare, but the members of the Academy (men and women from the four corners of our slightly ovoid planet), discreet, courtly, inhale the appalling breath of the pursuer. The image of routing is dim: what weapon is there against a hidden assassin who may strike a moment from
now, or tomorrow, or the day after? The arsenal of intellect—what we mean by the principles or intuitions of culture—is helpless before such willed, wild atrocity: anybody here might overnight become Rushdie. The Academy’s President, a survivor of Auschwitz, has already
been
Rushdie: a human being pitilessly hunted as prey. No one cranes down the endless table, with its line of microphones, to gape at this newest human prey; yet Rushdie’s quiet reality is electrifying, a prodigy in itself. It is his first appearance at a meeting since his unanimous election to the Academy. His arrival was hinted at—discreetly, elusively—by President Wiesel the evening before, but would the man who is hunted and stalked actually show up? His plain humanity is a marvel—a fellow sitting in a chair, loosening his tie, taking off his jacket as the afternoon warms. He is no metaphor, no legend, no symbol. His fame, once merely novelist’s fame, is now the fame of terror. A writer has been transmuted into a pharaoh, wrapped in hiddenness, mummified in life. It happens that Rushdie nowadays looks more scribbler than pharaoh: a certain scruffiness of falling-out hair and indecisive beard, the telltale fleshiness of the sedentary penman; the redundant mien of someone who hates wearing a tie. How different from that slender princeling who, at the Forty-eighth International PEN Conference in New York in 1986, stood up to speechify in the aisle! What we saw then was a singularly beautiful young man got up in a bright Indian (or perhaps pseudo-Indian) tunic, black-haired, black-eyed, as ravishing in outline as some gilt Persian miniature. I no longer recollect what he said on that occasion, though I retain something of his point of view: rigidly “Third World,” loyally “progressive.” A document protesting Middle Eastern terrorism was circulating through that body for some days; Rushdie did not append his name to it.

The bristling protection that surrounds him now is an offense, an enormity: professional, determined, watchful, admitting no breach; above all, conducted on a kingly scale. There is a twist of corruption—civilization undone—in Rushdie’s necessary retinue, a retinue that shocks: all these sentries, these waiting police cars in the courtyard, dedicated to the preservation of a single human life. Or one could easily, and more justly, claim the opposite: that
it is civilization’s high humane standard, a society’s concrete and routine glory, that so much sheltering force should be dedicated to the protection of one man under threat. But the first response is the sharper one: the sensation of recoil from the stealthily meandering armed men in black, the armed men lurking on the way to the toilet, the squad of armed men churning in this or that passageway or bunched oddly against a wall. When, at the beginning of the year, President Mitterrand came for the official inauguration of the Académie Universelle des Cultures, the crush of television cameras, reporters, ambassadors, distinguished oglers, assorted intellectuals, and the charmed hoopla of fervent French
gloire
brought in the wake of the President’s footsteps a troop of security men drumming over the Louvre’s burnished floors—but there was nothing grim in that train. It signified honor and festivity. Monarchs and presidents may have to live like targets in danger of being detonated; for their guests at a celebration, though, that busy retinue, however fearsomely occupied, registers as innocently as a march of bridesmaids. Rushdie, by contrast, is tailed by a reminder of death. Whoever is in a room with him, no matter how secured against intruders, remembers that the would-be assassin is on the alert for opportunity, whether for greed or for God.

Rushdie’s so-called blasphemy is the fabrication of literalists whose piety can be respected but whose literalism assumes what may not be assumed: that the Creator of the Universe can be diminished by any human agency, that the sacred is susceptible of human soiling. How can a novel blaspheme? How can a work of art (which can also mean a work of dream, play, and irony) blaspheme? Islam, like Judaism, is not an iconic creed (both are famously the opposite), but the philosophers of even iconic religious expressions like medieval Christianity and classical Hinduism do not locate the divine literally in paint or carving, and know that art, while it may, for some, kindle reverence, cannot be a medium for the soiling of the sacred. Art cannot blaspheme because it is not in the power of humankind to demean or besmirch the divine. Can a man’s book tarnish God? “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?” the Lord rebukes Job.
“Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven? canst thou set the dominion thereof in the earth?… Who hath put wisdom in the inward parts? or who hath given understanding to the heart?” After which, Job is chastened enough to “lay mine hand upon my mouth.”

Men who were not there when the foundations of the earth were laid nevertheless lay their hands on a novelist’s mouth. One of Rushdie’s translators, the Japanese Hitoshi Igarashi, has been murdered; another, the Italian Ettore Capriolo, was seriously wounded. The American publishers of the paperback
Satanic Verses
hide behind an anonymous “consortium.” And meanwhile Rushdie walks or rides nowhere without his train of guards. After lunching in a dining room of the Pyramid, the other members of the Academy stroll the few yards across the Louvre’s inner court to return to the Richelieu for the afternoon plenary; but Rushdie, emerging alone from the Pyramid like the pharaonic figure he has been made into, is invisibly placed, alone, in a limousine that moves with glacial languor from one part of the courtyard to the other, accompanied by security men slowly pacing beside it and all around it. Rushdie is the prisoner both of his protectors and of his accusers.

In the eyes of his accusers, his very existence is a blasphemy to be undone and a blemish to be annihilated. Barricaded day and night against fanatic absolutists who look for a chance to kill, who despise reason and discourse, repudiate compromise, and reject amelioration, he has become, in his own person, a little Israel—or, rather, Israel as it felt its circumstances until just recently, before the Rabin-Arafat peace accord (and as it continues to feel them vis-à-vis Hamas and other rejectionists). This is something that, in all logic, has cried out to be said aloud ever since the
fatwa
was first promulgated; but Rushdie’s defenders, by and large, have not said it—some because they feared to exacerbate his situation (but how could it have been worsened?), some because they have themselves been among Israel’s fiercest ideological opponents. But one fact is incontrovertible: for the mullahs of Iran, who oppose both recognition and peace, Rushdie and the Jews of Israel are to be granted the same doom. What can be deduced from this
ugly confluence is, it seems to me, also incontrovertible: morally and practically, there is no way to distinguish between the terrorist whose “cause” is pronounced “just” (and whose assaults on civilians are euphemized as political or religious resistance) and the terrorist who seeks to carry out the mullahs’
fatwa
against Rushdie (a call to assassination euphemized as religious duty). One cannot have exculpated Arafat’s Fatah for its long-standing program of bloodshed—not yet wholly suppressed—directed against both Jews and Arabs (the latter for what is termed “collaboration”), while at the same time defending Rushdie and deploring his plight. And in one way, after all, Rushdie is better off than women knifed on street corners or bus passengers blown up: he is at every moment under the surveillance of his security team. On the other hand, individual civilians on their errands, exposed to the brutal lottery of ambush, have their lucky and unlucky days; Rushdie, no longer a civilian, drafted into the unwilling army of victimhood, has drawn the targeted ticket. All his days are unlucky.

But like James in the Gallery of Apollo, today in the Louvre he means to turn the tables.

Why link Henry James and Salman Rushdie? They are separated by a century. They were born continents apart. One is a vast and completed library; the other, unfathomable as to his ultimate stature, is in the middle of the way. Moreover (as for the issue of terror), what threatens Rushdie has a name,
fatwa
, and a habitation—Iran, and all those other places and men and women driven by the mullahs’ imaginings of God’s imperatives. Whereas what threatened James was no more than his own imagination, an extrusion of the psyche’s secrets, nothing enacted in the world of real and ferocious event. What threatened James was a fable of his own making. But a dream, gossamer and ephemeral though it may be, is like a
genius loci
, the spirit of a site, which can send out exhalations with the force of ciphers or glyphs. Ciphers can be decoded; glyphs can be read across centuries. (Is it the Louvre itself that will speak up for Rushdie? Wait and see.) There is, besides, an arresting nexus of situation and temperament. Like James, Rushdie left the country of his birth for England: each sought, and
won, a literary London life. Each kept a backward-glancing eye on his native society. As James never abandoned interest, inquisitiveness, sympathy, and the sometimes adversarial passions of kinship with regard to America, so Rushdie retains a familial, historical and scholarly connection to Islam, warmed by kinship, interest, sympathy. Both men were charged with apostasy—James because near the end of his life, out of gratitude to Britain, he gave up his American citizenship; Rushdie more savagely, on account of having written a fable. Both are in thrall to fable; both have an instinct for the intercultural tale of migration, what James called “the international theme.” Both are beguiled by notions of assimilation and strangeness, of native and newcomer.

There is more. Rushdie, like James, is secular, history-minded, skeptical, impatient with zealotry. James’s father, though harmless enough, was a man metaphysically besotted, a true believer, dogmatically sunk in Swedenborgian fogs. Having been reared in an atmosphere of private fanaticism, James repudiated its public expression wherever he encountered it. He had nothing but contempt for the accusers of Dreyfus, the French Jewish army officer condemned for treason. He followed the case day by day. “I sit … and read L’Affaire Dreyfus. What a bottomless and sinister
affaire
and in what a strange mill it is grinding.… I eat and drink, I sleep and dream Dreyfus.” He did better than that. He wrote to Zola to congratulate him on the publication of
J’Accuse
, a defense of Dreyfus—“one of the most courageous things ever done”—for which Zola was brought to trial and convicted. In James’s view, if Zola had not fled from his sentencing, “he would have been torn
limb from limb
by the howling mob in the street.”