Hitch-22

Salman

A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.

—Baal the Poet in The Satanic Verses

Where books are burned, people will next be burned.

—Heinrich Heine, on the burning of the Koran by the Inquisition, in his Almansor [1821]

NOTTING HILL has always been my particular London. When I was eighteen, I signed up for an American-style “summer project” in the area, collecting data and raising consciousness in the “inner city.” The old ’hood had got a name for itself in the late 1950s as the site of Britain’s first race-riot,[53] and as I unrolled my sleeping bag amid the guitars and duffels on the floor of the run-down school where the volunteers slept, I could still see some of the traces. (The lightning-flash symbol of Sir Oswald Mosley’s fascist party, which had attempted to profit from the localized hatred, was often to be seen whitewashed and chalked on crumbling local walls. One of my contributions to the project was to organize teams to go up the Portobello Road rubbing these out or painting them over: a contribution to improving the atmosphere that was my first intuition of the “broken windows” theory of community policing.)

Padding around Notting Hill was an education in cheek-by-jowlery. Spicy Indian restaurants along Westbourne Grove, the West Indians and their ganja funk around the Mangrove in All Saints: Irish pubs where the regulars were not entirely thrilled by the arrival of the latest immigrants. Multiculturalism was a new thing in those days and even then could take aberrant forms. A ludicrous but menacing local figure had named himself “Michael X” in the hope of attracting some cross-Atlantic street cred: as a Trinidadian pimp and hustler called Michael de Freitas he had won notoriety as an especially nasty enforcer of evictions for a rack-rent landlord named, in one of those Dickensian coincidences, Mr. Rachman. The soi-disant X had a group—actually a gang—called RAAS. The letters were supposed to stand for Racial Adjustment Action Society and some white liberal clergymen and similar dupes were induced to take it seriously, but in Caribbean patois, as one soon discovered, a “raas” was a used tampon. How the gang must have cackled when they saw this filthy word solemnly printed in the newspapers. John Lennon fell for the con, as did some other gullible showbiz types. Years later, reporting on the murders that eventually saw the grisly Mr. X go through the trapdoor of a Trinidadian execution shed, I found myself on many a celebrity doorstep, including that of Corin Redgrave, of those who had been in his star-periphery. At Oxford in my first term, a rather silly Catholic bleeding-heart don named Michael Dummett managed to use his privileges to get X to speak in the All Souls dining room. The New Statesman, by some frightful miscalculation, found that a block of its shares had been acquired by the head of RAAS, who could in theory have turned up to vote at board- meetings. The air of Notting Hill was thick with bullshit on the racial question, and some other questions too, and it was sometimes a relief to walk over to Holland Park and sit on the grass for some of the free open-air summer concerts. As always in London, it was astonishing to see how swiftly one could make the transition from a slum quarter to a green one. There were still private gardens in the middle of some of the crumbling old stucco squares, accessible only to lucky residents with keys. We briefly campaigned to have some of these gardens opened to local children, who got knocked down by traffic while playing in the street. I can’t imagine what we thought we were doing: this much-restored housing stock went on to furnish a backdrop for Hugh Grant’s oleaginous talents and later for the hardly less slithery emergence of David Cameron as the hip Tory.

It was in an early stage of this metamorphosis of the ’hood that I made a visit to London in the mid-1980s, and went back as I always did to Notting Hill. It was carnival time: the time of that great non-bullshit event where London’s West Indians compete to flaunt the finest floats and to deploy the steel bands with the most stamina. Some of the indigenous bourgeoisie take that weekend off and flee to Dorset or Wiltshire, leaving their keys and their viewing balconies to trusted friends, while others “stay on” and maintain every appearance of ultra-coolness and empathy. It was in John Ryle’s more-than-cool mews house that I was introduced to Salman Rushdie, who was scanning the external world with an ironic gaze shaded by the brim of a flat cap.

It would be trite to say that I already knew him by reputation. Who didn’t? If Midnight’s Children had not won the Booker Prize, and won it fairly early in that prize’s career, then the Booker might have been the sort of prize won by its first winner, John Berger. But in proposing himself as the product of a simultaneous parturition and partition, the offspring of a country that had had to undergo amputation and mutilation in order to achieve independence, Salman had managed to represent as well as record all the ambivalences of the postcolonial. To phrase it another way, he had come via Rugby School and King’s College Cambridge to remind the British that they had betrayed the very people they had claimed to be schooling for nationhood: tossed away the “jewel in their crown” like some cheap piece of paste.

One great fictional chronicler of this sell-out had been Paul Scott, whose Raj Quartet had spoken to my depths because it understood that the treason at midnight in 1947, and the monstrous birth of a spoiled theocracy in Pakistan, was a tragedy for the English too. I knew that Rushdie had written scornfully of the reception of Scott, at least on the screen, viewing this as an old-style wallow in sentiment and nostalgia. I knew also that he hung around with a somewhat “Third World” and even black-power crew in north London. In a celebrated broadcast about the way that Britain treated its internal colony—the immigrants—Salman had quoted warmly from the above-mentioned silly-clever Catholic don Michael Dummett of All Souls (he of the warm collegial welcome for Michael X) about “the will not to know—a chosen ignorance, not the ignorance of innocence” where British attitudes to the “other” were involved. “Four hundred years of conquest and looting, four centuries of being told that you are superior to the fuzzy-wuzzies and the wogs, leave their stain,” as he had pugnaciously put it. So I was prepared to be slightly Mau-Mau-ed if I said anything that wasn’t all OK and on the up-and-up about the racial correctness question. But this turned out to be a needless and groundless fret. We burbled a bit about Pakistan and about Benazir Bhutto, whom we had both known in different ways, and I didn’t quite tell him what I thought, which is that his novel Shame, anatomizing the heap of madnesses and contradictions that went to make up the nightmarish state of Pakistan, was the superior in wit and depth even of Midnight’s Children.

We kept up a kind of touch after I went back to Washington. He wrote a book about a voyage to revolutionary Nicaragua, called The Jaguar Smile, which was unfairly attacked in America as a credulous work of revolutionary tourism. I defended it in print, saying that it seemed to me he had gone to Nicaragua knowing perfectly well in advance the dangers of excessive idealism. (Salman later confounded me by saying that he thought the Sandinistas had succeeded in deceiving him about a few things, but I think that makes the same point in a different way.) I published my first collection of essays, titled Prepared for the Worst, which contained a short critique of his attack on Paul Scott, and asked him for a jacket blurb. After a short pause, back came a very handsome endorsement with the proviso that it didn’t apply to “the inexplicable wrongheadedness on here.”

Salman had not been at our table in the days of the Bloomsbury kebab joint, but he soon started to feature in all my conversations with, and letters from, Martin and Ian and Colin MacCabe. We began to meet during the permanent floating crap game of book launches and book fairs, and tended to sign the same petitions. But the first great qualitative change Salman brought was in the level of the after-dinner word games. I have already offered the excuse that the puerility of these was at least a muscle-building dress rehearsal for a higher form. You may think it absurd or pathetic, for example, to see what happens when you subtract the word “heart” from any well-known title or saying and then substitute the word “dick.” Some of the results are in fact mildly funny (“I Left My Dick in San Francisco,” “Bury My Dick at Wounded Knee,” “Dick of Darkness,” “The Dick of the Matter,” and so forth), and others can recur to one at absurd moments (“Dickbreak Hotel,” “The Sacred Dick,” “The Dick and Stomach of a