Hitch-22

his original statement. The third thing was said by Salman himself at our next meeting: that his awful article had been “the price of the ticket.” I didn’t exactly feel I had any right to tell him that he owed it to the cause of free expression to risk immolating himself, but then he did at least have the grace, as he was saying this thing, to look somewhat abashed. Anyway, as it turned out, there was no “ticket.” The preachers at the Regent’s Park Mosque, so fawning and pleasant when it came to the posturing Islamophile Prince Charles and so vicious when it came to Salman, may have pronounced the word “faith” to the point of nausea, but the concept of “good faith” was foreign to them, and not even the craven Foreign Office could hold them to a crummy bargain they had never intended to honor.

It’s arduous in the extreme to have a disagreement, on principle, with someone who embodies what is to you the most important of all principles, but fortunately this tension didn’t endure. Salman began making ventures in travel, testing the walls of the prison that he had to cart, almost tortoise-like, around with him. Vaclav Havel agreed to receive him in Prague. President Mary Robinson of Ireland had him to Dublin. He continued pushing at the bars and restrictions, refusing to allow himself to be immured or obliterated. (It was at about this time that he took the “Proust Questionnaire” for Vanity Fair. One of the regular questions is: “What do you most dislike about your appearance?” His response: “Its infrequency.”)

Having been repudiated by George H.W. Bush on a previous trip to Washington—“just another author on a book-tour,” as the White House spokesman put it—he wanted to see if the newly elected Clinton administration would follow the Havel-Robinson lead. I have never felt more as if my life and my “job,” or my work, were the same thing. My immediate job was to make sure that the Iranian mullahs could not say that Rushdie had come back to Washington and been turned away yet again. I was ready for a certain amount of temporizing and hairsplitting and throat-clearing, but not for as much of it as I got. Every “official” human-rights committee in the nation’s capital turned me down flat when I asked them to sponsor a visit by Salman or to lend their help in getting him invited to the Oval Office. I was looked at with incredulity and even hostility, as if I had proposed something insanely dangerous as well as latently “offensive.” It was, if anything, even worse than the atmosphere of panic and capitulation in New York three years before.

The Susan Sontag role was now taken up by George Stephanopoulos. Again, it was striking to see how much difference a bit of character and guts and integrity could make. I telephoned him at the White House, presuming on a not very old or strong acquaintance, but he came right on the line and said immediately that he could guess why I might be calling. “Also,” he added, “it’s extremely clear what the obviously right thing is. Let me tell him that and see what I can do.” The Clintonian “him” in this case was his usual triangulating and vacillating self and would not make a definite commitment, but by the time Salman landed and had established himself in our apartment, which had been turned into an armed command post by the security services, it had been agreed that he could meet Tony Lake, Clinton’s chief of staff, and Secretary of State Warren Christopher, and that the meeting would take place at the White House. The excellent Sir Robin Renwick had also offered to give a later reception at the British embassy with Katharine Graham of the Washington Post as co-host. Honor was reasonably satisfied. Even if Clinton would not commit, it wasn’t going to be a hole-and-corner visit as in the Bush years.

It was Thanksgiving. The city was rather still. Salman was disposed to chat, and to chat about anything but the inevitable topic. One evening I told him that I had a slight column to write, for the upcoming “Black and White” issue of Vanity Fair. I simply had to produce, I said, about three thousands words a la Truman Capote on exclusively black and white themes. Might he care to free- associate? He looked at me and lowered his very heavy lids: these later became so heavy that they needed a slight surgical correction but in those days he could adopt the gaze of what Martin unforgettably called “a falcon looking through a Venetian blind.” This meant his attention was engaged. For the next twenty or thirty minutes he poured out a spate of closely connected allusions, from the photographic-negative techniques of Eadweard Muybridge to a projected jet-black version of the Taj Mahal that Shah Jahan had planned but failed to build on the opposite side of a reflecting pool. My little essay was essentially written for me. More than that, though, was the intuition it gave me. People who knew Mozart said that he was not so much composing music as hearing it and then writing it down. On a previous visit, I had arranged for Salman to be given a private tour of the Folger Shakespeare Library, which has in its vaults an unrivaled collection of the playwright’s First Folios as well as—something we know he must have actually handled—the title deed to his house in Stratford. At lunch afterward, Salman had talked in an unstoppably poetic way about all matters Shakespearean: unstoppable in the sense that nobody present wanted to stop him. And again, it was more than a show of erudition. This was the Salman I wished the world could see, and hear. Paul Valery said that poetry is not speech raised to the level of music, but music brought down to the level of speech. This was also the Salman who went beyond Valery’s thesis and made me think that there might exist a deep connection between music and literature.

Although I am capable at a stretch of writing a short story or faking up a mock-sonnet, I soon enough realized when young that I did not have the true “stuff” for fiction and poetry. And I was very fortunate indeed to have, as contemporaries, several practitioners of those arts who made it obvious to me, without unduly rubbing in the point, that I would be wasting my time if I tried. Now, listening to Salman “compose,” as it were, I suddenly wondered if this was related to my near-total inability with music, itself quite possibly linked with my incapacity in chess and mathematics. Thinking quickly and checking one by one, I noticed that all my poet and novelist friends possessed at the very least some musical capacity: they could either play a little or could give a decent description of a musical event. Could it be this that marked them off from the mere essayist? I hit one iceberg-size objection right away. Vladimir Nabokov, perhaps the man of all men who could make one feel embarrassed to be employing the same language (English being only his third), detested music: “Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds… The concert piano and all wind instruments bore me in smaller doses and flay me in larger ones.” Ah, but that needn’t mean he wasn’t musical. He wrote a story in 1932 called “Music,” in which the protagonist is trapped at a recital with his former wife. (“Any music that he did not know could be likened to the patter of a conversation in a strange tongue.”) However, the chords and notes come to exert a healing power and he realizes suddenly “that the music, which before had seemed a narrow dungeon, had actually been incredible bliss, a magic glass dome that had embraced and imprisoned him and her.” Another guest at the party speculates that what they have just heard might be the Kreutzer Sonata, which was the title of Tolstoy’s own personal favorite among his own works. And in the New York Public Library there rests a case of written material—“Nabokov Under Glass”—in which the great lepidopterist attempted a form of notation that could run along the top of his holographs. What is this if not a form of musicality? I feel certain that I was on to something. And at least a negative corollary seemed to be furnished by the Taliban in Afghanistan: they allowed the existence of prose and poetry only to the extent of the enforced recitation of one book, but all music they forbade outright.

The pressure of security around the apartment became almost farcically insupportable as the time came for Salman to be taken by armored vehicle to the White House. (“Is your secret guest your prime minister?” inquired my Filipina housekeeper in a reverent whisper. It turned out that the man she had identified as this key figure was Salman’s intrepid agent Andrew Wylie, who had joined us late one night.) As Salman eventually left for the appointment, there was still no word on whether the president would consent to meet him. But Stephanopoulos was on the phone in a half an hour or so, to say “The Eagle Has Landed” and the presidential hand had been outstretched. Later we celebrated this triumph at a press conference and later—after Clinton had basely and typically insisted that the meeting had been unofficial and accidental and off-the-record, with no photograph—we slightly uncelebrated. But it was still no defeat. At dinner I made a point of inviting Kemal Kurspahi, the editor of the Bosnian resistance’s daily paper Oslobojenje (Freedom): Muslim Bosnia was a site of daily slaughter by Christians and we had also been trying to get Clinton to take some kind of intelligibly vertebrate position on that. It may have been after that dinner that Salman began to evolve and improvise a new word game, this time of book titles that had almost but not quite made it to acceptance by publishers: The Big Gatsby, A Farewell to Weapons, For Whom the Bell Rings, Good Expectations, Mr. Zhivago, Two Days in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch…

Talking of “vitches” I noticed again not long ago that the patronymic middle name of Nicholas Rubashov in Koestler’s Darkness at Noon is “Salmanovitch.” Interesting to think of him being a son of a Salman: I don’t think it completely fanciful to imagine Rushdie as being the lineal descendant of all those who have had to confront the totalitarian idea physically as well as morally.[56] He would, I am sure, make light of this and pooh-pooh any comparison between himself and a Gulag victim. But it’s still