Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002
Page 45
*6 Mr. Naipaul—now Sir Vidia—published a new novel, Half a Life, five years after making this statement. We must thank him for bringing the dead form back to life. Return to text.
*7 Allen Mandelbaum’s translation of the Metamorphoses of Ovid (Harcourt Brace, 1993). Return to text.
*8 M.D. Herter Norton’s translation, from Translations from the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (W. W. Norton, 1993 reissue). Return to text.
*9 When this piece was first published in The Observer, a caustic reader wrote in to say that although he supposed (wrongly) that I probably hadn’t had much sex in recent years, he really didn’t want to read about my lusts. Well, too bad, pal. Return to text.
*10 Some of these thoughts found their way into the mind of Ormus Cama, the hero of The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Return to text.
*11 However, it is deeply disturbing to discover that the club records contain no reference to this game, although there was an Arsenal–Real Madrid friendly in September 1962, which Real won 4–0. It seems I have somehow constructed a phantom memory, on the veracity of which my mind continues to insist, in spite of the documentary evidence to the contrary. An early indication, perhaps, that my métier would turn out to be fiction. Return to text.
*12 A joke with legs. In 2001 it happened again. Sol Campbell, the Spurs’ captain and star defender, decided to switch allegiances to Arsenal as well. Return to text.
*13 This love affair didn’t last. Eventually Graham’s true nature reasserted itself and Ginola was sent packing. But not so long afterward, Graham was sent packing too. That’s soccer, as they say. Return to text.
*14 George Graham’s sacking made possible the Second Coming of Glenda. He took over at White Hart Lane and kept the spiritual stuff to himself. Return to text.
*15 They haven’t knocked it down yet. Instead, in the great tradition of British fiascoes—cf. the Bouncing Bridge across the Thames, the Millennium Dome—the super-stadium plan has hit snag after snag. Will there be a new stadium in North London or not? Who knows? Return to text.
*16 When first published in two slightly different versions, this essay caused howls of protest and condemnation. Almost all Indian critics and most Indian writers disagreed with its central assertion. Readers are accordingly warned that mine is an improper view. Which doesn’t necessarily mean it’s wrong. Return to text.
*17 One OFD who managed to allow a bullet-proof Jaguar to be stolen while in his care was instantly named the king of Spain by his colleagues, because the king of Spain (say it aloud) is Juan Carlos. Return to text.
*18 See page 129, in “Farming Ostriches.” Return to text.
*19 Gianni Pico, who negotiated the release of many of the Lebanon hostages. Return to text.
*20 Nicholson and Temple-Morris have both left the Conservatives: Nicholson is now a Liberal Democrat MEP, and Temple-Morris joined Labour. Return to text.
*21 Aziz Nesin did survive the Sivas attack. He died in 1995. Return to text.
*22 The cost of my protection has always stuck in the throat of many British commentators. Estimates ranging from the wild (one million pounds a year) to the surreal (ten million pounds a year) have been repeated so often that they have become pseudo-facts. The British authorities have over the years placed me in an invidious position by refusing to clarify the facts while “senior Home Office sources” regularly leaked misleading information. The truth is as follows. First, although the “thirty different safe houses” provided for me, according to the Mail, at “an estimated cost . . . of ten million pounds” are by now a well-established myth, the fact is that no safe house was provided for me at any time. I always found, and met the cost of, my own accommodation. The cost to the British taxpayer was nil. Second, I was protected by officers who, had they not been allocated to me, would still have been on the police payroll; the additional cost to British taxpayers of protecting me was therefore limited to overtime expenses. Third, during these dark years I have paid a great deal of income tax on those big book deals and large royalties of which segments of the media—and Islamic members of the House of Lords—so disapprove. I would suggest that the British exchequer has actually made a net profit on our strange relationship. Finally, the U.K. taxpayer has never footed the bill when I’ve been out of Britain. Return to text.
*23 The Mail had attacked me for responding to the Prince of Wales’s reported view that too much public money was being spent on me. I had been asked by a Spanish journalist what I thought of Ian McEwan’s remark that Prince Charles cost much more to protect than I did but had never written anything of interest. I had replied light-heartedly that I agreed with Ian. The wrath of the Mail—that same Mail which had devoted dozens of pages to Prince Charles’s desire to be Ms. Parker-Bowles’s tampon!—knew no bounds. Return to text.
*24 Or he didn’t. It now looks probable that Malraux’s much-quoted dictum, “The twenty-first century will be a century of religion or it will not be at all,” which he is supposed to have come up with not long before he died, falls into the same category of never actually made remarks as “Play it again, Sam,” and “Come up and see me sometime.” I’m relieved to discover this. It’s nice not to have to think of Malraux—for so long so sophisticated on the subject of religion—as an old fool at the last. Return to text.
*25 Or, in the new world of the George W. Bush administration, when America tries to foist a useless missile shield, and maybe a new arms race, on us all; or when America withdraws from the Kyoto environmental accords, or refuses to sign a treaty designed to outlaw chemical weapons . . . In spite of all Bush’s attempts to turn the USA into a pariah state, however, it remains the case that American culture isn’t the enemy. Globalization itself isn’t the problem; the inequitable distribution of global resources is. Return to text.
*26 Apparently this wasn’t a joke. I later found out he’d said the same thing, quite seriously, to Lou Reed as well. Return to text.
*27 Now that the Bush administration has revealed itself to be a hard-line, ideological right-wing regime, this article looks ridiculously naÏve. It is the columnist’s fate to be rendered absurd by events. Return to text.
*28 On March 6, 2002, Arundhati Roy was given a “symbolic” one-day jail sentence, and fined two thousand rupees (approximately fifty dollars), for contempt of court. The court said it wanted to show that it could be magnanimous and had taken into account that Arundhati Roy was “a woman.” Return to text.
*29 When I wrote these words, I’d meant to say that we’d probably be subjected to more annoying, intrusive checks at airports. I failed to foresee the eagerness with which Messrs. Ashcroft, Ridge, et al. would set about creating the apparatus of a more authoritarian state. Return to text.
*30 Translated by John Mavrogordato in Poems by C. P. Cavafy (Chatto & Windus, 1951). Return to text.
*31 From T. H. White, The Sword in the Stone. Return to text.
*32 From an article in The Guardian. Return to text.
*33 In the film Little Big Man, the old Cheyenne chief, who calls the Cheyenne “the Human Beings,” which is apparently what “Cheyenne” means in Cheyenne, explains mournfully to the eponymous hero that there is no resisting the advance of the white man because, while there appears to be an inexhaustible supply of white men, there is a strictly limited number of Human Beings. Return to text.
*34 By Stephen Ives and Ken Burns, from their documentary The West; see www.pbs.org/weta/thewest. Return to text.
*35 “The Frontier in Medieval History,” American Historical Association (1955). Return to text.
*36 Q.v., “Columns,” April 1999. Return to text.
*37 In Lectures on Russian Literature, 1981. Return to text.
PERMISSIONS
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, LLC: Excerpt from “Songs for a Colored Singer,” from The Complete Poems 1927–1979 by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice
Helen Methfessel. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, L.L.C.
Grove Atlantic, Inc.: Excerpt from “What the Doctor Said,” from A New Path to the Waterfall, by Raymond Carver. Copyright © 1989 by the Estate of Raymond Carver. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Jalma Music: Excerpt from “Big in Japan,” by Tom Waits. Copyright © 1999 by Jalma Music (ASCAP). Reprinted by permission of Jalma Music.
Andrew Marlatt: Excerpt from “Angered by Snubbing, Libya, China, Syria Form Axis of Just as Evil,” by Andrew Marlatt from Satirewire.com. Copyright © 2002 by SatireWire, LLC. Used by permission of Andrew Marlatt, Oligarch of SatireWire and author of Economy of Errors (Broadway Books, 2002).
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.: Excerpt from “First Part, #7,” from Sonnets to Orpheus by Rainer Maria Rilke. Copyright 1942 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., renewed 1970 by M.D. Herter Norton. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.: “A Villanelle,” from The Country Without a Post Office, by Agha Shahid Ali. Copyright © 1997 by Agha Shahid Ali. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
The Orion Publishing Group: Excerpts from “The Ancients of the World” and “Those Others,” from Collected Poems by R. S. Thomas, published by J. M. Dent, 1993. Reprinted by permission of the Orion Publishing Group.
Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd.: “Ithaca” and “Waiting for the Barbarians,” from Poems, by C. P. Cavafy, translated by John Mavrogordato. Translation copyright © 1951 by John Mavrogordato. Reproduced by permission of Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd., 20 Powls Mews, London W11 1JN.
Sony/ATV Music Publishing: Excerpt from “Revolution,” by Lennon/McCartney. Copyright © 1968 (renewed) by Sony/ATV Tunes LLC. All rights administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing, 8 Music Square West, Nashville, TN 37203. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In addition to those journals and institutions already acknowledged during the course of this book, I must particularly thank Gloria B. Anderson and her team at The New York Times, who syndicated all the columns collected in Part III; and The New Yorker, where nine of these pieces first appeared in print: “Out of Kansas” (also published as a British Film Institute booklet, “The Wizard of Oz”); “In Defense of the Novel, Yet Again”; “Reservoir Frogs”; “Heavy Threads”; “On Leavened Bread”; “Crash”; “The People’s Game”; “Damme, This Is the Oriental Scene for You!”; and “A Dream of Glorious Return.” “Step Across This Line” was written for, and first delivered as, the 2002 Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Yale. “In the Voodoo Lounge” originally appeared in The Observer, and “U2” was first published in the Sunday Times. “The Best of Young British Novelists” and “Beirut Blues” appeared in The Independent on Sunday. “On Being Photographed” appeared (in French translation) in EgoÏste. Many thanks to Richard Avedon and to Nicole Wisniak, publisher and editor of EgoÏste, for allowing the Avedon portrait of me to be reproduced in this book. And to Article 19, especially Frances D'Souza and Carmel Bedford, who led the Rushdie Defence Campaign; to all those who participated in the Rushdie Defence Committees in various countries, to all those writers, publishers, booksellers, readers, politicians, diplomats, security officers, and well-wishers who joined us in the struggle, I offer deeper gratitude than I have words to express.
S.R.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SALMAN RUSHDIE is the author of eight novels: Grimus, Midnight’s Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the “Booker of Bookers”), Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, and Fury, and one work of short stories, East, West. He has also published four works of nonfiction: The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands, The Wizard of Oz, and Mirrorwork.
ALSO BY SALMAN RUSHDIE
FICTION
Grimus
Midnight’s Children
Shame
The Satanic Verses
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
East, West
The Moor’s Last Sigh
The Ground Beneath Her Feet
Fury
NONFICTION
The Jaguar Smile
Imaginary Homelands
SCREENPLAY
Midnight’s Children
PLAYS
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
(with Tim Supple and David Tushingham)
Midnight’s Children
(with Tim Supple and Simon Reade)
ANTHOLOGY
Mirrorwork
(co-editor)
Copyright © 2002 Salman Rushdie
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Owing to limitations of space, acknowledgments of permission to quote
from previously published materials will be found following the index.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rushdie, Salman.
Step across this line: collected nonfiction 1992–2002 / Salman Rushdie.
p. cm.
I. Title.
PR6068.U757 S74 2002 824′.914—dc21 2002021314
Random House website address: www.atrandom.com
eISBN: 978-1-58836-279-7
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