Cold war: The Le Carré and Rushdie feud
FREEDOM OF SPEECH CLASH WITH SIR SALMAN RECALLED AS TRIBUTES PAID TO LITERARY GREAT
WARM tributes were paid to the British espionage writer John le Carré, author of such Cold War spy classics as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, who died last Saturday (12), aged 89.
What was slightly overlooked was the feud between le Carré and the Indian-origin Booker Prize winner Sir Salman Rushdie which lasted for 15 years. It was on the subject of freedom of speech.
Rushdie, who had received a fatwa from the Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini after his book The Satanic Verses was published in 1988, complained of a speech le Carré had delivered about freedom of speech. Rushdie accused him of sympathising with Islamic fundamentalists who had threatened to murder him.
In November 1997, le Carré complained that he had been called an anti-Semite in a New York Times book review.
The battle ground between the two was to be the letters’ columns of the Guardian newspaper.
Rushdie shot off a letter on November 18, 1997: “John le Carré complains that he has been branded an anti-Semite as a result of a politically correct witchhunt and declares himself innocent of the charge. It would be easier to sympathise with him had he not been so ready to join in an earlier campaign of vilification against a fellow writer. “In 1989, during the worst days of the Islamic attack on The Satanic Verses, le Carré wrote an article in which he eagerly, and rather pompously, joined forces with my assailants. It would be gracious if he were to admit that he understands the nature of the thought police a little better now that, at least in his own opinion, he’s the one in the line of fire.”
Le Carré responded the next day: “Rushdie’s way with the truth is as self-serving as ever. I never joined his assailants. Nor did I take the easy path of proclaiming him to be a shining innocent. My position was there is no law in life or nature that says great religions may be insulted with impunity.
“I wrote that there is no absolute standard of free speech in any society. I wrote that tolerance does not come at the same time, and in the same form, to all religions and cultures, and that Christian society too, until very recently, defined the limits of freedom by what was sacred.
“I wrote, and would write again today, that when it came to the further exploitation of Rushdie’s work in paperback form, I was more concerned about the girl at Penguin Books who might get her hands blown off in the mailroom than I was about Rushdie’s royalties. My purpose was not to justify the persecution of Rushdie, which, like any decent person, I deplore, but to sound a less arrogant, less colonialist, and less self-righteous note than we were hearing from the safety of his admirers’ camp.”
A day later, Rushdie wrote: “I’m grateful to John le Carré for refreshing our memories about exactly how pompous an ass he can be. He claims not to have joined in the attack against me but also states ‘there is no law in life or nature that says great religions may be insulted with impunity’.
“A cursory examination of this lofty formulation reveals that (1) it takes the philistine, reductionist, radical Islamist line that The Satanic Verses was no more than an ‘insult’, and (2) it suggests that anyone who displeases philistine, reductionist, radical Islamist folk loses his right to live in safety.
“So, if John le Carré upsets Jews, all he needs to do is fill a page of the Guardian with his muddled bombast, but if I am accused of thought crimes, John le Carré will demand that I suppress my paperback edition. He says he is more interested in safeguarding publishing staff than in my royalties. But it is precisely these people, my novel’s publishers in some 30 countries, together with the staff of bookshops, who have most passionately supported and defended my right to publish.
“John le Carré is right to say that free speech isn’t absolute. We have the freedoms we fight for, and we lose those we don’t defend.
Le Carré sent another letter on November 22, 1997: “Anyone reading yesterday’s letters from Salman Rushdie and Christopher Hitchens [who had written in support of Rushdie] might well ask himself into whose hands the great cause of free speech has fallen. Whether from Rushdie’s throne or Hitchens’s gutter, the message is the same: ‘Our cause is absolute, it brooks no dissent or qualification; whoever questions it is by definition an ignorant, pompous, semi-literate unperson.’
“Rushdie sneers at my language and trashes a thoughtful and well-received speech I made to the Anglo-Israel Association, and which the Guardian saw fit to reprint. Hitchens portrays me as a buffoon who pours his own urine on his head. Two rabid ayatollahs could not have done a better job. …Rushdie, so far as I can make out, does not deny the fact that he insulted a great religion. Instead, he accuses me – note his preposterous language for a change – of taking the philistine reductionist radical Islamist line. I didn’t know I was so clever.
“What I do know is, Rushdie took on a known enemy and screamed ‘foul’ when it acted in character. The pain he has had to endure is appalling, but it doesn’t make a martyr of him, nor – much as he would like it to – does it sweep away all argument about the ambiguities of his participation in his own downfall.”
In response, Rushdie wrote: “It’s true I did call him a pompous ass, which I thought pretty mild in the circumstances. ‘Ignorant’ and ‘semi-literate’ are dunces’ caps he has skillfully fitted on his own head…. Le Carré’s habit of giving himself good reviews (‘my thoughtful and well-received speech’) was no doubt developed because, well, somebody has to write them. He accuses me of not having done the same for myself. ‘Rushdie,’ says the dunce, ‘does not deny he insulted a great world religion.’ I have no intention of repeating yet again my many explications of The Satanic Verses, a novel of which I remain extremely proud. A novel, Mr le Carré, not a gibe. You know what a novel is, don’t you, John?”
In 2012, the two giants of literature sort of made up.
Rushdie told the Cheltenham literature festival that he “really” admired Le Carré as a writer. “I wish we hadn’t done it,” he said of their feud. “I think of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy as one of the great novels of postwar Britain.”
Meanwhile, Le Carré told the Times: “I too regret the dispute”.
He went on: “I admire Salman for his work and his courage, and I respect his stand. Does that answer the larger debate which continues to this day?
“Should we be free to burn Korans, mock the passionately held religions of others? Maybe we should – but should we also be surprised when the believers we have offended respond in fury? I couldn’t answer that question at the time and, with all good will, I still can’t. But I am a little proud, in retrospect, that I spoke against the easy trend, reckoning with the wrath of outraged western intellectuals, and suffering it in all its righteous glory.
“And if I met Salman tomorrow? I would warmly shake the hand of a brilliant fellow writer.”