After Years of Offering Refuge, the British Write Off Rushdie

Iranian ayatollahs may have taken Salman Rushdie off their hit list, but the British chattering classes aren’t feeling as generous about the author who declared he has moved to New York because he found London too “backbiting and incestuous.”

The knives are out for the “author out-of-hiding.” Hatchets and verbal whips too.

Everyone knows how much London loves a good literary spat, so it can’t have come as a great shock to Rushdie that the city wouldn’t take kindly to his rejection. Or to his ingratitude, as some here saw it.

“ ‘Satanic Verses’ author Salman Rushdie, whose scant claim to fame is that he once wrote a book no one understood, has deserted our shores for New York,” columnist Carole Malone wrote in the Sunday Mirror tabloid.

“The great pity is that it took 10 years and 10 million pounds of British taxpayers’ money to protect him before he realized he wanted to shove off,” Malone wrote.

The money went to pay for round-the-clock security for Rushdie after the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued an edict imposing a death sentence against him in 1989 for the alleged blasphemies in “The Satanic Verses.” Eager to improve relations with the West in 1998, Iran disavowed the ruling.

But in the interim, Rushdie lived in hiding, moving constantly among about 30 houses with Special Branch officers parked in his kitchen, playing Scrabble with him and, quite possibly, reading his books to pass the time. It made him a little cranky.

Meanwhile, hit men killed the Japanese translator of “Satanic Verses” and wounded the Italian translator and Norwegian publisher. Bombs were planted outside bookshops in Britain owned by its English publisher, Penguin Books. Scores of people were killed or injured in protests over the book.

Rushdie made his London-bashing comments in an interview with his new hometown paper, the New York Times.

“I think it speaks for itself that, for somebody who lived in England for as long as I did, relatively little of my work has dealt with it,” Rushdie said.

In the ensuing war of words, Guardian newspaper columnist John Sutherland came limping to Rushdie’s defense. He called Rushdie “the greatest living novelist we have,” while noting that few books have as high a “body count” as “Satanic Verses.”

“Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’ the ‘little woman whose book started a big war’ [as Abraham Lincoln put it], heads the league. Nonetheless, there are people dead who would still be living had Rushdie never put pen to paper,” Sutherland wrote last week.

“At the end of the day, of course, it is fanaticism, not literature, that pulls the trigger,” Sutherland wrote.

Thanks, but no thanks, Rushdie responded in a letter to the Guardian. He rejected Sutherland’s suggestion that bad reviews and cocktail party gossip had driven him out of town.

“What got to me, in the end, was the belief--widespread in Britain, rare elsewhere except in fundamentalist circles--that I was to blame for the terrorist assault against my life and work; the constant attack on the cost of my protection; and the incessant attempts at character assassination,” Rushdie said.

With even Sutherland “prepared to cloud the issue,” he added, “it’s not surprising that so many people in Britain find it easier to blame the ‘arrogant’ novelist than his would-be killers.”

Granted, there were complaints, but Rushdie did receive support from Britain, as well as protection. There was a free-speech campaign on his behalf, his books were generally well received, and he was admired as an intelligent novelist. When the presenters of the prestigious Booker Prize created a special award in 1993 for the best novel the Booker had gone to in its first 25 years, the honor was bestowed on Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children.”

In fact, columnist Yasmin Alibhai Brown of the Independent newspaper argued that Rushdie left not because Britons disliked him, but because he has a tendency to leave those who love him. After all, she wrote, he didn’t just leave London for New York, he left his third wife and toddler for his new lover, the Indian model Padma Lakshmi, who happens to live in New York.

“These repeated betrayals of various constituencies seem perplexingly self-destructive, especially as Rushdie’s massive ego needs this adoration to live and grow,” Alibhai Brown wrote.

She conceded that she was a Rushdie fan when “Midnight’s Children” was published in 1981 but said that, like many British Muslims, she became disillusioned with him over the publication of “Satanic Verses” in 1988.

“He had the right to publish, no question about that. But was he right to do so? This is what many of us were asking as we lived through those turbulent times,” she wrote. “We felt like orphans, caught between Muslim extremists and liberal fundamentalists.”

No one likes to be spurned--not London, and not Rushdie. He said that Alibhai Brown’s presenting herself as a disappointed admirer was “an old trick.” Her malevolence, he said, obliged him to reply.

“My remarks about the bitchiness and incestuousness of life in literary and media London seem to have been amply borne out by the response to my attempt to forge a new life for myself,” Rushdie wrote.

“I am sorry to disappoint Alibhai Brown and all those who have joined her in the good-riddance chorus aimed at me, but I am not ‘abandoning’ Britain,” he said, insisting that he would be commuting between New York and London to see friends and family, children included. He also has a grown son in London.

Peter Hitchens, a conservative commentator for the Spectator magazine, dismissed the whole brouhaha as the predictable nastiness of left-wing people.

“The don’t even bother biting me in the back, they stab me in the front,” Hitchens said in a telephone conversation of his own experience.

“Personally,” he added, “I wouldn’t abandon anywhere for New York. I don’t like it.”

Alexander Chancellor, a British commentator and former New Yorker editor, said that, while Rushdie may have made the right choice in one way--”When you’re leaving your wife, it probably helps to get out of the country”--he could be in for a surprise in the Big Apple.

“New York has an incestuous, backbiting literary culture as well,” Chancellor said. “I don’t see a vast difference.”