Some British Literary Figures

Some British Literary Figures

Amis, Fenton, Hitchens, McEwan, Rushdie: A Portrait Gallery

Martin Amis
James Fenton
Christopher Hitchens
Ian McEwan
Salman Rushdie

Journalist Christopher Hitchens, poet James Fenton, and
novelist Martin Amis, photographed in Paris in the 1970s

By Paul Quinn
The Daily Telegraph, November 18, 2007

He's the recipient, this year, of the Queen's Medal for Poetry, and the man who rode the first North Vietnamese tank into the Presidential Palace when Saigon fell in April 1975. He's a trustee of the National Gallery, and the one-time film critic of Socialist Worker. He's the Antiquarian of the Royal Academy, and a man who was kidnapped in Belfast by the IRA.

He's adapting Don Quixote for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and he's the man who was commissioned to write the book for Les Misérables, thus making him almost the only rich poet in the world. He's sitting beneath a pergola in the remarkable garden he's created at his house, six miles from the centre of Oxford. There is, as his friend Christopher Hitchens says, 'a lot of James'.

But the bigness is a solidity that seems entirely suitable to such an eminent member of the intellectual great and good. Altogether, 'the old curmudgeon' (Hitchens again) has what the Tories used to call 'bottom'. There's nothing new in that; as Martin Amis says, 'James always had gravitas, even as an undergraduate. He always behaved with dignity - unlike the rest of us.'

Had he felt burdened by being called 'the most talented poet of his generation'? 'Well,' he says, 'I didn't necessarily feel I was living up to things. But I don't think I had an offensive amount of praise.' The Queen has been the most recent to bestow some of that praise.

Fenton has said that, 'My feeling is that poetry will wither on the vine if you don't regularly come back to the simplest fundamentals of the poem: rhythm, rhyme, simple subjects – love, death, war.' To Stephen Spender, Fenton was 'a brilliant poet of technical virtuosity.' For Peter Porter, 'It's the way he writes, with a mixture of poetic language and real directness.'

Fenton first published poems in the national press while still at Oxford, where he also reviewed fiction for the New Statesman and won the Newdigate Prize for Poetry. In 1973, he took off for Cambodia, as a freelance foreign reporter.

After an unhappy period in Vietnam, Fenton returned to England. He wrote the political column for the New Statesman, went to Germany for the Guardian and was theatre critic and chief book reviewer for the Sunday Times. He translated Rigoletto for the ENO - a triumph that brought Les Misérables to his door.

Fenton said he got less than one per cent of worldwide royalties, but given that the show has earned more than £1.4 billion worldwide, the wolf has since been absent from his door.

His home is the Oxfordshire house, Fenton tells me, that Ian McEwan described as 'the scene-of-the-crime house', so derelict and so likely to contain a murder victim did it appear when Fenton bought it and the 150 acres around it.

Fenton shares his life with Darryl Pinckney, an American writer. They've been together since 1989. Fenton was recently asked if he would be prepared to go on the Pink List as one of the top gay people of influence. He said yes.

Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens and his wife Carol Blue, photographed by Annie Leibovitz in 1990

One of the most annoying things about Christopher Hitchens is that, even at his most vitriolic, he makes at least as much sense as the majority of sober journo-intellectuals buzzing around Washington. This despite the fact that he is one of the last defenders of Bush’s Iraq war—a position that has cost the former Nation contributor a multitude of friends and gotten him new ones like Paul Wolfowitz. Hitchens has finally written the ultimate attack book, God Is Not Great.

You say you’ve been writing this book your whole life. Do you think it’ll mean as much to others as it means to you?
No, it’s one small step for C.H. into one enormous argument dominated by giants in philosophy and theology and science.

So what makes it different from recent atheist screeds by the likes of Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins?
I don’t think Richard Dawkins would mind me saying that he looks at religious people with this sort of incredulity, as if, “How possibly can you be so stupid?” And though we all have moods like that, I think perhaps I don’t quite.

And what if one of your children found God? Would that be a problem?
Not at all. My children, to the extent that they have found religion, have found it from me, in that I insist on at least a modicum of religious education for them. The schools won’t do it anymore. And I even insist, though my wife [who is Jewish] isn’t that thrilled, on having for our daughter a little version of the Seder.

What’s your favorite Bible story?
“Casting the first stone” is a lovely story, even though we’ve found out how much it wasn’t in the Bible to begin with. And the first of the miracles. Jesus changes water into wine. You can’t object to that.

Well, you’ve said plenty about the pleasures of drink before
But it also shows the persistence of the Hellenic influence in those regions. If the Jews had not made the crucial mistake of rejecting Hellenism and philosophy and submitting themselves, or being reconquered, by the Maccabean ultra-Orthodox, everything would have been better and we’d never have had to endure Christianity and Islam.

You’re an even bigger critic of Islam.
If you ask specifically what is wrong with Islam, it makes the same mistakes as the preceding religions, but it makes another mistake, which is that it’s unalterable. You notice how liberals keep saying, “If only Islam would have a Reformation”—it can’t have one. It says it can’t. It’s extremely dangerous in that way.

Has anyone in the Bush administration confided in you about being an atheist?
Well, I don’t talk that much to them—maybe people think I do. I know something which is known to few but is not a secret. Karl Rove is not a believer, and he doesn’t shout it from the rooftops, but when asked, he answers quite honestly. I think the way he puts it is, “I’m not fortunate enough to be a person of faith.”

What must Bush make of that?
I think it’s false to say that the president acts as if he believes he has God’s instructions. Compared to Jimmy Carter, he’s nowhere. He’s a Methodist, having joined his wife’s church in the end. He also claims that Jesus got him off the demon drink. He doesn’t believe it. His wife said, “If you don’t stop, I’m leaving and I’m taking the kids.” You can say that you got help from Jesus if you want, but that’s just a polite way of putting it in Texas.

Do you consider yourself a hawk?
I used to wish there was a useful term for those of us who thought American power should be used to remove psychopathic dictators.

So one day we’ll all see just how right you all were about Iraq?
No, I don’t think the argument will stop, perhaps forever. But when it does become the property of historians rather than propagandists and journalists, it’ll become plainer than it is to most people now that it was just.

You’ve complained that American discourse is too polite. But a lot of people think you’re too rude.
I used to get told by nice old ladies at bookstores, “It’s so nice to meet you, because I used to think you were very unhappy and just disliked everything, and you seem quite friendly.” And I would think, Oh, God, is that how I seem?

Boris Kachka, New York Magazine
May 7, 2007

Christopher Hitchens wielding an AK47 assault rifle in Iraq in 1991

It never seemed to me that there was any alternative to confronting the reality of Iraq, which was already on the verge of implosion and might, if left to rot and crash, have become to the region what the Congo is to Central Africa: a vortex of chaos and misery that would draw in opportunistic interventions from Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. Bad as Iraq may look now, it is nothing to what it would have become without the steadying influence of coalition forces. None of the many blunders in postwar planning make any essential difference to that conclusion. Indeed, by drawing attention to the ruined condition of the Iraqi society and its infrastructure, they serve to reinforce the point.

Christopher Hitchens, Slate
August 8, 2005

Hitch-22: A Memoir
By Christopher Hitchens
Twelve, 435 pages

Reviewed by Dwight Garner
The New York Times, June 1, 2010

While studying at Oxford in the late 1960s (he was in the room on the famous night that Bill Clinton didn't inhale), Christopher Hitchens discovered that "if you can give a decent speech in public or cut any kind of figure on the podium, then you never need dine or sleep alone."

Hitchens has a mind like a Swiss Army knife, ready to carve up or unbolt an opponent's arguments with a flick of the wrist. He holds dear the serious things, the things that matter: social justice, learning, direct language, the free play of the mind, loyalty, holding public figures to high standards.

Hitchens is devoted to wit and bawdy wordplay and to good Scotch and cigarettes and long nights spent talking. He is also devoted to friendship. His close friends include Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, and James Fenton.

Hitchens was born in 1949 in Portsmouth. According to family legend, his first complete sentence was "Let's all go and have a drink at the club." His parents scraped to send him to boarding school at the tender age of 8. "If there is going to be an upper class in this country," his mother said, "then Christopher is going to be in it." Hitchens strode through boarding school in Cambridge and Balliol College in Oxford.

Hitchens details his early years as a literary journalist in London, his budding friendships with Amis and Fenton and Clive James (among many others), and his Zelig-like ability to be in international capitals when trouble was brewing.

In the early 1980s, Hitchens moved to America. His drift away from the left began in 1989, after the fatwa against Rushdie. This drift continued after 9/11. He supported the invasion of Iraq, in large part, because of his sense of the wickedness of Saddam Hussein's regime.

George Orwell wrote: "A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats." Hitchens passes this test, if only by a nose.

More on or by Ian McEwan

Atonement
Chesil Beach
Revelation

Salman Rushdie

Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie
(some years ago)

The row over Muslim women's dress codes reignited today after author Salman Rushdie declared that "veils suck". Rushdie, whose book The Satanic Verses triggered death threats from Islamic clerics, gave his full backing to Leader of the Commons Jack Straw for raising the issue.

Rushdie was forced into hiding for 10 years after Iranian cleric Ayatollah Khomeini served a "fatwah" on him over his book's alleged slight on the prophet Mohammed. He had round-the-clock police protection costing nearly £1 million a year, although that has been downgraded in recent years after Iran indicated the death sentence no longer applied.

But Rushdie has always insisted he was right to publish The Satanic Verses and today he risked fresh Muslim anger with a savage attack on the wearing of veils. "I think the battle against the veil has been a long and continuing battle against the limitation of women, so in that sense I'm completely on [Straw's] side. He was expressing an important opinion, which is that veils suck, which they do. I think the veil is a way of taking power away from women."

thisislondon.co.uk
October 10, 2006

March 2006: Salman Rushdie and his fourth wife, TV star and former Indian model Padma Lakshmi

June 2007: The freshly minted Sir Salman Rushdie and his wife Padma Lakshmi are soon to divorce

Salman Rushdie was "thrilled and humbled to receive this great honour, and am very grateful that my work has been recognised in this way," while others saw a belated endorsement or even recompense.

In the House of Islam, the reaction was all too predictable. "Salman Rushdie has turned into a hated corpse, which cannot be resurrected by any action," Mohammad Reza Bahonar told the parliament in Tehran, where the knighthood was angrily denounced as a further provocation. Iran was, of course, the country where the fatwa was pronounced on Rushdie by the ayatollahs in 1989. In Islamabad, Robert Brinkley, the British representative, was summoned to be rebuked for the "utter lack of sensitivity" in knighting Rushdie.

All this was familiar from the eruption over Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses 18 years ago, but the response in England was also painfully familiar.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Slate
June 20, 2007

The Enchantress

By Andrew Anthony
The Observer, April 6, 2008

Salman Rushdie's latest novel, The Enchantress of Florence, is a hymn to the creative and destructive power of female beauty.

'Ridiculously beautiful, comically beautiful' was how he once described Padma Lakshmi, the woman who became his fourth wife. But in fact, Rushdie insists, he had the concept of the novel before he met her.

According to Rushdie, the irony is that not only did she not inspire the book, she was very nearly the cause of its demise: 'To put it bluntly, I had to write it in spite of her. Because what happened to me last year when I was writing this book was a colossal calamity.' In January of 2007, Lakshmi asked for a divorce.

We meet in the Bloomsbury offices of his agent, Andrew Wylie. He's pleased with the novel, a fabulous interweaving of fiction and history across two continents, though his critics would say this is nothing new.

He says there was a period, after Lakshmi left him, that he worked eight or nine hours a day for six weeks and produced 'about three pages'. But at the end of this block, he refound the story.

Indeed one of the pleasures of the book is the sense of delight that the prose takes in conjuring seductive myths from the solid foundations of history: 'One of the things that I came to feel more than before, while writing the book, and it's not a very complicated truth, is the idea that human nature really is constant.'

He is pessimistic about the future of East-West relations: 'I hope I'm wrong but the best-case optimistic argument I can make is that if you look at the phenomenon of Islamic extremism, the places where it's most hated are the places where it's most powerful.'

Having graduated from Cambridge in 1968, his politics were not untypical of his generation and class. In The Satanic Verses, he writes of 'the Coca-Colonization of the planet' and refers to New York as the 'transatlantic New Rome with its Nazified architectural gigantism, which employed the oppressions of size to make its human occupants feel like worms'.

Rushdie still has his criticisms of America, where he lives for much of the time in the architectural gigantism of New York. He remains a committed multiculturalist. 'I couldn't exist were it not for that transcultural movement. So obviously I'm biased.'

Rushdie would argue that he was never a proponent of cultural relativism. The event that made him an outspoken opponent was the fatwa on his life issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini on Valentine's Day in 1989. It was a defining moment in the cultural wars that have grown dramatically more political in recent years.

Rushdie found himself in the strange position of having to rely on the support of Margaret Thatcher: 'I only met Margaret Thatcher twice. The thing that I thought about meeting her was how extraordinarily intelligent she was.'

He developed not just an admiration, but a fondness for many people he came to know within the security and intelligence services: 'I've met a lot of Special Branch officers both at the everyday and higher levels and, with one or two exceptions, I liked all of them.'

It's been a decade since the Iranian government withdrew their support for the fatwa, effectively allowing Rushdie back into civilian life. He says it now feels like something that happened to him in the past.

There was a brief reprise last year when Rushdie was awarded a knighthood. A few opportunists in Pakistan tried to generate a firestorm of protest, but it came to nothing.

Since 2001, he's been joined in the political arena by a number of fellow authors, some of whom have taken up a more controversial position than Rushdie: 'It's a big subject that everybody's thinking about. I don't agree with all Christopher Hitchens's views but that doesn't stop him being my friend. And I don't agree with everything Martin [Amis] said, but he's entirely entitled to say it without being abused in the way that he was.'

The point for Rushdie is that he and his friends remain on the progressive side of the argument. 'My instincts are completely liberal, but I do think we live in a very weird world and we do need to realise that the world has changed. And when Martin, Ian [McEwan] and I say that we get called conservative. But we're not conservative.'

We discuss politics but Rushdie resents being recruited to positions he does not hold, a legacy of the fatwa.

The Satanic Verses, 20 years on

Kenan Malik
Spiked, November 2008

When The Satanic Verses was published in September 1988, it had been expected to set the world alight. Salman Rushdie was then perhaps the most celebrated British novelist of his generation. Almost five years in the making, there was something mythical about the novel even before it had been published. Within a month The Satanic Verses had been banned in Rushdie's native India. And then on 14 February 1989 came the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa. The fatwa transformed the Rushdie affair into a global conflict with historic repercussions.

To see how much the ground has shifted in the past 20 years, we only have to compare the response to The Satanic Verses to that to The Jewel of Medina. Written by an American journalist, Sherry Jones, The Jewel of Medina is a tale about Aisha, the Prophet Muhammad's youngest wife. It had originally been bought by the American publishers Random House. Then an American academic, Denise Spellberg, condemned the book as offensive. Random House immediately dropped it. No other major American publishing house would touch it.

In 1989 even the Ayatollah's death sentence could not stop the publication of The Satanic Verses. Rushdie was forced into hiding for almost a decade. Translators and publishers were killed, bookshops bombed and Penguin staff forced to wear bomb-proof vests. Yet Penguin never wavered in its commitment to keep it published. Today, all it takes for a publisher to run for cover is a letter from an outraged academic. In the 20 years between the publication of The Satanic Verses and the withdrawal of The Jewel of Medina, the fatwa has in effect become internalised.

Twenty years ago, most liberals defended Rushdie's right to publish The Satanic Verses despite the offence it caused many Muslims. Today, many argue that in practice one must appease religious and cultural sensibilities. By accepting the fiction that hostility to The Satanic Verses was driven by theology, that all Muslims were offended by the novel and that in a plural society speech must necessarily be less free, liberals have helped create a culture of grievance in which being offended has become a badge of identity.

Christopher Hitchens
Vanity Fair, February 2009

Salman Rushdie, raised a Muslim, concluded that the Koran was a book made by the hands of men and was thus a fit subject for literary criticism and fictional borrowing. Various intellectualoids argued that Rushdie got what he deserved for insulting a great religion. Others remarked darkly that Rushdie knew what he was doing. He certainly did know what he was doing. He had studied Islamic scripture at Cambridge University. We live now in a climate where every publisher and editor and politician has to weigh in advance the possibility of violent Muslim reprisal. Though I can think of many circumstances in which I would take a life, the crime of writing a work of fiction is not a justification.

Salman Rushdie
(illustration by André Carrilho)

Salman Rushdie

Born 1947 in Mumbai, read History at King's College, Cambridge
1981 Midnight's Children, won Booker Prize and 1993 Booker of Bookers prize
1988 The Satanic Verses, earned a fatwa by Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini
1995 The Moor's Last Sigh, won Whitbread prize
June 2007 Awarded a knighthood

The iPod Moment

By Robert McCrum
The Observer, May 25, 2008

When I joined The Observer in 1996, the world of books was in limbo between hot metal and cool word processing. The business of books was run by anonymous men in suits whose judgments were largely ignored. Trade was trade. Literature was another calling.

Now that world is more or less extinct. But the appetite for print is growing. In 1996, there were between 60 000 and 100 000 new titles in the UK each year. By 2007, it was pushing 200 000. That's the biggest annual output of any country in the Western world, turning over some £4 billion a year.

All this has been fuelled by an explosive mixture of global commerce and technology. In simple terms, you could say that Amazon plus Microsoft equals a new literary stratosphere.

New Blood

Zadie Smith, the author of White Teeth, was first noticed in 1997 when she landed an unheard-of advance for her work in progress. When publication came in 2000, there were plenty of envious critics to pronounce her book dead on arrival. But White Teeth was exhilaratingly and distinctively new.

With worldwide sales of more than 2 million, White Teeth won success that was sustained by a new global market. The effect was almost instantaneous. In London, Sydney, Delhi and New York, publishers were now on the alert for "the next Zadie Smith."

Amazon

In the excitement of the dotcom boom, from which Amazon emerged as a survivor, the most visible symbol of change was a marriage between the 600-year-old printed book and the high-tech world of online selling. By 2007, sales had soared to $3.58 billion in 200 countries. Without Amazon, there would have been no "long tail" and no online bookselling.

Across the English-speaking world, Amazon united the market. Previously, new editions of books had been confined to territories like North America, Australasia or the West Indies. Now books could be accessed by and sold to customers across the world. Almost as revolutionary, Amazon put the customer first.

New writers who found a readership in the global marketplace began to command substantial advances. By the end of the 1990s, a new generation of market-savvy literary entrepreneurs was beginning to emerge. The headline news was that the book trade was now bestowing extraordinary riches on a privileged and talented few.

J.K. Rowling

I began to grasp the true dimensions of the Harry Potter phenomenon on the morning of July 8, 2000. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone had been published with a tiny first printing of 500 in 1997, to modest but enthusiastic reviews, swiftly followed by Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Bloomsbury took the unusual step of releasing the new book, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, to the literary media at 6 am on a Saturday morning. As I drove at dawn to Bloomsbury's central London offices for my copy, I passed a long line of Harry Potter fans, all waiting to devour the latest volume.

Ms Rowling has now sold some 400 million copies of her books and is worth £545 million.

Jonathan Franzen

Jonathan Franzen spoilt his publisher's lunch by refusing to allow The Corrections, his "sweeping account of a dysfunctional American family" and the surprise literary bestseller of the stricken 9/11 season, to be selected for Oprah's Book Club.

What Franzen objected to was that in order to join "Oprah's authors" he had to allow the chat-show queen to label The Corrections with her garish orange book club logo. Just in case his message had been misunderstood, he added: "I feel like I'm solidly in the high-art literary tradition."

The Franzen episode illustrates the paradox of this decade that the more golden the opportunities available to the book, the more marginal it has seemed to become. Behind the brilliant façade of new technology, new money, and new markets, there has been a massive interior renovation in the house of books.

Festivals

When Peter Florence and his father launched the first Hay-on-Wye literary festival in 1988, the experience was distinctly unpromising. Hay's tipping point came in 2001 with the visit of ex-US President Bill Clinton. With his genius for infectious slogans, Clinton declared Hay "the Woodstock of the mind." Literary festivals became the new rock'n'roll.

Traditionally, the special joy of the book was that you communed with it in the one place that no one else can trespass: your head. Not any more. The novelist had become a cross between a commercial traveller, a rock musician and a jobbing preacher. In just over a generation, the novel had gone public in the most astounding way.

Prizes

In 2002, the Booker administrators moved their prize-giving dinner from the Guildhall to the British Museum and appointed the witty and provocative Lisa Jardine as the chair. Professor Jardine immediately set the tone by declaring that the shortlist for 2002 marked "the beginning of a new era."

Some of her fellow judges then waded in with snippy comments about the novels they had been required to read. "It's like a formula," complained David Baddiel. "They attempt to grab a big theme, and have a vulgar, obvious seriousness, even a kind of pompous pretentiousness, about them."

Next, in another defining moment of literary prize marketing, Jardine took her panel for an impromptu ride on the London Eye. Jardine also steered her committee to choose a novel that the reading public actually enjoyed.

Book prizes now began to play a new and important role, one previously played by reviews. In 2008, the literary prize has become one of the most reliable guides to the literary landscape.

Kate Mosse, founder of the Orange Prize, says: "Prizes, far more than star reviews, are what make books succeed now and it's also prizes that give readers the confidence to trust a new writer."

Ian McEwan

Saturday is probably not McEwan's best book, but when it was published in 2005, it enjoyed the kind of success that can only be explained by the new worldwide market for English literature.

After its first week of publication, Saturday was doing so well that it actually became a news item on the ITN evening news. The conventional reviews had been far from ecstatic but there it was, piled up in the supermarkets and reported on commercial television.

After a decade of change, many of the old, elite signposts through the contemporary jungle of books and writing had become smothered in a profusion of comment, from blogs to book clubs. It became harder and harder to achieve a serious-minded consensus. The dictates of commerce seemed to threaten the traditional authority of the critic.

The Wave

American democratic instincts have transformed its literary landscape as surely as its colossal market has revolutionised bookselling. Anyone can review books, and now, in America, everyone does.

Book blogs now have such power and influence that a publisher's editor in Manhattan is likely to advise a new novelist not that they will be reviewed in the New York Times but that they will be covered on curledup.com. This, according to Trish Todd of Simon & Schuster, "is the wave of the future."

Readers had been posting reviews on Amazon for year. Now these book blogs could take over and hand the power back to the common reader. The equation of Amazon plus Microsoft has left the common reader dazed and confused.

Lynne Truss

Lynne Truss's plea for proper English usage touched a nerve. Eats, Shoots and Leaves spoke to an anxiety about usage and standards in an age of cultural upheaval. Word of mouth on a worldwide scale made the book a bestseller in Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore and Australia.

The Kindle

This spring may be the tipping point in the innovative commercial development of e-reading. While the market expanded, and more and more readers were enfranchised by the English language, the technology was racing to keep up.

In November 2007, these two forces finally converged with the American launch of the Kindle. The Kindle, in direct competition with the Sony Reader, is a handheld, wireless reading device that can hold all manner of digital text files.

The Kindle is the brainchild of Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon. It has many of the features of its e-book predecessor, the Sony Reader. What sets the Kindle apart is wireless connectivity via a system called Whispernet. As a result, says Bezos: "This isn't a device, it's a service."

The marriage of Amazon with the world of internet technology may herald the "iPod moment" for books, the moment when electronic technology finally swept six centuries of ink and paper aside.

For five years and more, there had been a steady trend towards the digitization of the world's copyright material, pioneered by the Google Print Initiative. To Google's alliance with some of the world's greatest libraries, including the Bodleian, all the major publishers had responded by digitizing their back lists.

The iPod moment in the book world is expected to happen this year. It's an awesome prospect. The indexed part of the world wide web is around 40 billion pages. The deep web is much bigger.

Universal access to this virtual library is an enthralling prospect. These are the birth pangs of a golden age.