Step Across This Line (16 page)

Farming Ostriches

[
Originally delivered as a keynote address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors
]

It’s a somewhat daunting privilege to face so distinguished a “press conference” at an hour of the morning at which I’m usually barely capable of speech. Although I must say that after my recent American book tour, 9:00 A.M. feels like child’s play. On one January day in Chicago I found myself sitting up in President Reagan’s hotel bed—I should say not at the same time as President Reagan—and giving, by telephone, no fewer than eleven radio interviews before eight o’clock: a personal best. When I came to Washington four years ago to participate in a free-speech conference, an aide of President Bush, explaining why no member of that administration was willing to meet me, remarked that, after all, I was “just an author on a book tour.” It is hard to put into words how sweetly satisfying it felt this January, what a sense of overcoming it gave me, in spite of all those early starts, finally to be, indeed, just an author on a book tour. An author on a book tour
sleeping in the president’s bed.

Speaking of presidents, it may interest you to know that when I was finally able to visit the White House, the meeting was arranged for the day before Thanksgiving, and scheduled to take place immediately before President Clinton’s unbreakable appointment on the White House lawn with a certain Tom the Turkey, whom he was to “pardon” before the assembled press corps. It was therefore understandably unclear whether the president would have time to be involved in my own visit. On the way to the meeting I found myself hysterically inventing the next day’s headlines: “Clinton Meets Turkey—Rushdie Gets Stuffed,” for example. Fortunately, this imaginary headline turned out to be incorrect, and my encounter with Mr. Clinton took place, and proved interesting and, to speak politically, extremely useful.

I was wondering what I might usefully and interestingly say to
you
today—wondering what, if any, common ground might be occupied by novelists and journalists—when my eye fell upon the following brief text in a British national daily: “In yesterday’s
Independent
we stated that Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber is farming ostriches. He is not.”

One can only guess at the brouhaha concealed beneath these admirably laconic sentences: the human distress, the protests. As you know, Britain has been going through a period of what one might call heightened livestock insecurity of late. As well as the mentally challenged cattle herds, there has been the alarming case of the great ostrich-farming bubble, or swindle. In these overheated times, a man who is not an ostrich farmer, when accused of being one, will not take the allegation lightly. He may even feel that his reputation has been slighted.

Plainly, it was quite wrong of
The Independent
to suggest that Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber was actually breeding ostriches. He is of course a celebrated exporter of musical turkeys. But if we agree for a moment to permit the supposedly covert and allegedly fraudulent farming of ostriches to stand as a metaphor for all the world’s supposedly covert and allegedly fraudulent activities, then must we not also agree that it is vital that these ostrich farmers be identified, named, and brought to account for their activities? Is this not at the very heart of the project of a free press? And might there not be occasions on which every editor in this room would be prepared to go with such a story—one might call it Ostrichgate—on the basis of less-than-solid evidence, in the national interest?

I am arriving by degrees at my point: which is that the great issue facing writers both of journalism and of novels is that of determining, and then publishing, the truth. For the ultimate goal of both factual and fictional writing is the truth, however paradoxical that may sound. And truth is slippery, and hard to establish. Mistakes, as in the Lloyd Webber case, can be made. And if truth can set you free, it can also land you in hot water. Fine as the word sounds, truth is all too often unpalatable, awkward, unorthodox. The armies of received ideas are marshaled against it. The legions of all those who stand to profit by useful untruths will march against it. Yet it must, if at all possible, be told.

But, it may be objected, can there really be said to be any connection between the truth of the news and of the world of the imagination? In the world of facts, either a man is an ostrich farmer or he is not. In fiction’s universe, he may be fifteen contradictory things at once.

Let me attempt an answer.

The word “novel” derives from the Latin word for
new;
in French,
nouvelles
are both stories and news reports. A hundred years ago, people read novels, among other things, for information. From Dickens’s
Nicholas Nickleby,
British readers got shocking information about poor schools like Dotheboys Hall, and such schools were subsequently abolished.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Huckleberry Finn,
and
Moby-Dick
are all, in this newsy sense, information-heavy.

So: until the advent of the television age, literature shared with print journalism the task of telling people things they didn’t know. This is no longer the case, for either literature or print journalism. Those who read newspapers and novels now get their primary information about the world from the TV, Internet, and radio. There are exceptions: the success of that lively novel
Primary Colors
shows that novels can just occasionally still lift the lid on a hidden world more effectively than reporting; and of course the broadcast news is highly selective, and newspapers provide far greater breadth and depth of coverage. But many people now read newspapers, I suggest,
to read the news about the news.
We read for opinion, attitude, spin. We read not for raw data, not for Gradgrind’s “facts, facts, facts,” but to get a “take” on the news that we like. Now that the broadcasting media fulfill the function of being first with the news, newspapers, like novels, have entered the realm of the imagination. They both provide versions of the world.

Perhaps this is clearer in a country like Britain, with its primarily national press, than in the United States, where the great proliferation of local papers allows print journalism to provide the additional service of answering to local concerns and adopting local characteristics. The successful quality papers in Britain—among dailies,
The Guardian, Times, Telegraph,
and
Financial Times
—are successful because they have clear pictures of who their readers are and how to talk to them. (The languishing
Independent
once did, but appears latterly to have lost its way.) They are successful because they share, with their readers, a vision of British society and of the world.

The news has become a matter of opinion. And this puts a newspaper editor in a position not at all dissimilar from that of a novelist. It is for the novelist to create, communicate, and sustain over time a personal and coherent vision of the world that entertains, interests, stimulates, provokes, and nourishes his readers. It is for the newspaper editor to do very much the same thing with the pages at his disposal. In that specialized sense—and let me emphasize that I mean this as a compliment!—we are all in the fiction business now.

Sometimes, of course, the news in newspapers seems fictive in a less complimentary sense. Over Easter, a leading British Sunday newspaper ran a front-page lead story announcing the discovery of the tomb—indeed, of the very bones—of Jesus Christ himself; a discovery, as the newspaper was quick to point out, with profound significance for the Christian religion, whose adherents were, at that very moment, celebrating Jesus’s physical ascension into heaven, presumably accompanied by his bones. Not only Jesus but Joseph, Mary, someone called Mary II (presumably Magdalene), and even a certain Judah, son of Jesus, had been discovered, banner headlines proclaimed. A long way down the article—far further than most readers would have read—it was revealed that
the only evidence
that this was indeed the family of Jesus was the simple coincidence of names, which, the journalist admitted, were among the most common names of the period. Nevertheless, she insisted, the mind could not resist the speculation . . .

Such nonsense has perhaps always been a part of newspapers’ entertainment value. But the spirit of fiction permeates the press in other ways as well.

One of the more extraordinary truths about the soap opera that is the British Royal Family is that to a large extent the leading figures have had their characters invented for them by the British press. And such is the power of the fiction that the flesh-and-blood Royals have become more and more like their print personae, unable to escape the fiction of their imaginary lives.

The creation of “characters” is, in fact, rapidly becoming an essential part of print journalism’s stock-in-trade. Never have personality profiles and people columns—never has
gossip
—occupied as much of a newspaper’s space as they now do. The word “profile” is apt. In a profile, the subject is never confronted head-on but receives a sidelong glance. A profile is flat and two-dimensional. It is an outline. Yet the images created in these curious texts (often with their subjects’ collusion) are extraordinarily potent—it can be next to impossible for the actual person to alter, through his own words and deeds, the impressions they create—and, thanks to the mighty Clippings File, they are also self-perpetuating.

A novelist, if he is talented and lucky, may in the course of a lifetime’s work offer up one or two characters who enter the exclusive pantheon of the unforgotten. A novelist’s characters hope for immortality; a profile journalist’s, perhaps, for celebrity. We worship, these days, not images but Image itself: and any man or woman who strays into the public gaze becomes a potential sacrifice in that temple. Often, I repeat, a willing sacrifice, willingly drinking the poisoned chalice of Fame. But for many people, including myself, the experience of being profiled is perhaps closest to what it must feel like to be used as a writer’s raw material, what it must feel like to be turned into a fictional character, to have one’s feelings and actions, one’s relationships and vicissitudes, transformed, by writing, into something subtly—or unsubtly—different. To see ourselves mutated into someone we do not recognize. For a novelist to be thus rewritten is, I recognize, a case of the biter bit. Fair enough. Nevertheless, something about the process feels faintly—and, I stress,
faintly
—improper.

In Britain, intrusions into the private lives of public figures have prompted calls from certain quarters for the protection of privacy laws. It is true that in France, where such laws exist, the illegitimate daughter of the late President Mitterrand was able to grow up unmolested by the press; but where the powerful can hide behind the law, might not a good deal of covert ostrich farming go undetected? I’m still against laws that curtail the investigative freedoms of the press. But, speaking as someone who has had the uncommon experience of becoming, for a time, a hot news story—of, as my friend Martin Amis put it, “vanishing into the front page”—it would be dishonest to deny that when my family and I have been the target of press intrusions and distortions, my principles have been sorely strained.

Still, my overwhelming feelings about the press are ones of gratitude. No writer could have wished for a more generous response to his work—or for fairer, more civil profiles!—than I have received in America and around the world—this year. And in the long unfolding of the so-called Rushdie affair, American newspapers have been of great importance in keeping the issues alive, ensuring that readers have kept sight of the essential points of principle involved, and even pressuring America’s leaders to speak out and act. But there is more than that to thank you for. I said earlier that newspaper editors, like novelists, need to create, impart, and maintain a vision of society. In any vision of a free society, the value of free speech must rank the highest, for that is the freedom without which all the other freedoms would fail. Journalists do more than most of us to protect those values; for the exercise of freedom is freedom’s best defense, and that is something you all do, every day.

However, we live in an increasingly censorious age. By this I mean that the broad, indeed international, acceptance of First Amendment principles is being steadily eroded. Many special-interest groups, claiming the moral high ground, now demand the protection of the censor. Political correctness and the rise of the religious right provide the pro-censorship lobby with further cohorts. I would like to say a little about just one of the weapons of this resurgent lobby, a weapon used, interestingly, by everyone from anti-pornography feminists to religious fundamentalists: I mean the concept of “respect.”

On the surface, “respect” is one of those ideas nobody’s against. Like a good warm coat in winter, like applause, like ketchup on your fries, everybody wants some of
that.
Sock-it-to-me-sock-it-to-me, as Aretha Franklin puts it. But what we used to mean by respect—what Aretha meant by it; that is, a mixture of good-hearted consideration and serious attention—has little to do with the new ideological usage of the word.

Religious extremists, these days, demand
respect
for their attitudes with growing stridency. Very few people would object to the idea that people’s rights to religious belief must be respected—after all, the First Amendment defends those rights as unequivocally as it defends free speech—but now we are asked to agree that to dissent from those beliefs—to hold that they are suspect, or antiquated, or wrong; that, in fact, they are
arguable
—is incompatible with the idea of respect. When criticism is placed off limits as “disrespectful,” and therefore offensive, something strange is happening to the concept of respect. Yet in recent times both the American National Endowment for the Arts and the very British BBC have announced that they will use this new version of “respect” as a touchstone for their funding decisions.

Other minority groups—racial, sexual, social—have also demanded that they be accorded this new form of respect. To “respect” Louis Farrakhan, we must understand, is simply to agree with him. To “diss” him is, equally simply, to disagree. But if dissent is also to be thought a form of “dissing,” then we have indeed succumbed to the Thought Police. I want to suggest to you that citizens of free societies, democracies, do not preserve their freedom by pussyfooting around their fellow-citizens’ opinions, even their most cherished beliefs. In free societies, you must have the free play of ideas. There must be argument, and it must be impassioned and untrammeled. A free society is not a calm and eventless place—that is the kind of static, dead society dictators try to create. Free societies are dynamic, noisy, turbulent, and full of radical disagreements. Skepticism and freedom are indissolubly linked; and it is the skepticism of journalists, their show-me, prove-it unwillingness to be impressed, that is perhaps their most important contribution to the freedom of the free world. It is the
disrespect
of journalists—for power, for orthodoxies, for party lines, for ideologies, for vanity, for arrogance, for folly, for pretension, for corruption, for stupidity, maybe even for editors—that I would like to celebrate this morning, and that I urge you all, in freedom’s name, to preserve.