Step Across This Line

by Salman Rushdie

  My heart’s in my mouth, but Ginola gives me something to enjoy: a couple of fast, swerving runs with no fewer than three Leicester players trying to shut him down, and one moment of breathtaking ball control, in which he pulls down an awkwardly high ball with one touch of the outside of his right boot, and passes it away almost instantly, the speed of his artistry setting up a dangerous Tottenham break.

  No goals in the first half. In the second, however, high drama. In the sixty-third minute, the Tottenham full-back Justin Edinburgh is crudely tackled by Leicester’s blond-thatched Robbie Savage. Irritated by the clumsiness of the tackle, Edinburgh stupidly reaches out with an open hand and smacks Savage somewhere on the head. Blond hair flies. Then, after a comically long pause, Savage executes a perfect backflip of a dive and collapses to the ground.

  The referee, Terry Heilbron, has been fooled. He cautions Savage for his unfair tackle, but then shows Edinburgh the dreaded red card for his “foul” on Diving Robbie. Edinburgh has been sent off, expelled from the game, and Spurs are down to ten men against Leicester’s eleven.

  “Cheat, cheat,” chant the Spurs fans, and then boo. The noise made by thirty-five thousand or so soccer fans booing in unison is unearthly, monstrous; but in our hearts we fear that the day may be lost. And for the next several minutes, as Leicester City charge forward, our fears seem justified. In the Spurs goal, Ian Walker has to stretch hard to catch a loose ball. Then Leicester burst through Spurs’ depleted defenses again, and this time Vega is cautioned for a “professional foul”—the deliberate fouling of a player whom he couldn’t have stopped by fair means.

  It’s all Leicester City, but slowly—and this is an indication of the steely confidence Graham has engendered—Tottenham regroup. Their fans sing a rousing chorus of “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah” to encourage them, and, surprisingly, Spurs begin once more to have the better of the exchanges. David Ginola on the left wing is having a quiet game by his exalted standards, but Leicester are still being forced to use two or even three players to stop him. This means that, in spite of being a man down, Spurs actually often have a man over on their right flank, and it is down this flank that their best attacks now come. The Tottenham right-back Stephen Carr is making more and more threatening runs. The England international midfield player Darren Anderton (once nicknamed “Sicknote” because he got injured so often, but fit at last these days) is also beginning to show, with his trademark long-legged stride and his dangerous floated crosses. Spurs main goalscorer, Les Ferdinand, is looking livelier, and so is the team’s duo of Scandinavian stars: the Norwegian striker Steffen Iversen and the Danish midfielder Allan Nielsen, who has been picked only because the team’s new signing, the England player Tim Sherwood, is ineligible, have a shot each, and then combine fluently to allow Nielsen another shot, well saved by Kasey Keller.

  Meanwhile, Leicester’s Savage, clearly rattled by the boos that fill the stadium whenever he touches the ball, is involved in another bit of rough stuff, but gets away with it. The game goes into its last five minutes. If there is no result after ninety minutes’ play, there will be half an hour of extra time, and if the scores are still level, the game will be decided by penalty kicks. (Soccer fans hate the arbitrariness of the sudden-death penalty shoot-out. We always hope it won’t come to that.) In the eighty-sixth minute, Ian Walker moves to the edge of his penalty area to gather a loose ball, slips, misses the ball completely, and allows Leicester’s Tony Cottee to send it bouncing and bobbling across the face of Tottenham’s undefended goal. Amazingly, there isn’t a single Leicester player on hand to tap it into the empty net. Walker scrambles back into position. Tottenham’s moment of greatest danger has passed.

  The game enters the last minute of normal time. Leicester, already playing for extra time, take the precaution of bringing off the much-reviled Robbie Savage, who would be sent off if cautioned a second time, and the way he’s been playing, he’s lucky not to have been shown the red card already. On, in his place, comes Theo Zagorakis, captain of Greece’s international side. Before Leicester have time to settle down to the change in their formation, however, lightning strikes.

  A whipped pass from Ferdinand in midfield releases Iversen, whose fast run down the right catches the Leicester defense cold. He cuts in toward goal and shoots. It isn’t a great shot, on target but weak. Somehow, however, Kasey Keller fails to hold the ball, and palms it feebly right onto the forehead of the charging Allan Nielsen. Boom! As the Univision commentators would say, “Góóóóóóóóóóóóól!!!!!!”

  It’s all over in an instant, and Tottenham have won 1–0. And then there are the celebrations to enjoy, the presentations, the jeering. You’re not singing, you’re not singing, you’re not singing anymore. The oddly three-handled Worthington Cup is held high by each Tottenham player in turn. In victory they suddenly stop looking like rich, pampered superstar athletes and become, instead, innocent young men bright with the realization that they are experiencing one of the great moments of their lives. The massed joy of the Spurs fans is itself a joy to behold. Never mind the scrappiness of the game. It’s the result that counts.

  George Graham is famous as a manager of “result teams,” teams that will somehow grind out the result they need without bothering too much about providing entertainment along the way. I can’t remember when the term was last applied to a Spurs lineup. It’s an Arsenal kind of concept. “Boring Arsenal” were also “Lucky Arsenal,” because of their habit of stealing games like this one. Well, who’s boring and lucky now?

  As I left the ground, beaming foolishly, a fellow Spurs fan recognized me and waved cheerily in my direction. “Gawd bless yer, Salman,” he yelled. I waved back, but I didn’t say what I wanted to say: Nah, not Gawd, mate, he doesn’t play for our team. Besides, who needs him when you’ve already got David Ginola; when you’re leaving Wembley Stadium with a win?

  April 1999

  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 farm
ing 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 tru
e 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.”