LIFE INTIMIDATES ART

A thoughtful letter from Erica Jong to the Editor of the New York Times published yesterday (Sunday August 5).

To the Editor:

Rachel Donadio’s summary of the trans-Atlantic response to Salman Rushdie’s “Satanic Verses” (“Fighting Words,” July 15) caught my attention because I happened to be president of the Authors Guild when that book was published in America.

What I remember most from that time was the rampant hypocrisy of the response. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had issued the fatwa on Feb. 14, 1989, and several translators and publishers had paid with life or limb. I was particularly concerned because one of the victims of the fatwa was my and Rushdie’s Norwegian publisher, William Nygaard, who was wounded in an attack provoked by the fatwa.

The winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize in Literature, Naguib Mahfouz, correctly assailed Khomeini for “intellectual terrorism,” and V. S. Naipaul, who won the prize in 2001, wryly labeled Khomeini’s fatwa “an extreme form of literary criticism.”

But for the people who died or were critically wounded by the attacks the fatwa inspired, this was no occasion for clever remarks. In the face of these attacks, the entire membership of the Authors Guild voted to support Rushdie’s right to publish and protested when Rushdie’s publishers tried to suppress the paperback edition of his book out of fear that bookstore and publishing personnel would be injured.

To read the rest of the letter use this link.

Author pic from her website.