The stabbing of Salman Rushdie: A fellow author’s personal reflection

The horrific, near-fatal stabbing of celebrated author Salman Rushdie on a lecture stage in Chautauqua, N.Y., provoked a small but not unrelated memory; I — someone who has also measured out a life putting one sentence after another — needed to find some clarity in all that had happened.

A lifetime ago, as a restless, ambitious 20-year-old with a year of graduate school under my belt, I found myself dismayingly marooned at my parents’ Bronx home for a few weeks before my real summer could start. 

And so it was that on a stifling hot June afternoon, hoping to ease the monotony of this brief interregnum between school and a looming adventure with friends, I sat down at the pale-green Hermes typewriter I had lugged back from Palo Alto. Something I had seen previously on an evening stroll with my younger sister had started me thinking.

The geographic anchor — at least that’s how it’d always seemed to me — of the north Bronx neighborhood of Riverdale, where I grew up, was a weathered stone bell tower. It had been erected long ago to commemorate the soldiers who fought in World War I. “The Monument,” everyone called it. 

But when I accompanied Missy (these days, under her more adult name of Marcy, she is arguably the nation’s most sought-after wedding planner) as she set out to rendezvous with her barely-teenage crew, the crowd of kids on the stone portico that surrounded The Monument was a revelation. They looked like they had assembled for a casting call for “Hair.” It was a defiant sea of wild locks, bell bottoms and love beads. And, of course, the pungent, mischievous smell of pot wafted through the still Bronx evening — a siren call, I imagined, to those high school kids still uncomfortably moored to their parents’ dinner tables.  

I took it all in with some astonishment. This was, after all, starchy and sedate Riverdale, not the fountain in Washington Square Park. The times, as the poet had promised, were indeed a changin’. No doubt about it — the Riverdale burghers’ sons and daughters were “beyond their command.”

So, with a particularly heavy and gleeful hand, I wrote up what I had seen, as well as all that I intuited was brewing. Consider, for malicious example, my apocalyptic description of the kids’ blatant use of psychedelics, and how “little girls who had never been kissed had their minds raped.” Then, after typing a professional “-30-” at the end of my account, as I had been taught to do on the college newspaper, I put the pages in a manila envelope and mailed it to “Editor, The Village Voice.”

It was a real kick (and certainly a surprise) when the piece ran in the Voice — heady stuff for a young man lugging around lots of adult dreams. But it was pretty much forgotten once the summer was in full swing and I was up on Martha’s Vineyard with a couple of friends, running a decidedly makeshift operation we’d christened “Martha’s Mid-Summer Film Festival.”

Then came the call from my father. “Do you know what you have done?” he challenged ominously.

I could only wonder; there were lots of possibilities. But this one I hadn’t expected: The Riverdale Press, the neighborhood’s weekly paper, had taken indignant aim at my Village Voice piece in a fuming editorial whose banner headline ran across an entire page. Rather than confront the myriad implications of the wild scene I had described, the editorial made nasty work of me, the Voice and, in a particularly apoplectic tirade, compared the green pastures of the north Bronx with the garbage-strewn streets of Greenwich Village. It was all-out generational warfare and to my reading, at least, I was portrayed as the ring-leader of some sort of hippie cabal that was poised to run wild through the neighborhood.

It was an awakening to me, a first-hand lesson in the high-voltage power of the written word. You sit quietly at your desk putting sentences together, but once they go off into the world, the words can shake people up and have unanticipated consequences. Take my father, as a besieged example. He was put on the defensive, the butt of some remarkably snide comments, as a result of his wayward son’s unrestrained pen. It shook him up; he wasn’t used to this sort of thing. And I felt tremendously guilty about the predicament into which I had shoved my unsuspecting, embarrassed dad.

Now, I am not comparing my being the subject of a mean-spirited editorial to a vicious, steely fatwa decreeing a death sentence in 1989 on the author of “The Satanic Verses” and on “all involved in its publication.” Nor am I placing my scribblings on a plane with Rushdie’s magisterial, imaginative, and so very carefully wrought novel; his talent is remarkable and wondrous.

My point is about the freedom of the press, and about its power, too. 

The Riverdale Press, the neighborhood newspaper that came out swinging against 20-year-old me, also had its say about Salman Rushdie. After several national-chain bookstores cowered to the ayatollahs’ threats and refused to sell “The Satanic Verses,” the Press took them to task and, in addition, gave a shout-out to a courageous local bookstore that defiantly continued to sell the novel. 

What was the reaction to this editorial? Days later, the paper’s offices went up in smoke; a firebomb had been hurled into it by some terrorist. But the gutsy local newspaper patched itself up, kept on publishing and, nine years later, a new editor — the son of the man who had torn into me — wrote an impassioned editorial decrying Penguin’s decision not to publish a paperback of Rushdie’s novel. “The need to defend our fragile civilization remains undiminished,” Bernard Stein wrote in the piece’s penultimate sentence. It was an editorial that was cited, among others, when Stein won the 1998 Pulitzer for Editorial Writing.

That’s what is brought so searingly home to me in the aftermath of the barbaric attack on Rushdie: the need to keep civilization and an open society flourishing with the sweet discord of a multitude of voices. Let the 20-year-old preening upstarts have their say. Let the visionary novelists spin their provocative tales. Let the storefront neighborhood newspapers continue to call them as they see them. It’s all part of the same gushing force of ideas that feeds and energizes the life of our times. It’s the cacophony that keeps civilization singing.

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Howard Blum is a former reporter for The New York Times and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. He is the author of several bestselling books, most recently “The Spy Who Knew Too Much: An Ex-CIA Officer’s Quest Through a Legacy of Betrayal” (HarperCollins). His non-fiction book, “Night of the Assassins,” is being developed by Sony as a limited series.