Bérnard-Henri Lévy champions Salman Rushdie for the Nobel Prize
It will have come as no surprise to just about anyone that the response of Bérnard-Henri Lévy, France’s pre-eminent public intellectual, to the murderous attack on Salman Rushdie in upstate New York was to launch a campaign, headed by himself, for Rushdie to be awarded this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature.
The prize – writing’s ultimate accolade – won’t be announced until October, but those in the frame have been under consideration for months and may or may not include Rushdie. The Nobels are not like the Oscars. No list of nominees is released in the lead-up to the big night. But if the author of Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses is included, then it is hard to see how he could not prevail.
The French rather resent the fact that their only internationally recognised living novelist is the brilliant but dedicatedly acerbic Michel Houellebecq – no laureate in waiting, he. They yearn for greater global recognition, generally accepted as making it to Number One on the New York Times bestsellers list. BHL, as Lévy likes to style himself (like LVMH, he is, he says, a global brand), has tried everything in a bid to make himself famous outside the Paris Périphérique. He has money (his father was a successful business tycoon); he has rakish good looks (though at 73 he should probably button up his shirt); and, as a co-founder of the [not so] Nouveaux Philosophes, he has the requisite intellectual credentials. But, unlike Rushdie, his membership of the A-list is, at best, pending.
He would pump his fist like a football manager if his books – and he has written more than 30 – became at last a publishing sensation. So determined was he to break through in the US that in 2007 he came out with American Vertigo, an update of Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville’s celebrated study of politics and society in the then infant republic.
Assessing this shameless retread of a timeless classic, in which, unlike De Tocqueville, he rubbished everyday Americans, the writer and broadcaster Garrison Keillor (since cancelled by Me Too for some minor sexual indiscretion), famously included in his New York Times review the dismissive rebuke, “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out”. Lévy (who must have learned of Keillor’s subsequent fate with undisguised glee) was offended. The putdown followed him for years. But he persevered.
He probably came closest with Public Enemies: Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World, which he co-wrote with – who else? – Houellebecq, in 2010. The New York Times reviewer Iain Buruma described the pot-boiler as “a brilliant satire on the vanity of writers”. He added, however, that Lévy’s over-the-top self-regard, on display on every other page, was “the false braggadocio of what Germans call a hochstapler, something between a boaster and an imposter, a well-known comic figure in European literature”.
In the end, all being well and assuming the Swedish Academy backs his nominee, Lévy’s best shot at glory might be to be seated close to Rushdie at this year’s Nobels, due to take place in December, alongside Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, the American satirist Bill Maher and Frances D’Souza (Baroness D’Souza), the respected free-speech campaigner and former Speaker of the House of Lords.
It was the Fatwa imposed on Rushdie back in 1989 for The Satanic Verses that made its author unique among celebrity authors. Writers like nothing more than to complain of the cruel world in which they are forced to function. If it isn’t money problems, it’s the stupidity and cupidity of critics that most upsets them. In the twenty-first century, cancellation, which, at its worst, cuts them off from the mostly young, woke-leaning liberal Establishment, is a fate they can hardly be expected to relish. Yet, having no alternative, they choose to wear it as a badge of honour.
A fatwa takes criticism to a whole new level. An actual sentence of death, imposed by a murderous regime that likes to hang its enemies from crane jibs, is a judgment most authors would go a long way to avoid, as would we all. But it was this grim decree, rather than his writing, that made Rushdie stand out from his peers. If the Grand Ayatollah Khomeini, had dismissed The Satanic Verses as irrelevant – a mere pinprick in the rear of a great religion – as Pope Paul VI did with Graham Greene’s anti-clerical masterpiece The Power and the Glory, the critics might conceivably have acclaimed Rushdie’s next novel, The Moor’s Last Sigh, shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of the 1996 Whitbread, as the superior product.
It was Rushdie’s brave and dignified acceptance of his plight that aroused the world’s admiration. For years his life was put on hold. Only after the death of Khomeini, as his “blasphemy” faded into history, was he able to live anything like a normal life. It was then, as a frequent guest on talk shows and at literary festivals, that he came across as not just gutsy but, at his best, when the mood caught him, disarmingly entertaining.
In France, of course, where Houellebecq has chosen to walk a fine line, the use of words, and cartoons, to take on extremism has produced its own martyrs. The attack by Islamists on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in 2015 left 12 people dead and 11 others seriously wounded. One of the first to condemn what happened was Rushdie, who lost no time in identifying with the victims.
As did Lévy. For America’s news media, the French intello, with his shirt unbuttoned almost to his belly-button, was the go-to guy to explain what had happened in Paris and to put it in context – which he did, effectively and with passion.
Seven years on, in consideration of the vicious assault on his fellow writer at a conference dedicated to free speech, he has taken it unto himself to be Rushdie’s sponsor for the Nobel Prize. Perhaps – who knows? – he could even stand in for him at the ceremony itself. “This act of absolute terror,” he wrote in an article commissioned by Le Journal du Dimanche, “is an attack on all the books and all the words of the world [and] calls for a dazzling response.” It is not hard to imagine Lévy looking up at this point to let the light fall on his craggy features. “The campaign,” he said, “begins now.”