Has the writing community given you the support you've needed during the fatwa?
There were a few disappointing moments, but the overwhelming majority of the people in the literary community did really very well. The backsliding was really in the political area, and actually journalists are the ones who have a lot to answer for. A lot of journalists do not come out of this so well.
How so?
I don't know about here, but certainly in Britain there are journalists who are not interested in truth, they are interested in the angle. And no matter how closely a given angle may correspond to the truth, once it's been used for a while you need a new angle. So the original angle was entirely sympathetic toward me, how appalling that such a thing could happen. And that lasted for a while and eventually you needed a new angle. So the next angle was, "Where does he get off thinking we should care about him?"
So this interesting discovery -- that journalism is interested in angles, not in truths -- created some difficulties. There were some journalists who just felt that, because most of their fellows and most of the members of their social milieu would automatically side with me, the interesting thing was to take the other point of view. And that led to some very nasty hatchet jobs, of which although there were probably more in England than there were here, the very nastiest one that ever appeared was in America a few years ago in Esquire magazine. It was an ostensible profile, written by somebody I've never met, never even spoken to, the defamatory content of which was so extraordinary as to be genuinely surrealistic. He said that my friends ran prostitution services for me, it was just amazing, lie after lie after lie.
I wrote (Esquire) and said I thought this really was way beyond what was acceptable, and I didn't propose to sue them because that wasn't what I thought should happen. But I thought they should publish an acknowledgment that there were factual errors. I said if you don't like me that's up to you, but you should not lie about me. And I itemized in this letter some 14 serious errors and said this is not opinion, this is verifiable fact. Check it. And I said this is an indication of what this journalist was up to because he did not check it, or having checked it, nonetheless persisted. They never published anything, needless to say. Anyway the editor got fired after that so I felt a bit better. I'm sure that because, even more in America than in England, the almost universal journalistic attitude was supportive, this guy on the make thought, "How do I get some attention here?" Actually he is a complete shit.