“Happiness writes in white ink on a white page.”
The French writer Henry de Montherlant said it; these days, the words have been spilling from Salman Rushdie’s lips as he makes the rounds talking about his new memoir, “Knife: Mediations After an Attempted Murder.”
I just started reading the book in which, as the title suggests, Rushdie reflects on matters of life and death after a near-fatal stabbing in August 2022. He was getting ready to deliver a public lecture — ironically about the United States as a safe haven for exiled writers — at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York when his assailant attacked him with a knife. Rushdie’s injuries were grave and he spent the first 24 hours in hospital laboring on a ventilator. He lost his right eye and part of his small intestine but he recovered well enough to write another brilliant book.
Itopens with the attack, which, as tragic as it was, has all the ingredients of what Rushdie says a writer needs to tell a compelling story. I first heard him mention the de Montherlant quote in a Master Class on writing, recorded the year before the attempted murder. What Montherlant meant, of course, is that happiness and joy are hard to write about. It’s like writing in white ink on white paper. It simply doesn’t show up.
“Without conflict, it’s hard to have drama,” Rushdie says in his Master Class. “If people are happy, there’s no story.”
Rushdie is known for his fiction but I can see my journalist friends nodding their heads in agreement. At the crux of every powerful nonfiction narrative is conflict, tension, a problem or a central question begging to be answered. Otherwise, the story falls flat. Otherwise, what is the driver of the story? Its engine? Why would readers keep reading paragraph after paragraph if the main character is happy or worry-free all the time?
So now, in this memoir, R
ushdie has found in himself an ideal character, a man who had indeed found contentment and utter joy after meeting his fifth wife, the poet and photographer Rachel Eliza Griffiths. And that his life in New York City had been happy to the point that he felt guilty about it, especially during the pandemic.
In that sense, he had been white ink on white paper until that fateful August day when his Ralph Lauren suit turned crimson and the ink suddenly turned black.
I met Rushdie once, on one of his early visits to Emory University, which houses his archives. My friend Teresa Weaver was then book editor at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and she graciously invited me to tag along for a private reception.
I couldn’t tell you exactly why but I had always thought of Rushdie as somewhat of a haughty human. Perhaps it was the language of his books or perhaps it was how I perceived Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s fatwa condemning Rushdie to death for “The Satanic Verses” had affected him.
But he was a kind and gentle soul.
We shared wine and laughs and he was genuinely interested in my work. He enquired after my Indian origins and we both shared a story or two about the India that once was.
I thought of that evening as I began reading “Knife.” It is Rushdie’s second memoir — He penned Joseph Anton (the name he chose to go by after the 1989 fatwa) about his time in hiding and the numerous threats to his life.
I have many chapters of “Knife” left to read but so far, Rushdie’s words are in line with the man I met. I hope, after all that he has endured, he has found happiness again and that the story of his own life is once again written in ink white enough to not show up on a page.
