Free Step Across This Line by Salman Rushdie

game.”
    What shall I do with these ideas? agonizes Asmahan, and perhaps the best answer lies in her indomitable grandmother’s advice. “Remember who we are. Make sure the larder and the fridge are never empty.” In this, her finest novel, fluently translated by Catherine Cobham, Hanan al-Shaykh makes that act of remembrance, joining it to an unforgettable portrait of a broken city. It should be read by everyone who cares about the truths behind the clichéd Beirut of the TV news; and by everyone who cares about the more enduring, and universal, truths of the heart.
    March 1995
     

Arthur Miller at Eighty
    [
Originally delivered as part of a birthday celebration for and of Arthur Miller at the University of East Anglia
]
    Arthur Miller’s is not only a great life; it is also a great book,
Timebends,
an autobiography that reads like a great American novel—as if Bellow’s Augie March had grown up to be a tall Jewish playwright and had, in Bellow’s famous words, “made the record in his own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.”
    In an age when much literature and even more literary criticism has turned inward, losing itself in halls of mirrors, Arthur Miller’s double insistence on the reality of the real, and on the moral function of writing, sounds once again as radical as it did in his youth. “The effort to locate in the human species a counterforce to the randomness of victimization,” he calls it, adding, “But, as history has taught, that force can only be moral. Unfortunately.”
    When a great writer reaches a great age, the temptation to turn him into an institution, into a statue of himself, is easily succumbed to. But to read Miller is to discover, on every page, the enduring relevance of his thought: “The ultimate human mystery,” he writes, “may not be anything more than the claims on us of clan and race, which may yet turn out to have the power, because they defy the rational mind, to kill the world.” The sharpness of such perceptions makes Miller very much our contemporary, a man for this season as well as all his others. Willy Loman’s line “I still feel kind of temporary about myself” is also the way Arthur Miller says he has always felt. “This desire to move on, to metamorphose—or perhaps it is a talent for being contemporary—was given me as life’s inevitable condition.” In Miller, the temporary and the contemporary are united, and shown to be the same thing.
    Miller’s genius has always been to reveal what the opening stage directions to
Death of a Salesman
call the “dream rising out of reality.” By paying attention, he discovers the miraculous within the real. His is a life dedicated as passionately to the remembrance, and the enlivening through art, of the small and the unconsidered as it is to the articulation of the great moral issues of the day. Here, in his autobiography, is an endless sequence of men and women caught in wonderful cameos: the great-grandfather who was “an orchestra of scents—each of his gestures smelled different”; and the rabbi who stole the dying patriarch’s diamonds, and had to be beaten up by the dying man before he returned them; and Mr. Dozick the pharmacist, who sewed up Miller’s brother’s ear on his drugstore table; and the Polish school bully who taught Miller some early lessons in anti-Semitism; and Lucky Luciano in Palermo, nostalgic for America, and scarily over-generous, so that Miller began to fear being lost in the Bunyanesque “swamp of Something for Nothing, from which there is no return.”
    Moral stature is a rare quality in these degraded days. Very few writers possess it. Miller’s seems innate but was much increased because he was able to learn from his mistakes. Like Günter Grass, who was brought up in a Nazi household and had the dizzying experience, after the war, of learning that everything he had believed to be true was a lie, Arthur Miller has