Terrorism The New Satans

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On Wednesday some 200 members of the National Writers Union demonstrated in front of the Iranian mission to the United Nations. And in New York City's SoHo district, 21 American writers, including Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag and Joan Didion, met to exchange brave words and read passages from the Rushdie novel. Christopher Hitchens, a columnist for the Nation, received the loudest response when he said, "Until the threat of murder by contract is lifted, all authors should declare themselves as coconspirators. It is time for all of us to don the yellow star and end the hateful isolation of our colleague." In a grander flight of moral outrage, Mailer told the crowd, "Khomeini has offered us the opportunity to regain our frail religion, which happens to be faith in the power of words and our willingness to suffer for them."

On a lighter note, Mailer said he suspected the odds against a customer suffering harm while browsing at a bookstore were close to 100,000 to 1. "Such odds, if widely promulgated," he observed, "would have brought in many prospective customers looking for the spice of a very small risk." ; Biographer Robert Massie, president of the 6,500-member Authors Guild, offered a practical suggestion: he urged writers to ask publishers to withdraw their books from chains that had removed the Rushdie novel from their shelves.

Once again the bookstore chains bent with the wind. They had suffered a direct hit earlier in the week when New York Times columnist William Safire rebuked them: "Even for ever-merging Big Publishing, below the bottom line is another line marked 'freedom.' " At midweek B. Dalton, which also owns the Barnes & Noble stores, announced that "at the urging of an overwhelming majority of its store managers and employees," it would again stock the Rushdie novel. Waldenbooks said it would stick to its policy of selling the book but not displaying it, though local managers were permitted to put it on the shelves if they chose to. For the moment, the talk was theoretical, since the book was sold out in the U.S.

As for Rushdie, he remained in hiding. With him was his American wife, novelist Marianne Wiggins, who canceled her U.S. book tour to promote her new novel, John Dollar.

Rushdie's friends worried aloud about how he could make a life for himself under the Ayatullah's threat of death. Would he hire guards, or remain in seclusion, or retreat to some distant land? Few held out any hope that Khomeini would simply change his mind because the real victims of the Rushdie affair were not only the hapless author and his wife but the 50 million citizens of revolutionary Iran. After a decade of terror and death, the country had seemed to be in the early stages of recovery. But by his actions last week Khomeini brought that healing process to a halt.