Give Me Everything You Have

SIR

Aside from anything else, this was just plain puzzling to me. She had never, as far as I remembered, said anything about Jews before, let alone “yelled and screamed” about them, and I’d never raised the subject myself. I’d published, long before I met her, a book of poems that explored some of the convolutions of my own Anglo-Jewish background, as well as an article about my father that further aired the subject, and Nasreen had-as later became apparent-read both, but in both it is manifestly clear, or I thought it was, that I am not a supporter of Israel’s military policy, let alone any kind of Zionist, so it was very strange to find myself cast suddenly as some kind of would-be silencer of Arabs. Still, this was a relatively benign, even tentative, sounding of the new motif: a test, perhaps, to see how she herself was going to feel about elevating the terms of her grievance against me into something more grand and global.

Judging from the first email to arrive the next morning, she felt all right about it:

I think the holocaust was fucking funny and about as hilarious as the holocaust industry…

How about that, SIR?

The same email introduces another new theme, also to become a major element in the sustained tirade that had just begun. This was my apparent misconduct as a teacher, in which capacity I was now accused of having deliberately humiliated her:

You’re so self-serving, you were willing to try to make the stupid class made up of a bunch of shitty American low-lives laugh at my expense after Thanksgiving break.

“Oh, and how was your thanksgiving, Nasreen?”

I had no idea what this referred to, but anyway had no time to think about it: a few minutes later another email arrived, bringing another major new theme into play: my apartment, though as yet it was unclear what her precise target was here. “Morgan College, your brothel,” runs the heading:

that’s what it is. that’s why you have that apartment you would not consider giving up to ACTUALLY HELP SOMEONE.

A little later she returns to the theme of my exploiting her life in my work, spiking it with the following (presumably) sarcastic suggestion, and thereby introducing yet another theme into the great fugue of hatred and malice that thundered over my life for the next several years, namely the reprehensible nature of my writing in general:

why don’t you write some more exotic stories about fucking your servants?

This, as she confirmed in the next, more public phase of her attack, refers to a short story of mine, “The Siege,” about a relationship between an Englishman and a married woman from an unnamed third-world country who lives in his basement and cleans his house in lieu of rent. Half an hour later my novel The Horned Man comes in for similar treatment:

what is the bottom line of horned man? that men should fuck everything in sight so they don’t become underground psycho killers?

Fresh attacks began the next morning. At one point she forwarded another round of correspondence with her English academic, with whom she was now also discussing my various wrongdoings:

He took verbatim things I’d written him in an email and just tacked it onto his story. I’m sure my thoughts and ideas are all over his work by now… But he’s a fraud and it’ll all be exposed…

The intent here, among other things, seemed to be to convey to me that she was now planning to go public with her accusations, which indeed turned out to be the case, though not until those accusations had been substantially beefed up.

I was in a state of extreme bewilderment by now, my head reeling every time a new email arrived. K- did her best to calm me down, telling me there was no point getting upset by something so obviously crazy. Her relaxed attitude to life has been a source of immeasurable comfort to me throughout our marriage in general and this saga in particular. But I’ve never quite learned to make it my own, and outside the immediate field of her practical good sense I would soon lapse back into my own more familiar, gnawing anxiety. At this point the anxiety was still closer to bafflement than to actual dread. Among other things, I simply couldn’t connect the ferocity of Nasreen’s words with the quiet, articulate student I had taught at Morgan College, or even with the annoyingly compulsive emailer she had become later. There was an untraversable chasm, it seemed to me, between this eruption of verbal violence and everything that had gone before. My silence, however poorly Nasreen understood it (but I think she understood it well enough-why else all those promises to leave me alone for a bit?), didn’t seem enough to explain what had happened, but then what did? Had she really “gone crazy,” or was this all simply a desperate attempt to get me to react, a mask of madness put on to provoke a response? Possibly. At 9:36 that evening comes the cry:

You fucking faggot coward, say something!

She couldn’t know it, of course, but I had been wanting very badly to “say something” since the beginning of this onslaught, and in fact had typed out several emails to her, some enraged, some trying to strike a conciliatory note, some explaining at length all the reasons for my silence over the past few months. But in every case something had held me back from hitting the send button. Aside from my confusion about what to say, I was suddenly wary of what this forwarder of emails might do with anything I might send her.

I didn’t know much, at that time, about the protocols of forging or altering emails from other people and resending them to recipients of your choice, or of determining the true identity of the sender (I have since become an expert), but instinctively, it seemed a mistake to deliver anything containing my own electronic DNA into Nasreen’s possession. Though I didn’t quite know it yet, I had entered the realm of stricken enchantment in which technology and psychology overlap, where the magical thinking of the primitive mind, with its susceptibility to spells, curses, witchcraft of every kind, converges with the paranoias peculiar to our own age.

9:45 p.m.:

Do you have to be the stereotype of a Jew, James?

A few seconds later:

I’m NOT in love with you, I want your apartment

9:48 p.m.:

give me your fucking keys.

By the next day, August 2, I have become fully identified with Bush’s America: “your troops coming home…,” runs the heading,

I hope they die, every single one of your money-making gangster lowlives…

And a little later, in self-reflexive mode again, comes the comment:

I think this is called verbal terrorism.

I hadn’t heard that phrase before. But as I came to appreciate Nasreen’s grasp of the dynamics of assymetric conflict, where she had apparently nothing to lose, and I had everything, I realized that it was peculiarly apposite. I, as an Anglo-American Jew, a family man, a published author, a middle-aged male in a position of power (at least from her perspective), was the axis of, shall we say, “virtue,” while she, in her own mind at least, was the lone jihadi. It took a while for her to figure out the exact nature of her mission, but when it did finally clarify itself in her mind, she laid it out in her characteristically succinct and forceful way:

“I will ruin him.”

One hot morning, as K- and I were on the porch of our barn, drawing maps, the phone rang. It was Janice Schwartz, my agent, and she sounded upset. For several days she had been receiving strange, unpleasant emails about me from Nasreen. She hadn’t wanted to tell me at first, but now she herself was being attacked in the emails, and she was concerned for her safety. That morning a woman sounding very like Nasreen had called her. “Can I speak to Meir Kahane?” the woman had asked, before hanging up. Meir Kahane was the ultra-Zionist rabbi whose follower Baruch Goldstein had massacred Muslims praying in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron. Kahane himself was assassinated in 1990, shot in the neck.

Janice forwarded me the emails. The first, dated August 1, strikes a businesslike tone:

Janice,

I’m sure James is not reading my emails anymore, so I’d appreciate it if you’d tell him that I didn’t appreciate him using my words and ideas I’d expressed in emails verbatim in the short story about the psychotic jaywalker.

The next is less controlled:

… after reading that short story in which my private words to him jumped at me (and I’m not talking about silly stock-character shit like her drug use, but, rather, her feelings on surrender and vulnerability), I’m left to think that he was being parasitic. Seductively parasitic.

And I’m pissed. And I wanted to share it with you. Why not? You’re not interested in my work and you support your little boy and all he can do to bring you both money.

So, as you can see, reading the psychotic jaywalker story has made me very angry.

“His future stories…,” runs the heading of the next:

Better not be things he stole from me. Listen, lady I’m a real person who’s spent her whole life trying to survive because I live in a fucked up sadistic country…

… if your little boy, who you’re so impressed with for aping a white Englishman, steals anything else from me and I have to see it in print when I deserved to be given a level playing field to write my novel, not pumped for his amusement, there will be hell to pay.

I’m livid-and rightfully so

I was not put on earth to feed James Lasdun’s children. I hope you can understand that.

Later that day Nasreen sets her sights on Paula Kurwen, the editor to whom Janice had introduced her. For the moment Paula’s offense is merely that she “was an elegant middle-class post-Nazi era Jewess living in America. In other words, she was privileged.” Nevertheless, she, too, is implicated: “You all play a part in unleashing the fury.”

A minute or so later, with this “fury” now apparently reaching for terms strong enough to account for its own escalating intensity, Nasreen brings on one of those words that scorch everything they come near. The word is “rape.” It isn’t the first time she has used it, but it is the first time she has used it in connection with me, and even though she uses it figuratively rather than literally, I feel immediately the disfiguring potency of its touch, as if I have been splashed with acid:

I say if I can’t write my book and get emotionally and verbally raped by James Lasdun, a Jew disguising himself as an English-American, well then, the Holocaust Industry Books should all be banned as should the films.

It is one thing to be abused in private: you experience it almost as an internal event, not so different from listening to the more punitive voices in your own head. But to have other people, people you know and care about, brought into the drama, whether as witnesses or collateral victims or both, is another matter. It confers a different order of reality on the abuse: fuller and more objective. This strange, awful thing really is happening to you, and people are witnessing it.

Along with the accusations of theft, Janice had also received details of my supposed (but entirely fictitious) affair with Nasreen’s former classmate Elaine, complete with descriptions of various kinky sexual practices that Nasreen claimed to have heard I went in for (she had an uncanny way with that transparent and yet curiously effective device of rumor, the unattributed source: “I’m told he…” “I hear he…” “Everyone knows he…”).

Regardless of whether Janice believed a word of these emails (and she assured me she didn’t), my impulse was to deny them indignantly. But even as I was forming the words I felt the futility of doing so. Intrinsic to the very nature of Nasreen’s denunciations and insinuations was, as I began to understand, an iron law whereby the more I denied them, the more substance they would acquire, and the more plausible they would begin to seem. Their very wildness was a part of their peculiar power. On the basis of there being no smoke without fire (so I imagined Janice, and then Paula, and then, as things got worse, all sorts of other people, thinking), surely something as black and billowing as these emails must indicate that I was guilty of something, and that even if I wasn’t unscrupulous or weird or fucked up in the precise way Nasreen claimed, I probably was in some other, related way. For the first time in my life I began to consider the word “honor” as something more than an antique formula, and the word “reputation” as something other than an index of value in the literary marketplace.

But the “psychotic jaywalker.”

Something bizarre happened to me when I first arrived in New York, in 1986. I was walking down a quiet street in the West Village when I heard a woman’s voice calling “Sir, sir, excuse me, sir” from a window at the top of a narrow town house. The door to her apartment was stuck, she said, and she was trapped inside. Would I come up and help her get it open? She sounded pleasant enough, laughing a little at her own helplessness, but I’d heard too many horror stories about New York not to be suspicious, and my instinct was to keep moving. Still, I hesitated, and a moment later I was gloomily climbing the dark stairway to her floor, certain I was being set up to be mugged.

Outside her apartment I tried opening the door with the handle, but I couldn’t get it to engage with the opening mechanism. I pushed the door, but that didn’t work either. “Try taking a run at it,” the woman called from the other side. The imagined mugging gave way, in my mind, to something worse: I was going to be framed for breaking and entering or whatever they called it here, blackmailed, sent home in disgrace… Resigning myself, I went to the end of the narrow hallway and ran full tilt at the door, hurling myself against it as hard as I could. It flew open, revealing a cluttered, brick-walled studio, with a bed in the corner and the woman-dark-haired, well dressed, attractive-looking at me, startled. She thanked me profusely. There was no mugger, no blackmail camera, nothing untoward at all.

But as I stood in the doorway, the situation seemed to take on a new, unexpected complexion, in which I myself was the source of menace. I was a man who had just broken open the door to a strange woman’s apartment, and this large fact somehow overshadowed, even seemed to obliterate, the perfectly innocent explanation behind it. The woman appeared suddenly nervous. She did ask if she could offer me a cup of coffee, but I felt she was doing so only out of politeness and that to accept, even just to linger there talking to her (both of which I found myself wanting to do), would have been to take advantage of the situation in an underhand way. I declined politely and left, reflecting on how the desire to appear scrupulously honorable (itself based entirely on the fact that I had found her attractive and wanted her to find me attractive) had required me to do precisely the thing that would guarantee no further contact between us.

There was something else too that lingered with me: an atmospheric quality that, like the equivocal mood of certain dreams, continually drew my mind toward it but then, every time I came close to identifying what it was, seemed to evaporate.

For months I tried to write a story about the episode, but I couldn’t figure out how to make it work as fiction. Twenty years later, however, just before I set off for Provence with my family, I found myself thinking of it again and a new approach occurred to me.

This consisted of telling the story in two parts: one from the man’s point of view, the other from the woman’s. The first part kept close to the facts as I recalled them. The second was of course purely speculative, and reflected a change in the way I had come to think about the woman herself, a change based on that dim sense I’d had of some mysterious further dimension to the encounter, which I had never satisfactorily accounted for. Unlike the simple, practical-minded damsel in distress I had made of her at the time (a projection, I suppose, of my own relative naïveté-I was twenty-eight), she is now a complicated figure: isolated, a bit reckless, and full of strong desires of her own. Her door has jammed once in the past, we discover. She called to a man for help and after he forced it open, the two of them, jarred out of their usual selves, ended up in her bed. Since then, she has taken to jamming the door deliberately when she feels like company, and watching at the window for men to lure up (though “lure” suggests something sinister, whereas all she wants is the warmth and connection of freely reciprocated desire). The Englishman she beckons up on the day the story takes place turns out to be younger and more innocent-looking than she had judged from his appearance on the street below her, and this unsettles her. His polite reserve makes her even more nervous, but she perseveres, offering him the usual cup of coffee. His refusal, followed by his abrupt disappearance, upsets her badly-this hasn’t happened before. Still, with the help of a stiff drink she recovers, and soon, having reset the catch in the door, she is back at her window, fondly remembering past encounters while gazing down at the street in preparation for the next.

There are no drugs in the story (only a glass of vodka), and no jaywalkers, psychotic or otherwise, but this is the story Nasreen refers to as my “psychotic jaywalker” story. I wrote it quickly and sent it off before we flew to Marseille. It was published in a British magazine while we were in Provence, and at some point was put in the magazine’s online archive, where Nasreen found it, presumably while “google-stalking” me.

In her many accusations of theft concerning this story, she never spelled out exactly what it was I was supposed to have stolen. But she did copy me on emails that she had begun sending out to other people (the public-defamation aspect of her campaign was widening now, and she wanted me to know about it) in which my various misdeeds are recounted, among them this alleged plagiarism. Even in these emails the details are a bit hazy, but they center on the idea of surrender. The clearest statement of them comes in an email she copied me on, to a former classmate-I’ll call her Sandy-in which Nasreen writes:

well, the piece James wrote and why it bothered me was there was a section and in that section he wrote, nearly verbatim, what i’d said to him-my ideas on surrender (I was linking sado-masochism with the image of the lady of justice, balancing scales…)

… this was my conversation about it and surrender (islam means surrender)… and not only did he co-opt it, he made the character out to be a psychotic jaywalker…

It is possible that Nasreen did send me an email talking about such things, and that it was among the many from that early, friendly phase that I didn’t keep. It’s also possible that her words resembled the passage she seems to be referring to in my story, where the woman reflects on her discovery of the inverse power of surrender. The passage in my story begins: “There were ways in which the world forced itself on you and you had no choice but to yield. But there were also ways of using your own weakness as a source of strength.”

A description of how the woman discovered this paradoxical strength follows, along with details of times in her past when she has used it, and then the passage concludes: “It wasn’t about willpower; it was about submission. That was the glory of it.”

Early on in this steadily deepening crisis, I began to find myself drifting occasionally into a courtroom fantasy in which I was defending myself against Nasreen’s various charges. On the subject of this alleged theft, I would picture myself taking the stand with a calm expression that nevertheless contained a glint of clenched anger. Strutting before me, thumbs hooked in his waistcoat as he grins and winks at the jury, Nasreen’s attorney reads out the passage I have quoted above and asks if the words and thoughts are entirely my own.

Yes, I reply.

He asks if I recall an email from Nasreen in which she discusses similar ideas about the secret power inherent in the gesture of surrender or, as I put it, “submission” (and he assumes a snide expression here, as if to imply that nobody is fooled by my substitution of a synonym for his client’s word).

I do not, I tell him.

With a sly grin he produces an email, dated sometime in 2006, and reads aloud a few sentences in which Nasreen does, indeed, appear to be articulating a similar idea. The jury members look at me askance.

Well, sir, the attorney says, I suppose you will now attempt to persuade the court that the resemblance, the remarkably close resemblance if I may say so, between these two passages is purely coincidental?

No, I say, it isn’t coincidental at all.

The attorney looks startled, though he contrives to give his shock a deliberately staged appearance.

Oh?

Both passages are borrowed, I tell him. From the same source.

Indeed?

He rolls his eyes a little in the direction of the jury: this fellow before us appears to be not only a scoundrel and a fraud but also the village idiot, and we must now prepare ourselves to be greatly amused.

Leaving aside your earlier statement, he continues, that these thoughts were entirely your own, and passing over the question of whether you have therefore just admitted to perjuring yourself, perhaps you would be good enough to tell us what this common source might be?

Certainly.

Reaching into my briefcase, I produce a battered paperback, and hand out photocopies of a page from the book’s introductory essay, drawing the jury’s attention to the following passage, concerning the importance of the gesture of renunciation to the author under discussion:

The closer you look at him, the more central the gesture seems, both to his life and his writing, and the more it appears to invert itself into a paradoxical tool for its opposite, taking possession.

The attorney frowns, pantomiming irritated bewilderment as to the relevance of this, but I read on, quoting another passage, highlighted in fluorescent yellow marker for the jury’s benefit, that describes how the act of renunciation becomes:

a means of leveraging one’s very powerlessness so as to exert power…

Darting a glance at the jury, the attorney gives his copy of the pages a dismissive shake.

Even suppose we accept some similarity in the general sentiments here, he says, why should we accept that this essay rather than my client’s email was the source of your words?

Because I wrote it, I tell him, icily.

I let the jury examine the book, a New York Review of Books edition of Italo Svevo’s novel As a Man Grows Older. On its cover are the words “Introduction by James Lasdun.” In the front matter is the publication date, 2001.

While they absorb the implications of this, I reach into my briefcase for more books and photocopies. Here is the Penguin Classics edition of D. H. Lawrence’s St. Mawr, published in 2006, with my introduction, from which I read my analysis of the heroine’s journey as yet another instance of the power of letting go:

Lou’s grand processional journey from London to New Mexico takes her through a series of shatterings and disavowals: friendship, love, marriage, England, St. Mawr himself… These function as the principle of growth in her psyche:

she becomes steadily more capacious as a character with everything she relinquishes.

Here is a volume of my poetry from 1997 with a poem about a man who gives away all his possessions:

… each object’s

Hollowed-out void successively

More vivid in him than the thing itself,

As if renouncing merely gave

Density to having…

After passing out a few more samples further illustrating the point, I rest my case. And from the sympathetic looks directed at me from the jury, it seems to me I have proved not only that the ideas about surrender in my “psychotic jaywalker” story are not taken from Nasreen, but also that any ideas Nasreen may have believed she herself had on that subject are most likely (avid reader of my work as her emails show her to be) taken from me.

It’s a consoling fantasy, and it serves the function it evolved to fulfill: of enabling me to exonerate myself, over and over, in the arena of public opinion, which (as I imagined it in my increasingly harried state) was a vast space full of people with nothing better to do than examine me and watch me suffer.

But there is a private question that lingers:

Why, after being unable to write that story for twenty years, was I suddenly able to write it when I did?

Was it because I finally had a character-Nasreen’s-on whom to model the woman in the story, and thereby bring it to life? If so, what does that say about my perception of Nasreen, and what does this perception say about my interest in her?

I hadn’t been conscious of modeling the woman on her. There is no particular physical resemblance between them, no suggestion of anything Middle Eastern about the woman’s background, which, to the small extent that I describe it, is thoroughly American.

Her behavior, however, is another matter. For one thing, it now seems to me completely implausible. What real woman would do this: fake a broken door to lure men up to her apartment in the hope of a spontaneous fuck? I had been reading Maupassant’s stories around the time of writing, and I think I imagined this action of hers would come over as something like the hard-edged erotic avidity you find in his studies of Parisian men and women, with something amusingly worldly and raffish about it. But it doesn’t come over as anything like that. It comes over as the action of a woman who is either seriously disturbed, or else very obviously just a cipher in a fantasy of the writer who dreamed her up.

The notion of an attractive woman offering herself with no strings attached and no need for the effort or skills of seduction (no need, in fact, for any preliminaries at all) is, I imagine, a fairly standard component of male fantasy. It certainly is in mine. A voice calls to you from on high, from out of the blue, like some supernatural being who has read your mind, heard your prayer, the mumble of your everlasting need, which may be narrowly sexual or may have more to do with jolting yourself out of the settled patterns of your life, however pleasant that life might be, and all you have to do is acquiesce, surrender, and there you are, face-to-face with her, beside her bed…

It seems to me possible that I was motivated to write this story at least partly by the idea of imagining such a being, and that I was able to do this, finally, by combining my memory of the original woman with certain resonances from my first impressions of Nasreen, Nasreen’s first emails having come at me out of the blue (or at least out of a two-year silence) like the voice of the woman in the window, calling for help like her, and curiously similar to her in their amusedly courteous tone and language: Sir, sir, excuse me, sir…

The fact that the young Englishman in my story is resistant to her charms, gallantly rescuing her from her ostensible plight while failing to acknowledge the underlying emotional plea, if anything further cements the connection, offering, as it does, an accurate representation both of my own irreproachably “correct” behavior with Nasreen and of the extent to which this depended on ignoring more complicated elements in the picture. He remains unaware of her designs on him, as he does of any desires of his own that might have led him up to her apartment in the first place. But both are known, of course, to his author, fabricator of this impeccably English mask, and of the fantastical femme fatale herself, who sends her curses after him as he vanishes out of her life: “Goddam Englishman…,” just as Nasreen was to do when I vanished out of her life a few months later.

So I stand guilty of appropriating some kind of echo or semblance of Nasreen’s “essence,” for literary purposes. Not a crime, perhaps, in the eyes of the ordinary world, but by my own standards definitely troubling, if only for its very strange consequence: that the hybridization seems to have doubled back from the purely fictional realm into the realm of reality, with Nasreen exhibiting symptoms of a disturbance as deep as that of the woman in my story, and doing so more vividly the more closely she identified with her. As she herself was to write a few months later: “i’m living your short story out and I’m scared.” This troubles and perplexes me quite a bit. It is as if in writing a character to some extent modeled on her, I am also guilty of modeling her, in turn, on the character: of causing her to develop her own version of the “psychotic” behavior of the woman at the window.

We are in the realm of the Gothic here: mind control, telepathic metamorphosis, whatever you want to call it. I don’t believe in such things; I’m embarrassed even to mention them, and I wouldn’t, were it not for the fact that this peculiar mechanism of reciprocity was to become a steadily more pronounced feature of the story as things got worse, and that, moreover, it began to work as much on me, after a while, as on Nasreen. So much so that, by a certain point, we were both, in effect, creating or re-creating each other in the image of our crassest fear, our most cravenly stereotyping fantasy: the Demon Woman, shall we say, and the Eternal Jew.

Good Morning

You pose as an intellectual but you’re a corrupt thief.

Do you have to be the stereotype of a Jew, James? Oh, I see all the white male writers are doing it too…

I want your apartment because you owe it to me because you were miserable and you sucked my nectar and didn’t help me when you should have…

what is wrong with your people?

do any of you have any ideas of your own? after you kill all of “us” what will you do? everything you have is stolen… there will be nothing left to steal!

Subj: Fwd: Re: (more notes on your sadistic world)

To: [Sandy]

… I was begging for help. And fine, who the fuck am I? A former student, someone he could get a little “lift” from in the midst of his mid-life… Fine, but it hurts to see that he thinks me worthy of something to steal but not to support in any real way for it to be my own.

Subj: why do I bother forwarding this shit?

To: [her English academic]

James. He’s an innocent bystander. It’s almost as if he just walked past a window and I manipulatively called down for help. “Sir… Sir?”

Look, muslims are not like their Jewish counterparts, who quietly got gassed and then cashed in on it… my people are crazy motherfuckers and there will be hell to pay for what your people have done to them…

Subj: signs of the end of the world…

began with Janice’s limping.

why the fuck did you send me to her? was this supposed to be a joke on me? an inside jew-joke?

ha ha ha ha! So nice of you. And I’m a psychotic jaywalker because I believe in God and haven’t sold my soul to American cash?

you couldn’t have, without all the bullshit (incestuously paid-for) rave reviews you get, found me an agent to work with?

[…]

You steal.

You steal.

You steal.

Call it antisemitism, I call what you do arrogance and I call it disgusting.

Subj: I want my money back…

For the term you “taught me” and for the term you were my “advisor” but couldn’t even remember to bring me my work.

Subj: apologies…

I hope you don’t take anything I say seriously. I understand everyone is too chickenshit to help an insane woman. And no, I don’t expect you to pay me for what you stole. it happens all the time and why should you care about my nervous breakdowns? I never even fucked you…

Subj: a real, unpsychotic note

[…]

You are a kind man, James. I don’t think you’re the caricature of a white man but I’m hoping I’ve pissed you off. It brings color to the cheeks.

Mr. Horned God.

So tacky!

Subj: surrender…

you must be so perplexed.

i’m hoping my mean-streak doesn’t lend itself to calling your management company and telling them you rent the apartment out on weekends. I would. I hope I don’t. I really firmly believe that you need to absolve your guilt by giving me your keys.

[…]

(I hope I’m scaring you slightly. That would be exciting.)

I also believe you are on medication instead of dealing with why you and most Jewish people are sadistic. That is why your writing falls flat.

Subj: Harriet too… you fucked her too?

Is that right?

Well, I almost feel sorry for her because she obviously went from being a good writer to turning in nothing and you stole her writing too… in that story. You stole from everyone in our class.

[…]

I don’t feel that bad for her. She was another vicious, overly competitive Jewess…

I wish ill health and disaster…

for you and your family.

Baruch adonai,

Nasreen

jews in america

need to shut up. the crazy shit that comes out of your mouths spreads far and wide in a city filled with blacks, muslims and asians who’ve had it: This sort of projection doesn’t work and all of you pussies who sit around writing stupid shit and stealing from little girls are just as much to blame.

[…]

Go forward this to the anti-defamation league. They’re criminals too…

So the summer continued.

I was bewildered, stunned, appalled, but at this time I didn’t take the actual content of the emails very deeply to heart. I regarded the outburst as something entirely freakish: an eruption of irrational fury that, unpleasant as it was to witness, had nothing to do with me personally. It would end soon, I believed, either in silence or in a mortified apology (a genuine one that would unconditionally retract all the false accusations instead of reserving the right, as her occasional “conciliatory” emails always did, to continue calling me a thief if I failed to respond).

Sometime in the fall, Nasreen announced that she was going to move to California, where her family lived. The decision seemed to soften her tone. She appeared (though it’s hard to be certain) to be making fun of herself:

… I need to leave the East Coast where everyone is racist and crazy. Besides, I am unsafe here and the annoying trustfund hipsters raise my blood pressure.

Love,

Nasreen, the peace-seeking and relentless verbal terrorist.

There was even what appeared to be the beginnings of an explanation for her behavior:

I really hope you and Paula and Janice understand my bitter comments. I know you know what it’s like to be in character. I always have a hard time snapping out…

Being “in character,” presumably for her novel, wasn’t a very convincing explanation for her emails (there were no anti-Semites in her novel), but the fact that she seemed to think they needed to be explained seemed encouraging. It was December by now, and with the year winding down and Nasreen moving to the other side of the country, I was cautiously hopeful that the whole unpleasant episode might be coming to an end.

But my optimism was misplaced.

Over the previous year there had been a spate of novels and memoirs, some of them bestsellers, published by youngish women of Iranian origin. Many of these books, I gathered (I hadn’t read any of them), dealt with the period of the Shah’s downfall and the rise of the fundamentalists, which was the period Nasreen had been attempting to cover in her own novel.

Even the most well-balanced writers are prone to anxiety about their work being preempted by other books. I suffer from it myself. So it wasn’t a huge surprise to learn that Nasreen was unhappy about these rival publications. What was surprising, though perhaps it shouldn’t have been, was to find out how she intended to deal with this unhappiness.

“You and Paula pandered my work” was the first clear indication. Over the next few weeks, murkily, but with steadily growing conviction, Nasreen began to elaborate a theory in which I and various Jewish cohorts were guilty of deliberately preventing her from finishing her book so that we could steal her ideas and sell them to these other writers, most of whom happened to be Jewish as well as Iranian.

Like all conspiracy theories, this required constant adjustment in order to accommodate both Nasreen’s own shifting grievances and the obstinate bits of reality that stood in its way. Sometimes I appear to be acting alone; sometimes the complexity of the charges requires me to have been in league with one or both of my “yentas” (Janice and Paula), and sometimes the scale of my operation is perceived to be so vast that Nasreen is forced to link me to entirely new networks of co-conspirators, including, at one time, most of the faculty of the Morgan College writing program. So too with the authors we’re accused of helping: sometimes the denunciations focus on one in particular, sometimes two or more are grouped together, and there are periods in which I and my gang appear to be supplying as many as four desperate, unscrupulous writers with Nasreen’s material, all at the same time.

A kind of feedback effect occurs now, between the increasingly villainous scenarios Nasreen imagines and the pitch of her rage, each intensifying the other. “Janice gives you manuscripts…,” begins one,

that you type up in your boring trying-to-be-white style.

you are the downfall of a culture. go back to england. we don’t want you here.

[…]

We rule now, your ways are OVER. you’re all dying off…

get a toupe.

The emails become more apocalyptic in tone:

oh what will happen to you all… your stupid fortress… your stupid stupid life made from other people’s blood and sweat…

More overtly threatening:

X [one of the Iranian authors] is fucked. And if you have something to do with this, you are too…

More bitterly sarcastic:

i hope the money is worth it

when should i expect to see the rest of my work stolen?

More firmly accusatory even in their moments of apparent lucidity:

I’m sorry I fell in love with you but I don’t understand why you’re punishing me with the books that have come out

More wide-ranging in their vitriol, as in this group email addressed to me, Paula, and Y (another Iranian writer, somehow involved in our conspiracy):

Y, keep your cunts-on-a-leash away from my material. […] You’re all pathetic, and I’ve had enough of your thievery. If you don’t have a single thought of your own and your little empty-headed heiresses don’t either, spare the American reader. But do not touch my work. I know what you’re all up to and so do writers much more influential than anyone in your circle of crows.

More menacing in their demands for compensation:

I want every cent…

of what James made in “ghostwriting” from my emails for Z [another “buyer”] the whore. Or else I’m going to make him pay in other ways.

And more fantastically comprehensive in the evils they attribute to me:

Boycott this man, for God’s sake. He’s the reason behind terrorism.

By now, early 2008, I was beginning to feel seriously harassed, though it was still the tone of the emails rather than the content that was getting to me: the violent hatred they projected, rather than the accusations themselves. These latest ones, in particular, seemed too self-evidently preposterous to worry about. I was even a little relieved that they were as wild as they were. Who could possibly take seriously this idea that I was some kind of literary racketeer who had stolen her material in order to sell it off to other writers? It was too ridiculous to pay any attention to. I also felt, despite the widening embarrassment it entailed, protected by the growing number of people Nasreen now appeared to have in her sights. By this time she had copied me on emails she’d sent not only to Janice and Paula but also to several other writers and teachers she considered part of my conspiracy. These emails reserve their worst venom for me, but since they also attacked the recipients, they gave me a feeling of safety in numbers, at least on this particular front.

But I was forgetting the principles of assymetric warfare. I was forgetting my own observations about weakness as a source of strength, powerlessness leveraged into power. And I was forgetting the spirit of fair play that prevails among most people, whereby anyone claiming to have been victimized must be listened to with an open mind, however far-fetched the claim and however honorable-seeming the alleged victimizers.

“James’s Amazon Reviews, read em!” runs the heading of the email Nasreen sent out on the morning of December 30, 2007. The email begins, in taunting parody of the tones of authentic victimhood: “I hope I’m not in trouble for speaking the truth…”

I logged, very warily, on to Amazon.

The review, under the byline “a former student of lasdun,” was posted on the page for my book Seven Lies. I’d never quite believed in the sensation you read about in novels of print swimming before a character’s eyes at moments of high agitation, but that was precisely the effect. Words seemed to undulate as I looked at the screen. Phrases came in and out of focus: “… writers who teach at mfa programs like mr. lasdun…” “… my work was stolen…” “… after I told him I was raped while trying to finish my novel…” “… he used my writing (emails to him) in that story…”

Even with these preliminary reiterations of the familiar charges, I had the sensation that a new order of harm was being inflicted on me. First the private attacks had been extended to form that little intimate theater of mortification comprised of my colleagues and acquaintances, and now a window had been opened up to the wider world. As if conscious of her new audience, Nasreen adopts a more measured voice. Laying aside the mask of naked rage, she poses instead as the scholar-victim who has taken it upon herself to deconstruct my work and expose the sociopathic attitudes encoded within it:

Having read Horned Man, I think he may have a penchant for sadism. His short story “the Siege” is disturbing in romanticising surveillance […] It’s also racist in sexualizing a black woman from a “revolutionary” country, who loves her husband but is demeaned and made to have sex with “the english composer” to save her true love’s life.

You don’t have to be a writer to imagine how it feels to find yourself the object of a malicious attack on the Internet. An ordinary negative review is depressing, but it doesn’t flood you with this sense of personal emergency, as if not only your book but also your life, or at least that large aura of meaning that accumulates around your life and gives it value, is in imminent and dire peril. Call that aura your “character,” call it your “good name,” your “reputation,” your “honor.” Whatever it was, as I read the review on my screen I seemed to be seeing, as if through a powerful medical instrument, the first stages of some irreversible damage spreading into this nebulous yet indispensable entity. However crudely Nasreen may have been deploying the gestures of critical theory and gender studies in her attempt to brand me as a monster, it seemed to me that she had mounted a successful attack. Needless to say, her description of “The Siege,” like all her other accounts of my work, bears little resemblance to the story itself, but who was going to check? The semblance of an annihilating critique had been created, and for people browsing the Web that is all that matters. Here, for the casual shopper landing on my page, was a reason to move on very quickly.

The multiplying effect of the Internet-the knowledge that anything on it can be infinitely reproduced-is a further element in the alarm this kind of attack induces. So too is its odd nature as a mass phenomenon in which, paradoxically, one participates in the blindest, most solitary manner. Who else has seen what you have seen? Who believes it? Who finds it entertaining? Who has copied it, posted it elsewhere, emailed it to a friend? One never knows, but where malice is involved, one quickly succumbs to the worst suspicions.

But perhaps I was exaggerating the effect of this particular attempt at character assassination. Unless you are a celebrity, nobody is ever as interested in your reputation as you are. Certainly no one who saw the review would have paid it as much attention as I did. And given my modest readership, it’s unlikely that many people ever did see it. As soon as I’d finished reading it I hit the “report” button and fired off complaints to Amazon at every address I could find for them. I didn’t get a reply, but after a few weeks the review was taken down. Similar reviews appeared on the Amazon pages of the authors I was accused of selling Nasreen’s work to, and these too were taken down after a while. So I suppose I can’t, after all, claim they did me serious harm.

But having raised the game to this freshly injurious level, Nasreen was hardly likely to give up exploring its possibilities. Her campaign, it appeared, was no longer aimed simply at expressing her anger, or at embarrassing me, but at something much more concrete and practical. It was at this time that she conceived that crystalline formulation of the true nature of her mission:

“I will ruin him.”