Joseph Anton: A Memoir: A Memoir

by Salman Rushdie

  He had begun work on another long essay. For the best part of a year he had not only been invisible but for the most part dumb as well, composing unsent letters in his head, publishing only a few book reviews and one short poem whose publication in Granta had displeased not only the Bradford Council of Mosques but, according to Peter Mayer, the staff of Viking Penguin too, some of whom were apparently beginning to believe, like Mr. Shabbir Akhtar, that he should be “removed from public knowledge.” Now he would have his say. He spoke to Andrew and Gillon. It would inevitably be a long essay and he needed to know what sort of maximum length would be acceptable to the press. Their view was that the press would publish whatever he wanted to write. They agreed that the best time for such a piece to appear would be on or around the first anniversary of the fatwa. It would obviously be important for the context of the essay to be right, so the choice of publication would be crucial. Gillon and Andrew began to make inquiries. He began to think about the essay that would become “In Good Faith,” a seven-thousand-word defense of his work, and in thinking about it he made one crucial mistake.

  He had fallen into the trap of thinking that his work had been attacked because it had been misrepresented by unscrupulous persons seeking political advantage, and that his own integrity had been impugned for the same reason. If he were a person of base morals, and his work lacking in quality, then it was unnecessary to engage with it intellectually. But, he convinced himself, if he could just show that the work had been seriously undertaken, and that it could honorably be defended, then people—Muslims—would change their minds about it, and about him. In other words, he wanted to be popular. The unpopular boy from boarding school wanted to be able to say, “Look, everyone, you’ve made a mistake about my book, and about me. It’s not an evil book, and I’m a good person. Read this essay and you’ll see.” This was folly. And yet, in his isolation, he convinced himself that it was achievable. Words had got him into this mess, and words would get him out of it.

  The heroes of Greek and Roman antiquity, Odysseus, Jason, and Aeneas, were all sooner or later obliged to sail their ships between the two sea monsters, Scylla and Charybdis, knowing that to fall into the clutches of either would lead to utter destruction. He told himself firmly that in whatever he wrote, fiction or nonfiction, he needed to sail between his personal Scylla and Charybdis, the monsters of fear and revenge. If he wrote timid, frightened things, or angry, vengeful things, his art would be mangled beyond hope of repair. He would become a creature of the fatwa and nothing more. To survive he needed to set aside rage and terror, hard though such setting might be, and to try to go on being the writer he had always tried to be, to continue down the road he had defined for himself as his own. To do that would be success. To do otherwise would be dismal failure. This, he knew.

  He forgot that there was a third trap: that of courting approval, of wanting, in his weakness, to be loved. He was too blind to see that he was running headlong toward that pit; and that was the trap that ensnared him, and almost destroyed him forever.

  They found the Globe Theatre, Shakespeare’s glorious wooden O, under a parking lot in Southwark. The news brought tears to his eyes. He had been playing chess against a chess machine and had reached level five but when they found the Globe he couldn’t move a pawn. The past had reached out and touched the present and the present was richer for it. He thought of the greatest words in the English language being spoken for the first time at Anchor Terrace and Park Street, the Elizabethan Maiden Lane. The birthplace of Hamlet and Othello and Lear. A lump rose in his throat. The love of the art of literature was a thing impossible to explain to his adversaries, who loved only one book, whose text was immutable and immune to interpretation, being the uncreated word of God.

  It was impossible to persuade the Qur’anic literalists to answer a simple question: Did they know that after the Prophet died there was, for some considerable time, no canonical text? The Umayyad inscriptions from the Dome of the Rock were at odds with what was now insisted upon as holy writ—a text that was first standardized at the time of the third caliph, Uthman. The very walls of one of Islam’s most sacred shrines proclaimed that human fallibility had been present at the birth of the Book. Nothing was perfect on earth that depended on human beings. The Book was orally transmitted around the Muslim world and in the early tenth century there were more than seven variant texts extant. The text prepared and authorized by al-Azhar in the 1920s followed one of these seven variations. The idea that there existed an ur-text, the perfect and immutable word of God, was simply inaccurate. History and architecture did not lie, even if novelists might.

  Doris Lessing, a writer greatly influenced by Sufi mysticism, called to say that his defense had been “wrongly conducted.” Khomeini should have been isolated as un-Islamic, a “Pol Pot figure.” “Also,” she said, being a plainspoken woman, “I must tell you that I didn’t like your book.” Everyone had an opinion. Everyone knew what should have been done.

  Fear was spreading through the publishing industry. Peter Mayer’s fear of his future books had spread to other publishers—he wondered if Penguin executives were trying to recruit support for their position, so that they didn’t look too cowardly—and now French and German publishers were saying the same thing. Publishers Weekly came out against the publication of a paperback edition and again he smelled a rat, or penguin. Mayer himself continued to refuse to give any date for paperback publication, mentioning the discovery of bombs near his home. These turned out to be the work of Welsh nationalists and had nothing to do with The Satanic Verses. That fact did nothing to affect Mayer’s position. Tony Lacey told Gillon that Peter had just received a death threat at his home. Bill Buford came to Essex and they cooked duck for dinner. “Don’t be bitter,” Bill said.

  Gillon and Andrew had begun talking to people at Random House—Anthony Cheetham, Si Newhouse—to see if they might be interested in publishing Haroun and the Sea of Stories. They said they were interested. But neither they nor Mayer made an offer. Tony Lacey said that Penguin would be “sending a letter.” Sonny Mehta called to say he was “doing his best” to get Random House to come through.

  At the beginning of November the Penguin letter arrived. It promised no paperback publication date for The Satanic Verses and made no offer for the new work. Mayer wanted “months” of complete calm before he would consider publishing the paperback. That seemed improbable in the week that BBC TV showed a documentary about the continuing Muslim “anger.” Random House, however, said they wanted to negotiate seriously for future books, and those negotiations began.

  He first met Isabel Fonseca at the 1986 PEN Congress in New York. She was smart and beautiful and they became friends. When she moved to London he began to see something of her, though there was never any suggestion of a romance. In early November 1989 she invited him to her London apartment for dinner and it was agreed that he could go. After the usual cloak-and-daggery there he was at her door, holding a bottle of Bordeaux, and there followed the illusion of a pleasant evening dining with a friend, listening to her tales of literary London and John Malkovich and drinking good red wine. Then, late in the evening, calamity struck. A protection officer—shy, parson-like Dick Billington—knocked awkwardly on the door and asked for a word. The apartment was small—a living room, one bedroom—so the team had to come in. The old rectory, he said, blinking rapidly behind his glasses, may have been blown. They were not certain of this, or of how it had happened, but there was beginning to be talk in the village, and his name had been cropping up. “Until we’ve looked into it,” Dick said, “you can’t go back there, I’m afraid.” He felt an ache in the pit of his stomach, and a feeling of great helplessness came over him. “What,” he said, “you mean I can’t go back there tonight? It’s ten o’clock, for goodness’ sake.” “I know,” said Dick. “But we’d rather you didn’t. To be on the safe side.” He was looking at Isabel. She responded at once. “Well, you can stay here, of course,” she said. “That’s impossible
,” he said to Dick. “Can’t we go back and then sort this out in the morning?” There was much unhappy body language from Dick. “My instructions are that you can’t go back,” he said.

  There was only one bed, a large double. They slept as far apart as they could and when his restless body accidentally collided with hers he apologized quickly. It was like a black sex comedy: two friends forced by circumstance into bed together and trying to pretend it was nothing special. In a movie they would have given up pretending at some point and made love, and then there would be the embarrassment-comedy of the next morning, and maybe, after much confusion, love. But this was real life and he had just been rendered homeless and she was giving him a roof over his head for the night and he had no idea what the next day would hold and none of that was very sexy at all. He was grateful and miserable and yes, a little desirous of her, wondering what would happen if he did turn toward her, but knowing or believing that such an approach would, in the circumstances, be a boorish exploitation of her kindness. He turned his back toward her and did not sleep very much. In the morning there was Mr. Greenup in Isabel’s living room. “You can’t go back,” he said.

  Dev Stonehouse had been off the team for a while, but he had recently been at Little Bardfield, and, perhaps inevitably, had had too much to drink at a local pub and—it seemed almost impossible to believe this when Bob Major told him about it later—had taken out his handgun and started showing off for the other drinkers. The publican, it turned out, used to run the Blind Beggar pub in Whitechapel, the favored watering hole of the notorious Kray twins, where the gangster Ronnie Kray had once murdered a man. A man who had run a pub like that, Bob Major said, “could see the Old Bill coming a mile off.” It was a pub to be avoided; but Dev had gone there to celebrate his birthday and after that people had put two and two together and somebody had said Salman Rushdie and that was that.

  “This is just intolerable,” he protested to Mr. Greenup. “I have paid a lot of money to rent that property and you’re telling me I can’t go back there because one of your officers got drunk? What am I supposed to do? I can’t stay here and I have no other possibilities.” “You’ll have to find somewhere,” Mr. Greenup said. “Just like that,” he said, a little wildly, snapping his fingers. “Hocus pocus, and here’s another place to live.” “Many people would say,” replied Mr. Greenup stonily, “that you brought this on yourself.”

  A day of crazy telephony. Sameen had a Pakistani industrialist friend who kept an apartment in Chelsea near the river. Maybe she could get the keys. Jane Wellesley offered her Notting Hill apartment again. And Gillon Aitken offered the services of Lady Cosima Somerset, who was at that time working in the London office. Cosima was utterly reliable and discreet, he said, and she would be wonderful at finding and setting up rentals. Everything could be done through the agency. He spoke to Cosima on the phone and she said briskly, “Right, I’ll get started at once.” He realized at once that she was indeed the perfect intermediary, intelligent and good-natured; and nobody would suspect this glamorous blue blood of being involved with anything as shady as the Rushdie Affair.

  Sameen came to Isabel’s later with the keys to her friend’s apartment and so, for a few days at least, he had a home. The police—Benny was back—smuggled him into the Chelsea apartment block and said they would take him back to the old rectory at dead of night to pack up his stuff. About the lost rental money there was nothing to be done. It was also Benny’s unsolicited opinion that he should withdraw the paperback of The Satanic Verses. He said local police officers had been visiting bookshops telling them to tell Penguin not to publish it. That contradicted what Branch officers had told him. Nothing was stable. Nothing could be believed.

  After Greenup left and Isabel went to work he made a mistake. In his destabilized condition he called his wife and went to see her. And then there was a bigger mistake: They made love.

  He settled into the Chelsea apartment as best he could with everything in his life in turmoil—no permanent abode, no publishing agreements, growing difficulties with the police, and what was to happen now with Marianne?—but when he turned on the TV he saw a great wonder that dwarfed what was happening to him. The Berlin Wall was falling, and young people were dancing on its remains.

  That year, which began with horrors—on a small scale the fatwa, on a much larger scale Tiananmen—also contained great wonders. The magnificence of the invention of the hypertext transfer protocol, the http:// that would change the world, was not immediately evident. But the fall of Communism was. He had come to England as a teenage boy who had grown up in the aftermath of the bloody partition of India and Pakistan, and the first great political event to take place in Europe after his arrival was the building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961. Oh no, he had thought, are they partitioning Europe now? Years later, when he visited Berlin to take part in a TV discussion with Günter Grass, he had crossed the wall on the S-Bahn and it had looked mighty, forbidding, eternal. The western side of the wall was covered in graffiti but the eastern face was ominously clean. He had been unable to imagine that the gigantic apparatus of repression whose icon it was would ever crumble. And yet the day came when the Soviet terror-state was shown to have rotted from within, and it blew away, almost overnight, like sand. Sic semper tyrannis. He took renewed strength from the dancing youngsters’ joy.

  There were times when the rush of events felt overwhelming. Hanif Kureishi was debating Shabbir Akhtar at the ICA and called, afterward, to say what a limp and incompetent adversary Akhtar had been. His friend the writer and Charter 88 founder Anthony Barnett debated Max Madden, MP, on the blasphemy law and Madden, too, proved a weak and craven opponent. Anthony Cheetham and Sonny Mehta of Random House and Knopf said they wanted to speak to Mr. Greenup before signing any contracts for future books. That was a depressing prospect, but, surprisingly, Greenup said that he had no problems regarding the future and would speak to Cheetham and Sonny and tell them so. Meanwhile Penguin fired Tim Binding, the young editor who had been most passionate about The Satanic Verses. Mayer was refusing to return Andrew Wylie’s calls. Fred Halliday, the Iran specialist, called to report that he had met with Abbas Maliki, Iran’s deputy minister for foreign affairs (and, incidentally, one of the men who had stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979). Maliki told Fred that nobody in Iran could go against Khomeini, but if British Muslims were to end their campaign it could let Iran off the hook. “By the way,” Fred added, “do you know that pirate Farsi radio stations are beaming readings of the Verses in translation into Iran all the time?”

  Marianne was still talking about publishing the stories “Croeso i Gymru” and “Learning Urdu” but suddenly decided that they weren’t “ready.” Her emotional fragility frightened him. Jane was scolding him for renewing contact with Marianne, and so were Pauline Melville and Sameen. What was he thinking about? The answer was that he wasn’t thinking straight. It had happened, that was all.

  Kalim Siddiqui’s latest bloodcurdling remarks were being examined by the Crown Prosecution Service and lawyer Geoff Robertson said the CPS was likely to go ahead with a prosecution. However, it declined to do so, citing “insufficient evidence.” Videotape of Siddiqui calling for a man’s death was not enough.

  There was a house in north London, at 15 Hermitage Lane, that the police liked because it had an “integral garage” that would make it much easier for him to come and go without being seen. John Howley and Mr. Greenup came to meet him at the Chelsea apartment. They were mortified about the “errors” at Little Bardfield and assured him there would be no repetition, and no more Dev Stonehouse. Perhaps because of their mortification they began to make concessions. They appreciated he had lost money on the old rectory and would now have to invest heavily in yet another rental. They were agreeable to him using the old rectory as an “occasional” place until the rental agreement ran out. They were willing to “allow” him to go about a little more and see his friends. And—this was the great breakthrough—they agreed
that Zafar could visit and stay with him. Yes, and, if he really insisted, Marianne as well. She was, after all, still his wife.

  In early December he went with Bill, his Polish girlfriend, Alicja, Zafar and Marianne to Little Bardfield for the weekend. Zafar was intensely excited and so was he. Marianne however was in a strange state of mind. A few days earlier she had actually apologized for “lying” but now the mad glint was back in her eye and at midnight she dropped another of her bombshells. She and Bill, she said, had become lovers. He asked to talk to Bill alone and they went into the rectory’s small TV room. Bill confessed that yes, it had happened once, and he had immediately felt like a fool, and hadn’t known how to tell the truth. They spoke for an hour and a half, both of them knowing that their friendship hung in the balance. They said what needed to be said, loudly and softly, in anger and finally with laughter. In the end they agreed to put the matter away and say no more about it. He, too, felt like a fool, who had to make a decision about his marriage all over again. It was like giving up smoking and then starting up again. He had done that too. After five years as a nonsmoker he was back on the drug. He was feeling angry with himself. He had to break both these bad habits soon.