Joseph Anton: A Memoir Read online

  Reading was living, too. He read William Kennedy, Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, and admiringly wrote down “the end of behavior was not action but comprehension on which to base action.” He read Hawking’s A Brief History of Time and it made his head hurt but even though he understood only a fraction of it he knew enough to argue with the great man’s contention that we were nearing the point at which everything would be known. The completion of knowledge: Only a scientist could be crazy enough or grand enough to imagine that that was possible.

  Zia ul-Haq died in a plane crash: no loss.

  A book, which he initially thought might be a play, maybe some reinvention of Othello, began to bud in him, though when he wrote it several years later it had grown in ways he did not then understand. He thought it might be called The Moor’s Last Sigh. Meanwhile, in a dream, an Indian woman he knew appeared to him, having read The Satanic Verses, and warned him that there would be “a bill to pay” for it. The London parts of the novel meant nothing to her, and the story about the parting of the Arabian Sea “just shows me your interest in cinema.” The dream enacted a fear he had: that people would react only to those parts of the novel with which they felt they had some personal—positive or negative—connection, and ignore the rest of it. He was beginning, as always after completing a book and before publication, to doubt what he had done. At times he thought it a little gawky, a “loose, baggy monster,” to use Henry James’s phrase. At other times he thought he had managed to control and shape it into something fine. He worried about several sequences: the “Rosa Diamond” passage with its Argentinian backstory, and the devilish metamorphosis of his character Chamcha in a police van and a hospital. He had real doubts about the workings of the main narrative, and the transformation scenes in particular. Then suddenly his doubts evaporated. The book was done, and he was proud of it.

  He flew to Lisbon for a few days in May. For a couple of years in the late 1980s the Wheatland Foundation—a collaborative venture between the British publisher George Weidenfeld and the American Ann Getty, who was “bankrolled,” as The New York Times put it, by her husband, Gordon Getty—hosted a series of lavish literary conferences around the world, a program that came to a halt when the Getty-Weidenfeld relationship collapsed in 1989 under the pressure of losses reported in The New York Times as being “at least $15 million.” Some of those millions were no doubt lost at the conference staged at the Queluz Palace in May 1988 and attended by the most extraordinary gathering of writers he had seen since the 1986 PEN Congress in New York. Sontag, Walcott, Tabucchi, Enzensberger and so on. He went with Martin Amis and Ian McEwan and after their “British” panel discussion the Italians grumbled that they had spoken too much about politics, whereas literature was about “sentences,” and Lord Weidenfeld grumbled that they had been critical of Margaret Thatcher, to whom they owed so much. While he was on stage the extraordinary Montenegran writer Danilo Kiš, who turned out to be a skilled caricaturist, drew a picture of him on a conference notepad and presented it to him at the end of the session. At the New York PEN Congress, Danilo, a writer of brilliance and wit, had defended the idea that the state could have an imagination. “In fact,” he said, “the state also has a sense of humor, and I will give you an example of a joke by the state.” He was living in Paris and one day received a letter from a friend in Yugoslavia. When he opened it he found an official stamp on the first page. It read THIS LETTER HAS NOT BEEN CENSORED. Kiš looked like Tom Baker as Doctor Who and spoke no English. Serbo-Croat not really being an option either, they became friends in French. By the time of the Lisbon conference Kiš was in the grip of illness—he died of lung cancer in 1989—and his vocal cords were badly affected, making it hard for him to speak at all. The caricature was offered in lieu of conversation and became a treasured possession.

  The little argument about the utterances of the “British panel” were no more than an amuse-bouche. The main event was the sharp confrontation that took place between the Russian writers and those from the area they insisted should be known as “central Europe”—Kiš himself, the Hungarians György Konrád and Péter Esterházy, the Canadian Czech émigré Josef Škvorecky, and the great Polish poets Adam Zagajewski and Czesław Miłosz. These were the days of glasnost, and it was the first time the Soviets had let the “real” writers out—not the Writers’ Union stooges, but the likes of Tatyana Tolstaya. The major writers of the Russian emigration, led by Joseph Brodsky, were there too, and so the event offered a kind of reunification of Russian literature, which was a moving thing to witness (Brodsky refused to speak in English, wishing, he said, to be a Russian among Russians). However, when the central European writers, ignoring the Italian view that literature was about sentences, launched into passionate denunciations of Russian hegemony, the Russians reacted badly. Several of them claimed that they had never heard of a separate central European culture. Tolstaya added that if writers were worried about the Red Army they could always retreat into their imaginations, as she did, and there they would be totally free. This didn’t go down well. Brodsky averred, in an almost comically cultural-imperialist formulation, that Russia was in the process of solving its own problems, and once it had done so all the central Europeans’ problems would also be solved. (This was the same Brodsky who, after the fatwa, would join the he-knew-what-he-was-doing, he-did-it-on-purpose party.) Czesław Miłosz rose from the floor to take issue with Brodsky in stentorian terms, and the seventy-odd writers in the room were treated to the spectacle of the two giants, both Nobel laureates (and old friends), angrily clashing in terms that left all who heard it in no doubt that a great change was brewing in the East. It was like watching a preview of Communism’s fall, the dialectic of history brought to life, expressed and enacted by the greatest intellectuals of the region in the presence of their international colleagues: a moment never to be forgotten by those lucky enough to be there.

  If history progressed dialectically, as Hegel proposed, then the fall of Communism and the rise of revolutionary Islam demonstrated that dialectical materialism, Karl Marx’s reworking of Hegel and Fichte that identified the dialectic as one of class struggle, was flawed at the root. The thinking of the central European intellectuals at Queluz Palace, and also the very different philosophy of the radical Islam whose power was growing so rapidly, both scorned the Marxian idea that economics was primary, that economic conflict, expressed in the struggle of the classes, offered the best explanation of how things worked. In this new world, in the dialectics of the world beyond the Communism-capitalism confrontation, it would be made clear that culture could be primary too. The culture of central Europe was asserting itself against Russianness to unmake the Soviet Union. And ideology, as Ayatollah Khomeini and his cohorts were insisting, could certainly be primary. The wars of ideology and culture were moving to the center of the stage. And his novel, unfortunately for him, would become a battlefield.

  He was asked to go on the radio show Desert Island Discs, a bigger honor, in Britain, than any mere literary prize. One of the eight musical choices he took with him to his imaginary desert island was an Urdu ghazal written by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, a close family friend who had been the first great writer he ever knew, both a public poet whose verses about the partition of India and Pakistan were the finest anyone ever wrote, and a somewhat jaundiced creator of much-admired poems of love. He had learned from Faiz that the writer’s task was to be both public and private, an arbiter both of society and of the human heart. Another of his choices was, perhaps, the music playing beneath the text of his new novel: “Sympathy for the Devil,” by the Rolling Stones.

  Bruce Chatwin was mortally ill, and he visited him several times. The illness was affecting the balance of Bruce’s mind. He had been refusing to say the words AIDS or HIV, but now he deliriously claimed to have found the cure. He said he was calling his wealthy friends “like the Aga Khan” to raise money for research, and wanted his literary friends to contribute too. The “experts” at the Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford
were “very excited” and sure he was “onto something.” Bruce was also sure that he had become extremely rich himself. His books had sold “an immense number of copies.” One day he telephoned to say that he had bought a Chagall oil painting. This was not his only extravagant “purchase.” His wife, Elizabeth, was obliged quietly to return his acquisitions and to explain that Bruce was not himself. In the end his father had to go to court to take charge of his son’s finances, and that caused a melancholy rift in the family. Bruce had a book coming out too, his last novel, Utz. One day he called up to say, “If we’re both listed for the Booker we should just announce that we intend to share it. If I win, I’ll share it with you, and you should say the same thing.” Until then, Bruce had always scorned the Booker Prize.

  He was asked to review Dear Mili, a Grimm tale illustrated by Maurice Sendak, for The New York Times, and though he took care to express his admiration for much of Sendak’s oeuvre he could not avoid saying that these illustrations seemed to be repetitive of what the great illustrator had done before. After that Sendak told interviewers that it was the most hurtful review he had ever received and he “hated” its author. (He wrote two other book reviews, for the British Observer, in which he found the book under consideration less wonderful than the author’s earlier work, and the authors of The Russia House and Hocus Pocus, John le Carré and Kurt Vonnegut, both friendly acquaintances until then, declared themselves his foes, too. This was what book reviewing did. If you loved a book, the author thought your praise no more than his rightful due, and if you didn’t like it, you made enemies. He decided to stop doing it. It was a mug’s game.)

  On the day he received the bound proofs of The Satanic Verses he was visited at home on St. Peter’s Street by a journalist he thought of as a friend, Madhu Jain of India Today. When she saw the thick, dark blue cover with the large red title she grew extremely excited, and pleaded to be given a copy so that she could read it while vacationing in England with her husband. And once she had read it she demanded that she be allowed to interview him and that India Today be allowed to publish an extract. Again, he agreed. For many years afterward he thought of this publication as the match that lit the fire. And certainly the magazine highlighted what came to be seen as the book’s “controversial” aspects, using the headline AN UNEQUIVOCAL ATTACK ON RELIGIOUS FUNDAMENTALISM, which was the first of innumerable inaccurate descriptions of the book’s contents, and, in another headline, ascribing a quote to him—MY THEME IS FANATICISM—that further misrepresented the work. The last sentence of the article, “The Satanic Verses is bound to trigger an avalanche of protests …” was an open invitation for those protests to begin. The article was read by the Indian parliamentarian and Islamic conservative Syed Shahabuddin, who responded by writing an “open letter” titled “You Did This with Satanic Forethought, Mr. Rushdie,” and it had begun. The most powerful way to attack a book is to demonize its author, to turn him into a creature of base motives and evil intentions. The “Satan Rushdy” who would afterward be paraded down the world’s streets by angry demonstrators, hanged in effigy with a red tongue hanging out and wearing a crude tuxedo, was being created; born in India, as the real Rushdie had been. Here was the first proposition of the assault: that anyone who wrote a book with the word “satanic” in the title must be satanic, too. Like many false propositions that flourished in the incipient Age of Information (or disinformation), it became true by repetition. Tell a lie about a man once and many people will not believe you. Tell it a million times and it is the man himself who will no longer be believed.

  With the passage of time came forgiveness. Rereading the India Today piece many years later, in a calmer time, he could concede that the piece was fairer than the magazine’s headline writer had made it look, more balanced than its last sentence. Those who wished to be offended would have been offended anyway. Those who were looking to be inflamed would have found the necessary spark. Perhaps the magazine’s most damaging act was to break the traditional publishing embargo and print its piece nine days before the book’s publication, at a time when not a single copy had arrived in India. This allowed Mr. Shahabuddin and his ally, another opposition MP named Khurshid Alam Khan, free rein. They could say whatever they pleased about the book, but it could not be read and therefore could not be defended. One man who had read an advance copy, the journalist Khushwant Singh, called for a ban in The Illustrated Weekly of India as a measure to prevent trouble. He thus became the first member of the small group of world writers who joined the censorship lobby. Khushwant Singh further claimed that he had been asked for his advice by Viking Penguin and had warned the author and publishers of the consequences of publication. The author was unaware of any such warning. If it was ever given, it was never received.

  Disappointingly, the attack on his character was not confined to Muslim critics. In Britain’s newborn Independent newspaper the writer Mark Lawson quoted an anonymous Cambridge contemporary who called him “pompous” and who, as a “grammar school lad,” felt “alienated from him by his education.” So the wretched years at Rugby were to be held against him by the nameless. Another “close friend,” also anonymous, could “see” why he might appear “surly and arrogant.” And there was more: He was “schizophrenic,” he was “completely bonkers,” he corrected people’s mispronunciations of his name!, and—worst of all—he once got into a taxi that Mr. Lawson had ordered and left the journalist stranded. This was small, and small-minded, stuff, and there was a good deal more of it elsewhere, in other newspapers. “Close friends often confess that he is not actually likeable,” Bryan Appleyard wrote in The Sunday Times. “Rushdie is massively egotistical.” (What sorts of “close friends” talked about their friends like this? Only the anonymous ones unearthed by profile writers.) In “ordinary life” all of it would have been hurtful but none of it would have mattered much. But in the great conflict that followed the notion that he was not a very nice man was to prove very damaging indeed.

  Lord Byron intensely disliked the work of the eighteenth-century poet laureate Robert Southey and venomously attacked it in print. Southey replied that Byron was part of a “Satanic school” of writing, and his poetry was nothing but “Satanic verses.”

  The British edition of The Satanic Verses was published on Monday, September 26, 1988, and in retrospect he felt a deep nostalgia for that moment when trouble still felt far away. For a brief moment that fall, the publication of The Satanic Verses was a literary event, discussed in the language of books. Was it any good? Was it, as Victoria Glendinning suggested in the London Times, “better than Midnight’s Children, because it is more contained, but only in the sense that the Niagara Falls are contained,” or, as Angela Carter said in The Guardian, “an epic into which holes have been punched to let in visions … [a] populous, loquacious, sometimes hilarious, extraordinary contemporary novel”? Or was it, as Claire Tomalin wrote in The Independent, a “wheel that did not turn,” or a novel that went “plunging down, on melting wings,” in Hermione Lee’s even harsher opinion in the Observer, “towards unreadability”? How large was the membership of the apocryphal “Page 15 Club” of readers who could not get past that point in the book?

  Soon enough the language of literature would be drowned beneath the cacophony of other discourses, political, religious, sociological, postcolonial, and the subject of quality, of serious artistic intent, would come to seem almost frivolous. The book about migration and transformation that he had written was vanishing and being replaced by one that scarcely existed, in which Rushdie refers to the Prophet and his Companions as “scums and bums” (he didn’t, but he did allow those characters who persecuted the followers of his fictional Prophet to use abusive language), Rushdie calls the wives of the Prophet whores (he hadn’t, though whores in a brothel in his imaginary Jahilia take on the names of the Prophet’s wives to arouse their clients; the wives themselves are clearly described as living chastely in the harem), Rushdie uses the word “fuck” too many times (well, okay, h
e did use it a fair bit). This imaginary novel was the one against which the rage of Islam would be directed, and after that few people wished to talk about the real book, except, often, to concur with Hermione Lee’s negative assessment.

  When friends asked what they could do to help he often pleaded, “Defend the text.” The attack was very specific, yet the defense was often a general one, resting on the mighty principle of freedom of speech. He hoped for, he often felt he needed, a more particular defense, like the quality defense made in the cases of other assaulted books, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Ulysses, Lolita; because this was a violent assault not on the novel in general or on free speech per se, but on a particular accumulation of words (literature being, as the Italians had reminded him at Queluz Palace, made up of sentences), and on the intentions and integrity and ability of the writer who had put those words together. He did it for money. He did it for fame. The Jews made him do it. Nobody would have bought his unreadable book if he hadn’t vilified Islam. That was the nature of the attack, and so, for many years, The Satanic Verses was denied the ordinary life of a novel. It became something smaller and uglier: an insult. There was something surreally comical about this metamorphosis of a novel about angelic and satanic metamorphoses into a devil-version of itself, and he could think of a few black jokes to make about it. (Soon enough there would be jokes about him. Have you heard about Rushdie’s new novel? It’s called “Buddha, You Big Fat Bastard.”) But for him to be humorous would be out of place in this new world, a comic remark would sound a jarring note, lightheartedness was utterly inappropriate. As his book became simply an insult, so he became the Insulter; not only in Muslim eyes, but in the opinion of the public at large. Polls taken after the “Rushdie Affair” began showed that a large majority of the British public felt he should apologize for his “offensive” book. This would not be an easy argument to win.