Joseph Anton: A Memoir Read online

  He himself felt painfully temporary. His private life with Clarissa was happy, and this had calmed the storm inside him a little, while another young man might have been pleased that his job was going well. But the troubles of the interior life, his repeated failures to be, or become, a decent, publishable writer of fiction, dominated his thoughts. He resolved to set aside the many criticisms others had made of his work and to make his own critique of it instead. He was already beginning to understand that what was wrong with his writing was that there was something wrong, something misconceived, about him. If he hadn’t become the writer he thought he had it in him to be, it was because he didn’t know who he was. And slowly, from his ignominious place at the bottom of the literary barrel, he began to understand who that person might be.

  He was a migrant. He was one of those who had ended up in a place that was not the place where he began. Migration tore up all the traditional roots of the self. The rooted self flourished in a place it knew well, among people who knew it well, following customs and traditions with which it and its community were familiar, and speaking its own language among others who did the same. Of these four roots, place, community, culture and language, he had lost three. His beloved Bombay was no longer available to him; in their old age his parents had sold his childhood home without discussion and mysteriously decamped to Karachi, Pakistan. They didn’t enjoy living in Karachi; why would they? It was to Bombay what Duluth was to New York. Nor did their reasons for moving ring true. They felt, they said, increasingly alien in India as Muslims. They wanted, they said, to find good Muslim husbands for their daughters. It was bewildering. After a lifetime of happy irreligion they were using religious rationales. He didn’t believe them for a moment. He was convinced there must have been business problems, tax problems, or other real-world problems that had driven them to sell the home to which they were devoted and abandon the city they loved. Something was fishy here. There was a secret he was not being told. Sometimes he said this to them; they did not reply. He never solved the mystery. Both his parents died without admitting that any secret explanation existed. But they were no more godly in Karachi than they had been in Bombay, so the Muslim explanation continued to feel inadequate and wrong.

  It was unsettling not to understand why the shape of life had changed. He often felt meaningless, even absurd. He was a Bombay boy who had made his life in London among the English, but often he felt cursed by a double unbelonging. The root of language, at least, remained, but he began to appreciate how deeply he felt the loss of the other roots, and how confused he felt about what he had become. In the age of migration the world’s millions of migrated selves faced colossal problems, problems of homelessness, hunger, unemployment, disease, persecution, alienation, fear. He was one of the luckier ones, but one great problem remained: that of authenticity. The migrated self became, inevitably, heterogeneous instead of homogeneous, belonging to more than one place, multiple rather than singular, responding to more than one way of being, more than averagely mixed up. Was it possible to be—to become good at being—not rootless, but multiply rooted? Not to suffer from a loss of roots but to benefit from an excess of them? The different roots would have to be of equal or near-equal strength, and he worried that his Indian connection had weakened. He needed to make an act of reclamation of the Indian identity he had lost, or felt he was in danger of losing. The self was both its origins and its journey.

  To know the meaning of his journey, he had to begin again at the beginning and learn as he went.

  It was at this point in his meditations that he remembered “Saleem Sinai.” This West London–based proto-Saleem had been a secondary character in his abandoned manuscript “The Antagonist,” and had deliberately been created as an alter ego, “Saleem” in memory of his Bombay classmate Salim Merchant (and because of its closeness to “Salman”), and “Sinai” after the eleventh-century Muslim polymath Ibn Sina (“Avicenna”), just as “Rushdie” had been derived from Ibn Rushd. The Saleem of “The Antagonist” was an entirely forgettable fellow and deserved to drift up Ladbroke Grove into oblivion, but he had one characteristic that suddenly seemed valuable: He had been born at midnight, August 14–15, 1947, the “freedom-at-midnight” moment of India’s independence from British rule. Maybe this Saleem, Bombay-Saleem, midnight-Saleem, needed his own book.

  He himself had been born eight weeks to the day before the end of the empire. He remembered his father’s joke, “Salman was born and eight weeks later the British ran away.” Saleem’s feat would be even more impressive. The British would run away at the exact moment of his birth.

  He had been born in Dr. Shirodkar’s Nursing Home—the celebrated gynecologist V. N. Shirodkar, creator of the famous “Shirodkar stitch” or cervical cerclage operation—and now, in his pages, he would bring the doctor back to life under a new name. Westfield Estate, overlooking Warden Road (now renamed Bhulabhai Desai Road), its villas bought from a departing Englishman and named after the royal palaces of Britain, Glamis Villa, Sandringham Villa, Balmoral, and his own home, Windsor Villa, would be reborn as Methwold’s Estate, and “Windsor” would become “Buckingham.” Cathedral School, founded “under the auspices of the Anglo-Scottish Education Society,” would keep its own name, and the small and large incidents of childhood—the loss of a fingertip in a slammed door, the death of a classmate during school hours, Tony Brent singing “The Clouds Will Soon Roll By,” Sunday morning jazz “jam sessions” in Colaba, the Nanavati affair, a cause célèbre in which a high-flying navy officer murdered his wife’s lover and shot the wife as well, although not fatally—would also be here, transmuted into fiction. The gates of memory opened and the past surged back. He had a book to write.

  For a moment it seemed that this might be a simple novel about childhood, but the implications of his protagonist’s birth date quickly became clear. If his reimagined Saleem Sinai and the newborn nation were twins, then the book would have to tell the story of both twins. History rushed into his pages, immense and intimate, creative and destructive, and he understood that this dimension, too, had been lacking from his work. He was a historian by training and the great point of history, which was to understand how individual lives, communities, nations, and social classes were shaped by great forces, yet retained, at times, the ability to change the direction of those forces, must also be the point of his fiction. He began to feel very excited. He had found an intersection between the private and the public and would build his book on that crossroads. The political and the personal could no longer be kept apart. This was no longer the age of Jane Austen, who could write her entire oeuvre during the Napoleonic Wars without mentioning them, and for whom the major role of the British Army was to wear dress uniforms and look cute at parties. Nor would he write his book in cool Forsterian English. India was not cool. It was hot. It was hot and overcrowded and vulgar and loud and it needed a language to match that and he would try to find that language.

  He realized he was taking on a gigantic, all-or-nothing project, and that the risk of failure was far greater than the possibility of success. He found himself thinking that that was just fine. If he was going to have one last try at achieving his dream, he didn’t want it to be with a safe, conservative, middling little book. He would do the most artistically challenging thing he could think of, and this was it, this untitled novel, “Sinai,” no, terrible title, would make people think it was about the Middle East conflict or the Ten Commandments, “Child of Midnight,” but there would have to be more than one, wouldn’t there, how many children would be born in the midnight hour, hundreds, maybe a thousand, or, yes, why not, one thousand and one, so “Children of Midnight”? No, boring title, sounded like pedophiles gathering at a Black Sabbath, but … Midnight’s Children? Yes!

  The advance for Grimus had been the princely sum of £750, and there had been two translation sales, to France and Israel, so that was about £825 in the bank, and he took a deep breath and suggested to Clarissa that he give up his good job
at Ogilvys and that they go to India for as long as they could make the money last, traveling as cheaply as possible, just plunging into the inexhaustible Indian reality, so that he could drink deeply from that horn of plenty and then come home and write. “Yes,” she said at once. He loved her for her adventurous spirit, the same spirit that had led her away from the maternally approved Mr. Leworthy of Westerham, Kent, and into his arms. Yes, they would go for broke. She had backed him this far and would not stop backing him now. They set off on their Indian odyssey, staying in flophouses, going on twenty-hour bus rides during which chickens vomited on their feet, arguing with local villagers at Khajuraho who thought the famous temple complex with its Tantric carvings was obscene and only for tourists, rediscovering Bombay and Delhi, staying with old family friends and at least one notably inhospitable uncle with a new and even more inhospitable Australian wife, a convert to Islam who couldn’t wait to see the back of them and then, many years later, wrote him a letter asking for money. He discovered the widows’ hostel in Benares and, in Amritsar, visited Jallianwala Bagh, the scene of General Dyer’s notorious “massacre” of 1919; and returned, glutted with India, to write his book.

  Five years later, he and Clarissa had married, their son, Zafar, had been born, the novel had been completed, and it had found publishers. An Indian woman stood up at a reading and said, “Thank you, Mr. Rushdie, because you have told my story,” and he felt a lump rise in his throat. Another Indian woman, at another reading, said, “Mr. Rushdie, I have read your novel Midnight’s Children. It’s a very long novel, but never mind, I read it through. And my question for you is this: Fundamentally, what’s your point?” A Goan journalist said, “You’re lucky, you just finished your book first,” and showed him a typed chapter of his own novel, about a boy born in Goa on that same midnight. The New York Times Book Review said the novel “sounded like a continent finding its voice,” and many of the literary voices of South Asia, speaking in the myriad languages of the subcontinent, returned a resounding, “Oh, yeah?” And many things happened about which he had not even dared to dream, awards, bestsellerdom, and, on the whole, popularity. India took the book to its heart, claiming the author as its own just as he had hoped to reclaim the country, and that was a greater prize than anything awarded by juries. At the very bottom of the barrel he had found the open-sesame door that led to the bright air at the top. Once again, after the Khomeini fatwa, he would revisit the barrel’s bottom, and, again, would find there the strength to go on, and to be more fully himself.

  He had returned to copywriting part-time after the Indian trip, persuading first Ogilvys and later another agency, Ayer Barker Hegemann, to employ him for two or three days a week, leaving him four or five days a week free to write the book that grew into Midnight’s Children. After the book came out he decided the time had come to give up this work once and for all, lucrative as it was. He had a small son, and the money would be tight, but it was what he needed to do. He asked Clarissa her opinion. “We’d have to prepare to be poor,” he told her. “Yes,” she said without hesitation. “Of course that’s what you must do.” The book’s commercial success, which neither of them had expected, when it came felt like a reward for their joint willingness to leap away from security into the financial dark.

  When he resigned his boss thought he was asking for more money. “No,” he said. “I’m just going to try to be a full-time writer.” Oh, his boss said, you want a lot more money. “No, really,” he said. “This isn’t a negotiation. I’m just giving you my thirty days’ notice. Thirty-one days from now, I won’t be coming in.” Hmm, his boss replied. I don’t think we can give you as much money as that.

  Thirty-one days later, in the summer of 1981, he became a full-time writer, and the feeling of liberation as he left the agency for the last time was heady and exhilarating. He shed advertising like an unwanted skin, though he continued to take a sneaky pride in his best-known slogan, “Naughty but nice” (created for the Fresh Cream Cake Client), and in his “bubble words” campaign for Aero chocolate (IRRESISTIBUBBLE, DELECTABUBBLE, ADORABUBBLE, the billboards cried, and bus sides read TRANSPORTABUBBLE, trade advertising said PROFITABUBBLE, and storefront decals proclaimed AVAILABUBBLE HERE). Later that year, when Midnight’s Children was awarded the Booker Prize, the first telegram he received—there were these communications called “telegrams” in those days—was from his formerly puzzled boss. “Congratulations,” it read. “One of us made it.”

  On the night of the Booker Prize he was walking with Clarissa toward the Stationers’ Hall and ran into the firebrand Lebanese-Australian publisher Carmen Callil, creator of the feminist imprint Virago. “Salman,” cried Carmen, “darling, you’re going to win!” He immediately became convinced that she had jinxed him and that he would not win. The short list was formidable. Doris Lessing, Muriel Spark, Ian McEwan … he didn’t stand a chance. And then there was D. M. Thomas and his novel The White Hotel, which many critics were calling a masterwork. (This was before accusations of excessive borrowing from Anatoly Kuznetsov’s Babi Yar surfaced to sully the book’s reputation in some people’s eyes at least.) No, he told Clarissa: Forget about it.

  Many years later one of the judges, the distinguished presenter of TV arts programs Joan Bakewell, told him of her fear that Malcolm Bradbury, the chairman of the jury, might try to steamroller his fellow judges into awarding the prize to The White Hotel. As a result she and two other judges, the critic Hermione Lee and Professor Sam Hynes of Princeton University, met privately before the final judging session to assure one another that they would hold firm and vote for Midnight’s Children. In the end Bradbury and the fifth judge, Brian Aldiss, voted for The White Hotel, and Midnight’s Children carried the day by the narrowest of margins: three votes to two.

  D. M. Thomas was not at the prize-giving ceremony and his editor Victoria Petrie-Hay was so nervous that she might have to accept the award on his behalf that she was drinking a little too quickly. After the announcement he bumped into her again. By now she was pretty far gone and confessed her relief at not having to read Thomas’s acceptance speech. She took the speech out of her handbag and waved the envelope around vaguely. “I don’t know what to do with this now,” she said. “Give it to me,” he told her, mischievously. “I’ll look after it.” And she had drunk so much that she did as he suggested. For half an hour after that he had Thomas’s victory speech in his pocket. Then conscience got the better of him and he sought out the sodden editor and returned the unopened envelope. “You should probably hold on to this,” he said.

  He showed his editor Liz Calder the handsome leather-bound presentation copy of Midnight’s Children and opened it to the bookplate inside that read WINNER. She was so happy and excited that she poured a glass of champagne over it, to “baptize” it. The words smudged a little and he cried out in horror, “Look what you’ve done!” A couple of days later the Booker people sent him a new, pristine bookplate, but by then the baptized plate, bearing the smudge of victory, was the one he wanted. He never replaced it.

  The good years began.

  He had seven good years, more than many writers are granted, and for those years, during the bad times that followed, he was always grateful. Two years after Midnight’s Children he published Shame, the second part of the diptych in which he examined the world of his origins, a work deliberately conceived to be the formal opposite of its precursor, dealing for the most part not with India but with Pakistan, shorter, more tightly plotted, written in the third person rather than the first, with a series of characters occupying the center of the stage one after the other instead of a single dominant narrator-antihero. Nor was this a book written with love; his feelings toward Pakistan were ferocious, satirical, personal. Pakistan was that place where the crooked few ruled the impotent many, where bent civilian politicians and unscrupulous generals allied with one another, supplanted one another, and executed one another, echoing the Rome of the Caesars, where mad tyrants bedded their sisters and made their
horses into senators and fiddled while their city burned. But, for the ordinary Roman—and so also for the ordinary Pakistani—the murderous, psychotic mayhem inside the palace changed nothing. The palace was still the palace. The ruling class continued to rule.

  Pakistan was the great mistake of his parents, the blunder that had deprived him of his home. It was easy for him to see Pakistan itself as a historical blunder too, a country insufficiently imagined, conceived of the misguided notion that a religion could bind together peoples (Punjabi, Sindhi, Bengali, Baloch, Pathan) whom geography and history had long kept apart, born as a misshapen bird, “two Wings without a body, sundered by the land-mass of its greatest foe, joined by nothing but God,” whose East Wing had subsequently fallen off. What was the sound of one Wing flapping? The answer to this version of the famous Zen koan was undoubtedly “Pakistan.” So in Shame, his Pakistan-novel (the description was an oversimplification; there was plenty of Pakistan in Midnight’s Children, and a fair bit of India in Shame), the comedy was blacker, the politics more bloodily comic, as if, he told himself, the calamities in the palaces of the Twelve Caesars, or in a Shakespearean tragedy, were being enacted by buffoons, people unworthy of high tragedy—as if King Lear were to be performed by circus clowns, becoming simultaneously tragic and farcical, a circus catastrophe. The book drove itself forward at a speed that was new to him; after spending five years on Midnight’s Children, he had finished Shame in just over a year and a half. This novel, too, had a wonderful reception everywhere, or almost everywhere. In Pakistan itself it was unsurprisingly banned by Pakistan’s dictator, Zia ul-Haq, the point of origin for the character of “Raza Hyder” in the novel. However, many copies of the book found their way into Pakistan, including, he was told by Pakistani friends, quite a few that were brought in through the diplomatic pouches of various embassies, whose staffs read the book avidly and then passed it on.