Joseph Anton: A Memoir Page 8

  Some years later he learned that Shame had even been awarded a prize in Iran. It had been published in Farsi without his knowledge, in a state-sanctioned pirate edition, and then had been named the best novel translated into Farsi that year. He never received the award, nor was he sent any formal notification of it; but it meant—according to stories emerging from Iran—that when The Satanic Verses was published five years later, the few Iranian booksellers who sold English-language books assumed that it would be unproblematic to sell this new title, its author having already gained the mullocracy’s approval with his previous work; and so copies were imported and put on sale at the time of the book’s first publication in September 1988, and these copies remained on sale for six months, without arousing any opposition, until the fatwa of February 1989. He was never able to find out if this story was true, but he hoped it was, because it demonstrated what he believed: that the furor over his book was created from the top down, not from the bottom up.

  But in the mideighties the fatwa was an unimaginable cloud hidden below the far horizon. Meanwhile, the success of his books had a beneficial effect on his character. He felt something relax deep within him, and became happier, sweeter natured, easier to be around. Strangely, however, older novelists gave him warnings in those balmy times of worse days to follow. He was taken to lunch by Angus Wilson at the Athenaeum Club not long after Wilson’s seventieth birthday; and, listening to the author of Anglo-Saxon Attitudes and The Old Men at the Zoo speak wistfully of the days “when I used to be a fashionable writer” he understood that he was being told, gently, that the wind always changes; yesterday’s hot young kid is tomorrow’s melancholy, ignored senior citizen.

  When he went to America for the publication of Midnight’s Children he had his picture taken by the photographer Jill Krementz and met her husband, Kurt Vonnegut; and they invited him out to their house in Sagaponack, Long Island, for the weekend. “Are you serious about this writing business?” Vonnegut unexpectedly asked him as they sat drinking beers in the sunshine, and when he replied that he was, the author of Slaughterhouse-Five told him, “Then you should know that the day is going to come when you won’t have a book to write, and you’re still going to have to write a book.”

  On his way to Sagaponack he had read a bundle of reviews sent over by his American publishers, Knopf. There was an astonishingly generous notice by Anita Desai in The Washington Post. If she thought well of the book then he could be happy; perhaps he really had done something worthwhile. And there was a positive review in the Chicago Tribune, written by Nelson Algren. The Man with the Golden Arm, A Walk on the Wild Side … that Nelson Algren? The lover of Simone de Beauvoir, the friend of Hemingway? It was as if literature’s golden past had reached out to anoint him. Nelson Algren, he thought in wonderment. I thought he was dead. He arrived in Sagaponack earlier than expected. The Vonneguts were on their way out of the house to go to the housewarming party of their friend and neighbor … Nelson Algren. It was an amazing coincidence. “Well,” said Kurt, “if he reviewed your book I’m sure he’d like to meet you. I’ll go call him and tell him you’re coming over with us.” He went indoors. A few moments later he came back from the telephone looking shaken and gray. “Nelson Algren just died,” he said. Algren had prepared his party and then suffered a fatal heart attack. The first guests to arrive found the host dead on the living room rug. His review of Midnight’s Children was the last thing he ever wrote.

  Nelson Algren. I thought he was dead. Algren’s death darkened Vonnegut’s mood. His own thoughts were sober, too. The sudden, unforeseeable plunge toward the rug awaited us all.

  The critical success of Midnight’s Children in the United States took Knopf by surprise. He had come to New York at his own expense just to be there when his book was published, and no interviews had been arranged for him, and none were, not even after the excellent notices appeared. The print run was small, there was a small reprint, a small paperback sale, and that was that. However, he was fortunate enough to shake hands, at the entrance to the offices at 201 East 50th Street, with the legendary Alfred A. Knopf himself, an elderly, courteous gentleman in an expensive coat and a dark beret. And he also met his gangling, intense publisher, Robert Gottlieb, who was something of a legend himself. He was taken to Bob Gottlieb’s office, which was decorated with fiftieth-birthday bunting and cards, and after they had spoken for a while, Gottlieb said, “Now that I know I like you, I can tell you that I thought I wasn’t going to.” This was shocking. “Why?” he said, fumbling for words. “Didn’t you like my book? I mean, you published my book.…” Bob shook his head. “It wasn’t because of your book,” he said. “But I recently read a very great book by a very great writer and after it I thought I wouldn’t be able to like anyone with a Muslim background.” This was, if anything, an even more astonishing statement. “What was this very great book?” he asked Gottlieb, “and who is this very great writer?” “The book,” said Bob Gottlieb, “is called Among the Believers, and the author is V. S. Naipaul.” “That,” he said to the editor-in-chief of Knopf, “is a book I definitely want to read.”

  Bob Gottlieb didn’t appear to know how his words were being received, and, in fairness, he went on to be extremely hospitable toward the author he hadn’t thought he would like, inviting him to eat at his town house in Turtle Bay, the tony Manhattan neighborhood whose other residents included Kurt Vonnegut, Stephen Sondheim and Katharine Hepburn. (The septuagenarian movie star had recently showed up on Gottlieb’s doorstep after a snowstorm, carrying a shovel, and offered to clear the snow off the publisher’s roof.) Gottlieb was also on the board of George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet and invited his new young Indian novelist—who had once seen Balanchine’s greatest love, Suzanne Farrell, dance in London with the Maurice Béjart ballet company after her quarrel with the great Russian choreographer—to watch a performance. “There is only one condition,” Bob said. “You have to forget about Béjart and agree that Balanchine is God.”

  He offered literary hospitality, too. When Gottlieb left Knopf in 1987 to step into William Shawn’s shoes as editor of The New Yorker, the doors of that august journal finally opened to allow the author of Midnight’s Children to enter. Under Mr. Shawn’s regime those doors had remained resolutely closed, and Salman was not one of those who mourned the end of the great editor’s fifty-three-year reign. Bob Gottlieb published both his fiction and nonfiction, and was a brilliant, detailed and passionate editor of the long essay “Out of Kansas” (1992), a response to The Wizard of Oz, which, as Gottlieb rightly encouraged him to stress, was one of the sweetest of odes to friendship in the movies.

  During the fatwa years he saw Gottlieb only once. Liz Calder and Carmen Callil gave a joint birthday party at the Groucho Club in Soho, and he was able to go for a while. When he said hello to Bob, the publisher said, with great intensity, “I’m always defending you, Salman. I always tell people, if you had known that your book was going to kill people, of course you wouldn’t have written it.” He counted very slowly to ten. It would not be right to hit this old man. It would be better to make an excuse and just walk away. He inclined his head in a meaningless gesture and turned on his heel. In the years that followed they did not speak. He owed a great deal to Bob Gottlieb but he couldn’t get those final words out of his head, and he knew that, just as Gottlieb hadn’t understood the impact of his words about Naipaul’s book when they had met for the first time, he also didn’t understand what was wrong with what he said at this, their last meeting. Bob believed he was being a friend.

  In 1984 his marriage ended. They had been together for fourteen years and had grown apart without noticing it. Clarissa wanted a country life, and they had spent one summer looking at houses west of London, but in the end he realized that to move into the countryside would drive him insane. He was a city boy. He told her this and she acquiesced, but it was a difficulty between them. They had fallen in love when they were both very young and now that they were older their interest
s often failed to coincide. There were parts of his life in London that didn’t greatly interest her. One such part was his antiracist work. He had been involved for a long time with a race relations group, the Camden Committee for Community Relations, or CCCR, and his voluntary work there, overseeing the community work team, had become important to him. It had shown him a city he had previously known little about, the immigrant London of deprivation and prejudice, what he would afterward call a city visible but unseen. The immigrant city was right there in plain sight, in Southall and Wembley and Brixton as well as Camden, but in those days its problems were largely ignored, except during brief explosions of racial violence. This was a chosen blindness: an unwillingness to accept the city, the world, as it really was. He gave a lot of his spare time to race relations work, and used his experiences with CCCR as the basis of a polemical broadcast titled “The New Empire Within Britain,” an attempt to describe the growth of a new underclass of black and brown Britons, made for the Opinions slot on Channel Four, and it was obvious she didn’t much care for the rhetoric he used in that talk, either.

  But their biggest problem was a more intimate one. Ever since Zafar’s birth they, and in particular Clarissa, had wanted more children, and the children had not come. Instead there was a series of early miscarriages. There had been one such miscarriage before Zafar’s conception and birth and there were two more afterward. He discovered that the problem was genetic. He had inherited (probably from his father’s side) a condition known as a simple chromosome translocation.

  A chromosome was a stick of genetic information and all human cells contained twenty-two pairs of such sticks, as well as a twenty-third pair that determined gender. In rare cases a piece of genetic information broke off one chromosome and attached itself to another. There were then two faulty chromosomes, one with too little genetic information and another with too much. When a child was conceived, half the father’s chromosomes, chosen at random, combined with half the mother’s, to create a new set of pairs. If the father had a simple chromosome translocation and both his faulty chromosomes were selected, the child would be born normally, except that it would inherit the condition. If neither of the faulty chromosomes were selected, the pregnancy would also be normal and the child would not inherit the condition. But if only one of the two problem chromosomes were to be selected, then the fetus would not form, and the pregnancy would miscarry.

  Trying to have a baby became a kind of biological roulette. Their luck had not been good, and the stress of all those miscarriages, all those dashed hopes, had worn them both down. Their physical relationship came to an end. Neither of them could bear the idea of yet another attempt followed by yet another failure. And perhaps it was humanly impossible for Clarissa not to blame him for the end of her dream of a family of children running around her and becoming the meaning of her life. It was impossible for him not to blame himself.

  Any long relationship that no longer included sex was probably doomed. For thirteen of their fourteen years together he had been unquestioningly faithful to her but in the fourteenth year the bond of loyalty had broken, or been eroded, and there were brief infidelities during literary trips to Canada and Sweden and a longer infidelity in London, with an old Cambridge friend who played the violin. (Clarissa had been unfaithful to him only once, but that was long ago, in 1973, when he was still writing Grimus, and although she was briefly tempted to leave him for her lover she soon gave the other man up, and they both forgot the episode; or almost forgot. He never forgot his rival’s name. It was, a little improbably, Aylmer Gribble.)

  At the time he was idiotically certain that he had concealed his affairs so well that his wife knew nothing, suspected nothing. In retrospect he was amazed that he could have been so vain. Of course she knew.

  He went by himself to Australia, to take part in the Adelaide Festival and, afterward, accompanied Bruce Chatwin into the Australian desert. They were in a bookstore in Alice Springs when he saw a paperback copy of Robyn Davidson’s Tracks, an account of her solo trek across the Gibson Desert accompanied by camels she had caught and trained herself. His editor at Cape, Liz Calder, had praised the book and its intrepid author when it came out, and he had said, dismissively, “Why walk across the desert when you can go by Airbus?” But now he was seeing the places the book talked about and so he bought it and was impressed. “You should meet her when you go to Sydney,” Bruce said. “Let’s call her. I’ve got her phone number.” “Of course you do,” he replied. In Bruce’s famous Moleskine notebooks were the phone numbers of everyone on earth who had ever amounted to anything. If you had asked him for the queen of England’s unlisted personal line he would have found it in an instant.

  Robyn, blond, blue-eyed, anguished, not at all his type, invited him to dinner in her tiny house in Annandale and the thunderbolt hit them both hard. When she went to get the roast chicken she found it was still cold. She had been so distracted that she had forgotten to turn the oven on. Their three-year affair began the next morning and was the polar opposite of his long, calm, mostly happy relationship with Clarissa. They were strongly attracted to each other but in every other way incompatible. They yelled at each other almost every day.

  She took him out into the Australian outback and he, the city mouse, was awed by her ability to survive in the wilderness. They slept under the stars and were not murdered by scorpions or eaten by kangaroos or stomped flat by the giant Old Woman Dreamtime Ancestor, Dancing. It was an extraordinary gift to be given. They transported her camels from a “station” or ranch in the Australian northwest, near Shark Bay (where he swam with dolphins and saw a house built entirely out of shells), down to new accommodations on a friend’s property to the south of Perth. He learned two new things about camels. The first thing was that camels are happily incestuous; the baby of this group was the result of an uncomplicated union between a male camel and his mother. (This incest camel was given his name, or an Australianized version of it. It became “Selman the Camel.”) And the second thing was that when a camel is upset its shit changes from dry innocuous pellets to a liquid spray that blasts out a considerable distance behind the aggrieved dromedary. You should never stray behind a grumpy camel. These were both important lessons.

  She moved to England but it proved impossible for them to live together and in their final year they broke up more than a dozen times. Two months after their last separation he awoke in the middle of the night in his new home, the house on St. Peter’s Street, and there was someone in his bedroom. He leaped naked to his feet. She had used her key to get in—he had not changed the locks—and she insisted that they “had to talk.” When he refused and tried to leave the room she grabbed him and, at one point, stamped hard with her heel on his foot. After that one of his toes lost all feeling. “If I were a woman and you were a man,” he asked her, “what would you call this?” That got through to her and she left. When she published her first and only novel, Ancestors, it featured a highly unpleasant American character who became the sadistic lover of the main female character. In an interview she gave to The Guardian she was asked, “Was he based on Salman Rushdie?” and she replied, “Not as much as in the first draft.”

  There was a novel growing in him but its exact nature eluded him. He had fragments of narratives and characters, and an obstinate instinct that in spite of the enormous differences between these fragments, they all belonged in the same book. The precise shape and nature of the book remained obscure. It would be a big book, he knew that much, ranging widely over space and time. A book of journeys. That felt right. After he finished Shame the first part of his plan had been completed. He had dealt, as well as he knew how to deal, with the worlds from which he had come. Now he needed to connect those worlds to the very different world in which he had made his life. He was beginning to see that this, rather than India or Pakistan or politics or magic realism, would be his real subject, the one he would worry away at for the rest of his life, the great matter of how the world joined up, not o
nly how the East flowed into the West and the West into the East, but how the past shaped the present while the present changed our understanding of the past, and how the imagined world, the location of dreams, art, invention and, yes, belief, leaked across the frontier that separated it from the everyday, “real” place in which human beings mistakenly believed they lived.

  This was what had happened to the shrinking planet: People—communities, cultures—no longer lived in little boxes, sealed away from one another. Now all the little boxes opened up into all the other little boxes, a man’s job in one country could be lost because of the machinations of a currency speculator from a faraway land whose name he didn’t know and whose face he would never see, and, as the theorists of the new science of chaos told us, when a butterfly flapped its wings in Brazil it could cause a hurricane in Texas. The original opening sentence of Midnight’s Children had been “Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence,” and even though in the end he had buried it elsewhere in the text, thinking it too Tolstoyan an opening—if there was one thing Midnight’s Children was not, it was not Anna Karenina—the idea continued to nag at him. How to tell the stories of such a world, a world in which character was no longer always destiny, in which your fate could be determined not by your own choices but by those of strangers, in which economics could be destiny, or a bomb?