Joseph Anton

by Salman Rushdie

  He met Duncan Slater for the last time. Slater was off to be British ambassador to Malaysia. They spoke for three hours and the upshot was that “HMG” had been affected by the louder noises he had begun to make, especially at Columbia. “Hurd recognizes you have a large constituency,” Slater told him. “It’s not necessarily his, but it’s large and impossible to ignore.” The foreign secretary had understood that the Rushdie case couldn’t be swept under the carpet. “We might be able to get the bounty money canceled,” Slater said. Well, that would be a good start, he replied. “The FCO isn’t pleased about your plans for the paperback, though.”

  On Elizabeth’s birthday, a few days later, they heard that Angela Carter’s cancer was in both lungs. It was hard for her to breathe and she had only a few weeks left. Her beautiful little boy, Alex, had been told. The idea of losing her was unbearable, but as his mother used to say, what can’t be cured must be endured. Two weeks later, Angela invited him to tea. It was the last time he saw her. When he got to the old familiar Clapham house he found that she had hauled herself out of bed and dressed up for him and was sitting upright in an armchair pouring tea like a formal hostess. He could see what an effort it was for her, and how much it mattered to her to do this, so they had a proper afternoon tea together and laughed as much as they could. “The insurance people will be furious,” she cackled, “because I’ve only paid three years’ premiums on a huge new plan and now they have to pay up, so my boys will be all right.” Her boys were her husband, Mark, who sat silently with them as was his wont, and her son, Alex, who wasn’t there. After a short time she was exhausted and he got up to go and kissed her goodbye. “You take care,” she said, and that was that. Four weeks after their tea she was dead.

  His closest friends—Caroline Michel, Richard and Ruth Rogers, Alan Yentob and Philippa Walker, Melvyn Bragg and others—were planning a public event to take place on the third anniversary of the fatwa, with many leading writers attending. Günter Grass said yes, he would come, and so did Mario Vargas Llosa and Tom Stoppard, and those who couldn’t come—Nadine Gordimer, Edward Said—promised to send video messages. What was not being publicly announced was that he himself would make a “surprise” appearance. The venue was the Stationers’ Hall, the old guildhall where many years earlier, in another life, he had received his Booker Prize.

  That young writer would not have had to listen to his publishers refusing to publish his paperback, but the golden years were over. He met Peter Mayer at Gillon’s home and Mayer was finally clear. No, he didn’t see the day when Penguin would publish a paperback edition of The Satanic Verses, though he would personally guarantee that the hardcover would be kept in print; and yes, he would, therefore, allow paperback rights to revert to the author so that some kind of consortium publication could be put together. Everyone tried to be polite and gracious even though it was a shocking moment. Mayer’s lawyer Martin Garbus was present again and opined that in America a consortium led by the American Booksellers Association, PEN American Center and the Authors Guild might be possible. The next day he called Frances D’Souza and, without any authority to do so, claimed that he was setting up a consortium, and asked her if Article 19 would be willing to serve as the book’s UK publishers. (Garbus would later claim in The New York Times that he had indeed been behind the creation of the consortium that published the book, a claim so much the opposite of the truth that it had to be swiftly refuted.)

  His life was like a day of high winds that sent clouds rushing across the sun: first darkness, then sudden light, then gloom again. The day after the Penguin meeting Sameen’s second child was born in the Florence Ward of Northwick Park Hospital in Harrow: a second daughter, Mishka. She would grow up to be a piano virtuoso, bringing music into a family which, until her arrival, had been comically unmusical.

  He was told by Special Branch that the latest intel suggested that Hezbollah units were still actively trying to hunt him down and kill him. There was no change in the threat assessment, which remained at Ludicrously High.

  Andrew met in New York with the United Nations’ Giandomenico Picco, the negotiator who had engineered the release of many of the Lebanon hostages, including John McCarthy. Picco said, of the Rushdie case, “I have worked on this and am working on it.” Some months later, in Washington, D.C., the invisible man was able to meet with the secret negotiator, and Picco gave him a piece of advice he would always remember. “The trouble with negotiating such a deal,” Picco said, “is that you spend a lot of time waiting for the train to arrive at the station, but you don’t know at which station it will arrive. The art of the negotiation is to be standing at as many stations as possible, so that when the train arrives, you are there.”

  In Berlin the newspaper Die Tageszeitung began a campaign of “Letters to Salman Rushdie.” The letters would be reprinted in two dozen newspapers across Europe and the Americas, and Peter Carey, Günter Grass, Nadine Gordimer, Mario Vargas Llosa, Norman Mailer, José Saramago, and William Styron were among the great writers who had agreed to contribute. When Carmel Bedford called Margaret Atwood to ask her to write a letter, the mighty Peggy said, “Oh, my, what could I possibly say?” To which Carmel with steely Irish ballsiness, answered, “Use your imagination.” And there was one great novelist who called him who did not contribute but was perhaps the most exciting of all to hear from. It was Thomas Pynchon, another famous invisible man, calling to thank him for his review of Vineland in The New York Times Book Review, and asking solicitously how he was doing. He replied by quoting the title of the cult classic by Pynchon’s friend Richard Fariña, the dedicatee of Gravity’s Rainbow: “Been down so long it looks like up to me.” Pynchon suggested that whenever next they were both in New York together they might meet for dinner. “Oh my goodness,” he said, sounding like a spotty schoolboy with a crush, “ooh, yes, please.”

  Putting together a consortium of publishers, booksellers, industry organizations and prominent individuals in the book world had not been difficult in Germany and Spain. Everyone had wanted to be part of what they saw as an important defense of free expression. Mysteriously, it was proving to be a very different matter in the United States. Andrew had taken advice from Justice William Brennan, one of the American “Supremes,” from the celebrated constitutional lawyer Floyd Abrams, and from the former attorney general Elliot Richardson, and they had all agreed that the paperback publication of The Satanic Verses was a major First Amendment issue. America’s eight leading publishers all disagreed. One after the other the great figures of U.S. publishing denied that freedom of expression was an issue in this matter, murmuring that to join a consortium would be an “implicit criticism” of Peter Mayer and Penguin. Sonny Mehta said to him, “What if people just don’t want to do it, Salman—if they just want it to go away?” Andrew heard that the Association of American Publishers was actually forming an unofficial anti-publication cartel to support Peter Mayer (whom they liked) and to oppose his own efforts, because, to be frank, they didn’t much care for the notorious Andrew Wylie, whose client was reputed to be pretty unpalatable as well. People were not returning his calls. Doors were being shut in his face. The New York Times reported that efforts to form a consortium were “faltering.” But Andrew—and Gillon in London—remained grimly determined. “We can publish this paperback,” they said, “and we will.”

  One single publisher broke ranks with the rest. George Craig of HarperCollins told Andrew he would—quietly—help. He could not authorize HarperCollins to join the consortium but he could and would bankroll the printing of the first one hundred thousand copies, and provide a designer to create a paperback jacket; and he would show Andrew how to set up the printing, warehousing and distribution system the consortium would need to keep publication going. But even Craig was nervous; he didn’t want it known that he was doing anything. And so, covertly, surreptitiously, a publishing plan came together, like the planning of a crime by men in snap-brim hats and outsized overcoats grouped around a wooden table in
a basement under a single naked lightbulb. The company, named The Consortium, Inc., was incorporated in Delaware. There were three members of the Consortium: Gillon Aitken, Salman Rushdie and Andrew Wylie. Not a single American, or indeed British, publisher added his name officially or—George Craig honorably excepted—gave the project any financial or organizational support. Andrew and Gillon poured their money into the project too and reached an agreement with their author about how any profits might be divided. “We’re doing this,” Andrew said. “We’re just about ready to go.”

  He had bought Elizabeth’s flat and was still waiting for Robert McCrum to complete the purchase of the house on St. Peter’s Street. The building works at 9 Bishop’s Avenue were costing a small fortune and money was tight. If for some reason Hampstead Lane were to be “blown,” he thought, he probably couldn’t afford another high-priced rental. It might have to be the army base after all.

  Valentine’s Day was almost upon him and the usual unpleasant noises were being made. The fatwa was restated, of course. An Iranian newspaper described the order as a “divine command to stone the devil to death.” Iran’s British lackey Kalim Siddiqui spoke up from under his toadstool. “Rushdie is Islam’s Enemy Number One.” But this time there were a few answering cries. One hundred and fifteen European MPs signed a motion expressing “deep sympathy for the continuing difficulties experienced by the author,” and calling upon all member states to press Iran to withdraw the threats. David Gore-Booth told him that Douglas Hogg and the Foreign Office were taking a “very positive” line, but wanted to wait until after the April elections to the Iranian Majlis. Then they could seek to have the bounty revoked and to get the fatwa formally “ring-fenced”—that is, to get the Iranians to declare it to be valid only inside Iran—as a first step toward its final cancelation.

  He was a little encouraged. At least the defense campaign’s pressure was obliging the government to come up with new ideas about the case.

  Then a very surprising thing happened. Frances and Article 19’s Middle East expert Saïd Essoulami wrote to the Iranian chargé d’affaires asking for a meeting to discuss the case—and the Iranians agreed. On the morning of February 14, 1992, Frances and Saïd met Iranian officials and discussed the fatwa and the bounty money. The Iranians gave very little away, but they had plainly been rattled by the pro-Rushdie publicity, Frances thought. They insisted to her and Saïd that the British government was not interested in the case. (When news of this meeting got into the press, the Iranians tried to deny that it had taken place, and then claimed that only a “local employee” and not any of the mission’s diplomatic staff had been present.)

  There were protests and statements in his support all over the world that day. In France seventeen million people watched a TV interview he had recorded: the largest audience ever measured in France for a program other than the main evening news. That evening at the Stationers’ Hall in London he spoke to an audience of writers and friends, telling them, “I refuse to be an un-person. I refuse to forgo the right to publish my work.” The event was sympathetically covered in all the British newspapers except The Independent, which failed to mention it at all.

  Angela Carter died on February 16, 1992. When the phone call came he stood in his living room and wept. Then he was wanted for the Late Show, to talk about her. A media appearance was the last thing on his mind, but Alan Yentob said, “Angela would have wanted it to be you,” so he wrote something and was taken to the studio. When he got there he said, “I’m doing exactly one take of this. I’m not going to be able to do two.” He got through it somehow and went home. Another version of his piece ran in The New York Times. He had just finished his essay about The Wizard of Oz and he remembered that it was Angela who had first told him the tales of the Munchkins’ dreadful behavior in Hollywood, their drunkenness and promiscuity. She had particularly loved the story of the boozed-up Munchkin who got stuck in a toilet bowl. He dedicated his little book to her. Unlike that old fraud, Oz, the Great and Terrible, she had been a very good wizard, as he wrote in his newspaper piece, and a very dear friend.

  She had made detailed arrangements for her funeral service and he was commanded to participate and to read Andrew Marvell’s poem “On a Drop of Dew”:

  So the Soul, that Drop, that Ray

  Of the clear Fountain of Eternal Day

  Does, in its pure and circling thoughts, express

  The greater Heaven in an Heaven less.

  On the day before the funeral the tabloids ran more unpleasant stuff about Elizabeth and her “expense” to the nation. They had no photograph of her, however, and the police warned him that if they went to the service the paparazzi would hound them and get the picture that would place her in greater danger. He said they would go separately then and Helen Hammington’s sympathetic mask slipped. He was making too many demands on the Branch, she said, because of his public appearances. “Every other principal you protect,” he pointed out, “has a full daily program of events and you don’t complain. I want to go to my friend’s funeral and you say it’s too much.” “Yes,” she said, “but every other principal is performing or has performed a service to the nation. You, in my opinion, have not.”

  In the end Elizabeth did not go to the service at Putney Vale Cemetery. There was not a single press photographer at the event. The police had been wrong about that. They did not say so, of course. They were planning for the worst-case scenario as they always did. He would not live his life by the worst-case scenario. That would turn him into their prisoner. He was nobody’s prisoner. He was an innocent man trying to lead a free man’s life.

  Michael Berkeley told him afterward that the presence of so many policemen in the crematorium grounds on the day of the funeral had provoked the following exchange among the congregation emerging from the previous cremation: “Must be someone really important on next.” And, just as Michael was about to interject, yes, someone really important, Angela Carter, he heard the reply. “Nah. Probably just some villain let out of the Scrubs for the morning to bury his mother.”

  The protection officers themselves continued to be as friendly, sympathetic and helpful as they could. When Zafar wanted to demonstrate his prowess at rugby the new guy, Tony Dunblane—he of the dashing mustache and tweed jackets, like a pirate from the suburbs—took father and son to the police sports ground at Bushey and the guys lined up like a three-quarter line so that Zafar could run and pass the rugby ball. (Zafar had done his entrance exam and interview for Highgate School and, to his parents’ great joy and infinite relief, won himself a place. He knew he had achieved a big thing for himself and his confidence soared, just as his mother and father had hoped.) Elizabeth was methodically going about the business of choosing furniture and wallpaper for the new house as if they were any couple setting up home together and Tony brought back pictures of the latest, state-of-the-art sound systems and TV sets and offered to assemble everything they selected once they had all moved in. And when Robert McCrum finally did exchange contracts and the deal to sell 41 St. Peter’s Street was done the police took him back to what was no longer his home and helped him box up his possessions and take them out to a waiting van to be stored at a police lockup until they could be brought to the new house. The ordinary human kindness of these men toward a fellow human being in “one hell of a jam,” as Tony Dunblane put it, never ceased to move him.

  It took almost five hours, with Elizabeth’s help, to pack up Marianne’s effects. Hidden among her belongings he found all the pictures he had taken on his trip to Nicaragua in 1986, about which he had written his short book of reportage, The Jaguar Smile. And all the negatives, too. (Later, Gillon’s colleague Sally Riley, appointed by Marianne to receive her possessions, returned other discoveries—an antique stone Gandhara civilization head that his mother had given him, and a bag of his photographs—not the ones from the missing albums, but the spares, rejects and double prints. At least these few reminders of his life before Marianne had been salvaged. Imag
es of Zafar’s birth and early moments were especially good to regain. The main body of the missing photographs, the ones pasted into the lost albums, was never recovered.)

  The difficulties of the everyday—or that calamitous distortion of the quotidian that had become “everyday” to him—continued, like an invader, to occupy him. Andrew Wylie had been trying to buy a new apartment; when the co-op board learned that he was the literary agent for the author of The Satanic Verses, it turned him down. Communicating this news, trying to sound as if it didn’t matter, Andrew had never sounded so low. It was a poor reward for all he had done, and was doing, on his author’s behalf. This story, at least, had a happy ending. Not long after his rejection, Andrew found a better apartment, and this time the co-op board did not refuse him.

  Then, a bombshell. Helen Hammington came to visit and the iron fist emerged from the velvet glove. After he and Elizabeth had settled into the new house, she said, police protection would be withdrawn, because Deputy Assistant Commissioner John Howley was not willing to risk the safety of his men in what would inevitably become an overt protection.

  It was a breathtaking betrayal of trust. From the first day of the protection he had been assured that it would continue until the intelligence services’ threat assessment came down to an acceptable level. That had not happened. Moreover, it had been Howley and his henchman Greenup who had suggested that the time had come when he should buy a place. They had specifically assured him that if the proper security systems were installed the protection could continue in that location even if it became known as his house. They had obliged him to buy a detached property, with a forecourt and two separate gates, one electronic and one manually operated (in case of power cuts), an integral garage whose automatic wooden door would conceal a sheet of bulletproof metal; he had been obliged to install the expensive bulletproof windows and alarm systems they had insisted upon, and, most of all, had had to buy a house more than double the size he and Elizabeth needed for themselves, so that four police officers—two protection officers and two drivers—could sleep on the premises, and have their own living room as well. He had spent a huge amount of money and effort satisfying every requirement, and now that he had spent that money and was nailed to the spot they were saying, “Okay, we’ll be off, then.” The immorality of it was almost impressive.