Once, at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, at a dinner for the many Indian writers invited that year, he was told, apropos of nothing, by the Indian novelist Githa Hariharan, “Of course, your position in Indian literature is highly problematic.” He was shocked and slightly hurt. “Really?” he replied, sounding foolish. “Oh, yes,” she said emphatically. “Highly.”
On the beach outside their hotel he met a small, slightly built man in a natty straw hat, selling tourist trinkets with unusual fervor. “Hello, sir, buy something, sir,” the man said, smiling a huge smile, and adding, “My name is Body Building.” It was as though Mickey Mouse had introduced himself as “Arnold Schwarzenegger.” He shook his head. “No, it isn’t,” he said, and then switched into Hindi. “You must have an Indian name.” The effect of the language was dramatic. “You are proper Indian, sir?” Body Building asked, also in Hindi. “From India proper?” In three days’ time it would be Holi, the spring festival of colors, when all over India—and, apparently, in Mauritius too—people “played Holi,” that is, drenched one another with colored water and threw colored powders at one another. “You must play Holi at my house,” Body Building insisted, and the delighted laughter of the Holi players offered some release of the growing tension between himself and his companions. It was a good day in the five-week-old marriage that was already showing signs of strain. There were electric sparks crackling between Marianne and Lara, and himself and Lara, and himself and Marianne. The warm Indian Ocean could not wash that fact away, nor could the bright colors of Holi conceal it. “I’m in your shadow,” Marianne said to him, and he saw the resentment on her face. Andrew Wylie and Gillon Aitken were her agents too. He had introduced her and they had taken her on. But now The Satanic Verses was being sold and her novel had to wait in line.
When they got back from the festivities, soaking wet and colored pink and green, there was a message from Andrew waiting for him. He called New York from the hotel bar. Celebratory sunset colors exploded across the sky. The bids were in. They were high, almost shockingly high, to his mind, more than ten times higher than his previous highest advance. But the big money came at a price. Two good friendships had been seriously damaged.
Liz Calder, his first and only editor and his close friend for fifteen years, had resigned from Jonathan Cape earlier that year to become one of the founders of the new Bloomsbury publishing house. Because of their friendship there was an assumption that he would follow her. At that time Andrew Wylie represented him only in the United States; his British agent was still the highly respected Deborah Rogers, also a close friend of Calder’s. Deborah quickly agreed with Liz that “the new Rushdie” would go to Bloomsbury for a modest fee, as the new publishing house couldn’t afford high advances. It was the kind of sweetheart deal that was common in British publishing, and he didn’t like it. Andrew Wylie told him that if he accepted a low figure in the United Kingdom it would ruin the book’s prospects in the United States. After much hesitation he agreed to allow Andrew, and his British counterpart, Gillon Aitken, to represent him worldwide. The sweetheart deal was canceled, Liz and Deborah were both deeply hurt, and the auction followed. It occurred to him to point out to Liz that, in fact, she had been the one who had left him by leaving Cape and going to Bloomsbury, but she wasn’t inclined to listen to such arguments. There wasn’t much to say to Deb. She was no longer his agent. There was no way to sugar-coat that pill.
Friendship had always been of great importance to him. He had spent much of his life physically distant from his family and also emotionally distant from much of it. Friends were the family one chose. Goethe used the scientific term elective affinities to propose that the connections of love, marriage and friendship between human beings were similar to chemical reactions. People were drawn to one another chemically to form stable compounds—marriages—or, when exposed to other influences, they fell apart from one another; one part of the compound was displaced by a new element and, perhaps, a new compound was formed. He himself didn’t much like the use of chemistry as metaphor. It felt too determinist and left too little room for the action of human will. Elective to him meant chosen, not by one’s unconscious biochemical nature but by one’s conscious self. His love of his chosen friends, and of those who had chosen him, had sustained and nourished him; and the wounds his actions had inflicted, even though they were justifiable in business terms, felt humanly wrong.
He had met Liz through Clarissa’s closest friend, Rosanne Edge-Partington, in the early seventies. Clarissa’s mother, Lavinia, had recently emigrated to the village of Mijas in the south of Spain, General Franco’s favorite Andalusian beauty spot, a magnet for ultraconservative expatriates from all over Europe, and, eventually, the model for the fictional but not dissimilar village of Benengeli in The Moor’s Last Sigh. She sold her large house at 35 Lower Belgrave Street to the actors Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson, who later sold it—strangely enough—to the wife of the dictator of Nicaragua, Hope Somoza; but Lavinia kept the smaller maisonette, No. 37a, which had originally been attached to the main house, for her daughter to live in. Clarissa and he lived there for three and a half years until they bought the house at 19 Raveley Street in Kentish Town in north London, where he wrote Midnight’s Children, dreaming of heat-hazy Indian horizons while looking out at leaden English skies; and for most of those three and a half years Liz Calder was their lodger. Her then boyfriend Jason Spender was pursuing a doctorate at Manchester University while she worked in the publicity department at the publishers Victor Gollancz in London, and she was commuting between Manchester and London, spending three or four days a week in the office and the rest up north.
She was a gorgeous woman and one of the jobs she gave him was that when men drove her home from various book-world events, as men often did, he had to stay up and chat to them cheerfully until they went home. “Don’t ever leave me alone with them,” she ordered him, as if she were not perfectly able to handle whatever a man might try on her. One of these night visitors was the writer Roald Dahl, a long, unpleasant man with huge strangler’s hands, who gave him hate-filled looks that made him determined not to budge an inch. Finally Dahl stormed off into the night, barely saying goodnight, even to Liz. Another of her gentlemen callers was the New Statesman magazine’s film critic John Coleman, supposedly a reformed alcoholic, who opened his briefcase, took out a couple of seriously alcoholic bottles and announced, “These are for me.” Coleman stayed so late that in the end he betrayed her trust and went to bed, with Liz looking daggers at him as he went. The next morning she revealed that Coleman had torn all his clothes off in the living room and cried, “Take me, I’m yours.” She had gently made the eminent critic dress again and had shown him to the door.
Liz had married young, moved from New Zealand to Brazil with her husband, Richard, had a son and a daughter, worked as a model, left her husband and gone to London. Brazil remained a great love and once, when a “Brazilian ball” in London offered two plane tickets to Rio as first prize for the best carnival costume, she covered her naked body in white cold cream, struck a pose and was drawn around the ballroom on a little trolley by her new boyfriend, Louis Baum, the editor of the publishing trade’s weekly bible The Bookseller, who was dressed in smock and beret as a sculptor, with a chisel in his hand. Naturally, she won.
She was promoted from the publicity department at Gollancz and became an editor just as he finished Grimus. She had been sleeping at night in the room he wrote in by day and, unknown to him, had been sneaking looks at the growing manuscript. When it was done she published it, and so his first novel as an author was also her first novel as a publisher. After Zafar was born they had all vacationed together in France along with Louis’s little boy Simon. This was the connection he had broken, for money. What did that say about him?
The association with Deborah Rogers wasn’t as old as his friendship with Liz, but it was close. She was a kindly, mothering, emotionally capacious and generous woman, whose relationship with her au
thors was as affectionate as it was businesslike. After the publication of Midnight’s Children, long before its Booker award and international bestsellerdom, it was in her office that he had worked out that, if he were to be very careful, he might be able to live by his pen. Her encouragement gave him the strength to go home and tell Clarissa to “prepare to be poor,” and then Clarissa’s faith had redoubled his confidence and allowed him to go into the ad agency and resign. He and Clarissa had spent happy times at Middle Pitts, the farm in Wales owned by Deb and her composer husband, Michael Berkeley. This rift, too, left behind a guilty ache. But when the storm broke over his head both Deborah and Liz at once set aside their grievances and behaved toward him with spectacular loyalty and generosity. It was the love and loyalty of his friends that enabled him to survive those years, and, yes, their forgiveness, too.
And Liz came to feel that she had dodged a bullet. If she had published The Satanic Verses, the ensuing crisis, with its bomb threats, death threats, security expenses, building evacuations and fear would very probably have sunk her new publishing venture right away, and Bloomsbury would never have survived to discover an obscure, unpublished children’s author called Jo Rowling.
There was one more thing. In the battle of The Satanic Verses, no writer could have wished for more courageous, unflinching, determined allies than Andrew Wylie and Gillon Aitken. When he appointed them he did not know they would be going to war together, and nor could they have known what lay ahead. But when the war came he was glad they were standing with him.
The highest offer for the English-language rights to publish The Satanic Verses was not made by Viking Penguin. Another offer was a full $100,000 higher, but Andrew and Gillon both advised him strongly against accepting it. He was not accustomed to figures of this size, much less with turning them down, and he asked Andrew, “Could you just explain again why I should not agree to receive an extra one hundred thousand dollars?” Andrew was adamant. “They would be the wrong publishers for you.” Later, after the storm broke, an interview with Mr. Rupert Murdoch was printed in The New Yorker, in which he stated emphatically, “I think you should not give offense to people’s religious beliefs. For instance, I hope that our people would never have published the Salman Rushdie book.” It was possible that Rupert Murdoch didn’t know that some of “his people” had been so enthusiastic about the novel that they had outbid the opposition by a considerable distance, but it seemed probable, in the light of this New Yorker profile, that had Murdoch found himself in the position of being the publisher of The Satanic Verses he would have withdrawn the book the moment the trouble began. Andrew Wylie’s advice had been unusually prescient. Murdoch was indeed the wrong publisher for the book.
There was no such thing as “ordinary life.” He had always liked the idea of the surrealists that our ability to experience the world as extraordinary was dulled by habituation. We grew used to the way things were, to the dailiness of life, and a sort of dust or film obscured our vision, and the true, miraculous nature of life on earth eluded us. It was the task of the artist to wipe away that blinding layer and renew our capacity for wonderment. That felt right to him; but the problem was not only one of habituation. People also suffered from a form of chosen blindness. People pretended that there was such a thing as ordinary, such a thing as normal, and that was the public fantasy, far more escapist than the most escapist fiction, inside which they cocooned themselves. People retreated behind their front doors into the hidden zone of their private, family worlds and when outsiders asked how things were they answered, Oh, everything’s going along just fine, not much to report, situation normal. But everyone secretly knew that behind that door things were rarely humdrum. More typically, all hell was breaking loose, as people dealt with their angry fathers, drunken mothers, resentful siblings, mad aunts, lecherous uncles and crumbling grandparents. The family was not the firm foundation upon which society rested, but stood at the dark chaotic heart of everything that ailed us. It was not normal, but surreal; not humdrum, but filled with event; not ordinary, but bizarre. He remembered with what excitement he had listened, at the age of twenty, to the Reith Lectures delivered on BBC Radio by Edmund Leach, the great anthropologist and interpreter of Claude Lévi-Strauss who, a year earlier, had succeeded Noel Annan as provost of King’s. “Far from being the basis of the good society,” Leach had said, “the family, with its narrow privacy and tawdry secrets, is the source of all our discontents.” Yes! he thought. Yes! That is a thing I also know. The families in the novels he later wrote would be explosive, operatic, arm-waving, exclamatory, wild. People who did not like his books would sometimes criticize these fictional families for being unrealistic—not “ordinary” enough. However, readers who did like his books said to him, “Those families are exactly like my family.”
English-language publication rights to The Satanic Verses were sold to Viking Penguin on March 15, 1988. It was published in London on September 26. Those were the last six months of his “ordinary life,” after which the patinas of habituation and self-deception were roughly torn away and what became visible was not the surreal beauty of the world, but its beastly monstrosity. It would be his task, in the years that followed, to rediscover, as Beauty did, the beauty in the Beast.
When Marianne moved into the house on St. Peter’s Street she looked for a local physician. He offered to introduce her to his own GP. “No,” she said, “I want a woman doctor.” But, he said, his GP was a woman. “Still,” she said, “I need to find someone who understands the treatment I had.” She was, she said, a survivor of colonic cancer, which she had beaten by undergoing an avant-garde form of treatment in Canada. (It was legal there but not in the United States, she told him.) “So I’m asking around on the cancer network.” After a couple of days she said she had found the doctor she wanted.
In the spring of 1988 he and Marianne were thinking about the future. At one point they briefly thought they might buy a new house in New York and keep only an apartment in London, but Zafar was not quite nine years old so they soon gave up that idea. They looked at houses in Hampstead, on Kemplay Road, and then on Willow Road on the edge of the Heath, and they even made an offer for the Willow Road house that was accepted. But he backed out of the deal, saying he didn’t really want the disruption of a house move. The truth was darker: He didn’t want to buy a house with Marianne, because he wasn’t sure their relationship would last.
She began to complain, that spring, of feeling ill again. After a violent quarrel about his continuing “obsession” with Robyn, which was in reality her obsession, she spoke of feeling a shadow within her, a deep ache in her blood. She needed to see the doctor. She feared the onset of cervical cancer. He felt the bitter irony of such a crisis arising at the very moment when they had both finished books, and had much to look forward to; of the possibility of a horrifying loss rising up to dwarf their joy. “You’re always talking about what you have lost,” she told him. “But it’s obvious how many things you have gained.”
Then she learned that her application for a Guggenheim had not been successful, and her mood deflated. She heard from the doctor; the news was inconclusive but not great. But within a couple of weeks, as abruptly as the possibility of cancer had been introduced, it was dismissed. The gathering clouds disappeared. She was healthy. The future existed again.
Why did he feel that there was something wrong with this narrative? He couldn’t put his finger on it. Perhaps the trust between them was already too badly eroded. She could not forgive the piece of paper she had found in his pocket. His decision not to buy the Willow Road house had dealt another blow to her faith in their marriage. And he, too, had some difficult questions in his head.
Clarissa’s father had jumped off a building. Robyn Davidson’s mother had hanged herself. Now he learned that Marianne’s father had committed suicide also. What did it mean that all the important women in his life were the children of suicides? He couldn’t, or didn’t want to, answer the question. Soon after
he met Elizabeth West, who would become his third wife and the mother of his second son, he felt obliged to ask about her parents. It was a relief to learn that there was no suicide in Elizabeth’s background. But her mother had died when she was very young, and her father, a much older parent, had been unable to look after her, and she had been raised by other relatives. The parent-shaped hole was there again.
He was trying to kick-start his imagination because the eternal question, What next?, was already nagging at him. He read Graham Greene’s The Confidential Agent and was impressed by the simplicity of Greene’s effects. A man does not look like his passport photograph, and that’s enough for Greene to conjure up an uncertain, even sinister world. He read Little Dorrit and loved, as always, Dickens’s gift for animating the inanimate: the city of Marseille staring at the sky, at strangers, at one and all, a stare so fierce that blinds and shutters had to be closed against it. He read Herzog for the umpteenth time and this time around the book’s attitude to women really grated. Why did so many of Bellow’s male characters fantasize that they would be more sexually successful if they were more violent? From Moses Herzog to Kenneth Trachtenberg in More Die of Heartbreak, the same fantasy. Mr. B., your slip is showing, he noted. He read The Key by Junichiro Tanizaki and enjoyed its tale of secret journals and sexual high jinks in old Japan. Marianne said it was an evil book. He thought it was a book about the manipulative nature of erotic desire. The soul had many dark corners and books sometimes illuminated them. But what did he, an atheist, mean when he used the word “soul”? Was it just poetry? Or was there something noncorporeal in us, something more than flesh, blood and bone, the thing that Koestler called the ghost in the machine? He toyed with the notion that we might have a mortal soul instead of an immortal one; a spirit housed in the body that died when the body died. A spirit that might be what we meant when we spoke of das Ich, the I.
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