Joseph Anton: A Memoir: A Memoir

by Salman Rushdie

  He received a threatening letter, the first for a long while, warning him that his “time was drawing near,” because “Allah saw all things.” The letter was signed by D. Ali of the “Manchester Socialist Workers Party and Anti-Racist League.” Their members were watching all the airports, he said, and they had people in all neighborhoods—“Liverpool, Bradford, Hampstead, Kensington”—and as the winter darkness was “better for them to do their work,” he would soon be “back in Iran.”

  There was an evening at Isabel Fonseca’s apartment with Martin Amis, James Fenton, and Darryl Pinckney, and Martin depressed him by telling him that George Steiner believed he had “set out to make a lot of trouble,” and Martin’s father, Kingsley Amis, had said that “if you set out to make trouble you shouldn’t complain when you get it,” and Al Alvarez had said that he had “done it because he wanted to be the most famous writer in the world.” And to Germaine Greer he was a “megalomaniac” and John le Carré had called him a “twerp” and Martin’s ex-stepmother Elizabeth Jane Howard and Sybille Bedford thought he had “done it to make money.” His friends were ridiculing these assertions but by the end of the evening he felt very upset and only Elizabeth’s love brought him back. Maybe they should marry, he wrote in his journal. Who could love him better, be braver, sweeter-natured, or give more of herself? She had committed herself to him, and deserved no less in return. At home, celebrating their first year at 9 Bishops’ Avenue, they had a loving evening and he felt better.

  In his Beckettian moods, hunched over in his wooden study, he was a man lost in a mocking void: both Didi and Gogo, playing games against despair. No, he was their antithesis; they hoped for Godot, whereas he was waiting for what he hoped would never come. Almost every day there were moments when he allowed his shoulders to slump, then pushed them back again. He ate too much, gave up smoking, wheezed, quarreled with the empty air, rubbing his fists against his temples, and always thinking, thinking like a fire, as if thinking could burn away his ills. Almost every day was like this: a battle against hopelessness, often lost, but never lost forever. “Inside us,” José Saramago had written, “there is something that has no name. That something is what we are.” The something that had no name within him always came to his rescue in the end. He clenched his teeth, shook his head to clear his thoughts, and ordered himself to get on with it.

  William Nygaard took his first steps. Halfdan Freihow said that William had decided to move house because of the “danger of the bushes,” which would prevent him “taking a late-night piss in the garden.” They were finding him a high-security apartment building to live in. The hit man had not been found. William had “nowhere to aim his anger.” But he was getting better. The novel’s Danish publisher, Johannes Riis, said that things were calm in Denmark, and he had “the advantage of a calm wife.” He thought of the danger as comparable to crossing the road, he said, and his author, hearing this, was again humbled in the presence of real courage. “I am furious,” Johannes added, “that such an obscenity should continue to be part of the frame in which we live.”

  At the first meeting of the so-called “International Parliament of Writers” in Strasbourg he worried about the name, because they were unelected, but the French shrugged and said that in France un parlement was just a place where people talked. He insisted that the statement they were drafting against Islamist terror should include references to Tahar Djaout, Farag Fouda, Aziz Nesin, Ugur Mumcu and the newly embattled Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen as well as himself. Susan Sontag swept in, embraced him, and spoke passionately in fluent French, calling him un grand écrivain who represented the crucial secularized culture the Muslim extremists wished to suppress. Strasbourg mayor Catherine Trautmann wanted to give him the freedom of the city. Catherine Lalumière of the Council of Europe promised that the council would take up his cause. That evening there was a party for the visiting writers and he was accosted by a crazily passionate Iranian woman, “Hélène Kafi,” who rebuked him for not making common cause with the Mujahideen-e Khalq. “I am not being aggressive, Salman Rushdie, but je suis un peu deçu de vous, you should know who your real friends are.” The next day she claimed in the media that she, and through her the PMOI, had joined the French “Rushdie committee” and the grenades that had been thrown at the French embassy and Air France offices in Tehran were because of that. (In fact they were because of France’s decision to give asylum to the PMOI leader Maryam Rajavi, and unrelated to the “Rushdie Affair.”)

  He sat on a small red sofa with Toni Morrison, who had just won the Nobel Prize, and Sontag, who shouted, “My God, I’m sitting between the two most famous writers in the world!”—whereupon both he and Toni began assuring her that her day in Stockholm would surely come very soon. Susan asked him what he was writing. She had put her finger on the thing that was worrying him most. To lead the campaign against the fatwa he had had almost to stop being a working writer. This was the flattening effect of becoming involved in politics. His thoughts had been full of airlines and ministers and feta cheese and had turned away from the sweet recesses of the mind where fiction lurked. His novel had stalled. Was this campaign, which people told him was working so well, actually a way of diminishing himself in the world’s eyes as well as his own? Was he actually helping to turn himself into nothing more than the flattened, two-dimensional caricature at the heart of the “Rushdie Affair” and abdicating his claim to art? He had gone from Salman to Rushdie to Joseph Anton and now, perhaps, he was making a nobody of himself. He was a lobbyist lobbying for an empty space that no longer contained a man.

  He told Susan, “I’ve sworn an oath that next year I’ll stay home and write.”

  To reach the summit—a meeting with a president—it was necessary to approach him from many directions at once. The approach to Mount Clinton had been made by him personally, by the Rushdie defense committee and Article 19, by the British ambassador in Washington on behalf of the British government, by PEN American Center. Aryeh Neier of Human Rights Watch, Nick Veliotes of the Association of American Publishers and Scott Armstrong of the Freedom Forum were among those pushing for the meeting. In addition, Christopher Hitchens had been urging his White House contacts to make it happen. Christopher was not an admirer of Bill Clinton, but he was on friendly terms with the president’s close adviser George Stephanopoulos, and spoke to him several times. It seemed that Clinton’s people were divided between those who were telling him the fatwa was not America’s affair and those, like Stephanopoulos, who wanted him to do the right thing.

  Two days after his return to London the “green light from Washington” came through. At first Nick Veliotes was told that the president would not be at the meeting. It would be with the national security adviser, Anthony Lake, with Vice President Gore “dropping in.” At the U.S. embassy in Grosvenor Square, his contact person Larry Robinson confirmed that it would be a meeting with Lake and Gore. He would be given “portal to portal protection,” that was to say, from the aircraft to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (where he was to be honored—Alan Lightman, author of Einstein’s Dreams, who taught at MIT, had called him to make the offer of an honorary professorship), from MIT to D.C., and in D.C. until he left the country again. Two days later Frances was told that Gore would be in the Far East and Lake might be unavailable so the meeting would be with Secretary of State Warren Christopher and Lake’s “number two.” The meeting with Warren Christopher would be in the Treaty Room with photographers. He spoke to Christopher Hitchens, who feared this was a case of Clinton “funking it.” That evening the deal changed again. The meeting would be with Anthony Lake and Warren Christopher and the assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor, John Shattuck. The president was “not confirmed.” It would be the day before Thanksgiving, and the president had a great deal to do. He had to pardon a turkey. He might not have time to help out a novelist as well.

  At JFK there were eight cars waiting instead of the lower-key three he had been promi
sed. The officer in charge, Jim Tandy, was a big improvement on Lieutenant Bob, gently spoken and helpful, a tall, thin, mustachioed man with a wide-eyed, serious face. He was taken first to Andrew’s apartment, where the police were making a big deal out of his arrival, even preventing the other residents of the building from using the elevators. That would be popular, he thought. He was supposed to be a Pakistani diplomat called Dr. Ren, but nobody was being fooled.

  Inside Andrew’s apartment there were friends to greet him. Norman Mailer wished him luck, and Norris Mailer said, “If you see Bill, tell him I said hello.” As a young woman she had worked on Clinton’s campaign when he was running for governor of Arkansas. “I got to know him very well,” she said. Okay, he told Norris politely, I’ll mention it. “No,” she said, putting her elegant hand on his arm like Margaret Thatcher at her most touchy-feely. “You don’t understand. I mean I got to know him very well.” Oh. Right. Yes, Norris. In that case I’ll definitely give him your best.

  He met Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt, who were very affectionate; it was the beginning of what would become one of his closest friendships. Don DeLillo was there too. He was working on a “huge and sprawling book,” he said. It would be called Underworld. “I know something about underworlds,” he replied. Paul and Don wanted to produce a leaflet with a text about the fatwa that would be inserted into every book sold in America on February 14, 1994, but they had been told it would cost over $20,000 to produce and that was unrealistic. Peter Carey arrived and said with his usual dry comedy, “Hello, Salman, you look like shit.” Susan Sontag, who had agreed to be his “beard” at MIT, was looking forward to their little plot. David Rieff was full of sadness about Bosnia. Annie Leibovitz talked a little about her Bosnia photographs, but seemed oddly reluctant to push herself forward in Susan’s presence. Sonny and Gita Mehta arrived and Gita looked ill and drained. They said she was fine now, recovering from the cancer, and he hoped they were telling the truth. And suddenly Andrew said, “Oh my God, we’ve forgotten to invite Edward Said.” That was very bad. Edward would certainly mind.

  Elizabeth and he slept at Andrew’s place and awoke to find a line of black limos parked in the street, as well as a large, unsubtle blue van labeled BOMB SQUAD. Then came the road trip to Concord, Massachusetts, where they would be the guests of Alan and Jean Lightman. Alan took them for a walk around Walden Pond and when they came to the remains of Thoreau’s hut he said to Alan that if he ever wrote up this trip he would call it “From a Log Cabin to the White House.” The hut was disappointingly close to the town, and Thoreau could easily have strolled in for a beer if he wanted one. It wasn’t exactly a wilderness retreat.

  The next morning he was driven to a Boston hotel and Jean Lightman took Elizabeth off to see the city. Andrew and he worked the phones to see what progress had been or could be made. It became obvious that Frances and Carmel were at odds with Scott Armstrong, though Christopher Hitchens spoke up for him. Within the White House, Hitch added, Stephanopoulos and Shattuck were on his side and working on the president, but there was nothing definite to report. A U.S. official, Tom Robertson called to say that the meeting had been pushed back half an hour, from 11:30 A.M. to noon. What did this mean? Did it mean anything? Scott and Hitch said later that the change happened right after George Stephanopoulos and others went to see the president’s scheduling person … so … maybe. Fingers crossed.

  In the afternoon he went with Andrew Wylie to see Andrew’s childhood home. The new owner, a fiftysomething lady with a big smile called Nancy, looked at the motorcade and said, “Who are all those people outside?” Then she said “Oh,” and asked him if he was who he looked like. At first he said, “No, unfortunately,” and she replied, “You mean ‘fortunately.’ The poor man doesn’t have a very nice life, does he?” But she had all his books, so he owned up, and she was thrilled and wanted them signed. The house evoked many memories for Andrew because much of it, even the wallpaper upstairs, was unchanged from thirty years ago, and the letters AW were still scratched into the wood of the bookcases in the library, and on the edge of a door the three-foot height of the young Andy Wylie was still marked and named.

  They had dinner at MIT hosted by a spectacularly cross-eyed provost and then it was time for the Event. He had never received even an honorary degree before, so he was a little overcome by this honorary professorship. MIT did not like handing out honorary doctorates, he was told, and it had only once in its history bestowed an honorary professorship on anyone else. That person was Winston Churchill. “Pretty exalted company for a scribbler, Rushdie,” he told himself. The Event was billed as an evening with Susan Sontag, but when Susan stood up to speak she told the audience that she was only there to introduce another writer whose name could not be announced in advance. She then spoke about him with fondness and described his work in language that meant more to him than the professorship. Finally he entered the lecture theater through a small door at the rear. He spoke briefly and then read parts of Midnight’s Children and the “Columbus and Isabella” story. Then he and Elizabeth were whisked away, and there was a late-night flight to Washington. They arrived in a state of some exhaustion at the Hitchens apartment sometime after midnight. He met Hitch and Carol’s daughter, Laura Antonia, for the first time and was asked to be an “ungodparent.” He agreed at once. With him and Martin Amis as ungodly mentors, he thought, the little girl had no chance. His throat felt sore, and he had a rough tooth that had cut his tongue. The latest on Clinton was no better than a maybe. Hitch confessed to loathing Carmel, who was messing things up by being clumsy, he said. It was time to sleep and fix things in the morning.

  The morning brought a fight among the friends. Scott Armstrong came by to say that the White House had decided not to offer Clinton or Gore. He had been told “Nice try, but no.” Carmel had launched a telephone campaign involving Aryeh Neier and others and that had been “counterproductive.” When Carmel and Frances arrived the tension exploded and everyone was yelling at everyone else, accusation and counteraccusation, Frances claiming that Scott was the one who had fouled things up. Finally he had to call a truce. “We have something to achieve here and I need your help.” Scott arranged for the post–White House press conference to be at the National Press Club, so that was one thing done, at least. Then the quarrel flared up again. Who would go with him to the White House? He was allowed to bring only two people with him. Voices were raised once more, tempers ran high. I called so-and-so. I did such and such. Andrew quickly withdrew himself from the contest and Christopher said he had no reason to be one of the chosen but the NGOs were locking horns.

  Once again, he put an end to the dispute. “Elizabeth is going with me,” he said, “and I’d like Frances to come too.” Sulking, cloudy faces retreated to corners of Christopher’s apartment or beyond it. But the quarrel was over.

  The motorcade was waiting to drive them to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Once they were in their appointed car the three of them were laid low by an infection of nervous giggles. They wondered if, in the end, Clinton’s duties with Tom the Turkey would keep him away from their meeting, and if so what the next day’s headlines would say. “Clinton Pardons Turkey,” he improvised. “Rushdie Gets Stuffed.” Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Then they were at the “diplomats’ entrance,” the side door, and were allowed inside. World politics, the great dirty game, inevitably funneled back in the end to this smallish white mansion in which a big pink man in an oval room made yes-no choices in spite of being deafened by the babbling maybes of his aides.

  At twelve noon they were taken up a narrow staircase to Anthony Lake’s smallish office, past a flurry of smiling, excited aides. He told the national security adviser it was exciting to be at the White House at last and Lake, twinkling, said, “Well, hang on, because it’s about to get a little more exciting.” POTUS had agreed to meet him! At 12:15 P.M. they would walk across to the Old Executive Building and find Mr. Clinton there. Frances began to talk quickly and managed to persuade Lake that
she should come along as well. So poor Elizabeth was to be left behind. There were many books waiting to be autographed in Lake’s outer office and as he was signing them Warren Christopher arrived. Elizabeth was left to entertain the secretary of state while Lake and he walked toward the president. “This should have happened years ago,” Lake said to him. They discovered Clinton in a hallway under an orange cupola and George Stephanopoulos was there too, grinning broadly, as well as two female aides who also looked delighted. Bill Clinton was even bigger and pinker than he had anticipated and very affable, too, but he got right to the point. “What can I do for you?” the president of the United States wanted to know. The year of political campaigning had prepared him for the question. When you’re the Supplicant, you must always know what you want from the meeting, he had learned, and always ask them for something that is in their power to give.