Joseph Anton: A Memoir

by Salman Rushdie

  It was an impossible task: to write something that could be received as an olive branch without giving way on what was important. The statement he came up with was one he mostly loathed. “As author of The Satanic Verses I recognize that Muslims in many parts of the world are genuinely distressed by the publication of my novel. I profoundly regret the distress that publication has occasioned to the sincere followers of Islam. Living as we do in a world of many faiths this experience has served to remind us that we must all be conscious of the sensibilities of others.” His private, self-justifying voice argued that he was apologizing for the distress—and after all he had never wanted to cause distress—but he was not apologizing for the book itself. And yes, we should be conscious of others’ sensibilities, but that did not mean we should surrender to them. That was his combative, unstated subtext. But he knew that for the text to be effective it had to be read as a straightforward apology. That thought made him feel physically ill.

  It was a useless gesture. It was rejected, then half-accepted, then rejected again, both by British Muslims and by the Iranian leadership. The strong position would have been to refuse to negotiate with intolerance. He had taken the weak position and was therefore treated as a weakling. The Observer defended him—“neither Britain nor the author has anything to apologize for”—but his feeling of wrongness, of having made a serious misstep, was soon confirmed. “Even if Salman Rushdie becomes the most pious man of all time, it is incumbent on every Muslim to employ everything he has got, his life and his wealth, to send him to hell,” said the dying imam. It felt like the bottom of the barrel. It was not. The bottom of the barrel would be reached a few months later.

  The protection officers said he should not spend more than two nights at the Lygon Arms. He was lucky the media hadn’t found him yet, and in another day or so they surely would. This was when another harsh truth was explained: It was up to him to find places to stay. The police advice, which was more like an instruction, was that he could not return to his home, as it would be impossible (which was to say, very expensive) to protect him there. But “safe houses” would not be provided. If such places existed, he never saw them. The generality of people, trained by spy fiction, firmly believed in the existence of safe houses, and assumed that he was being protected in one such fortress at the public’s expense. Criticisms of the money spent on his protection would grow more vociferous with the passing weeks: an indication of a shift in public opinion. But on his second day at the Lygon Arms he was told he had twenty-four hours to find himself somewhere else to go.

  He made his daily phone call to Clarissa’s house to speak to Zafar and she offered him a temporary solution. She was working then as a literary agent at the A. P. Watt agency, whose senior partner, Hilary Rubinstein, had a country cottage in the village of Thame in Oxfordshire, and had offered it for a night or two. It was the first of many acts of generosity by friends and acquaintances, without whose kindness he would have been rendered homeless. Hilary’s cottage was relatively small and not very secluded, not an ideal location, but he needed it and was grateful. The arrival of the repaired Jaguar, the Beast, Stan the tennis player, Benny the sharp dresser, Dennis the Horse and big Mickey C., plus Marianne and the invisible man could not go unnoticed in a tiny village. He was certain that everyone knew exactly what was going on at the Rubinstein place. But nobody came nosing around. A proper English distance and reserve was maintained. It was even possible for him to be driven to see Zafar for a few hours at the Hoffmans’ country house. He had no idea where to go next. He had been making phone calls to everyone he could think of, without success. Then he checked his voice mail and found a message from Deborah Rogers, the agent he had dismissed when he appointed Andrew Wylie. “Call me,” the message said. “I think we may be able to help.”

  Deb and her husband, the composer Michael Berkeley, offered him their farm in Wales. “If you need it,” she said simply, “it’s yours.” He was deeply moved. “Look,” she said, “it’s perfect, actually, because everyone thinks we’ve fallen out, and so nobody would ever imagine you’d be here.” The next day his strange little circus descended on Middle Pitts, that homely farmhouse in the hilly Welsh border country. Low clouds and rain and the renewal of a broken friendship, all disputes swept away by the pressure of events and by long, loving embraces. “Stay as long as you need to,” Deb said, but he knew he would not abuse her and Michael’s hospitality. He needed to find a place of his own. Marianne agreed to contact local estate agents the next day and start looking at rental properties. They had to hope that her face would be less instantly recognizable than his.

  As for him, he could not be seen at the farm or its safety would be “compromised.” There was a farmer who looked after the sheep for Michael and Deb and at one point he came down off the hill to talk to Michael about something. An ordinary moment became a crisis when invisibility was deemed essential. “You’d better get out of sight,” Michael told him and he had to duck down behind a kitchen counter. As he crouched there listening to Michael get rid of his man as quickly as possible he felt a sense of deep shame. To hide in this way was to be stripped of all self-respect. To be told to hide was a humiliation. Maybe, he thought, to live like this would be worse than death. In his novel Shame he had written about the workings of Muslim “honor culture,” at the poles of whose moral axis were honor and shame, very different from the Christian narrative of guilt and redemption. He came from that culture even though he was not religious, and had been raised to care deeply about questions of pride. To skulk and hide was to lead a dishonorable life. He felt, very often in those years, profoundly ashamed. Both shamed and ashamed.

  It was rare for a world news story to rest so squarely on the acts, motives, character, and alleged crimes of a single individual. The sheer weight of events was a crushing burden. He imagined the Great Pyramid of Giza turned upside down with the apex resting on his neck. The news roared in his ears. It seemed that everyone on earth had an opinion. Hesham al-Essawy, the “moderate” dentist from the BBC program, called him a product of sixties permissiveness, “which has now produced the AIDS crisis.” Members of the Pakistani parliament recommended the immediate dispatch of assassins to the United Kingdom. In Iran the most powerful clerics, Khamenei and Rafsanjani, fell into line behind the imam. “A black arrow of retribution is flying towards the heart of that blasphemous bastard,” Khamenei said during a visit to Yugoslavia. An Iranian ayatollah named Hassan Sanei offered $1 million in bounty money for the apostate’s head. It was not clear if this ayatollah possessed $1 million, or how easy it would be to claim the reward, but these were not logical days. The television was full of bearded (and clean-shaven) men shouting about death. The British Council’s library in Karachi—a drowsy, pleasant place he had often visited—was bombed.

  Somehow, in these blaring, terrible days, his literary reputation survived the battering. Much of the British and American and Indian commentary continued to stress the quality of his art and of the book under attack, but there were signs that this, too, might change. He watched a terrible episode of the Late Show on BBC television in which Ian McEwan, Aziz al-Azmeh and the courageous Jordanian novelist Fadia Faqir, who had also received death threats for her work, attempted to defend him against one of the Bradford book burners and the ubiquitous dentist Essawy. The program was intemperate and dire language issued from his opponents’ mouths, at once ignorant, bigoted and menacing. What made the episode especially terrible for him was that the prominent intellectual George Steiner—the very antithesis of an ignorant bigot—launched a powerful literary attack on his work. Soon after that other well-known British media figures, Auberon Waugh, Richard Ingrams, Bernard Levin, added their hostile comments. He was defended in other newspapers by Edward Said and Carlos Fuentes but he sensed the mood was beginning to shift. And his book tour to the United States was canceled, of course. There were gratifyingly positive notices in most of the American press but he would not be flying across the Atlantic anytime so
on.

  The publishing problems were multiplying. At the offices of Viking Penguin in London, and now in New York, many threatening telephone calls were received. Young women heard anonymous voices saying, “We know where you live. We know where your children go to school.” There were many bomb scares though, fortunately, there was never a bomb at any of his publishers’ offices, though Cody’s bookstore in Berkeley, California, was hit by a pipe bomb. (Many years later he visited Cody’s and was shown with great pride the damaged, burned-out area on the shelves where the bomb had been planted, and which Andy Ross and his staff had agreed to keep unrepaired, as the bookstore’s badge of courage.) And in a cheap hotel in London, in Sussex Gardens near Paddington Station, a would-be bomber whose target may have been the Penguin offices—though it was also rumored that he was planning to attack the Israeli embassy—blew himself to bits, scoring what in Special Branch parlance was called an “own goal.” After that there were dogs in the Penguin mailroom, trained to sniff out explosives.

  Peter Mayer, the head of the company, commissioned a security report from Control Risks Information Services Limited of London, analyzing the “own goal” and the continuing threat to the company. Copies were sent to Andrew Wylie and Gillon Aitken. In this report the major players in the story were, presumably for security reasons, not referred to by name. Instead they were given the names of birds. The document was magnificently titled Assessment of Strength and Potential of Dotterel Protest Against Godwit of Arctic Tern’s Pigeon and Implications for Golden Plover. It was perhaps not too difficult to work out that Dotterel meant Muslims, Godwit meant “the publisher” or “Viking Penguin,” Pigeon was The Satanic Verses and Golden Plover was Penguin’s parent company, the Pearson Group. The author of Pigeon was Arctic Tern.

  Peter Mayer (who lacked his own ornithological identity, though in the newspapers he was often the King Penguin) forbade all “Pigeon-related personnel,” on pain of instant dismissal, to speak to the press about Pigeon or Arctic Tern. The only public statements emanating from Godwit were to be made by their lawyer Martin Garbus or an official spokesman named Bob Gregory. Such statements as were made were cautiously defensive. All of this was understandable (except for the silly bird names, perhaps) but one consequence of this diktat by the King Penguin was that at the very moment at which the company’s beleaguered author needed his publishers to speak up for him, his editors were gagged and silenced. That silence created a rift between publisher and author. For the moment, however, the cracks in the relationship were minor, because the company was behaving with great courage and high principle. Muslim voices were threatening Penguin with dire reprisals against its offices around the world, and threatening, too, a global ban on Penguin Books and on all the business activities of Pearson, a conglomerate with large interests across the Muslim world. In the face of these threats the Pearson leadership did not flinch.

  Publication continued, and very large quantities of books were shipped and sold. When the book entered the New York Times bestseller list at number one, John Irving, who was used to being in that position but found himself stuck at number two, quipped that if that was what it took to get to the top spot, he was content to be runner-up. He himself well knew, as did Irving, that this was not a “real” number one bestseller; that scandal, not literary merit or popularity, was driving the sales. He also knew, and much appreciated, that many people bought a copy of The Satanic Verses to demonstrate their solidarity. John Irving had been his friend ever since Liz Calder had introduced them back in 1980. The joke was John’s way of sending a friendly wave in his direction.

  On the day the novel was published in America, February 22, 1989, there was a full-page advertisement in The New York Times paid for by the Association of American Publishers, the American Booksellers’ Association and the American Library Association. “Free people write books,” it said. “Free people publish books. Free people sell books. Free people buy books. Free people read books. In the spirit of America’s commitment to free expression we inform the public that this book will be available to readers at bookshops and libraries throughout the country.” PEN American Center, passionately led by his beloved friend Susan Sontag, held readings from the novel. Sontag, Don DeLillo, Norman Mailer, Claire Bloom and Larry McMurtry were among the readers. He was sent a tape of the event. It brought a lump to his throat. Long afterward he was told that some senior American writers had initially ducked for cover. Even Arthur Miller had made an excuse—that his Jewishness might be a counterproductive factor. But within days, whipped into line by Susan, almost all of them had found their better selves and stood up to be counted.

  The fear that spread through the publishing industry was real because the threat was real. Publishers and translators were threatened by the fatwa, too. And yet the world of the book, in which free people made free choices, had to be defended. He thought often that the crisis was like an intense light shining down on everyone’s choices and deeds, creating a world without shadows, a stark unequivocal place of right and wrong action, good and bad choices, yes and no, strength and weakness. In that harsh glare some publishers looked heroic while others looked spineless. Perhaps the most spineless of all was the head of a European publishing house, whom it would be unkind to name, who had bulletproof glass installed in the second-floor windows of his own office, but not in the first-floor windows through which his employees could be seen; and then brought a screwdriver to work so he could unscrew his company’s nameplate from the front door of the office building. The German publishers, the distinguished house of Kiepenheuer und Witsch, summarily canceled his contract and tried to charge him for their security costs. (In the end the German edition was brought out by a large consortium of publishers and eminent individuals, which was the method also employed in Spain.) The French publisher Christian Bourgois was initially reluctant to bring out his edition and postponed publication a number of times, but was eventually persuaded to do so by the increasingly strident criticisms leveled at him in the French media. Andrew Wylie and Gillon Aitken were astonishing. They went country by country to coax, cajole, threaten and flatter publishers into doing their job. In many countries the book was only published because of their determined pressure on nervous editors.

  In Italy, however, there were local heroes. His Italian publishers, Mondadori, published their edition a couple of days after the fatwa. Their proprietors—Silvio Berlusconi’s holding company Fininvest, Carlo De Benedetti’s CIR and the heirs of Arnoldo Mondadori—were wobblier than Viking Penguin’s, and there were doubts expressed about the wisdom of publication, but the determination of the editorial director Giancarlo Bonacina and his staff won the day. The book was published as planned.

  While all this and much more was happening the author of The Satanic Verses was crouching in shame behind a kitchen counter to avoid being seen by a sheep farmer.

  Yes, as well as the screaming headlines there were the private crises, the knot in his stomach created by the constant need to find the next place to live, his fear for his family (his mother had arrived in London to stay with Sameen so that she could be nearer to him, but it would be some time before he could see her), and, of course, there was Marianne, whose daughter, Lara, in several impassioned phone calls, told her mother that “none of her friends could understand” why her mother was courting such danger. That was a fair point, a point anyone’s daughter might have made. Marianne had found a house to rent and they could have it in a week. That had been a helpful deed, but he was privately certain that she would leave him if the crisis went on much longer. She was finding this new life very hard. Her book tour had been canceled, and if he had been in her position he would probably have left too. In the meanwhile she plunged into something like her normal work process, making copious notes about their location, copying bits of Welsh into her notebook, and beginning, almost at once, to write stories that weren’t really fictions but dramatizations of what they were living through. One of these stories was called “Croeso i Gy
mru,” which meant “Welcome to Wales,” and began We were on the lam in Wales, a sentence that annoyed him because to be on the lam was to be running from the law. They were not criminals, he wanted to say, but did not. She wasn’t in the mood for criticism. She was writing a story called “Learning Urdu.”

  The foreign secretary was on television telling lies about him. The British people, Sir Geoffrey Howe said, had no love for this book. It was extremely rude about Britain. It compared Britain, he said, to Hitler’s Germany. The author of the unloved book found himself shouting at the television. “Where? On what page? Show me where I did that.” The television did not reply. Sir Geoffrey’s smug, bland, oddly docile features blinked back at him impassively. He recalled that the former Labour cabinet minister Denis Healey had once compared being attacked by Howe to being “savaged by a dead sheep” and for a quarter of a minute he considered suing the dead sheep for defamation. But that was stupid, of course. In the eyes of the world he himself was the great Defamer and as a result it was permissible to defame him back.

  The dead sheep had company. The big unfriendly giant, Roald Dahl, was in the papers saying, “Rushdie is a dangerous opportunist.” A couple of days earlier the archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, had said that he “understood the Muslims’ feelings.” Soon the pope would understand those feelings too, and the British chief rabbi, and the cardinal of New York. The God squad was lining up its troops. But Nadine Gordimer wrote in his defense and on the day that he and Marianne left Deb and Michael’s farm and moved into the rented house the so-called World Writers’ Statement was published to support him, signed by thousands of writers. Britain and Iran had severed diplomatic relations. Bizarrely, it was Iran who had broken them off and not the Thatcher government. Apparently the British protection of the apostate renegade was more upsetting to the ayatollahs than the extraterritorial assault on a British citizen was to Britain. Or maybe the Iranians just got their retaliation in first.