Joseph Anton: A Memoir

by Salman Rushdie

  “Mr. President,” he said, “when I leave the White House I have to go to the Press Club and there will be a lot of journalists waiting to find out what you had to say. I’d like to be able to tell them that the United States is joining the campaign against the Iranian fatwa and supports progressive voices around the world.” Clinton nodded and grinned. “Yes, you can say that,” he replied, “because it’s true.” End of meeting, the Supplicant thought, with a little lilt of triumph in his heart. “We have friends in common,” the president said. “Bill Styron, Norman Mailer. They have been bearding me about you. Norman’s wife, Norris, you know, worked on my first political campaign. I got to know her pretty well.”

  The Supplicant thanked the president for the meeting and said it was of immense symbolic importance. “Yes,” Clinton said. “It should send a message around the world. It’s intended to be a demonstration of American support for free speech and of our desire that First Amendment–style rights should grow all around the world.” There was no photograph. That would be too much of a demonstration. But the meeting had happened. That was a fact.

  As they walked back to Anthony Lake’s office he noticed that Frances D’Souza was wearing an enormous goofy grin. “Frances,” he asked, “why are you wearing that enormous goofy grin?” Her voice had a distant, pensive quality. “Don’t you think,” she asked languorously, “he held on to my hand just a little too long?”

  Warren Christopher was more than a little in love with Elizabeth when they got back. Christopher and Lake at once agreed that the fatwa was “right at the top of the American agenda with Iran.” Their desire to isolate Iran more than equaled his own. They too were in favor of a credit freeze and were working to achieve one. The meeting was an hour long and afterward, returning to the Hitchens apartment, all the Supplicants felt giddy with success. Christopher said that Stephanopoulos, who had pushed hard for the Clinton encounter, was also elated. He had called Hitch as soon as it had happened. “The eagle has landed,” he said.

  The press conference—seventy journalists on the day before Thanksgiving, better than Scott Armstrong had feared—went well. Hitch’s friend Martin Walker of The Guardian said it was “perfectly done.” Then came the quid pro quo, the exclusive interview with David Frost, who could not have been a happier chap and super-ed and thrilling-ed and darling-ed and wonderful-ed him for simply ages when it was done, and absolutely wanted to have a drinkie in London before Christmas.

  Jim Tandy, the chief of the security detail, introduced a jarring note. A suspicious “Mideastern man” had been lurking around the building. He had made a call and then left in a car with three other men. Tandy asked: “Do you want to stay, or should we move you someplace else?” He said, “Stay,” but the final decision had to be Christopher and Carol’s. “Stay,” they said.

  The British ambassador had a reception for them. They were met at the embassy door by a plummy-voiced Amanda, who told them it was the only Lutyens building in America and then, “Of course, he built so much of New Delhi.… Have you ever been to India?” He let it pass. The Renwicks were gracious hosts. Sir Robin’s French wife, Annie, at once fell in love with Elizabeth, who was making many conquests in D.C. “She is so warm, so direct, so calm; she makes you feel you’ve known her a long time. A very special person.” Sonny Mehta came, and said Gita was okay. Kay Graham came and said almost nothing.

  They spent Thanksgiving with the endlessly hospitable Hitchenses. The English journalists and documentary filmmakers Andrew and Leslie Cockburn came with their very smart nine-year-old daughter, Olivia, who said with great fluency exactly why she was a fan of Haroun and the Sea of Stories and then went away to grow up into the actress Olivia Wilde. There was a red-haired teenage boy there—much more tongue-tied than Olivia, even though he was several years older—who said he had wanted to be a writer but now he didn’t anymore, “because look what happened to you.”

  The Clinton meeting was front-page news everywhere, and the coverage was almost uniformly positive. The British press seemed to be playing down the significance of the Clinton meeting, but the predictable fundamentalist responses to it were given plenty of ink. That, too, was predictable.

  After Thanksgiving Clinton seemed to wobble. “I only met him for a couple of minutes,” he said. “Some of my people didn’t want me to. I hope people won’t misunderstand. No insult was intended. I just wanted to defend free speech. I think I did the right thing.” And so on, pretty gelatinously. It didn’t sound like the Leader of the Free World taking a stand against terrorism. The New York Times felt the same way and wrote an editorial titled “Hold the Waffles, Please,” encouraging the president to stick by his good deed without feeling the need to apologize for it; to have the courage of his (or perhaps George Stephanopoulos’s and Anthony Lake’s?) convictions. On Crossfire Christopher Hitchens was confronted by a screaming Muslim and Pat Buchanan saying “Rushdie is a pornographer” whose work was “filthy” and attacking the president for meeting such a person. Watching the program was depressing. He called Hitch late at night and was told that the host, Michael Kinsley, felt that the opposition had been “trounced,” that the “foregrounding” of the issue again was a good thing, and that Clinton was “holding the line” even though there was a backstage battle between the Lake-Stephanopoulos grouping and the security-minded aides. Christopher had wise words for him too. “The fact is, you will never get anything for nothing. Every time you score a hit, the old arguments against you will be dragged out and deployed again. But this also means that they will be shot down again, and I detect an increasing unwillingness among the foes to come out and play. Thus you wouldn’t have got a Times editorial if there hadn’t been a waffle, and the overall effect of that is to invigorate your defenders. Meanwhile you still have the Clinton statement and the Christopher-Lake meeting, and that can’t be taken away from you. So cheer up.”

  Christopher had quickly become—with Andrew—the most dedicated friend and ally he had in the United States. A few days later he called to say that John Shattuck at State had suggested forming an informal group of himself, Hitch, Scott Armstrong at the Freedom Forum and maybe Andrew Wylie to “progress” the U.S. response. Hitch had spoken to Stephanopoulos at a reception, where people were listening, and George had said firmly, “The first statement is the one we stand by; I hope you don’t think we tried to take anything back.” A week later he faxed a note—ah, the days of faxes long ago!—about an “amazingly” good meeting with the new counterterrorism boss, Ambassador Robert Gelbard, who was raising the case at various G7 forums but facing “reluctance” from the Japanese and, guess who, the Brits. Gelbard promised to raise the airline issue with the Federal Aviation Authority, whose new chief of security, Admiral Flynn, was a “pal.” Also, Christopher reported, Clinton had told someone that he’d have liked to spend longer with the author of The Satanic Verses, only Rushdie had been in “such a hurry.” That was funny, and showed, Hitch thought, that he was glad the meeting had happened. Tony Lake was telling people that the meeting had been one of the high points of his year. Scott Armstrong was really helping too, Hitch said. Neither of them was impressed by Frances and Carmel, which was worrying; and which, almost at once, precipitated a crisis.

  An account of the Washington adventure appeared in The Guardian and in the article Scott Armstrong and Christopher Hitchens had both voiced their doubts about Frances and Carmel’s usefulness to the cause. “You have seriously undermined Article 19 in the United States,” Frances said on the phone in tones of extreme, righteous anger. “Armstrong and Hitchens would never have spoken as they did without your tacit approval.” He tried to tell her that he hadn’t even known such a piece was in the works, but she said, “I’m sure you’re behind it all,” and told him that as a result of what he had done the MacArthur Foundation might withdraw essential funding from Article 19. He took a deep breath, wrote a letter to The Guardian defending Frances and Carmel, and called Rick MacArthur in confidence. MacArthur said, not unrea
sonably, that he paid for half Frances’s budget. It was the foundation’s policy to bring organizations to the point at which they could “diversify their funding base” and that meant developing a high profile in the United States. It was Frances’s fault, he said, that she had failed to get attention for Article 19’s leadership role in “the most important human rights case in the world.” He went on talking to Rick until MacArthur agreed not to make the cuts for the moment.

  When he put down the phone he was very angry himself. He had just taken Frances with him to the White House, and had praised Article 19’s work at all subsequent press conferences, and felt unjustly accused. Carmel Bedford’s follow-up fax—“Unless we can undo the damage these self-seekers have brought about is there any point in us continuing?”—made matters worse. He faxed Frances and Carmel a note telling them what he thought of their accusations and why. He said nothing about his confidential call to Rick MacArthur, or its result. After a few days Carmel changed her tone and sent him mollifying faxes but from Frances there was nothing. She sulked like Achilles in her tent. The shock of her accusations did not fade.

  Carmen Balcells, the legendary all-powerful Spanish literary agent, called Andrew Wylie from Barcelona to say that the great Gabriel García Márquez was writing a “novelization based on Mr. Rushdie’s life.” It would, she added, be “completely written by the writer, who is a well-known author.” He didn’t know how to respond. Should he be flattered? Because he was not flattered. He was to be someone else’s “novelization” now? If the roles were reversed he would not have felt he had the right to come between another writer and his own life story. But his life had perhaps become everyone’s property, and if he tried to stop the book he could just imagine the headlines. RUSHDIE CENSORS MÁRQUEZ. And what was meant by a “novelization”? If García Márquez was writing about a Latin American writer who had fallen foul of Christian religious fanatics then good luck to him. But if Márquez proposed to climb inside his head then that would feel like an invasion. He asked Andrew to express his concerns and a long silence from Balcells ensued, followed by a message saying that the Márquez book was not about Mr. Rushdie. Then what, he wondered, had this whole strange episode been about?

  Gabriel García Márquez never published a “novelization” or anything bearing any resemblance to what Carmen Balcells had proposed. But the Balcells approach had rubbed salt in his self-inflicted wound. García Márquez had wanted, or didn’t want, to write either a work of fiction or nonfiction about him, but he himself hadn’t written a word of fiction all year—no, for much more than a year. Writing had always been at the center of his life but now things from the margins had flooded in to fill up the space he had always kept free for his work. He recorded a TV introduction to a film about Tahar Djaout. He was offered a monthly column to be distributed worldwide by the New York Times syndicate and asked Andrew to accept.

  Christmas was coming. He was exhausted and, in spite of all the year’s political successes, at a low ebb. He talked to Elizabeth about the future, about having a child, about how they might live, and realized that she could not imagine feeling safe without police protection. He had met her in the middle of the spider’s web and the web was the only reality she trusted. If one day he reached a point at which the “prot” could end, would she feel too frightened to stay with him? It was a small cloud on the horizon. Would it grow to fill the sky?

  Thomasina Lawson died aged just thirty-two. Clarissa was having chemotherapy. And Frank Zappa died too. The past leaped out at him when he read that, ambushing him with powerful, unexpected emotions. On one of their first dates Clarissa and he had gone to hear the Mothers of Invention at the Royal Albert Hall and in the middle of the show a stoned black guy in a shiny purple shirt climbed up onto the stage and demanded to play with the band. Zappa was unfazed. “Uh-huh, sir,” he said, “and what is your instrument of choice?” Purple Shirt mumbled something about a horn and Zappa cried, “Give this man a horn!” Purple Shirt began to tootle tunelessly. Zappa listened for a few bars and then, in a stage aside, said, “Hmm. I wonder what we can think of to accompany this man on his horn. I know! The mighty, majestic Albert Hall pipe organ!” Whereupon one of the Mothers climbed up to the organ bench, pulled out all the stops, and played “Louie Louie,” while Purple Shirt tootled on tunelessly and inaudibly below. It was one of their early happy memories, and now Zappa was gone, and Clarissa was fighting for her life. (At least her job had been saved. He had called her bosses at A. P. Watt, and pointed out how bad it would look to lay off a woman who was fighting cancer and was the mother of Salman Rushdie’s son. Gillon Aitken and Liz Calder called too, at his request, and the agency relented. Clarissa didn’t know he had had anything to do with it.) He invited her to spend Christmas Day with them. She came with Zafar, smiling weakly, looking hunted, and seemed to enjoy the day.

  People were writing him letters too, like the imaginary letters in his head. One hundred Arab and Muslim writers jointly published a book of essays written in many languages and published in French, Pour Rushdie, to defend freedom of speech. One hundred writers who mostly understood what he had been talking about, who came from the world out of which his book had been born, and who, even when they didn’t like what he said, were willing to defend, as Voltaire would have defended, his right to say it. With him the prophetic gesture has been opened up to the four winds of the imaginary, wrote the book’s editors, and then came the cavalcade of the great and small voices of the Arab world. From the Syrian poet Adonis: Truth is not the sword / Nor the hand that holds it. And Mohammad Arkoun of Algeria: I would like to see The Satanic Verses made available to all Muslims in order that they might be able to reflect in a more modern fashion on the cognitive status of revelation. And Rabah Belamri of Algeria: The Rushdie Affair has very clearly revealed to the entire world that Islam … has now demonstrated its incapacity to undergo with impunity any serious kind of examination. And from Turkey, Fethi Benslama: In his book Salman Rushdie went the whole way, once and for all, as if he really wanted to be, all by himself, all the different authors who had never been able to exist in the history of his tradition. And Zhor Ben Chamsi of Morocco: We should really be grateful to Rushdie for having opened up the imaginary for Muslims once again. And Assia Djebar, the Algerian: This prince of a writer … is nothing else but perpetually naked and alone. He is the first man to have lived in the condition of a Muslim woman (and … he is also the first man to be able to write from the standpoint of a Muslim woman). And Karim Ghassim of Iran: He is our neighbor. And Émile Habibi, Palestinian: If we fail to save Salman Rushdie—God forbid!—the shame will haunt global civilization as a whole. And the Algerian Mohammed Harbi: With Rushdie, we recognize the disrespect, the principle of pleasure that is freedom in culture and the arts, as a source of fruitful examination of our past and present. And the Syrian Jamil Hatmal: I choose Salman Rushdie over the murderous turbans. And Sonallah Ibrahim of Egypt: Every person of conscience must go to the aid of this great writer in hardship. And the Moroccan-French writer Salim Jay: The only truly free man today is Salman Rushdie.… He is the Adam of a library to come: one of freedom. And Elias Khoury of Lebanon: We have the obligation to tell him that he personifies our solitude and that his story is our own. And the Tunisian Abdelwahab Meddeb: Rushdie, you have written what no man has written.… Instead of condemning you, in the name of Islam, I congratulate you. And Sami Naïr, French-Algerian: Salman Rushdie must be read.

  Thank you, my brothers and sisters, he silently replied to the hundred voices. Thank you for your courage and understanding. I wish you all a happy new year.

  VII

  A Truckload of Dung

  HIS BIGGEST PROBLEM, HE THOUGHT IN HIS MOST BITTER MOMENTS, WAS that he wasn’t dead. If he were dead nobody in England would have to fuss about the cost of his security and whether or not he merited such special treatment for so long. He wouldn’t have to fight for the right to get on a plane, or to battle senior police officers for tiny increments of pers
onal freedom. There would no longer be any need to worry about the safety of his mother, his sisters, his child. He wouldn’t have to talk to any more politicians (big advantage). His exile from India wouldn’t hurt. And the stress level would definitely be lower.

  He was supposed to be dead, but he obviously hadn’t understood that. That was the headline everyone had set up, just waiting to run. The obituaries had been written. A character in a tragedy, or even a tragic farce, was not meant to rewrite the script. Yet he insisted on living, and, what was more, talking, arguing his case, believing himself not to be the wronger but the wronged, standing by his work, and also—if one could believe such temerity—insisting on getting his life back, inch by inch, step by painful step. “What’s blond, has big tits, and lives in Tasmania? Salman Rushdie!” was a popular joke, and if he had agreed to go into some sort of witness protection program and lived out his tedious days somewhere obscure under a false name then that, too, would have been acceptable. But Mr. Joseph Anton wanted to get back to being Salman Rushdie and that was, frankly, unmannerly of him. His was not to be a success story, and there was certainly no room in it for pleasure. Dead, he might even be given the respect due to a free-speech martyr. Alive, he was a dull and unpleasantly lingering pain in the neck.

  When he was alone in his room, trying to convince himself that this was no more than the familiar solitude of the writer at work, trying to forget the armed men playing cards downstairs and his inability to walk out of his front door without permission, it was easy to slide toward such bitterness. But fortunately there seemed to be a thing in him that woke up and refused that unattractive, self-pitying defeat. He instructed himself to remember the most important rules he had made for himself: Not to accept the descriptions of reality made by security people, politicians or priests. To insist, instead, on the validity of his own judgments and instincts. To move toward a rebirth, or at least a renewal. To be reborn as himself, into his own life: That was the goal. And if he was a “dead man on leave,” well, the dead went on quests, too. According to the ancient Egyptians death was a quest, a journey toward rebirth. He too would journey back from the Book of the Dead toward the “bright book of life.”