Joseph Anton: A Memoir (16 page)

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 authors 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.

Reading was living, too. He read William Kennedy,
Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game
, and admiringly wrote down “the end of behavior was not action but comprehension on which to base action.” He read Hawking’s
A Brief History of Time
and it made his head hurt but even though he understood only a fraction of it he knew enough to argue with the great man’s contention that we were nearing the point at which everything would be known. The completion of knowledge: Only a scientist could be crazy enough or grand enough to imagine that that was possible.

Zia ul-Haq died in a plane crash: no loss.

A book, which he initially thought might be a play, maybe some reinvention of
Othello
, began to bud in him, though when he wrote it several years later it had grown in ways he did not then understand. He thought it might be called
The Moor’s Last Sigh
. Meanwhile, in a dream, an Indian woman he knew appeared to him, having read
The Satanic Verses
, and warned him that there would be “a bill to pay” for it. The London parts of the novel meant nothing to her, and the story about the parting of the Arabian Sea “just shows me your interest in cinema.” The dream enacted a fear he had: that people would react only to those parts of the novel with which they felt they had some personal—positive or negative—connection, and ignore the rest of it. He was beginning, as always after completing a book and before publication, to doubt what he had done. At times he thought it a little
gawky, a “loose, baggy monster,” to use Henry James’s phrase. At other times he thought he had managed to control and shape it into something fine. He worried about several sequences: the “Rosa Diamond” passage with its Argentinian backstory, and the devilish metamorphosis of his character Chamcha in a police van and a hospital. He had real doubts about the workings of the main narrative, and the transformation scenes in particular. Then suddenly his doubts evaporated. The book was done, and he was proud of it.

He flew to Lisbon for a few days in May. For a couple of years in the late 1980s the Wheatland Foundation—a collaborative venture between the British publisher George Weidenfeld and the American Ann Getty, who was “bankrolled,” as
The New York Times
put it, by her husband, Gordon Getty—hosted a series of lavish literary conferences around the world, a program that came to a halt when the Getty-Weidenfeld relationship collapsed in 1989 under the pressure of losses reported in
The New York Times
as being “at least $15 million.” Some of those millions were no doubt lost at the conference staged at the Queluz Palace in May 1988 and attended by the most extraordinary gathering of writers he had seen since the 1986 PEN Congress in New York. Sontag, Walcott, Tabucchi, Enzensberger and so on. He went with Martin Amis and Ian McEwan and after their “British” panel discussion the Italians grumbled that they had spoken too much about politics, whereas literature was about “sentences,” and Lord Weidenfeld grumbled that they had been critical of Margaret Thatcher, to whom they owed so much. While he was on stage the extraordinary Montenegran writer Danilo Kiš, who turned out to be a skilled caricaturist, drew a picture of him on a conference notepad and presented it to him at the end of the session. At the New York PEN Congress, Danilo, a writer of brilliance and wit, had defended the idea that the state could have an imagination. “In fact,” he said, “the state also has a sense of humor, and I will give you an example of a joke by the state.” He was living in Paris and one day received a letter from a friend in Yugoslavia. When he opened it he found an official stamp on the first page. It read
THIS LETTER HAS NOT BEEN CENSORED
. Kiš looked like Tom
Baker as Doctor Who and spoke no English. Serbo-Croat not really being an option either, they became friends in French. By the time of the Lisbon conference Kiš was in the grip of illness—he died of lung cancer in 1989—and his vocal cords were badly affected, making it hard for him to speak at all. The caricature was offered in lieu of conversation and became a treasured possession.