Joseph Anton: A Memoir (17 page)

The little argument about the utterances of the “British panel” were no more than an
amuse-bouche
. The main event was the sharp confrontation that took place between the Russian writers and those from the area they insisted should be known as “central Europe”—Kiš himself, the Hungarians György Konrád and Péter Esterházy, the Canadian Czech émigré Josef Škvorecky, and the great Polish poets Adam Zagajewski and Czesław Miłosz. These were the days of
glasnost
, and it was the first time the Soviets had let the “real” writers out—not the Writers’ Union stooges, but the likes of Tatyana Tolstaya. The major writers of the Russian emigration, led by Joseph Brodsky, were there too, and so the event offered a kind of reunification of Russian literature, which was a moving thing to witness (Brodsky refused to speak in English, wishing, he said, to be a Russian among Russians). However, when the central European writers, ignoring the Italian view that literature was about sentences, launched into passionate denunciations of Russian hegemony, the Russians reacted badly. Several of them claimed that they had never heard of a separate central European culture. Tolstaya added that if writers were worried about the Red Army they could always retreat into their imaginations, as she did, and there they would be totally free. This didn’t go down well. Brodsky averred, in an almost comically cultural-imperialist formulation, that Russia was in the process of solving its own problems, and once it had done so all the central Europeans’ problems would also be solved. (This was the same Brodsky who, after the
fatwa
, would join the he-knew-what-he-was-doing, he-did-it-on-purpose party.) Czesław Miłosz rose from the floor to take issue with Brodsky in stentorian terms, and the seventy-odd writers in the room were treated to the spectacle of the two giants, both Nobel laureates (and old friends), angrily clashing in terms that left all who heard it in no doubt that a great change was brewing in
the East. It was like watching a preview of Communism’s fall, the dialectic of history brought to life, expressed and enacted by the greatest intellectuals of the region in the presence of their international colleagues: a moment never to be forgotten by those lucky enough to be there.

If history progressed dialectically, as Hegel proposed, then the fall of Communism and the rise of revolutionary Islam demonstrated that dialectical materialism, Karl Marx’s reworking of Hegel and Fichte that identified the dialectic as one of class struggle, was flawed at the root. The thinking of the central European intellectuals at Queluz Palace, and also the very different philosophy of the radical Islam whose power was growing so rapidly, both scorned the Marxian idea that
economics was primary
, that economic conflict, expressed in the struggle of the classes, offered the best explanation of how things worked. In this new world, in the dialectics of the world beyond the Communism-capitalism confrontation, it would be made clear that culture could be primary too. The culture of central Europe was asserting itself against Russianness to unmake the Soviet Union. And ideology, as Ayatollah Khomeini and his cohorts were insisting, could certainly be primary. The wars of ideology and culture were moving to the center of the stage. And his novel, unfortunately for him, would become a battlefield.

He was asked to go on the radio show
Desert Island Discs
, a bigger honor, in Britain, than any mere literary prize. One of the eight musical choices he took with him to his imaginary desert island was an Urdu
ghazal
written by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, a close family friend who had been the first great writer he ever knew, both a public poet whose verses about the partition of India and Pakistan were the finest anyone ever wrote, and a somewhat jaundiced creator of much-admired poems of love. He had learned from Faiz that the writer’s task was to be both public and private, an arbiter both of society and of the human heart. Another of his choices was, perhaps, the music playing beneath the text of his new novel: “Sympathy for the Devil,” by the Rolling Stones.

Bruce Chatwin was mortally ill, and he visited him several times. The illness was affecting the balance of Bruce’s mind. He had been refusing to say the words
AIDS
or
HIV
, but now he deliriously claimed to have found the cure. He said he was calling his wealthy friends “like the Aga Khan” to raise money for research, and wanted his literary friends to contribute too. The “experts” at the Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford were “very excited” and sure he was “onto something.” Bruce was also sure that he had become extremely rich himself. His books had sold “an immense number of copies.” One day he telephoned to say that he had bought a Chagall oil painting. This was not his only extravagant “purchase.” His wife, Elizabeth, was obliged quietly to return his acquisitions and to explain that Bruce was not himself. In the end his father had to go to court to take charge of his son’s finances, and that caused a melancholy rift in the family. Bruce had a book coming out too, his last novel,
Utz
. One day he called up to say, “If we’re both listed for the Booker we should just announce that we intend to share it. If I win, I’ll share it with you, and you should say the same thing.” Until then, Bruce had always scorned the Booker Prize.

He was asked to review
Dear Mili
, a Grimm tale illustrated by Maurice Sendak, for
The New York Times
, and though he took care to express his admiration for much of Sendak’s oeuvre he could not avoid saying that these illustrations seemed to be repetitive of what the great illustrator had done before. After that Sendak told interviewers that it was the most hurtful review he had ever received and he “hated” its author. (He wrote two other book reviews, for the British
Observer
, in which he found the book under consideration less wonderful than the author’s earlier work, and the authors of
The Russia House
and
Hocus Pocus
, John le Carré and Kurt Vonnegut, both friendly acquaintances until then, declared themselves his foes, too. This was what book reviewing did. If you loved a book, the author thought your praise no more than his rightful due, and if you didn’t like it, you made enemies. He decided to stop doing it. It was a mug’s game.)

On the day he received the bound proofs of
The Satanic Verses
he was visited at home on St. Peter’s Street by a journalist he thought of as a friend, Madhu Jain of
India Today
. When she saw the thick, dark blue cover with the large red title she grew extremely excited, and pleaded to be given a copy so that she could read it while vacationing in England with her husband. And once she had read it she demanded that she be allowed to interview him and that
India Today
be allowed to publish an extract. Again, he agreed. For many years afterward he thought of this publication as the match that lit the fire. And certainly the magazine highlighted what came to be seen as the book’s “controversial” aspects, using the headline
AN UNEQUIVOCAL ATTACK ON RELIGIOUS FUNDAMENTALISM
, which was the first of innumerable inaccurate descriptions of the book’s contents, and, in another headline, ascribing a quote to him—
MY THEME IS FANATICISM
—that further misrepresented the work. The last sentence of the article, “
The Satanic Verses
is bound to trigger an avalanche of protests …” was an open invitation for those protests to begin. The article was read by the Indian parliamentarian and Islamic conservative Syed Shahabuddin, who responded by writing an “open letter” titled “You Did This with Satanic Forethought, Mr. Rushdie,” and it had begun. The most powerful way to attack a book is to demonize its author, to turn him into a creature of base motives and evil intentions. The “Satan Rushdy” who would afterward be paraded down the world’s streets by angry demonstrators, hanged in effigy with a red tongue hanging out and wearing a crude tuxedo, was being created; born in India, as the real Rushdie had been. Here was the first proposition of the assault: that anyone who wrote a book with the word “satanic” in the title must be satanic, too. Like many false propositions that flourished in the incipient Age of Information (or disinformation), it became true by repetition. Tell a lie about a man once and many people will not believe you. Tell it a million times and it is the man himself who will no longer be believed.

With the passage of time came forgiveness. Rereading the
India Today
piece many years later, in a calmer time, he could concede that the piece was fairer than the magazine’s headline writer had made it
look, more balanced than its last sentence. Those who wished to be offended would have been offended anyway. Those who were looking to be inflamed would have found the necessary spark. Perhaps the magazine’s most damaging act was to break the traditional publishing embargo and print its piece nine days before the book’s publication, at a time when not a single copy had arrived in India. This allowed Mr. Shahabuddin and his ally, another opposition MP named Khurshid Alam Khan, free rein. They could say whatever they pleased about the book, but it could not be read and therefore could not be defended. One man who had read an advance copy, the journalist Khushwant Singh, called for a ban in
The Illustrated Weekly of India
as a measure to prevent trouble. He thus became the first member of the small group of world writers who joined the censorship lobby. Khushwant Singh further claimed that he had been asked for his advice by Viking Penguin and had warned the author and publishers of the consequences of publication. The author was unaware of any such warning. If it was ever given, it was never received.

Disappointingly, the attack on his character was not confined to Muslim critics. In Britain’s newborn
Independent
newspaper the writer Mark Lawson quoted an anonymous Cambridge contemporary who called him “pompous” and who, as a “grammar school lad,” felt “alienated from him by his education.” So the wretched years at Rugby were to be held against him by the nameless. Another “close friend,” also anonymous, could “see” why he might appear “surly and arrogant.” And there was more: He was “schizophrenic,” he was “completely bonkers,” he
corrected people’s mispronunciations of his name!
, and—worst of all—he once got into a taxi that Mr. Lawson had ordered and left the journalist stranded. This was small, and small-minded, stuff, and there was a good deal more of it elsewhere, in other newspapers. “Close friends often confess that he is not actually likeable,” Bryan Appleyard wrote in
The Sunday Times
. “Rushdie is massively egotistical.” (What sorts of “close friends” talked about their friends like this? Only the anonymous ones unearthed by profile writers.) In “ordinary life” all of it would have been hurtful but none of it would have mattered much. But in the great conflict that followed the notion that he was not a very nice man was to prove very damaging indeed.

Lord Byron intensely disliked the work of the eighteenth-century poet laureate Robert Southey and venomously attacked it in print. Southey replied that Byron was part of a “Satanic school” of writing, and his poetry was nothing but “Satanic verses.”