Joseph Anton: A Memoir (18 page)

The British edition of
The Satanic Verses
was published on Monday, September 26, 1988, and in retrospect he felt a deep nostalgia for that moment when trouble still felt far away. For a brief moment that fall, the publication of
The Satanic Verses
was a literary event, discussed in the language of books. Was it any good? Was it, as Victoria Glendinning suggested in the London
Times
, “better than
Midnight’s Children
, because it is more contained, but only in the sense that the Niagara Falls are contained,” or, as Angela Carter said in
The Guardian
, “an epic into which holes have been punched to let in visions … [a] populous, loquacious, sometimes hilarious, extraordinary contemporary novel”? Or was it, as Claire Tomalin wrote in
The Independent
, a “wheel that did not turn,” or a novel that went “plunging down, on melting wings,” in Hermione Lee’s even harsher opinion in the
Observer
, “towards unreadability”? How large was the membership of the apocryphal “Page 15 Club” of readers who could not get past that point in the book?

Soon enough the language of literature would be drowned beneath the cacophony of other discourses, political, religious, sociological, postcolonial, and the subject of quality, of serious artistic intent, would come to seem almost frivolous. The book about migration and transformation that he had written was vanishing and being replaced by one that scarcely existed, in which
Rushdie refers to the Prophet and his Companions as “scums and bums”
(he didn’t, but he did allow those characters who persecuted the followers of his fictional Prophet to use abusive language),
Rushdie calls the wives of the Prophet whores
(he hadn’t, though whores in a brothel in his imaginary Jahilia take on the names of the Prophet’s wives to arouse their clients; the wives themselves are clearly described as living chastely in the harem),
Rushdie uses the word “fuck” too many times
(well, okay, he did use it a fair bit). This imaginary novel was the one against which the rage of Islam would be directed, and after that few people wished to talk about the real book, except, often, to concur with Hermione Lee’s negative assessment.

When friends asked what they could do to help he often pleaded, “Defend the text.” The attack was very specific, yet the defense was often a general one, resting on the mighty principle of freedom of speech. He hoped for, he often felt he needed, a more particular defense, like the quality defense made in the cases of other assaulted books,
Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Ulysses, Lolita
; because this was a violent assault not on the novel in general or on free speech per se, but on a particular accumulation of words (literature being, as the Italians had reminded him at Queluz Palace, made up of sentences), and on the intentions and integrity and ability of the writer who had put those words together.
He did it for money. He did it for fame. The Jews made him do it. Nobody would have bought his unreadable book if he hadn’t vilified Islam
. That was the nature of the attack, and so, for many years,
The Satanic Verses
was denied the ordinary life of a novel. It became something smaller and uglier: an insult. There was something surreally comical about this metamorphosis of a novel about angelic and satanic metamorphoses into a devil-version of itself, and he could think of a few black jokes to make about it. (Soon enough there would be jokes about him.
Have you heard about Rushdie’s new novel? It’s called “Buddha, You Big Fat Bastard.”
) But for him to be humorous would be out of place in this new world, a comic remark would sound a jarring note, lightheartedness was utterly inappropriate. As his book became simply an insult, so he became the Insulter; not only in Muslim eyes, but in the opinion of the public at large. Polls taken after the “Rushdie Affair” began showed that a large majority of the British public felt he should apologize for his “offensive” book. This would not be an easy argument to win.

But for those few weeks in the fall of 1988 the book was still “only a novel,” and he was still himself. Viking UK gave a launch party for their autumn list and at it he met Robertson Davies and Elmore Leonard. He huddled in a corner with the two grand old men as Elmore
Leonard told the story of how, after the devastation of his wife’s death, he had been wondering how he would ever find another life partner when he looked out of the window of his home in Bloomfield Township, just outside Detroit, and saw a woman standing there. Her name was Christine and she was a master gardener and she came to Bloomfield regularly to take care of Leonard’s garden. They got married within the year. “I didn’t know where I would find a wife,” he said, “and then I found her right outside my window, watering my plants.”

There was the usual round of readings and signings around Britain. He traveled to Toronto to speak at the International Festival of Authors at Harbourfront.
The Satanic Verses
was short-listed for the Booker Prize alongside novels by Peter Carey, Bruce Chatwin, Marina Warner, David Lodge and Penelope Fitzgerald. (He avoided calling Bruce to reopen the subject of sharing the award.) The only cloud on the horizon was Syed Shahabuddin, the Indian MP, demanding that action be taken in India against his “blasphemous” book, which he declared that he had not read, saying, “I do not have to wade through a filthy drain to know what filth is,” which was a good point, about drains. It was briefly possible to ignore that cloud and enjoy publication (though, to tell the absolute truth, the publication of a book always made a large part of him want to hide behind the furniture). Then on Thursday, October 6, 1988, the cloud covered the sun. His friend Salman Haidar, whose family and his had been close for generations, and who was deputy high commissioner of India in London, had the tough job of calling him to tell him formally on behalf of his government that
The Satanic Verses
had been banned in India.

In spite of India’s much-trumpeted secularism, Indian governments from the mid-seventies onward—ever since the time of Indira and Sanjay Gandhi—had often given in to pressure from religious interest groups, especially those claiming to control large blocs of votes. By 1988, Rajiv Gandhi’s weak government, with elections due in November, cravenly surrendered to threats from two opposition Muslim MPs who were in no position to “deliver” the Muslim electorate’s votes to the Congress Party. The book was not examined by any properly authorized body, nor was there any semblance of judicial process. The ban came, improbably enough, from the Finance Ministry, under
Section 11 of the Customs Act, which prevented the book from being imported. Weirdly, the Finance Ministry stated that the ban “did not detract from the literary and artistic merit” of his work.
Thanks a lot
, he thought.

Strangely—innocently, naïvely, even ignorantly—he hadn’t expected it. In the years that followed, attacks on artistic freedom would multiply in India, and not even the most eminent would be spared: The painter Maqbool Fida Husain, the novelist Rohinton Mistry, the filmmaker Deepa Mehta would all be targeted, among many others. But in 1988 it was possible to believe in India as a free country in which artistic expression was respected and defended. He had believed it. Book banning was something that happened all too frequently across the border in Pakistan. It wasn’t the Indian way. Jawaharlal Nehru had written in 1929, “It is a dangerous power in the hands of a government; the right to determine what shall be read and what shall not.… In India, the power is likely to be misused.” The young Nehru was writing, at that time, against the censorship of books by India’s British overlords. It was sad to think that his words could be used, almost sixty years later, as a critique of India itself.

To be free one had to make the presumption of freedom. And a further presumption: that one’s work would be treated as having been created with integrity. He had always written presuming that he had the right to write as he chose, and presuming that it would at the very least be treated as serious work; and knowing, too, that countries whose writers could not make such presumptions inevitably slid toward, or had already arrived at, authoritarianism and tyranny. Banned writers in unfree parts of the world were not merely proscribed; they were also vilified. In India, however, the presumption of intellectual freedom and respect had been ever-present except during the dictatorial years of “emergency rule” imposed by Indira Gandhi between 1974 and 1977 after her conviction for electoral malpractice. He had been proud of that openness and had boasted of it to people in the West. India was surrounded by unfree societies—Pakistan, China, Burma—but remained an open democracy; flawed, certainly, perhaps even deeply flawed, but free.

Ever since
Midnight’s Children
had been so enthusiastically received,
the Indian response to his work had been a source of great pride to him, and so the embargo on the importation of
The Satanic Verses
was a painful blow. Out of that pain he published an open letter to Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, Nehru’s grandson, a letter some commentators found excessively aggressive. He complained of the official statements that the book had been banned as a preemptive measure. “Certain passages had been identified as susceptible to distortion and misuse, presumably by unscrupulous religious fanatics and such. The banning order had been issued to prevent this misuse. Apparently, my book is not deemed blasphemous or objectionable in itself, but is being proscribed for, so to speak, its own good!… It is as though, having identified an innocent person as a likely target for assault by muggers or rapists, you were to put that person in jail for protection. This is no way, Mr. Gandhi, for a free society to behave.” This was also not how novelists were supposed to behave: scolding a prime minister. This was … arrogant. This was cheek. The Indian press was calling the ban “a Philistine decision,” and an example of “thought control,” but he was supposed to watch what he said.

He had not done so. “What sort of India do you wish to govern? Is it to be an open or a repressive society? Your action in the matter of
The Satanic Verses
will be an important indicator for many people around the world.” No doubt unwisely, he had accused Rajiv Gandhi of carrying on a family vendetta. “Perhaps you feel that by banning my fourth novel you are taking long overdue revenge for the treatment of your mother in my second, but can you be sure that Indira Gandhi’s reputation will endure better and longer than
Midnight’s Children
?” Well, okay, that was arrogant. Angry and injured also, but the arrogance was undeniably there. Very well. So it was. He was defending a thing he revered above most things, the art of literature, against a piece of blatant political opportunism. Maybe a little intellectual arrogance was called for. It was not a practical defense, of course; not one calculated to change his adversary’s mind. It was an attempt to take the cultural high ground, and it concluded with a rhetorical appeal to that posterity whose judgment could not be known by either Rajiv Gandhi or himself. “You own the present, Mr. Prime Minister; but the centuries belong to art.”

The letter was widely published on Sunday, October 9, 1988. The next day the first death threat was received at the offices of Viking Penguin. The day after that a scheduled reading in Cambridge was canceled by the venue because it, too, had received threats. The cloud thickened.

The 1988 Booker Prize jury’s decision was swiftly made. The chairman of the judges, Michael Foot, MP, the former Labour Party leader and devotee of Hazlitt and Swift, was a passionate advocate of
The Satanic Verses
. The other four judges were adamantly convinced of the superior merits of Peter Carey’s excellent novel
Oscar and Lucinda
. A vote was taken after a short discussion and that was that. Three years earlier Carey’s wonderful comic-picaresque
Illywhacker
and Doris Lessing’s excellent IRA novel
The Good Terrorist
had deadlocked the judges and in the end, in a compromise decision, the prize had gone to Keri Hulme’s Maori epic
The Bone People
. He had had dinner with Peter Carey the night after that result and had told him that his book should have won. Carey talked about the novel he had begun to write. One of his reasons for being in England was to do some research. There was a particular beach in Devon he wanted to visit. He had offered to drive Peter down to the West Country, and they had spent a fine day traveling through England to the “Hennacombe” in which the child Oscar Hopkins and his fierce father, Theophilus, would live in his novel, just as their real-life models, the writer Edmund Gosse and his father, Philip (like Theophilus, a naturalist, a widower and a member of the Plymouth Brethren), had done in the middle of the nineteenth century. They found the beach four hundred steps down from the top of the cliff. They collected a few shells and many distinctive pink and gray pebbles. They ate a heavy pub lunch of warm beer and meat in dark gravy. All day they spoke of love. He was still with Robyn in those days, and she was Australian, like Carey, of course; and Peter had recently married the Sydney theater director Alison Summers, and was full of passion and joy. By the time they got back to London they had become friends. He broke up with Robyn soon afterward and Peter eventually separated acrimoniously from Alison, but that love could
die did not mean it had not lived. After the Booker result was announced he went quickly across the Guildhall to embrace Peter and congratulate him, and to murmur wryly in his ear that the moral of the story was that Writer A should never help Writer B to do his research, because then Writer B would use that research to beat Writer A to the Booker.

It would have been nice to win, but he was happy for Peter and, in truth, more concerned about the growing public argument over his book. A win for
The Satanic Verses
would have been helpful; it would have moved the “quality defense” back to center stage. But there were bigger issues to worry about. When he got home, around 11
P.M.
, he found a message on his answering machine asking him to call a Muslim cleric in South Africa urgently, even if it was very late. He had been invited to Johannesburg by the antiapartheid newspaper the
Weekly Mail
to deliver the keynote address at a conference about apartheid and censorship—an invitation made with the agreement of the “broad democratic movement” in South Africa, in other words, with the implicit backing of the African National Congress—and was scheduled to leave London in four days’ time. “I must speak to you before you fly,” the message said. He was in a strange mood, brought on by a combination of marital difficulties and the events of the evening (this was the night when Marianne told William Golding that she had written a feminist
Lord of the Flies
), and in the end he decided to make the call. He sat in a darkened living room and listened to a voice from another world tell him he must not come to speak at the
Weekly Mail
’s conference. The voice described itself as a liberal, modern person, whose concern was twofold: for his safety, and for the well-being of the antiapartheid movement. If he were to visit Johannesburg in the present climate the Muslim reaction would be large and hostile. That would be dangerous both at the personal and political levels. A quarrel within the antiapartheid coalition would be catastrophic and would only serve the interests of the white supremacist regime. He should avoid becoming the catalyst for such a quarrel, and stay away.