Joseph Anton: A Memoir (55 page)

Nigella Lawson and John Diamond got married in Venice. Like all her friends he was made very happy by the news. Where John was there would always be laughter. At the party they gave at the Groucho Club to celebrate their wedding, the cake was made by Ruthie Rogers and designed, Ruthie said, by her husband, the great architect himself. John said, innocently, “Surely not? If it’s a Richard Rogers design, shouldn’t all the ingredients be on the outside?”

Germany was Iran’s largest trading partner. He had to go there. A tiny, fierce member of the German Bundestag named Thea Bock intended, she said, to make sure he saw “everybody.” But first he had to get to Bonn, and he could not fly Lufthansa or British Airways. Thea Bock came up with a small private aircraft, bright red, like something out of a World War I story: “Biggles and the
Fatwa
.” The plane was so small and old-fashioned that
the windows opened
. It flew so low that he feared they might bump into a hill, or a steeple. It was like riding an Indian scooter-rickshaw through the sky. Fortunately the weather was good, a sunny, calm day, and his pilot was able to fly his little phut-phut uneventfully to the German capital, where the meetings went so well, thanks to the efforts of Thea Bock, that the Iranians got badly rattled, because here, all of a sudden, was Rushdie being greeted warmly by Björn Engholm, the leader of the Social Democrats, and by Rita Süssmuth, the Speaker of the German Parliament, and by many of the most prominent German MPs; and, in the absence abroad of Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel, here was Rushdie at the German Foreign Ministry being received by the head of its cultural section, Dr. Schirmer. The Iranian ambassador spoke angrily on German television and said he was certain that Germany would not jeopardize its relations with Iran on account of this man. He also said that American or Israeli assassins might be about to assassinate the apostate, pretending to be Muslim killers, just to make Iran look bad.

Ambassador Hossein Musavian was hauled into the German Foreign Ministry the next day. “We will protect Mr. Rushdie,” said the deputy foreign minister. “After our very frank exchange, he [the Iranian ambassador] knows this is the case.” The suggestions about a killing
by U.S. or Israeli intelligence were called “absurd.” Ambassador Musavian said that his remarks had been “misquoted.”

So there was
momentum
, as Frances said; but had
critical mass
(one of her favorite terms) been achieved? Not yet. The Bradford Council of Mosques made another nasty statement alleging that the campaign was making things worse and that the author should not expect any “reprieve” from the Muslim community. The council’s president, Liaquat Hussein, clearly believed he was an important man saying an important thing. But he sounded like a voice from the past. His fifteen minutes of fame were up.

He was in Stockholm to receive the Kurt Tucholsky Prize, given to writers resisting persecution, and to address the Swedish Academy. Iran condemned the award, of course. The Iranian chief justice spoke up, and so did the bountiful Ayatollah Sanei.
Dear Chief Injustice
, he began, but then abandoned the imaginary letter. Some people did not deserve to be written to, not even in the imagination.
My dear Sanei of the Bounty, may I draw your attention to the possibility of a mutiny? Maybe you and your pals will end up as Bligh spirits, adrift in a small boat, hoping for the coast of Timor
.

The Swedish Academy met in a beautiful rococo room on the upper floor of the old Stockholm Stock Exchange Building. Around a long table were nineteen chairs upholstered in pale blue silk. One was for the king, just in case he showed up; it stood empty if he did not, which was always. On the backs of the other chairs were Roman numerals from I to XVIII. When an academician died a new member was elected to fill his chair and sat in that chair until he or she moved on to the greater academy in the sky. He thought at once of G. K. Chesterton’s lively thriller
The Man Who Was Thursday
, about an anarchist cell whose seven leaders were code-named after the days of the week. He was not, however, in the presence of anarchists. He had been granted permission to enter literature’s holy of holies, the room in which the Nobel Prize was awarded, to address a gravely friendly gathering of gray eminences. Lars Gyllensten (XIV) and Kerstin Ekman (XV), the academicians who had withdrawn from this table to protest
their colleagues’ pusillanimous lack of response to the
fatwa
, did not attend. Their chairs were a vacant rebuke. That saddened him; he had hoped to bring about a reconciliation. The academy’s invitation had been offered as a way of compensating for their earlier silence. His presence among them indicated their support. A twentieth, numeral-free chair was drawn up to the table next to the empty seat of the king, and he sat in it and spoke and answered questions until the academicians were satisfied. Elizabeth, Frances and Carmel were allowed to watch, seated in other chairs lined up against a wall.

At the heart of the dispute over
The Satanic Verses
, he said, behind all the accusations and abuse, was a question of profound importance:
Who shall have control over the story?
Who has, who should have, the power not only to tell the stories with which, and within which, we all lived, but also to say in what manner those stories may be told? For everyone lived by and inside stories, the so-called grand narratives. The nation was a story, and the family was another, and religion was a third. As a creative artist he knew that the only answer to the question was:
Everyone and anyone has, or should have that power
. We should all be free to take the grand narratives to task, to argue with them, satirize them, and insist that they change to reflect the changing times. We should speak of them reverently, irreverently, passionately, caustically, or however we chose. That was our right as members of an open society. In fact, one could say that our ability to re-tell and re-make the story of our culture was the best proof that our societies were indeed free. In a free society the argument over the grand narratives never ceased. It was the argument itself that mattered. The argument was freedom. But in a closed society those who possessed political or ideological power invariably tried to shut down these debates.
We will tell you the story
, they said,
and we will tell you what it means. We will tell you how the story is to be told and we forbid you to tell it in any other way. If you do not like the way we tell the story then you are an enemy of the state or a traitor to the faith. You have no rights. Woe betide you! We will come after you and teach you the meaning of your refusal
.

The storytelling animal must be free to tell his tales.

At the end of the meeting he received a gift. Across the way from this room was a well-known restaurant, Den Gyldene Freden (The
Golden Peace), owned by the academy. At the end of their weekly meetings the Eighteen, or however many of them had showed up, retired to a private room at the Golden Peace for dinner. Each of them paid, on arrival, with a silver coin bearing the academy’s motto,
Snille och smak
. Talent and taste. When they left the restaurant the coins were returned to them. These coins were never given out to the general public, but he left the academy that day with one in his pocket.

In New York, this time, there was no motorcade waiting, no Lieutenant Bob worrying about what Elizabeth might do with a fork. (He had flown on Scandinavian Airlines, taking the long way round, via Oslo.) There were security personnel to guide him through the airport, but that was all. There was no public appearance planned and so the American police were willing to leave him largely to his own devices. He was allowed to have a few days of near-freedom, the closest to it he’d come in almost four years. He stayed in Andrew Wylie’s apartment and the NYPD remained in their cars in the street below. During those days he made peace with Sonny Mehta. And he had dinner with Thomas Pynchon.

One of Andrew’s best qualities was his unwillingness to bear a grudge. “You and Sonny should patch things up,” he said. “You’ve been friends too long. It’s the right thing to do.” And there were good business reasons for offering an olive branch. In the long term, Random House was the most likely publisher to take over the paperback publication of
The Satanic Verses
. Penguin would never do it, and as Penguin was the distributor of Granta Books that made a long-term relationship with Granta difficult to contemplate, in spite of Bill’s extraordinary friendship and heroism. “We can’t lose sight of the goal,” Andrew said, “and the goal is normal publication for all your books, including the
Verses
.” Now that the Consortium edition had leaped the paperback hurdle it would be possible, he believed, to persuade Sonny to take on new books without fear, and also to accept long-term responsibility for the backlist. “Not right away,” Andrew said, “but maybe after they have published the next novel. I really think they will do it. And that’s what should be done.” He and Gillon had gone ahead
and negotiated a deal with Sonny and Knopf for
The Moor’s Last Sigh
. They had also placated Bill, who had been very upset when he was told their plan. But Bill was a friend first and a publisher second and he had a big enough heart to see Andrew’s point. He had saved
Haroun
from Sonny and now agreed to surrender
Moor
back to him without rancor.

Before the deal could be signed he and Sonny needed to bury the hatchet and that was the real purpose of the New York trip. Andrew also contacted Pynchon’s agent (and wife), Melanie Jackson, and the reclusive author of
Gravity’s Rainbow
agreed to meet. In the end the two meetings were combined. He and Pynchon dined with Sonny at the Mehtas’ midtown apartment. The rift with Sonny was repaired with a hug and the matter of
Haroun
left undiscussed. That was Sonny’s taciturn way of doing things—to leave awkward things unsaid and move forward—and maybe it was for the best. Then Pynchon arrived, looking exactly as Thomas Pynchon should look. He was tall, wore a red-and-white lumberjack shirt and blue jeans, had Albert Einstein white hair and Bugs Bunny front teeth. After an initial half hour of stilted conversation Pynchon seemed to relax and then spoke at length on American labor history and his own membership, dating from his early days working as a technical writer at Boeing, of the trade union of technical writers. It was strange to think of those authors of user’s manuals being addressed by the great American novelist, whom they perhaps thought of as that fellow who used to write the safety newsletter for the supersonic CIM-10 Bomarc missile, without knowing anything about how Pynchon’s knowledge of that missile had inspired his extraordinary descriptions of the World War II V-2 rockets falling on London. The conversation went on long past midnight. At one point Pynchon said, “You guys are probably tired, huh,” and yes, they were, but they were also thinking
It’s Thomas Pynchon, we can’t go to sleep
.

When Pynchon finally left, he thought:
Okay, so now we’re friends. When I visit New York maybe we’ll sometimes meet for a drink or a bite to eat and slowly we’ll get to know each other better
.

But they never met again.

Exhilarating days. He took a buggy ride with Gita in the park and although one old woman cried “Wowie!” nobody else turned a hair. He breakfasted with Giandomenico Picco, who said, “The U.S. is the key.” He walked in Battery Park and through Lincoln Center. At Andrew’s office he had an emotional reunion with Michael Herr, who had moved back to America and was living upstate in his childhood town of Cazenovia, New York, a stone’s throw from Chittenango, the birthplace of L. Frank Baum, author of
The Wizard of Oz
. And Sonny threw a party for him, and Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Susan Sontag, Annie Leibovitz and Paul Simon were all there. His favorite moment of that evening of liberation, when he felt again a part of the only world he had ever wanted to inhabit, was when Bette Bao Lord said to Susan Sontag, straight-faced, really wanting to know the answer: “Susan, do you have any interesting quirks?”