Joseph Anton: A Memoir (56 page)

He and Elizabeth went out to Long Island with Andrew and Camie Wylie to their house in Water Mill, and were joined there by Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, David Rieff, Bill Buford and Christopher and Carol Hitchens. Andrew gave a party at which Susan Sontag revealed one of her interesting quirks. She was really two Susans, Good Susan and Bad Susan, and while Good Susan was brilliant and funny and loyal and rather grand, Bad Susan could be a bullying monster. A junior Wylie agency employee said something about the Bosnian conflict that was not to Susan’s liking and Bad Susan came roaring out of her and the junior Wylie agent was in danger of being devoured. It wasn’t a fair fight, Susan Sontag versus this young girl, who wasn’t able to fight back anyway because Sontag was a valued client of the Wylie Agency. It was necessary to save the young agent’s life, and he and Bill Buford went across and silenced the mighty Sontag by bombarding her with trivia. “Hey, Susan, how do you like the Yankees’ rotation?” “What? What are you talking about? I don’t give a
damn
about the Yankees’ rotation, I’m just telling this young woman …” “Yeah, but Susan, you’ve gotta admit, El Duque, he’s quite something.” “No, this is important, this young woman here thinks that in Bosnia …” “What do you think of the wine, Susan? I think the red may be a little corked.” And in the end Sontag fell silent, defeated by inconsequentiality, and the young agent was allowed to live.

It was cold November weather but they ran on the beach throwing a football around and skipped stones across the water and played their foolish word games (the game of Titles That Weren’t Quite Good Enough, for example:
Mr. Zhivago, A Farewell to Weapons, For Whom the Bell Rings, Two Days in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Mademoiselle Bovary, The Story of the Forsytes, The Big Gatsby, Cab Driver, Love in the Time of Influenza, Toby-Dick, Snag-22, Raspberry Finn
) and security officers were nowhere in sight. In those days of friendship he saw a glimmer of hope for the future. If America would let him come and stay quietly on American soil and take his chances then maybe that was the best possibility of finding some freedom in the short term; maybe he could achieve a part-time freedom at least, for a month a year, or two, or three, while he was fighting for an end to the threats. What was he, after all, but a huddled mass yearning to breathe free? He heard the song of the statue in the harbor, and she seemed to be singing to him.

His Canadian publisher, Louise Dennys, president of PEN Canada, Graham Greene’s niece and the best editor in Toronto as well as being one half of the tallest and best-looking happy marriage he knew of (to the even taller and just as gorgeous Ric Young), wanted him to make one of his surprise entrances at the annual benefit event for Canadian PEN. She was confident that meetings with leading politicians would follow and that Canada could be persuaded to “come on board” enthusiastically. A private plane had been found. It was quite a plane, with an interior designed by Ralph Lauren, and it was the most comfortable transatlantic flight of his life. But he would have preferred to be standing in line at Heathrow like any other passenger, flying as everyone flew. When life was a series of crises and emergency solutions, it was normality that felt like a luxury—infinitely desirable, yet unobtainable.

In Toronto they were met by Ric Young and the novelist John Ralston Saul, representing PEN, and were driven to the home of Michael Ondaatje and Linda Spalding. The next day the work began. He was interviewed, among many others, by the leading Canadian journalist Peter Gzowski, who asked, on his radio show, about his sex life. “No comment,” he said. “But,” pressed Gzowski, “that doesn’t mean
no sex?” At lunch he met the premier of Ontario, Bob Rae, whose help had been the crucial factor in getting the plane. Rae was youthful, friendly, blond, wore sneakers, and said he had agreed to come on stage at the benefit even though his wife was afraid he would be killed. It turned out that Canadian security had warned all politicians against meeting him; or that may have been a convenient excuse. For whatever reason, the meetings were proving to be difficult to arrange. That evening he and Elizabeth dined at the home of John Saul and the TV journalist and future governor-general of Canada, Adrienne Clarkson, and after dinner Adrienne stood up and sang “Hello, Young Lovers” to them in a good, strong voice.

The next evening they were all backstage at the Winter Garden Theatre and he put on the PEN T-shirt that Ric had brought for him. John Irving arrived, grinning. Peggy Atwood rushed in wearing a cowboy hat and fringed jacket and kissed him. Then the “Rushdie” part of the program began and it felt like the highest of literary honors, as writer after writer spoke a part of the
fatwa
’s dire chronology and then took a seat on the stage. John Irving spoke sweetly about their first meeting long ago and read the beginning and the end of
Midnight’s Children
and then it was Atwood who introduced him and he went out onto the stage and twelve hundred people gasped and then began to roar their solidarity and love. This business of being turned into an icon was very odd, he thought. He didn’t feel iconic. He felt … 
actual
. But right now it might just be the best weapon he had. The symbolic icon-Salman his supporters had constructed, an idealized Salman of Liberty who stood flawlessly and unwaveringly for the highest values, counteracted and might just in the end defeat the demon version of himself constructed by his adversaries. He raised his arm and waved and when the roar subsided spoke lightly of witch hunts and the dangerous power of comedy and then read his story “Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabella of Spain Consummate Their Relationship.” Louise had wanted him to do this, to be there as a writer among literary folk, and to offer them his writing. When the story was over Louise came out and read a message of support from Canada’s secretary of state for external affairs, Barbara Macdougall, and then Bob Rae came out and embraced him—the first head of a government in the world to do so—and the roar began again. It was an evening he would never forget.

The Iranian embassy in Ottawa had protested to the Canadian government that it had not been told about his visit in advance. That was the best joke of the week.

And before and in between and after these journeyings he and Elizabeth moved into their new house. It was a house he would never have chosen, in an area he would never have wished to live in; it was too big, because of the policemen who had to live with him, too expensive, too conservative. But David Ashton Hill had done a wonderful job, and Elizabeth had furnished it beautifully, and he had a terrific work room, and above all it was his home, not rented for him by helpful surrogates, not found for him by policemen or loaned to him by friends out of the goodness of their hearts; and so he loved it, and entered it in a sort of ecstatic state.
There’s no place like home
. The bimbomobile drove in through the electronic gates, the armored garage door rose and then closed behind him, and there he was. No policeman would ever force him to leave it.
Brother, I am too old to go again to my travels
, King Charles II had said after the Restoration, and the king’s sentiments were also his. Martin Luther was in his thoughts too.
Hier stehe ich. Ich kann nicht anders
. Martin Luther wasn’t talking about real estate, obviously. But this was how he also felt. Here I stand, he told himself. Here I also sit and work and ride my exercise bike and watch TV and bathe and eat and sleep. I can do no other.

Bill Buford had asked him to be one of the judges for the Best of Young British Novelists, 1993. In 1983 he had been on the first of those lists along with Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Kazuo Ishiguro, Graham Swift and Julian Barnes. Now he was reading the work of younger writers: Jeanette Winterson, Will Self, Louis de Bernières, A. L. Kennedy, Ben Okri, Hanif Kureishi. His fellow judges were A. S. Byatt, John Mitchinson of Waterstone’s booksellers, and Bill himself. There were pleasant discoveries (Iain Banks) and also disappointments (Sunetra Gupta was not a British citizen so couldn’t be considered). They agreed quickly about more than half the writers
included in the final twenty and then the interesting disagreements began. He argued with Antonia Byatt about Robert McLiam Wilson and lost. She favored D. J. Taylor, but that was a battle she, in her turn, did not win. There was a disagreement about which of the daughters of Lucian Freud they might include, Esther Freud or Rose Boyt. (Esther made it, Rose didn’t.) He was a great admirer of A. L. Kennedy’s work and managed to marshal enough support for it to override Antonia Byatt’s opposition. It was a passionate, serious debate and at the end there were sixteen writers about whom all the judges were in total agreement and a final four about whom they all disagreed equally strongly. Then the list was published and the piranhas of the little pond of the London literary scene went after it.

Harry Ritchie in
The Sunday Times
, after getting exclusive rights to reveal the names of the chosen twenty writers and agreeing to support the promotion properly, took it upon himself to trash the list. He called Ritchie and said, “Have you read all of those writers? Because I certainly hadn’t until I took on this job.” Ritchie admitted that he had read only about half the writers on the list. That hadn’t stopped him from disparaging them. Apparently you could no longer count on even your allotted fifteen minutes of grace before the bludgeoning began. You got whacked on the head as soon as you were out of the egg. Three days later James Wood, the malevolent Procrustes of literary criticism, who tormented his victims on the narrow bed of his inflexible literary ideologies, pulling them painfully apart or else cutting them off at the knees, gave the twenty the treatment in
The Guardian
. Welcome to English literature, boys and girls.

On Christmas Day he and Elizabeth were able to invite Graham Swift and Candice Rodd to spend the day with them. On Boxing Day, Nigella Lawson and John Diamond and Bill and Alicja Buford came to dine. Elizabeth, who loved the festival and all its rituals—he had begun to call her, affectionately, a “Christmas fundamentalist”—was very happy to be able to “do Christmas” for everyone. After four years they could spend the holidays in their own home, with their own tree, repaying their friends’ years of hospitality and kindness.

But the beating wings of the death angel were never far away. Nigella’s sister Thomasina was doing badly in her battle against breast cancer. Antonia Fraser’s son Orlando had a bad car accident in Bosnia, broke many bones and had a perforated lung. But he survived. Ian McEwan’s stepdaughter Polly’s boyfriend was caught in a burning house in Berlin. He did not survive.

Clarissa called, in tears. She had been given a six months’ layoff notice by the A. P. Watt literary agency. He spoke to Gillon Aitken and Liz Calder. This was a problem that had to be solved.

He was photographed in a sort of cage by Terry O’Neill for the London
Sunday Times
. This picture would run on the cover of the Sunday magazine, to illustrate an essay by him that would be given the title “The Last Hostage.” He wondered as he clutched the rusting bars O’Neill had found for him to stand behind if the day would ever again come when journalists and photographers were interested in him as a novelist. It didn’t seem likely. He had just heard from Andrew that in spite of the agency’s best efforts Random House had declined to take on the publication of the paperback of
The Satanic Verses
. The Consortium could not be dissolved just yet. However, Andrew added, many senior figures at Random House—Frances Coady and Simon Master in the London office, and Sonny Mehta in New York—professed to be “very angry” about this refusal by the top brass (the same top brass who, when refusing to join the paperback consortium, had said they “weren’t going to be pushed around by any damn agent”) and promised they were working to “turn it around.”

A political trip to Dublin. Elizabeth and he were invited to stay at Bono’s place in Killiney. There was a beautiful little guest house at the bottom of the Hewsons’ garden with CinemaScope views of Killiney Bay. Guests were encouraged to sign their names and scribble messages or drawings on the bathroom wall. On the first evening he met Irish writers at the home of the
Irish Times
journalist Paddy Smyth, whose mother, the eminent novelist Jennifer Johnston, told the story of how Tom Maschler at Jonathan Cape had told her, after reading her first
novel, that he thought she wasn’t a writer and would never write another book, which was why he wasn’t going to publish the one she had written. So there was literary gossip but also political work. The former prime minister Garret Fitzgerald was one of several politicians present, all of whom pledged their support.

President Mary Robinson received him at her official residence, Phoenix Park—his first meeting with a head of state!—and sat twinkling-eyed and silent while he made his case. She said little, but murmured, “It’s no sin to listen.” He spoke at the “Let in the Light” free-speech conference at Trinity and afterward at the drinks for the speakers a small sturdy woman came up to him and told him that because he had opposed the ordinance called Section 31, which banned Sinn Féin from Irish TV, “you have removed all danger to yourself from us.” “I see,” he said, “and who’s
us
?” The woman looked him in the eye. “You know fockin’ well who we are,” she said. After being given this free pass by the IRA he was whisked to the legendary talk-show host Gay Byrne’s
Late Late Show
, and because Gay said he had read and liked
The Satanic Verses
, just about the whole of Ireland decided that it and its author must be okay.

In the morning he visited Joyce’s Martello tower, where stately, plump Buck Mulligan had lived with Stephen Dedalus and walking up the stairs to the turreted roof he felt as many had felt before him as if he were stepping into the novel.
Introibo ad altare Dei
, he said under his breath. Then at the Abbey Theatre a lunch with writers and the new arts minister, the poet Michael D. Higgins, and all of them wearing
I AM SALMAN RUSHDIE
button badges. After lunch two of the other Salman Rushdies, Colm Tóibín and Dermot Bolger, took him for a walk out to the lighthouse on Howth Head (the Garda following at a polite distance) and the lighthouse keeper, John, allowed him to switch on the light. On Sunday Bono smuggled him out to a bar in Killiney without telling the Garda and for half an hour he was giddy with the unprotected freedom of it and maybe thanks to the unprotected Guinness too. When they got back to the Hewson house the Garda looked at Bono with mournful accusation but forbore to speak harsh words to their country’s favorite son.