Joseph Anton: A Memoir (81 page)

He should have kept his feelings to himself, of course, but he couldn’t resist replying. “It would be easier to sympathize with him,” he wrote in a letter to the newspaper, “had he not been so ready to join in an earlier campaign of vilification against a fellow writer. In 1989, during the worst days of the Islamic attack on
The Satanic Verses
, le Carré rather pompously joined forces with my assailants. It would be gracious if he were to admit that he understands the nature of the Thought Police a little better now that, at least in his own opinion, he’s the one in the line of fire.”

Le Carré rose grandly to the bait: “Rushdie’s way with the truth is as self-serving as ever,” he replied. “I never joined his assailants. Nor did I take the easy path of proclaiming him to be a shining innocent. My position was that there is no law in life or nature that says great religions may be insulted with impunity. I wrote that there is no absolute standard of free speech in any society. I wrote that tolerance does not come at the same time, and in the same form, to all religions and cultures, and that Christian society too, until very recently, defined the limits of freedom by what was sacred. I wrote, and would write again today, that when it came to the further exploitation of Rushdie’s work in paperback form, I was more concerned about the girl at Penguin Books who might get her hands blown off in the mailroom than I was about Rushdie’s royalties. Anyone who had wished to read the book by then had ample access to it. My purpose was not to justify the persecution of Rushdie, which, like any decent person, I deplore, but to sound a less arrogant, less colonialist, and less self-righteous note than we were hearing from the safety of his admirers’ camp.”

By now
The Guardian
was enjoying the fight so much that it was running the letters on the front page. His reply to le Carré ran the next
day: “John le Carré … claims not to have joined in the attack against me but also states that ‘there is no law in life or nature that says great religions may be insulted with impunity.’ A cursory examination of this lofty formulation reveals that (1) it takes the philistine, reductionist, radical Islamist line that
The Satanic Verses
was no more than an ‘insult,’ and (2) it suggests that anyone who displeases philistine, reductionist, radical Islamist folk loses his right to live in safety.… He says that he is more interested in safeguarding publishing staff than in my royalties. But it is precisely these people, my novel’s publishers in some thirty countries, together with the staff of bookshops, who have most passionately supported and defended my right to publish. It is ignoble of le Carré to use them as an argument for censorship when they have so courageously stood up for freedom. John le Carré is right to say that free speech isn’t absolute. We have the freedoms we fight for, and we lose those we don’t defend. I’d always thought George Smiley knew that. His creator appears to have forgotten.”

At this point, Christopher Hitchens joined the fray unbidden, and his reply would drive the spy novelist to greater heights of apoplexy. “John le Carré’s conduct in your pages is like nothing so much as that of a man who, having relieved himself in his own hat, makes haste to clamp the brimming
chapeau
on his head,” opined Hitch with his characteristic understatement. “He used to be evasive and euphemistic about the open solicitation of murder, for bounty, on the grounds that ayatollahs had feelings, too. Now he tells us that his prime concern was the safety of the girls in the mailroom. For good measure, he arbitrarily counterposes their security against Rushdie’s royalties. May we take it, then, that he would have had no objection if
The Satanic Verses
had been written and published for free and distributed gratis from unattended stalls? This might have at least satisfied those who appear to believe that the defense of free expression should be free of cost and free of risk. As it happens, no mailroom girls have been injured in the course of eight years’ defiance of the
fatwa
. And when the nervous book chains of North America briefly did withdraw
The Satanic Verses
on dubious grounds of ‘security,’ it was their staff unions who protested and who volunteered to stand next to plateglass windows in upholding the reader’s right to buy and peruse any book. In le Carré’s eyes, their brave decision was taken in ‘safety’ and was moreover blasphemous
toward a great religion! Could we not have been spared this revelation of the contents of his hat—I mean head?”

The next day it was le Carré’s turn: “Anyone reading yesterday’s letters from Salman Rushdie and Christopher Hitchens might well ask himself into whose hands the great cause of free speech has fallen. Whether from Rushdie’s throne or Hitchens’s gutter, the message is the same: ‘Our cause is absolute, it brooks no dissent or qualification; whoever questions it is by definition an ignorant, pompous, semiliterate unperson.’ Rushdie sneers at my language and trashes a thoughtful and well-received speech I made to the Anglo-Israel Association, and which
The Guardian
saw fit to reprint. Hitchens portrays me as a buffoon who pours his own urine on his head. Two rabid ayatollahs could not have done a better job. But will the friendship last? I am amazed that Hitchens has put up with Rushdie’s self-canonization for so long. Rushdie, so far as I can make out, does not deny the fact that he insulted a great religion. Instead he accuses me—note his preposterous language for a change—of taking the philistine reductionist radical Islamist line. I didn’t know I was so clever. What I do know is, Rushdie took on a known enemy and screamed ‘foul’ when it acted in character. The pain he has had to endure is appalling, but it doesn’t make a martyr of him, nor—much as he would like it to—does it sweep away all argument about the ambiguities of his participation in his own downfall.”

In for a penny, in for a pound, he thought. “It’s true I did call [le Carré] pompous, which I thought pretty mild in the circumstances. ‘Ignorant’ and ‘semiliterate’ are dunces’ caps he has skillfully fitted on his own head.… Le Carré’s habit of giving himself good reviews (‘my thoughtful and well-received speech’) was no doubt developed because, well, somebody has to write them.… I have no intention of repeating yet again my many explications of
The Satanic Verses
, a novel of which I remain extremely proud. A novel, Mr. le Carré, not a gibe. You know what a novel is, don’t you, John?”

Oh, and so on. His letters, le Carré said, should be required reading for all British high school students as an example of “cultural intolerance masquerading as free speech.” He wanted to bring the fight to an end but felt obliged to respond to the allegation of
taking on a known enemy and then screaming “foul.”
“I presume our Hampstead hero
would say the same to the many writers, journalists and intellectuals in and from Iran, Algeria, Egypt, Turkey and elsewhere, who are also battling against Islamism, and for a secularized society; in short, for freedom from the oppression of Great World Religions. For my part, I have tried, in these bad years, to draw attention to their plight. Some of the best of them—Farag Fouda, Tahar Djaout, Ugur Mumcu—have been murdered because of their willingness to ‘take on a known enemy.’ … I happen not to feel that priests and mullahs, let alone bombers and assassins, are the best people to set the limits of what it is possible to think.”

Le Carré fell silent, but now his friend William Shawcross leaped into the ring. “Rushdie’s claims are outrageous and … carry the stink of triumphalist self-righteousness.” This was awkward, because Shawcross was the outgoing chairman of Article 19, which then had to write a letter distancing itself from his allegations.
The Guardian
was reluctant to let the story die and its editor, Alan Rusbridger, called to ask if he would like to reply to the Shawcross letter. “No,” he told Rusbridger. “If le Carré wants to get his friends to do a little proxy whingeing, that’s his business. I’ve said what I had to say.”

Several journalists traced le Carré’s hostility back to that old, bad review of
The Russia House
, but he was suddenly overcome with sadness about what had happened. The le Carré of
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
and
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
was a writer he had long admired. In happier times they had even shared a comradely stage on behalf of the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign. He wondered if le Carré might respond positively if offered an olive branch. But Charlotte Cornwell, le Carré’s sister, was expressing her rage to Pauline Melville, whom she ran into in a north London street—“Well! As for your friend!”—so maybe feelings in the Cornwell camp were running too high for a peace initiative to succeed just yet. But he regretted the fight, and felt that nobody “won” the argument. Both of them had lost.

Not long after this spat he was invited to Spy Central to address a bunch of British intelligence station chiefs, and the redoubtable Eliza Manningham-Buller of MI5, a woman who looked exactly like her name, halfway between Bertie Wooster’s Aunt Dahlia and the queen, was furious about le Carré. “What does he think he’s doing?” she demanded.
“Does he understand nothing? Is he a complete fool?” “But,” he asked Eliza, “wasn’t he one of you lot back in the day?” Eliza Manningham-Buller was one of those rare and valuable women who could actually snort. “Hah!” she snorted, like a true Wodehouseian aunt. “I suppose he did work for us in some sort of minor capacity for about five minutes, but he never, my dear, reached the levels you’ve been talking to tonight, and let me tell you, after this business, he never will.”

Eleven years later, in 2008, he read an interview with John le Carré in which his former adversary said of their old contretemps, “Perhaps I was wrong. If so, I was wrong for the right reasons.”

He had written almost two hundred pages of
The Ground Beneath Her Feet
when Paul Auster’s hopes of casting him in his film
Lulu on the Bridge
were dashed. The Teamsters union—“Can you imagine it, the big, tough Teamsters?” he mourned—declared themselves too scared to have Mr. Rushdie in the picture. They wanted more money, of course, danger money, but this was a shoestring operation and there wasn’t any more money. Paul and his producer Peter Newman fought hard to make it happen, but in the end they had to admit defeat. “On the day I realized we couldn’t do it,” Paul told him, “I went into a room by myself and wept.”

His part went at short notice to Willem Dafoe. Which was, at least, flattering.

He went to hear Edward Said speak at the offices of the
London Review of Books
, and a young man named Asad came up and confessed that in 1989 he was the leader of the Islamic Society in Coventry and had been the “West Midlands convener” of demonstrations against
The Satanic Verses
. “But it’s all right,” he burst out in embarrassment, “I’m an atheist now.” Well, that was progress, he told Asad, but the young man had more to say. “And then recently,” Asad cried, “I read your book, and I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about!” “That’s good,” he replied, “but I should point out that you, who hadn’t read the book, were the person organizing the fuss.” He remembered the old
Chinese proverb, sometimes ascribed to Confucius:
If you sit by the river for long enough, the body of your enemy will float by
.

Milan was seven months old, smiling at everyone, babbling constantly, alert, good-natured, beautiful. A week before Christmas he began to crawl. The police were taking down their surveillance equipment and moving out. On New Year’s Day, Frank Bishop came to work for him, and after a few weeks of “transition” they would have their home to themselves, and because of that both he and Elizabeth felt, in spite of all the year’s disappointments, that it was ending well.

At the beginning of the year of the beginning of the end, when he closed the door for the last time on the four policemen who had lived with him under many different names and in many different places for the previous nine years, and thus brought to a close the period of round-the-clock protection that Will Wilson and Will Wilton had offered him in Lonsdale Square at the end of an earlier life, he asked himself if he was regaining freedom for himself and his family or signing everyone’s death warrant. Was he the most irresponsible of men, or a realist with good instincts who wanted to rebuild, in private, a real private life? The answer could only be retrospective. In ten or twenty years he would know if his instincts had been right or wrong. Life was lived forward but was judged in reverse.

So, at the beginning of the year of the beginning of the end; and without knowing the future; and with a baby boy who was attending to the things that it was a baby’s business to attend to, the business of sitting up by himself for the first time, straight-backed, the business of trying to pull himself up to a standing position in his crib, and failing, and trying again, until the day came when he ceased being a crawling thing and became
Homo erectus
, well on his way to being
sapiens;
and while the baby boy’s older brother was going away on a gap year adventure in Mexico, where he would be arrested by policemen and watch whales at play and swim in pools below high waterfalls in Taxco and watch the fire-torch-bearing divers plunge off the cliffs of Acapulco
and read Bukowski and Kerouac and meet his mother and go with her to Chichen Itza and Oaxaca and frighten his father by staying out of touch for alarmingly long periods, his father who could not help fearing the worst, who had silently feared for his son’s safety ever since the day of the unanswered telephone calls and the wrongly identified house with the front door open nine years ago; a journey from which the eighteen-year-old boy would return so slim, so tanned, so handsome that when he rang the doorbell and his father saw him on the entry phone monitor screen he didn’t recognize him,
Who’s that?
, he cried in wonderment and then realized that this young god was his own child; while all the ordinariness of ordinary life continued, as it was right that it should continue, even in the midst of another, engulfing existence that continued to be extraordinary, the day came, on Monday, January 26, 1998, when they slept alone in their home, and instead of being scared by the silence around them, by the lack of security technology and the absence of large sleeping policemen, they could not stop smiling and went to bed early and slept like the dead; no, not the dead, like the happy, unencumbered living. And then at 3:45
A.M.
he woke up and couldn’t go back to sleep.