Joseph Anton: A Memoir

  When he was able to visit people he noticed that they were more excited by the security precautions—the dry-cleaning, the curtains being drawn, the exploration of their homes by handsome men with guns—than by his visit. Afterward his friends’ most vivid memories of those days were invariably memories of the Special Branch. An improbable friendship was deepening between the London literary world and the British secret police. The protection officers liked his friends, who would make them welcome, make sure they were comfortable, and feed them. “You have no idea,” he was told, “how we get treated elsewhere.” Political grandees and their wives often treated these good men like the help.

  Sometimes people were too excited. He was once invited to visit Edward Said, who was staying in London at the Mayfair home of a Kuwaiti friend. When he arrived the Indian maid, wide-eyed, recognized him at once and became overwrought. She telephoned Said’s host’s household back in Kuwait and shouted incoherently down the line, “Rushdie! Here! Rushdie here!” Nobody in Kuwait could understand why the invisible man had manifested himself in their London base: Why was he taking refuge there? Edward had to explain that he had merely invited his friend to dinner. No long-term residence was envisaged.

  He slowly came to understand that the protection looked glamorous. Men arrived in advance of his own coming, everything was made ready, a sleek Jaguar stopped at the door, there was the moment of maximum risk between car door and front door, then he was whisked inside. It looked like VIP treatment. It looked like too much. It made people ask, Who does he think he is? Why does he deserve to be treated like a king? His friends didn’t ask this but maybe one or two of them wondered too: Was all of this really necessary? The longer it lasted, the longer he went without being killed, the easier it was for people to believe that nobody was trying to kill him, and that he wanted the protection around him to satisfy his vanity, his insufferable self-importance. It was hard to convince people that from where he was standing the protection didn’t feel like movie-stardom. It felt like jail.

  Meanwhile rumors swirled in the press. The Abu Nidal organization was training a hit team who would enter the United Kingdom “dressed as businessmen, in Westernized clothes.” Another assassination squad was supposedly being prepared in the Central African Republic. And as well as these lethal whispers, the ugliness was still blaring from every radio, television and newspaper front page. The Tory minister John Patten eloquently debated the pro-Muslim Keith Vaz, MP, on TV. Kalim Siddiqui was on TV, just back from Iran, saying menacingly, “He will not die in Britain,” implying that a kidnapping plot was being hatched. The former pop singer Cat Stevens, recently reincarnated as the born-again Muslim “leader” Yusuf Islam, was on TV, too, hoping for his death and stating that he would be prepared to call in the hit squads if he learned the blasphemer’s whereabouts.

  He telephoned Jatinder Verma of the Tara Arts theater group and was told of “heavy intimidation [of British Muslims by the campaign organizers] going on at the grass roots” and “political pressure by the Council of Mosques.” As depressing as the Islamic campaign were the attacks from the left. John Berger denounced him in The Guardian. And the eminent intellectual Paul Gilroy, author of There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, the nearest thing the United Kingdom had to a figure like Cornel West in America, accused him of having “misjudged the people” and therefore of having created his own tragedy. Surreally, Gilroy compared him to the boxer Frank Bruno, who evidently knew how not to “misjudge the people,” and was therefore loved. It was not possible, in the thinking of socialist intellectuals like Berger and Gilroy, that the people had misjudged him. The people could not be wrong.

  The house problem was becoming acute. Then Deborah Rogers came to the rescue for the second time and offered a solution: a spacious house she knew of in the village of Bucknell in Shropshire that was available for a year. The police checked it out. Yes, it was a possibility. His spirits rose. A home for a year sounded like an unthinkable luxury. He agreed: Joseph Anton would rent it.

  One day he asked the protection officer called Piggy: “What would you have done if The Satanic Verses had been, say, a poem, or a radio play, and had not been able to generate the income that allows me to rent these places? What would you have done if I had been too poor?” Piggy shrugged. “Fortunately, as it happens,” he said, “we don’t have to answer that question, do we.”

  Michael Foot and his wife, Jill Craigie, had persuaded his successor as leader of the opposition, Neil Kinnock, and his wife, Glenys, to meet him for dinner at their house in Pilgrims Lane, Hampstead. The writer and barrister John Mortimer, creator of Rumpole of the Bailey, and his wife, Penny, would also be there. He was driven to London and found himself stuck in a traffic jam right outside the Regent’s Park Mosque while the faithful poured out of Friday prayers, having just heard a sermon reviling him. He had to open The Daily Telegraph and bury his face in it. After a while he asked, “I assume the doors are locked?” There was a click and a clearing of the throat and Stumpy said, “They are now.” He could not help feeling how awful it was to be so segregated from “his” people. When he said this to Sameen she scolded him.

  “These mullah-ridden mobs were never your people,” she said. “You’d always have opposed them, and been opposed by them, in India or Pakistan also.”

  At the Foots’ house, Neil Kinnock was amazingly friendly, sympathetic and supportive. But he was also worried that it would “get out” that he had been there and that could cause him political problems. He could not have been nicer, but it was a secret niceness. Kinnock was opposed, he said at one point, to state subsidies being given to segregated Muslim schools, but what could he do, he cried, it was Labour Party policy. It was not possible to conceive of his adversary, the formidable Tory prime minister Margaret Thatcher, feebly throwing up her arms like that.

  Michael himself had become a passionate ally and friend. Their only disagreement was about Indira Gandhi, whom Michael had known well, and whose years of quasi-dictatorship during the “emergency” of the mid-1970s he was disposed to excuse. When Michael adopted you as a friend, he took the view that you could do no wrong.

  Also at the dinner was the poet Tony Harrison, who had made a film-poem for BBC TV called The Blasphemers’ Banquet, in which he dined in a restaurant in Bradford with Voltaire, Molière, Omar Khayyám and Byron. One chair was left empty. “That’s Salman Rushdie’s chair.” They talked about blasphemy being at the very root of Western culture. The trials of Socrates, Jesus Christ and Galileo had all been blasphemy trials and yet the history of philosophy, Christianity and science owed them a mighty debt. “I’m keeping your chair for you,” Harrison said. “Just let me know when you can take delivery.”

  He was driven away into the night. His wisdom teeth exploded.

  They had chosen a hospital near Bristol and made all the arrangements. He was smuggled in for examinations and X-rays and had to spend the night before the operation in the morning. Both lower wisdom teeth were impacted and a general anesthetic would be required. The police were concerned that if news of his presence there got out a hostile crowd could gather outside the hospital. They had a plan to cover that eventuality. They had a hearse standing by and would drive it into a hospital bay and bring him out anaesthetized, zipped up in a body bag. This proved to be an unnecessary stratagem.

  When he regained consciousness Marianne was holding his hand. He was in a happy morphine haze and the headache, jaw ache and neck ache didn’t feel so bad. There was a heated pillow under his neck and Marianne was being very nice to him. There were twenty or thirty thousand Muslims assembling in Hyde Park to demand whatever they were demanding but the morphine made it okay. They had threatened the biggest ever rally in Britain, five hundred thousand people, so twenty thousand felt piffling. Morphine was wonderful. If only he could stay on it all the time he would feel just fine.

  Later he had a row with Clarissa because she had allowed Zafar to watch the demonstration on TV. “How could you have done tha
t?” he demanded. “It just happened,” she said, adding that he was obviously upset by the demonstration and shouldn’t take it out on her. Zafar came on the phone and said that he had seen an effigy with an arrow through its head. He had seen twenty thousand men and boys marching through the streets, not of Tehran, but his own hometown, demanding his father’s death. He told Zafar: “People show off for the TV, they think it looks smart.” “But it doesn’t,” Zafar said. “It looks stupid.” He could be an astonishing boy.

  He spoke to his computer geek friend Gurmukh Singh, who had a brilliant idea: Why didn’t he get himself a “cellphone”? There were these “cellphones” now. You charged their batteries and then you carried them around wherever you went and nobody knew where you were calling from. If he had one of these new phones then he would be able to give out a number to family and friends and business colleagues without compromising his location. What a brainwave, he said, that sounds wonderful, almost unbelievable. “I’m going to look into it,” Gurmukh told him.

  The cellphone—ridiculously bulky, a brick with an antenna—arrived not long afterward and his excitement knew no bounds. He called people and gave them the number and they kept calling him back—Sameen, Pauline, and, several times, his friend Michael Herr, author of the Vietnam War classic Dispatches, who was living in London and had been obsessing about him more than anyone else, and who was, if anything, more afraid and paranoid on his behalf than he was himself. Kazuo Ishiguro, whose novel The Remains of the Day was just out and enjoying a great triumph, called to say that he thought The Satanic Verses should be rereviewed everywhere, this time by novelists, to turn the focus back toward literature. Clarissa called him to make peace. An Irish author represented by A. P. Watt, where she worked, had told her a story about Irish builders he knew in Birmingham who had been working on the foundations of a big new mosque. When nobody was looking they had dropped a copy of The Satanic Verses into the wet cement. “So that mosque is being built on your book,” Clarissa said.

  Michael Holroyd called to say that, in his opinion, the effect of the big march had been to create a huge swing of public opinion against the protesters. People who had been on the fence were coming off it, revolted by what they saw on TV, the posters reading KILL THE DOG, DIE RUSHDIE BASTARD, and WE’D RATHER DIE THAN SEE HIM LIVE, and the twelve-year-old boy explaining to the cameras that he was ready to kill the bastard personally. The appearances by Kalim Siddiqui and Cat Stevens had been helpful as well. The press coverage of these events was indeed very much on his side. “I hate,” said a commentator in the London Times, “to see a man outnumbered.”

  There had been sightings of him everywhere that hot, hot May—in Geneva and Cornwall and all over London, and at an Oxford dinner party picketed by Muslims. The South African writer Christopher Hope told Clarissa’s colleague Caradoc King that he had actually been at a reception in Oxford also attended by the invisible man. Tariq Ali claimed to have dined with him at a remote location. None of these sightings was accurate, unless there really was a phantom Rushdie on the loose, a runaway shadow like the one in Hans Christian Andersen’s great, scary story, performing party tricks while Joseph Anton stayed home. The runaway shadow first glimpsed on the stage of the Royal Court in Iranian Nights did crop up again in the title of a second play, by Brian Clark, author of Whose Life Is It Anyway? This new work was elegantly titled Who Killed Salman Rushdie? He telephoned Clark to point out that the answer to the question was “Nobody, or not yet, anyway, and let’s hope it doesn’t happen,” and Clark offered to change the title to Who Killed the Writer? but the premise would remain the same: a writer killed by Iranian assassins because of a book he wrote. “Fiction?” Sure. Could be anybody. Clark told him he intended to offer the work for production. His life and death were both becoming other people’s property. He was fair game.

  Everyone in England was sunbathing but he remained indoors, growing pale and hairy. He was offered a place on the European “ticket” of the Italian center parties—the Republican Party, the Liberal Party and the Radical Party of one Marco Pannella, who was the person making the offer, which reached him through the office of Paddy Ashdown, the leader of the British Liberal Democrats. Gillon said, “Don’t do it; it sounds like a publicity stunt.” But Pannella said he felt Europe should make a concrete gesture of solidarity toward him, and if he became a member of the European Parliament (MEP) any attack on him would be considered an attack on the European Parliament itself, which might dissuade some potential attackers. Scotland Yard, whose senior officers seemed determined to hold him incommunicado, feared that such a move might actually increase the danger to him, acting as a red rag to some Muslims; and it might endanger others too. How would he feel if as a result of his decision some “soft targets in Strasbourg” were attacked? In the end he decided against accepting Signor Pannella’s invitation. He was not a politician. He was a writer. It was as a writer that he wanted to be defended, as a writer that he wanted to defend himself. He thought of Hester Prynne wearing her scarlet letter with pride. He too had been branded with a scarlet A now, standing not for “Adulteress” but for “Apostate.” He too, like Hawthorne’s great heroine, must wear the scarlet letter as a badge of honor, in spite of the pain.

  He was sent a copy of the American magazine NPQ, in which he was glad to find an Islamic scholar writing that The Satanic Verses stood within a long Muslim tradition of doubting art, poetry and philosophy. One quiet voice of sanity, striving to be heard above the caterwauling of murderous children.

  There was a second meeting with Commander Howley, which took place at the Thornhill Crescent, Islington, home of his friend the raunchy Australian comic novelist Kathy Lette and her husband, his lawyer, Geoffrey Robertson QC. Howley reminded him of a nutcracker in the shape of a man’s head and arms that his father used to crack walnuts. One placed the nut in the man’s jaws and snapped the arms together and the nut gave way with a satisfying crack. The man had a fearsome jawline that Dick Tracy would have envied, and, when the nutcracker was closed, a thin, grim mouth. Any walnut, sighting Commander Howley, would have quaked in its shell. He was a stern and serious man. But on this occasion he had come to provide hope of a kind. It was plainly unreasonable, he conceded, to force on anyone a permanently peripatetic life, requiring him to rent or borrow homes forever. It had therefore been decided—policemen were fond of the passive voice—that he be allowed (there it was again, that strange allowed) to start looking for a permanent home to move into “in the middle of the next year, or thereabouts.” The middle of next year was a year away, which was disheartening, but the idea of being able to have a home again, and to be protected in it like every other “principal,” was cheering, and restorative of his self-respect. How much more dignified that would be than this fretful, scuttling existence! He thanked Commander Howley for that, and added that he hoped he would not be asked to remain buried in the countryside somewhere, far from his family and friends. “No,” Howley said. It would be easier for everyone if the house were to be located within the “DPG area.” The DPG was the Diplomatic Protection Group, which could offer a rapid-response service in case of need. There would have to be a reinforced safe room and a system of panic buttons but that was presumably acceptable. Yes, he said, of course. “Very well then,” Howley said. “We’ll aim at that.” The nutcracker jaw clamped shut.

  He was not able to share the news with anyone, not even his hosts for the day. He had met Kathy Lette in Sydney five years earlier when he was walking near Bondi Beach with Robyn Davidson. There were sounds of a party wafting down from a fourth-floor apartment and when they looked up they saw a woman sitting on the balcony railing with her back to the sea. “I’d recognize that bottom anywhere,” Robyn said. That was how his friendship with Kathy began: from the bottom up. Robyn vanished from his life but Kathy remained. She arrived in England after falling in love with Geoffrey, who broke up with Nigella Lawson to be with her, a decision that improved the lives of everyone concerned, including Nigell
a’s. In the Thornhill Crescent house, after the police departed, Geoff held forth on the legal attacks on The Satanic Verses and why they would fail. His conviction and strength of feeling were both reassuring. He was a valuable ally.

  Marianne came back from an outing in the city. She said she had run into Richard Eyre, the director of the National Theatre, on a subway platform, and when he saw her he burst into tears.

  So much was being said by so many people, but the police were asking him not to make further inflammatory statements, their assumption being that any statement by him would be inflammatory simply because he was the one making it. He found himself composing a thousand letters in his head and firing them off into the ether like Bellow’s Herzog, half-deranged, obsessive arguments with the world that he could not actually send on their way.

  Dear Sunday Telegraph,

  Your plan for me is that I should find a safe, secret haven in, perhaps, Canada, or a remote part of Scotland where the locals, ever alert to the presence of strangers, could see the bad guys coming; and once I had found my new home I should keep my mouth shut for the rest of my days. The notion that I have done nothing wrong and, as an innocent man, deserve to be able to lead my life as I choose has evidently been considered and eliminated from your range of options. Yet, oddly, this is the absurd idea to which I cling. Being a big city boy, I have never liked the countryside (except in short bursts) anyway, and cold weather is another long-standing dislike, which rules out both Scotland and Canada. I am also not good at keeping my mouth shut. If someone tries to gag a writer, Sirs, would you not—being journalists yourselves—agree that the best reply is not to be gagged? To speak, if anything, louder and more audaciously than before? To sing (if you are able to sing, which I confess I am not) more beautifully and daringly? To be, if anything, more present? If you can’t see it that way, I offer you my apologies in advance. For that is my plan.