“It didn’t happen,” Will Wilson said. “We’re as certain of that as we can be.”
He was being asked to believe that his wife had invented a CIA plot against him. Why might she have done such a thing? Was her desire to extricate herself from this underground British life so great that she had felt the need to shake his faith in his protectors, so that he would leave England for America, allowing her to do the same? But why would she not have realized that if he believed that the CIA had gone to so much trouble to find him, he might think them even less trustworthy than the Special Branch? After all, why would the CIA do such a thing? Might they plan to exchange him for American hostages being held in Lebanon? And if so, would he not be in greater danger on American soil than in Britain? His head whirled. This was insane. This was actually insane.
“It didn’t happen,” Will Wilton gently repeated. “No such thing took place.”
She spoke for a long time to convince him the police were the liars and not she. She used her considerable physical charms to try to persuade him she had told the truth. She grew angry and wept and fell silent and then was voluble again. This performance, her extraordinary last stand, went on for most of the night. But he had made up his mind. He couldn’t prove or disprove the truth of her story; but the odds seemed stacked against it. He couldn’t trust her anymore. It would be better to be alone than to allow her to remain. He asked her to leave.
Many of her possessions were still at Porlock Weir and one of the drivers took her there to pack. She made phone calls to Sameen and to his friends and everything she told them was untrue. He was beginning to be scared of her now, scared of what she might do or say once she was outside the bubble of the prot. Some months later, when she decided to give her version of their separation to a Sunday newspaper, she alleged that the police had driven her to the middle of nowhere and left her at a phone booth to fend for herself. This was pure fabrication. In reality she had his car and the keys to the Bucknell house, and now that she was considered a security risk he could no longer use any property she knew about. So the reality was that he, not she, had been rendered homeless again by their separation.
There were more bombs—at Collet’s bookshop again, and later on the street outside Liberty’s department store, and then at Penguin bookstores in four British cities—more demonstrations, more court cases, more Muslim accusations of “wickedness,” more bloodcurdling noises out of Iran (President Rafsanjani said the death order was irrevocable and supported by the “entire Muslim world”) and out of the mouth of the poisonous garden gnome Siddiqui in Britain, more heartening gestures of solidarity by friends and sympathizers in England, America and Europe—a reading here, a play performance there, and twelve thousand people signed the defense campaign’s “world statement,” Writers and readers in support of Salman Rushdie. The defense campaign was run by the respected human rights organization Article 19, named after the free speech article in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression,” the article declared. “This right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” How simple and clear that was. It didn’t add, “unless you upset someone, especially someone who is willing to resort to violence.” It didn’t say, “unless religious leaders decree otherwise and order assassinations.” He thought of Bellow again, of Bellow’s famous line near the beginning of The Adventures of Augie March: “Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression. If you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.” John Kennedy, less garrulous than Bellow’s Augie, said the same thing in three words. “Freedom is indivisible.”
These were ideas he had lived by, almost without knowing it. Artistic freedom had been the air he breathed, and as there had been a plentiful supply of it, it had been unnecessary to make a big deal about the importance of having air to breathe. Then people had started trying to turn off the air supply and it immediately became a matter of urgency to insist on the wrongness of that attempt.
Right now, however, most of his day was spent trying to solve a more basic problem: Where was he going to spend the next week of his life? Again, Jane Wellesley came to the rescue. She had a small house in Ayrshire and offered it with the same immediate grace as before. The Jaguars sped north. In the deep Scottish countryside a problem arose that plagued the protection wherever it went: Concealing the invisible man was easy. Explaining why two Jaguars were parked in the shed next to Jane’s house, not so easy. And who were these four large men prowling around the neighborhood? The suspicions of the locals were easily aroused and hard to lay to rest. In addition, the Scottish Special Branch, whose bailiwick this was, didn’t feel good about leaving this sensitive matter in the hands of their invading Sassenach counterparts. So they sent a team, too, and now there were four enormous cars in and around Jane’s shed, and eight enormous men, gesticulating and arguing, several of them sitting out there in their cars all night. “The problem,” he said to his protectors, “is how to hide you.”
Jane came up to look after him and brought Bill Buford along; Buford, more than half in love with her, was like an eager American puppy at her heels, and she treated him with affectionate, aristocratic amusement. He capered around the house, the happy Fool at the Court of Jane, lacking only motley and a jester’s cap and bells. Ayrshire, with the sun breaking out overhead, was briefly a happy island in the storm. Bill said, “You need a nice place, a place you can stay for a while and be comfortable. I’m going to find it for you.”
He was a Character, Bill, the capitalization a necessary expression of his amplitude. He was a waver of arms, a hugger, a man who spoke in exclamations and emphases, a self-taught chef, an ex–American footballer, an intellectual reader with deep knowledge of the Elizabethans, an entertainer, part egghead, part Ringling Brothers showman. He had taken a defunct Cambridge student magazine, Granta, and reinvented it as the house journal of his gifted generation. Amis fils, McEwan, Barnes, Chatwin, Ishiguro, Fenton, and Angela Carter all flourished in its pages; George Steiner allowed him to publish the whole of his Hitler novella, The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H.; he gave the name of “dirty realism” to the work of the Americans Carver, Ford, Wolff, and Joy Williams; his first Travel issue more or less started the craze for travel writing; all this while underpaying his contributors shockingly, enraging many of them by failing to read or decide on their submissions for months at a time, enraging many others by developing an editing style so aggressively intrusive that he needed all his legendary charm to persuade people not to hit him; and hustling subscriptions to a quarterly magazine that never once, during his sixteen years at the helm, ever managed to put out more than three issues a year. He brought great wine with him wherever he went and cooked up a series of feasts involving rich reductions and much ripe game—heart-attack food—and rooms that contained him were usually filled with laughter. He was also a storyteller and gossip and seemed to be the last man on earth to be trusted with the care of the inner sanctum of the secret world of Joseph Anton. Yet every secret was kept. Behind all the gaiety and extroversion, Bill Buford was a man to trust with your life.
“I’m going to get right on it,” Bill said. “We’re going to get this done.”
Two women he didn’t know were about to become important characters in his story: Frances D’Souza and Carmel Bedford. Carmel, a big Irishwoman of fierce opinions, was appointed by Article 19 as the secretary of the defense campaign, or to give it its full title, the International Rushdie Defense Committee, and Frances, the new head of Article 19, was her boss. The committee had been set up quite independently of the person it was defending, to fight against “armed censorship,” with the support of the Arts Council, PEN, the National Union of Journalists, the Society of Authors and the Writers’ Guild, and many other bodies. He had had nothing to do with its origins; but as the years passed he worked more and more closely with Fran
ces and Carmel and they became his indispensable political allies.
They saw him in many moods, depressed, belligerent, judicious, self-pitying, controlled, weak, solipsistic, strong, petty, and determined, and stood by him through them all. Frances—fine-boned, chic, dark, grave in her concentration and whinnyingly joyful in merriment—was a formidable woman. She had worked in the jungles of Borneo and in the Afghan mountains with the mujahideen. She had a fast, sharp mind and a big mothering heart. He was lucky in these compañeras. There was a lot to be done.
The cellphone was permitted again and they called him on it, worried. Marianne had showed up unbidden at the Article 19 offices and announced her intention, as his wife, to take a leadership role in the defense campaign. He needed someone to speak for him, she said, and she would be that person. “We just wanted to be sure,” Frances said in her careful way, “that this has your backing, that it’s what you want.” No, he almost yelped. It was the opposite of what he wanted and under no circumstances must Marianne have anything to do with the campaign or be allowed to speak for it, or for him. “Yes,” said Frances reflectively. “I thought as much.”
Marianne was leaving him angry messages: the banal stuff of marital crisis rendered grotesquely melodramatic by their cloak-and-dagger lives. Why don’t you call me? I’m going to talk to the papers. He called her, and for a moment she relented. But then she told The Independent that although “one is in perfect mental health one is living the life of a paranoid schizophrenic.” She did not specify who one was.
And Clarissa, too, was on the phone. She wanted him to buy her a new house. She felt she had to move, and that was because of him, and so he should pay the additional cost of the new place. He owed it to her and to his son.
There followed more time spent in guesthouses run by retired police officers (there seemed to be quite a supply of these): at Easton in Dorset and then at Salcombe, in Devon. The view in Devon was beautiful: Salcombe Bay below him in the sunshine, with sailboats cutting across it and gulls wheeling above. Bill was working on a rental in Essex. “Give me a few days,” he said.
His friend Nuruddin Farah had offered to mediate with the Islamic intellectual Ali Mazrui as a way of breaking the deadlock over the fatwa. “Okay,” he told Nuruddin, “but I’m not apologizing or withdrawing the book.” After a time Nuruddin admitted failure. “They want more than you’re willing to give.” Every so often in the fatwa years there would be these approaches by people claiming they had the “back-channel” connections that could solve the problem, and offering to act as intermediaries. There was a Pakistani gentleman named Sheikh Matin who approached Andrew in New York, a British-Iranian businessman called Sir David Alliance in London, several others. Every such approach turned out to be a dead end.
Bill called, half amused, half enraged. “Your poem,” he said. “The Bradford Council of Mosques wants it banned.” In its most recent issue Granta had broken with its anti-poetry tradition and published a verse he had written about how he felt, a poem called “6 March 1989.” It ended with lines affirming his resolve
not to shut up. To sing on, in spite of attacks,
to sing (while my dreams are being murdered by facts)
praises of butterflies broken on racks.
“You don’t want to live with me because I’m a writer,” Marianne said in her latest message. “You don’t own the franchise on genius.” She wanted to publish her “on the lam in Wales story,” “Croeso i Gymru.” And to write about the Liberty’s bomb.
He lived by the telephone but that, too, could bring difficult news. Anita Desai in Delhi was distressed by how “in-turned” people had become. She had gone to visit her friend the producer Shama Habibullah, and there was Shama’s mother, old Attia Hosain, the eminent author of Sunlight on a Broken Column, once a friend of his own mother’s, and now seventy-six years old. Attia was complaining that the fallout from The Satanic Verses had made a lot of trouble for her. “And at my age, it isn’t fair.”
He was in constant touch with Andrew and Gillon. The relationship with Viking Penguin was deteriorating rapidly. The question of paperback publication had arisen and it looked as if Peter Mayer was looking for a way not to issue a softcover edition. Andrew and Gillon had asked him for a meeting and he had replied by saying that he wanted Penguin’s lawyer Martin Garbus to attend any such meeting. This was a novelty: that a meeting between an author and his publisher—between this author and this publisher—could only take place in the presence of an attorney. It was a sign of how wide the rift had become.
He called Tony Lacey, the senior editor at Viking UK, and Tony tried to reassure him that everything would be all right. He called Peter Mayer and received no such reassurance from the publisher. He explained to Peter that he had spoken to the Special Branch and their advice had been that the safest course of action—the safest course—was to proceed as normal. Any deviation from the norm would be seen by the book’s adversaries as a sign of weakness and would encourage them to redouble their assault. If paperback publication nine months to a year after the hardcover was normal publishing practice, then that was what should happen. “That is not our security advice,” Peter Mayer said.
They both knew that for a book to remain in print a paperback edition was essential. If it was not published, a point would come at which the hardcover stopped selling and vanished from the stores. In the absence of a paperback, the novel would effectively have been withdrawn from sale. The campaign against it would have succeeded. “You know what we’re fighting for,” he told Mayer. “It’s all about the long term. So the bottom line is, will you or won’t you publish it? Yes or no?” “That is a barbaric attitude,” Mayer replied. “I can’t think in those terms.”
Soon after this conversation, the Observer mysteriously got a scoop, a very accurate account of the arguments over the paperback, slanted in favor of Penguin’s cautious approach. Penguin executives denied collaborating with the newspaper. However, Blake Morrison, who was the paper’s literary editor, told him that the paper had a “source inside Penguin” and believed that the purpose of the piece was to “scupper the paperback.” It seemed that a dirty war had begun.
Peter Mayer, a big, cuddly, tousle-headed bear of a man, famously attractive to women, soft-voiced, doe-eyed, much admired by his fellow publishers, and now caught up in the throes of what had become known as the “Rushdie Affair,” looked increasingly like a rabbit in the headlights. History was rushing at him like a truck, and there were two entirely contradictory discourses at war within him, bringing him to the point of paralysis: the discourse of principle and the discourse of fear. His sense of obligation was unquestionable. “How we responded to the controversy over The Satanic Verses would affect the future of free inquiry, without which there would be no publishing as we knew it but also, by extension, no civil society as we knew it,” he told a journalist years later. And when the danger was greatest, the fire at its hottest, he held the line. He received threats against himself and his young daughter. There were letters written in blood. The sniffer dogs and bomb-inspection machinery in the mailroom and the security guards everywhere made the publishing houses in London and New York look like no publishing house had ever looked; like a war zone. There were bomb scares, evacuations of office buildings, menaces and vilifications. And yet there was no retreat. It would come to be remembered as one of the great chapters in the history of publishing, one of the grand principled defenses of liberty, and Mayer would be remembered as the leader of that heroic team.
Almost.
Months of pressure took their toll on Mayer, eroding his will. He began to persuade himself, it seemed, that he had done what he needed to do. The book had been published and kept in print, and he was even willing to guarantee to keep the hardcover in print indefinitely, and the paperback could be issued at some date in the future, some notional date, when safety had returned. There was no need to do any more for the moment and renew the danger to himself, his family and his staff. He was begi
nning to have union problems. He worried, he said, about the man standing next to him in the urinals at the warehouse. What would he say to that man’s family if some calamity were to befall his pissing partner? Letters began to fly back and forth between Andrew, Gillon, Mayer and the author of the beleaguered book. In Mayer’s letters it was possible to observe an increasing syntactical convolution that mirrored an apparently knotted inner state. The ceremonial reading aloud of the Mayer letters—in phone calls, or, very occasionally, when they could meet—became a black-comic ritual for Andrew, Gillon and Joseph Anton, a.k.a. Arctic Tern. It was a time when comedy had to be found in dark places.
Mayer was trying to explain why he wanted his lawyer and friend Martin Garbus at the meeting without admitting that he wanted him there for lawyerish, legal reasons: “It is more important for me to meet with you than to insist on any aspect of a meeting for every kind of reason, not the least of which is personal.… I know that sometimes people can get trapped in their own positions and I am not saying that of you in an exclusive sense; I am saying that just as equally about me or ourselves. I thought, as sometimes happens, that if there were to be a bog down (out of anyone’s best intentions) sometimes a sympathetic third person can propose a way forward, having heard both parties speak, advance an idea useful to everyone. It doesn’t always work this way, I know, but the last thing I want to do is to cut ourselves off from such an opportunity, especially when there is someone around as gifted an intermediary as this man is.… For the moment, therefore, I am going to ask Marty to fly to London as, if he isn’t here, there is no way for him to attend.” By this time their laughter had become hysterical and it was difficult to complete the ceremonial reading. “As you can easily spot from the above,” came Mayer’s punch line, “I’m looking forward to seeing you.”