He, the author Peter Mayer was looking forward to seeing, had asked that the paperback be published by the end of 1989, because until publication was complete the tumult about the publication could not die down. Labour MPs like Roy Hattersley and Max Madden had focused on preventing the paperback publication to appease their Muslim constituents, and this was a further reason to proceed. Peace could not begin to return until the publication cycle had been completed. Nor were there any longer any commercial reasons for delay. The hardcover, having sold well, had all but stopped selling, had disappeared from all English-language bestseller lists, and was no longer stocked by many bookstores because of a lack of demand. In ordinary publishing terms this was the right time to publish a cheap edition.
There were other arguments. Translations of the novel were now being published across Europe, in, for example, France, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Portugal and Germany. Paperback publication in the United Kingdom and the United States would look like a part of this “natural” process, and, as the police had advised, that would in fact be the safest course of action. In Germany, after Kiepenheuer und Witsch had canceled their contract, a consortium of publishers, booksellers and prominent writers and public figures had been formed to publish the novel under the name Artikel 19, and that publication was to go ahead after the Frankfurt Book Fair. If Peter Mayer wished to construct such a consortium to spread the risk, so to speak, then that might be a possible solution. What he mostly wanted to say to Mayer, and did say when the meeting between them finally took place, was this: “You have done the hard part, Peter. With great steadfastness you, together with everyone at Viking Penguin, have jockeyed this publication around a danger-filled course. Please don’t fall at the last fence. If you leap that fence, your legacy will be a glorious one. If you don’t, it will always be flawed.”
The meeting took place. He was smuggled into Alan Yentob’s house in Notting Hill and Andrew, Gillon, Peter Mayer, and Martin Garbus were already there. No agreement was reached. Mayer said he would undertake to “try to convince his people to publish the paperback in the first half of 1990.” He would not give a date. Nothing else remotely constructive was said. Garbus, the “gifted intermediary,” had proved to be a royal pain in the neck, a person of immense self-satisfaction and imperceptible utility. It had been a waste of time.
Much of what Mayer had to say in other letters was not remotely funny. Some of it was insulting. Andrew and Gillon had told him that a new book, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, written for ten-year-old Zafar Rushdie as a gift from his dad, was being worked on whenever the author’s unsettled circumstances allowed. Mayer responded that his company was not prepared to consider publishing any new book by Rushdie until a finished text had been examined by them, in case it, too, sparked controversy. Nobody at his company, Mayer said, had known much about the “Koran” when they acquired The Satanic Verses. They could not acquire any more work by the author of that novel and then, when the trouble began, admit that they had not read a full manuscript. The author of that novel understood that Mayer had begun to think of him as someone who caused trouble, who was the cause of the trouble that had arisen, and who might cause trouble again.
This view of him went public when Mayer was profiled in The Independent. The anonymous profile writer, who had had extensive access to Mayer, wrote: “Mayer, a voracious reader who once said ‘every book has a soul,’ missed the religious time-bomb ticking inside its covers. Rushdie was asked twice, once before Penguin acquired the book and again afterward, what the now notorious Mahound chapter was supposed to mean. He seemed curiously reluctant to explain. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said at one point. ‘It’s not terribly important to the plot.’ ‘My God, this has come back to haunt us,’ a Penguin man said later.”
Dear Anonymous Profile Writer,
If I pay you the compliment of assuming you understand the meaning of your sentences, then I must assume you meant to imply that the “religious time-bomb” in my novel is the “soul” that Peter Mayer missed. The rest of this passage clearly suggests that I placed the time-bomb there intentionally and then intentionally misled Penguin about it. This is not only a lie, dear Anonymous, it is a defamatory lie. However, I know enough about journalists, or, let me say, about journalists in the so-called “quality” press, to understand that while you may exaggerate or distort what you have learned, you very rarely print anything for which you have no supporting evidence at all. Pure fiction is not your game. I therefore conclude that you are reporting, with reasonable accuracy, the impression you gained from your conversations with Peter Mayer and other “Penguin men” and, possibly, women. Did it strike you as plausible, Anonymous, that a writer, after almost five years’ work on a book, should say about a forty-page chapter that it was not “important to the plot”? Did it not occur to you, in the spirit of fairness, to inquire of me, through my agents, if I had indeed been asked—twice!—about this “unimportant” chapter and had been “curiously reluctant to explain”? Your neglect suggests, can only suggest, that this is the story you wanted to write, a story of which I am the deceitful villain and Peter Mayer the principled hero, standing by a book whose author tricked him into believing it did not contain a time-bomb. I got myself into trouble and now others must face the music: this is the narrative being constructed for me, a moral prison to add to my more quotidian restrictions. You will find, Sir, that it is a prison I am not prepared to occupy.
He called Mayer, who denied that he had anything to do with the newspaper’s insinuations, and did not believe that any other Penguin people had spoken to the journalist. “If you find out who said these things,” he said, “tell me, and I will fire that person.” He had his sources at the newspaper and one of them confirmed that the executive who had spoken off the record was the managing director of Penguin UK, Trevor Glover. He gave this information to Peter Mayer, who said he didn’t believe it. Trevor Glover was not fired, and Mayer still refused to talk about Haroun and the Sea of Stories until the book had been read and declared free of time bombs. The relationship between author and publisher was essentially at an end. When an author was convinced that his publishers were briefing the media against him, there was little more to be said.
Bill Buford had nailed down the house in Essex. It was in a village called Little Bardfield. It was expensive, but then everywhere had been expensive. “You’ll like it,” he said. “It’s what you need.” He was the “front man,” renting the place in his name for six months, with the possibility of an extension. The owner had “gone abroad.” It was an old rectory, an early-nineteenth-century, Grade II–listed, Queen Anne building with modern accents. The police liked it because it had a secluded entrance, which would simplify comings and goings, and because it stood on its own land and was not overlooked. There was a mature garden with large shady trees, and a lawn sloping down to a beautiful pond in which a fake heron stood on one leg. After all the cramped cottages and cooped-up boardinghouses it looked positively palatial. Bill would come down as often as he could, to lend credibility to his “tenancy.” And Essex was far closer to London than Scotland had been, or Powys, or Devon. It would be easier to see Zafar; though the police still refused to bring Zafar to his “location.” He was ten years old and they didn’t trust him not to blurt it out at school. They underestimated him. He was a boy with remarkable gifts of self-control, and he understood that his father’s safety was at issue. In all the years of the protection he was never guilty of an incautious remark.
A comfortable prison was still a prison. In the living room there were old paintings, one of a lady-in-waiting at the court of Elizabeth I, another of a certain Miss Bastard, whom he liked at once. They were windows into another world but he could not escape through them. He did not have in his pocket the key to the house filled with reproduction antique furniture that he was paying a small fortune to rent, and could not walk out the front gate into the village street. He had to write shopping lists that a police officer would take to a s
upermarket many miles away so as not to arouse suspicion. He had to hide in a locked bathroom each time the cleaner came to the house, or be smuggled off the premises in advance. The tide of shame rose in him each time such things had to be done. Then the cleaning lady quit, saying that “strange men” were at the rectory. This was worrying, of course. Once again it was proving harder to explain the police’s presence than to conceal his. After the cleaner’s exit they dusted and vacuumed the house themselves. The police cleaned their own rooms and he cleaned his part of the house. He preferred this to the alternative.
In those years he became aware that people imagined him living in some sort of isolation ward, or inside a giant safe with a peephole through which his protectors watched him, alone, always alone; in that solitary confinement, people asked themselves, would not this most gregarious of writers inevitably lose his grip on reality, his literary talent, his sanity? The truth was that he was less alone now than he had ever been. Like all writers he was familiar with solitude, used to spending several hours a day by himself. The people he had lived with had grown accustomed to his need for such silence. But now he was living with four enormous armed men, men unused to inactivity, the polar opposites of bookish, indoorsy types. They clattered and banged and laughed loud laughs and the thump of their presence in his vicinity was hard to ignore. He shut doors inside the house; they left them open. He retreated; they advanced. It wasn’t their fault. They assumed he would like, and need, a little company. So isolation was the thing he had to work hardest to re-create around himself, so that he could hear himself think, so he could work.
The protection teams kept changing and each officer had his own style. There was a fellow named Phil Pitt, a giant of a man who was a crazy gun enthusiast and, even by Branch standards, an ace sharpshooter, which would be valuable in a firefight but was a little terrifying to live with in a vicarage. His nickname in the Branch was “Rambo.” There was Dick Billington, the polar opposite of Phil, bespectacled, with a sweet shy smile. Now that was the country parson you expected to find in a vicarage, but this one carried a gun. And there were the Only Fucking Drivers too. They sat in their wing of the Essex house and cooked sausages and played cards and were bored out of their minds. “My friends are really the ones protecting me,” he once said to Dick Billington and Phil Pitt in a moment of frustration, “lending me their homes, renting places for me, keeping my secrets. And I’m doing the dirty work of hiding in bathrooms and so on.” Dick Billington looked sheepish when he said things like this while Phil Pitt fumed; not a man of words was Phil, and given his size and his love of the firearm it was probably a bad idea to make him fume. They explained tolerantly that their line of work looked like inaction, but that was because the advent of action would be proof that they had made a bad mistake. Security was the art of making nothing happen. The experienced security officer accepted boredom as a part of the job. Boredom was good. You didn’t want things to get interesting. Interesting was dangerous. The whole point was to keep everything dull.
They took great pride in their work. Many of them said to him, always using the same words, which were clearly an “A” Squad mantra: “We’ve never lost anyone.” It was a comforting mantra and he often repeated it to himself. The impressive fact was that nobody who had been under “A” Squad’s protection had ever been hit, in the long history of the Special Branch. “The Americans can’t say that.” They disliked the American way of doing things. “They like to throw bodies at the problem,” they said, meaning that an American security detail was usually very large indeed, dozens of people or more. Every time an American dignitary visited the United Kingdom, the security forces of the two countries had the same arguments about methodology. “We could take the queen in an unmarked Ford Cortina down Oxford Street in the rush hour and nobody would know she was there,” they said. “With the Yanks it’s all bells and whistles. But they lost one president, didn’t they? And nearly lost another.” Each country, he would discover, had its own way of doing things, its own “culture of protection.” In the years to come he would experience not only the manpower-heavy American system, but the scary behavior of the French RAID. RAID was “Recherche Assistance Intervention Dissuasion.” Dissuasion, as a description of how the RAID boys went about their work, seemed like one of the great understatements. Their Italian cousins liked to drive at high speed through urban traffic with Klaxon horns blaring and guns sticking out of the windows. All things considered, he was happy to have Phil and Dick and the softly-softly approach.
They weren’t perfect. There were mistakes. There was the time he was taken to Hanif Kureishi’s house. At the end of his evening with Hanif he was about to be driven away when his friend sprinted out into the street, looking very pleased with himself, and waving a large handgun in its leather holster above his head. “Oy,” Hanif shouted, delightedly. “Hang on a minute. You forgot your shooter.”
He began to write. A sad city, the saddest of cities, a city so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name. He too was a man who had lost his name. He knew how the sad city felt. “At last!” he wrote in his journal in early October, and, a few days later, “Completed Chapter One!” When he had written thirty or forty pages he showed them to Zafar to make sure he was on the right track. “Thanks,” Zafar said. “I like it, Dad.” He detected something a little less than wild enthusiasm in his son’s voice. “Really?” he probed. “You’re sure?” “Yes,” said Zafar and then, after a pause, “Some people might be bored.” “Bored?” This was a cry of anguish and Zafar tried to mollify him. “No, I’d read it, of course, Dad. I’m just saying that some people might …” “Why bored?” he demanded. “What’s the boring bit?” “It’s just,” Zafar said, “that it doesn’t have enough jump in it.” This was an astonishingly precise critique. He understood it immediately. “Jump?” he said. “I can do jump. Give me that back.” And he almost snatched the typescript out of his worried son’s hands, and then had to reassure him, no, he wasn’t annoyed, in fact this was very helpful, it might, in fact, be the best piece of editorial advice he had ever received. Several weeks later he gave Zafar the rewritten early chapters and asked, “How is it now?” The boy beamed happily. “Now it’s fine,” he said.
Herbert Read (1893–1968) was an English art critic—a champion of Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth—and a poet of the First World War, an existentialist and an anarchist. For many years the Institute of Contemporary Arts on the Mall in London held an annual memorial lecture bearing Read’s name. In the autumn of 1989 the ICA sent a letter to Gillon’s office asking if Salman Rushdie might be willing to deliver the 1990 lecture.
Mail did not reach him easily. It was collected from the agency and the publishers by the police, put through tests for explosives, and opened. Even though he was always assured that no mail was withheld from him, the relatively small number of abusive letters he received suggested to him that some filtering process had been put in place. There was concern at the Yard over his state of mind—Could he take the pressure? Was he about to crack up completely?—and no doubt it was thought best to spare him the literary onslaught of the faithful. The letter from the ICA made it through the net, and he replied, accepting the invitation. He knew at once that he wanted to write about iconoclasm, to say that in an open society no ideas or beliefs could be ring-fenced and given immunity from challenges of all sorts, philosophical, satirical, profound, superficial, gleeful, irreverent, or smart. All liberty required was that the space for discourse itself be protected. Liberty lay in the argument itself, not the resolution of that argument, in the ability to quarrel, even with the most cherished beliefs of others; a free society was not placid but turbulent. The bazaar of conflicting views was the place where freedom rang. This would evolve into the lecture-essay “Is Nothing Sacred?,” and that lecture, once it had been scheduled and announced, would lead to his first serious confrontation with the British police. The invisible man was trying to become visible again, and Scotland Yard didn’
t like it.
Dear Mr. Shabbir Akhtar,
I have no idea why the Bradford Council of Mosques, of which you are a member, believes it can set itself up as a cultural arbiter, literary critic, and censor. I do know that “the liberal inquisition,” the phrase you have coined, and of which you are clearly inordinately proud, is a phrase without any real meaning. The Inquisition, let’s remind ourselves, was a tribunal created by Pope Gregory IX, in or around the year 1232; its purpose was the suppression of heresy in northern Italy and southern France, and it became notorious for its use of torture. Plainly the literary world, which is teeming with what you and your colleagues would call heretics and apostates, has little interest in suppressing heresy. Heresy, you may say, is the stock-in-trade of many of that world’s members. The Spanish Inquisition, another bunch of torturers, established two and a half centuries later, in 1478, may be what you had in mind, because of its reputation for being anti-Islamic. Actually, however, it most vigorously pursued converts from Islam. Oh, and from Judaism, too. The torture of ex-Jews and ex-Muslims is relatively rare in the modern literary world. My own thumbscrews and rack have seen barely any use in oh, ever so long. However, a sizable percentage of your lot—and here I mean the Council of Mosques, the faithful it claims to represent, and all its allies in the clerisy in the UK and abroad—have been willing to put up their hands when asked if they believed in the execution of a writer for his work. (It’s reported that 300,000 Muslim men did this at mosques around Britain just the other Friday.) Four in five British Muslims, according to a recent Gallup poll, believe that some sort of action should be taken against that writer (me). The eradication of heresy, and the use of violence to that end, is a part of your project, not ours. You, Sir, celebrate “fanaticism on behalf of God.” You say that Christian tolerance is a reason for Christian “shame.” You are in favor of “militant wrath.” And yet you call me a “literary terrorist.” This would be funny except that you aren’t trying to be funny and actually, on reflection, it’s not funny at all. You say in The Independent that works like The Satanic Verses and The Life of Brian should be “removed from public knowledge,” because their methods are “wrong.” You may find people to agree with you that my novel is without merit; it is when you take on Monty Python’s Flying Circus that, in the words of Bertie Wooster, you make your bloomer. That antic circus and its works are beloved by many, and any attempt to remove them from public knowledge will be met by an army of adversaries armed with dead parrots and walking with silly walks and singing their anthem about always looking on the bright side of life. It is becoming evident to me, Mr. Shabbir Akhtar, that the best way of describing the argument over The Satanic Verses may be to call it an argument between those (like the fans of The Life of Brian) who have a sense of humor and those (like, I suspect, you) who do not.