41 St. Peter’s Street was empty, most of the furniture in storage, or given away to Sameen and Pauline, or used to furnish Elizabeth’s new flat near Hampstead Heath. The keys were sent to Robert McCrum and then the sale was complete. A chapter of life was closing.
On April 9 Melvyn Bragg and Michael Foot threw a joint election-night party at Melvyn’s Hampstead house. The night began in a celebratory mood with high expectations of an end to the long years of “Tory misrule.” But as the evening went on it became plain that Kinnock had lost. He had never seen a party die so fast. He left early because it was just too sad to stay there among all the broken hopes.
One week later Helen Hammington asked for another meeting. He told her he would want his lawyer present, and his solicitor Bernie Simons was brought to Hampstead Lane. Helen Hammington looked uneasy and embarrassed as she told him of the “revised plans” for his protection. As she spoke it became clear that she, and Howley behind her, were climbing down completely. The protection would continue until the threat level dropped. If the new house “went overt” then they would take that in their stride.
He would always believe that he had America—the senators, the newspapers—to thank for this little success. America had made it impossible for Britain to walk away from his defense.
VI
Why It’s Impossible to Photograph the Pampas
ON A VISIT TO MIJAS LONG AGO—MIJAS, WHERE MANUEL CORTÉS HAD hidden from Franco for three decades, spending his days in an alcove behind a wardrobe and, when his family had to move house, dressing up like an old woman to walk the streets of the town whose mayor he had been—he had met a photographer of German origin named Gustavo Thorlichen, a tall, handsome man with aquiline features, sleek silver hair, and three good stories to tell. The Mijas expat tribe whispered that he was probably an ex-Nazi because he had ended up in South America. In fact he had fled Germany in the 1930s to Argentina to escape the Nazis. One day in Buenos Aires he had been summoned to take photographs of Eva Perón, “one of four photographers,” the Perón aide told him on the phone, “to be so honored.” He took a deep breath and replied, “Thank you for the honor, but when you ask me to take photographs, you should ask me to come by myself, and in these circumstances I must respectfully decline.” There was a silence, and then the aide said, “You can be thrown out of Argentina for what you have just said.” “If I can be thrown out for saying that,” Gustavo answered, “then it’s not worth staying.” He put down the phone, went into the bedroom and told his wife, “Start packing.” Twenty minutes later the phone rang again and the same aide’s voice said, “Evita will see you tomorrow morning at eleven, alone.” After that he became the personal photographer of both Eva and Juan Perón, and the famous photograph of Evita’s face in death was, he said, his.
That was the first good story. The second involved hanging out with the young Che Guevara in La Paz and being called a “great photographic artist” in Che’s “motorcycle diaries.” The third was about being in a bookstore in Buenos Aires as a young photographer, just starting out, and recognizing the much older man shuffling into the store as Jorge Luis Borges. He screwed up his courage, approached the great writer, and said he was working on a book of photographs that would be a portrait of Argentina and he would be very proud if Borges were to write a foreword. To ask a blind man to write the preface to a book of images was crazy, he knew that, but he asked anyway. Borges said to him, “Let’s go for a walk.” As they strolled through the city Borges described the buildings around him with photographic accuracy. But every so often there was a new building in the place of a demolished old one. Then Borges would stop and say, “Describe it. Start on the ground floor and go up.” As Gustavo spoke he could see Borges putting up the new building in his mind and fixing it in its place. At the end of the walk Borges agreed to write the foreword.
Thorlichen had given him a copy of the Argentina book and even though it was boxed away somewhere now with almost all his possessions he still remembered what Borges had written about the limits of photography. Photography only saw what was in front of it, and that was why a photograph could never capture the truth of the great Argentinian pampas. “Darwin observed, and Hudson corroborated him,” Borges wrote, “that this plain, famous among the plains of the world, does not leave an impression of vastness on one regarding it from the ground, or on horseback, since its horizon is that of the eye and does not exceed three miles. In other words, the vastness is not in each view of the pampas (which is what photography can register) but in the imagination of the traveler, in his memory of days on the march and in his prevision of many to follow.” Only the passage of time revealed the infinite vastness of the pampas, and a photograph could not capture duration. A photograph of the pampas showed nothing more than a large field. It could not capture the delirium-inducing monotony of traveling on, and on, and on, and on through that unchanging, unending void.
As his new life stretched out into its fourth year he felt very often like that imaginary Borgesian traveler, marooned in space and time. The movie Groundhog Day had not yet been released but when he saw it he identified strongly with its protagonist, Bill Murray. In his life, too, each step forward was canceled by one going back. The illusion of change was undone by the discovery that nothing had changed. Hope was erased by disappointment, good news by bad. The cycles of his life repeated themselves over and over. Had he known that another six years of sequestration still stretched out in front of him, far beyond the horizon, then indeed dementia might have set in. But he could see only as far as the rim of the earth and what lay beyond it remained a mystery. He attended to the immediate and let infinity take care of itself.
His friends told him afterward that they saw the burden slowly crushing him, making him look older than his years. When it was finally lifted a sort of youth returned, as if at the end of the unendingness he had somehow made time reverse to the point at which he had entered the vortex. He would look younger in his fifties than he had in his forties. But his fifties were still half a decade away. And in the meantime many people, when his story was mentioned, grew impatient, or irritated, or bored. It was not a patient age, but a time of rapid change, in which no subject held the attention for very long. He became an annoyance to businessmen because his story got in the way of their desire to develop the Iranian market, and to diplomats trying to build bridges, and to journalists for whom, when there was nothing new to say, there was no news. To say that it was the unchangingness that was the story, the intolerable eternity of it, was to say a thing people could not or would not hear. To say that he woke up every day in a house full of armed strangers, that he was unable to stroll out of his door to buy a newspaper or pick up a cup of coffee, that most of his friends and even his family were unaware of his home address, and that he could do nothing and go nowhere except with the agreement of strangers; that what everyone else took for granted, air travel, for example, was a thing he had constantly to negotiate for; and that somewhere in the vicinity, always, was the threat of violent death, a threat that, according to the people whose job it was to assess such things, had not diminished in the slightest … this was dull. What, he was still traveling through the pampas, and everything was the same as before? Well, everyone had heard that story and didn’t want to hear it anymore. Tell us a new story, that was the general opinion, or else please go away.
There was no point telling the world it was wrong. No mileage in that approach. So, yes, a new story. If that was what was wanted, that was what he would provide. Enough of invisibility, silence, timidity, defensiveness, guilt! An invisible, silenced man was an empty space into which others could pour their prejudices, their agendas, their wrath. The fight against fanaticism needed visible faces, audible voices. He would be quiet no longer. He would try to become a loud and visible man.
It was not easy to be thrust onto so public a stage. It took time to find one’s bearings, to know how to act under all that light. He had fumbled and stumbled, had been stunned into
silence and said the wrong things when he spoke. But there was more clarity now. At the Stationers’ Hall he had refused to be an unperson. America had allowed him to begin his journey back to personhood, first at Columbia and then in Washington. There was more dignity in being a combatant than a victim. Yes; he would fight his corner. That would be the story from now on.
If he ever wrote a book about these years, how would he do it? He could change names, obviously—he could call these people “Helen Hammington” and “Rab Connolly” and “Paul Topper” and “Dick Wood,” or “Mr. Afternoon” and “Mr. Morning”—but how could he convey what these years had been like? He began to think of a project provisionally called “Inferno” in which he could try to turn his story into something other than simple autobiography. A hallucinatory portrait of a man whose picture of the world had been broken. Like everyone he had had a picture of the world in his head that had made a kind of sense. He had lived in that picture and understood why it was the way it was, and how to find his way around inside it. Then like a great hammer swinging the fatwa smashed the picture and left him in an absurd formless amoral universe in which danger was everywhere and sense was not to be found. The man in his story tried desperately to hold his world-picture together but pieces of it came away in his hand like mirror shards and cut his hands until they bled. In his demented state, in this dark wood, the man with the bleeding hands who was a version of himself made his way toward the daylight, through the inferno, in which he passed through the numberless circles of hell, the private and public hells, into the secret worlds of terror, and toward the great, forbidden thoughts.
After a while he abandoned this idea. The only reason his story was interesting was that it had actually happened. It wouldn’t be interesting if it wasn’t true.
The truth was that the days were hard but, in spite of his friends’ fears, he was not crushed. Rather, he learned how to fight back, and the immortal writers of the past were his guides. He was not, after all, the first writer to be endangered or sequestered or anathematized for his art. He thought of mighty Dostoyevsky facing the firing squad and then, after the last-minute commutation of his sentence, spending four years in a prison camp, and of Genet unstoppably writing his violently homoerotic masterpiece Our Lady of the Flowers in jail. The French translator of Les Versets Sataniques, unwilling to use his own name, had called himself “A. Nasier” in honor of the great François Rabelais, who had published his first book, Pantagruel, under the anagrammatic nom de plume of “Alcofribas Nasier.” Rabelais too had been condemned by religious authority; the Catholic Church had been unable to stomach his satirical hyperabundance. But he had been defended by the king, François I, on the grounds that his genius could not be suppressed. Those were the days, when artists could be defended by kings because they were good at what they did. These were lesser times.
His Mistake had opened his eyes, cleared his thoughts and stripped him of all equivocation. He saw the gathering danger ahead because he had felt its dreadful demoralizing force within his own breast. For a time he had given up his language and been forced to speak, haltingly and with many contortions, using a tongue that was not his own. Compromise destroyed the compromiser and did not placate the uncompromising foe. You did not become a blackbird by painting your wings black, but like an oil-slicked gull you lost the power of flight. The greatest danger of the growing menace was that good men would commit intellectual suicide and call it peace. Good men would give in to fear and call it respect.
Before anyone else was interested in the ornithology of terror he saw the gathering birds. He would be a Cassandra for his own time, cursed to be unheard, or if listened to, then blamed for what he pointed at. Snakes had licked his ears and he could hear the future. No, not Cassandra, that wasn’t right, for he was not a prophet. He was just listening in the right direction, looking toward the advancing storm. But it would be hard to turn men’s heads. Nobody wanted to know what he knew.
Milton’s Areopagitica sang against the shrieking blackbirds. He who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.… Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties. He had read the ancient texts on liberty long ago when they struck him as fine, but theoretical. He didn’t need the theory of freedom when he had the fact of it. They didn’t strike him as theoretical anymore.
The writers who had always spoken to him most clearly were members of what he thought of as a rival “Great Tradition” to set against the Leavisite canon, writers who understood the unreality of “reality” and the reality of the world’s waking nightmare, the monstrous mutability of the everyday, the irruption of the extreme and improbable into the humdrum quotidian. Rabelais, Gogol, Kafka, these and their ilk had been his masters and their world, too, no longer felt to him like fantasies. He was living—trapped—in the Gogolian, the Rabelaisian, the Kafkaesque.
In the photographs that survived of that time, assiduously preserved in large albums by Elizabeth, Mr. Joseph Anton was not well-dressed. His habitual daily attire was tracksuit trousers and a sweatshirt. The trousers were often green and the sweatshirt maroon. His hair was too long and his beard too shaggy. To dress like this was to say, I am letting myself go. I am not a person to take seriously. I am just some slob. He should have shaved daily and worn crisp, cleanly pressed clothes, Savile Row suits, perhaps, or at least a smart shirt and slacks. He should have sat at his desk like Scott Fitzgerald in his Brooks Brothers suit, or Borges, nattily turned out in a stiff collar and cuff-linked shirt. Maybe his sentences would have been better if he had taken more care of his appearance. Though Hemingway in his cotton shorts and sandals wasn’t so bad. He would like to have seen fancy shoes on his feet in those photographs, possibly two-tone oxfords, or white leather. Instead he slouched around the house in Birkenstocks, the uncoolest of all possible footwear, except for Crocs. He looked at himself in the mirror and loathed what he saw. He trimmed his beard and asked Elizabeth to cut his hair—chic Elizabeth, whose personal style had been Late Student when they met, and who had taken to designer clothes with the eagerness of a beached mermaid discovering the sea—and asked the police to take him out to buy new clothes. It was time to take himself in hand. He was going into battle and his armor needed to shine.
When a thing happened that had not happened before, a confusion often descended upon people, a fog that fuddled the clearest minds; and often the consequence of such confusion was rejection, and even anger. A fish crawled out of a swamp onto dry land and the other fish were bewildered, perhaps even annoyed that a forbidden frontier had been crossed. A meteorite struck the earth and the dust blocked out the sun but the dinosaurs went on fighting and eating, not understanding that they had been rendered extinct. The birth of language angered the dumb. The shah of Persia, facing the Ottoman guns, refused to accept the end of the age of the sword and sent his cavalry to gallop suicidally against the blazing cannons of the Turk. A scientist observed tortoises and mockingbirds and wrote about random mutation and natural selection and the adherents of the Book of Genesis cursed his name. A revolution in painting was derided and dismissed as mere impressionism. A folksinger plugged his guitar into an amp and a voice in the crowd shouted “Judas!”
This was the question his novel had asked: How does newness enter the world?
The arrival of the new was not always linked to progress. Men found new ways of oppressing one another, too, new ways of unmaking their best achievements and sliding back toward that primal ooze; and men’s darkest innovations, as much as their brightest ones, confused their fellow men. When the first witches were burned it was easier to blame the witches than to question the justice of their burning. When the odors from the gas ovens drifted into the streets of nearby villages and the dark snow fell from the sky it was easier not to understand. Most Chinese citizens did not understand the fallen heroes of Tiananmen. They were guided toward false understanding by the perpetrators of the crime. When tyrants rose to power across the Muslim world the
re were many who were ready to call their regimes authentic and the opposition to such regimes Westernized or deracinated. When a Pakistani politician defended a woman falsely accused of blasphemy he was murdered by his bodyguard and his country applauded the murderer and threw flower petals over him when he was brought to court. Most of these dark newnesses were innovations that came into being in the name of a totalizing ideology, an absolute ruler, an unarguable dogma, or a god.
The attack on The Satanic Verses was in itself a small thing, though it had garnered a lot of headlines, so it was hard to persuade people that it was extraordinary enough, that it meant enough to warrant an exceptional response. As he began his long trek around the world’s corridors of power, he was obliged, over and over again, to restate the case. A serious writer had written a serious book. The violence and menace of the response was a terrorist act that had to be confronted. Ah, but his book had offended many people, had it not? Perhaps, but the attack on the book, its author, publishers, translators and booksellers, was a far greater offense. Ah, so, having made trouble, he opposed the trouble that came at him in return, and wanted the world’s leaders to defend his right to be a troublemaker.
In seventeenth-century England Matthew Hopkins, the “Witch Finder Generall,” developed a test for witchcraft. You weighted the accused woman down—with stones, or by tying her to a chair—and then threw her into a river or a lake. If she floated, she was a witch, and merited burning; if she sank and drowned, she was innocent.
The accusation of witchcraft was often the same thing as a “guilty” verdict. Now he was the one in the crucible, trying to persuade the world that the witch finders were the criminals, not he.