Joseph Anton: A Memoir

  Why, then, did the Prophet afterward recant? Western historians (the Scottish scholar of Islam W. Montgomery Watt, the French Marxist Maxime Rodinson) proposed a politically motived reading of the episode. The temples of the three winged goddesses were economically important to the city’s ruling elite, an elite from which Muhammad was excluded, unfairly, in his opinion. So perhaps the “deal” that was offered ran something like this: If Muhammad, or the Archangel Gabriel, or Allah could agree that the bird-goddesses could be worshipped by followers of Islam—not as the equals of Allah, obviously, but as secondary, lesser beings, like, for example, angels—and there already were angels in Islam, so what harm could there be in adding three more, who just happened already to be popular and lucrative figures in Mecca?—then the persecution of Muslims would cease, and Muhammad himself would be granted a seat on the city’s ruling council. And it was perhaps to this temptation that the Prophet briefly succumbed.

  Then what happened? Did the city’s grandees renege on the deal, reckoning that by flirting with polytheism Muhammad had undone himself in the eyes of his followers? Did the followers refuse to accept the revelation about the goddesses? Did Muhammad himself regret having compromised his ideas by yielding to the siren call of acceptability? It was not possible to say for sure. Imagination had to fill in the gaps in the record. But the Qur’an spoke of how all the prophets had been tested by temptation. “Never have We sent a single prophet or apostle before you with whose wishes Satan did not tamper,” it said in Sura 22. And if the incident of the Satanic verses was the Temptation of Muhammad, it had to be said that he came out of it pretty well. He both confessed to having been tempted and also repudiated that temptation. Tabari quotes him thus: “I have fabricated things against God and have imputed to Him words which He has not spoken.” After that the monotheism of Islam, having been tested in the cauldron, remained unwavering and strong, in spite of persecution, exile and war, and before long the Prophet had the victory over his enemies and the new faith spread like a conquering fire across the world.

  “Shall God have daughters while you have sons? That would be an unjust division.”

  The “true” verses, angelic or divine, were clear: It was the femaleness of the winged goddesses—the “exalted birds”—that rendered them inferior and fraudulent and proved they could not be the children of God, as the angels were. Sometimes the birth of a great idea revealed things about its future; the way in which newness enters the world prophesied how it would behave when it grew old. At the birth of this particular idea, femaleness was seen as a disqualification from exaltation.

  Good story, he thought when he read about it. Even then he was dreaming of being a writer, and he filed the good story away in the back of his mind for future consideration. Twenty years later he would find out exactly how good a story it was.

  JE SUIS MARXISTE, TENDANCE GROUCHO, said the graffiti in Paris that revolutionary spring. A few weeks after the Paris évènements of May 1968, and a few nights before his graduation day, some anonymous wit, possibly a Marxist of the Grouchonian tendency, chose to redecorate his bourgeois, elitist college room, in his absence, by hurling a bucketful of gravy and onions all over the walls and furniture, to say nothing of his record player and clothes. With that ancient tradition of fairness and justice upon which the colleges of Cambridge prided themselves, King’s instantly held him solely responsible for the mess, ignored all his representations to the contrary, and informed him that unless he paid for the damage, he would not be permitted to graduate. It was the first, but, alas, not the last occasion on which he would find himself falsely accused of muck spreading.

  He paid up, and, in a defiant spirit, went to the ceremony wearing brown shoes. He was promptly plucked out of the parade of his properly black-shod contemporaries, and ordered to change. People in brown shoes were mysteriously deemed to be dressed improperly, and this again was a judgment against which there could be no appeal. Again he gave in, sprinted off to change his shoes, got back to the parade in the nick of time; and at length, when his turn came, he was required to hold a university officer by his little finger and to follow him slowly up to where the vice chancellor sat upon a mighty throne. He knelt at the old man’s feet and held up his hands, palms together, in a gesture of supplication, and begged in Latin for the degree, for which, he could not help thinking, he had worked extremely hard for three years, supported by his family at considerable expense. He had been advised to hold his hands way up above his head, in case the elderly vice chancellor, leaning forward to clutch at them, should topple off his great chair and land on top of him.

  Looking back at those incidents, he was always appalled by the memory of his passivity, hard though it was to see what else he could have done. He could have refused to pay for the gravy damage to his room, could have refused to change his shoes, could have refused to kneel to supplicate for his B.A. He had preferred to surrender and get the degree. The memory of that surrender made him more stubborn, less willing to compromise, to make an accommodation with injustice, no matter how persuasive the reasons. Injustice would always thereafter conjure up the memory of gravy. Injustice was a brown, lumpy, congealing fluid, and it smelled pungently, tearfully, of onions. Unfairness was the feeling of running back to one’s room, flat out, at the last minute, to change one’s outlawed brown shoes. It was the business of being forced to beg, on one’s knees, in a dead language, for what was rightfully yours.

  Many years later he told this story at a Bard College commencement ceremony. “This is the message I have derived from the parables of the Unknown Gravy Bomber, the Vetoed Footwear, and the Unsteady Vice Chancellor upon His Throne, and which I pass on to you today,” he told the graduating class of 1996 on a sunny afternoon in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. “First, if, as you go through life, people should some day accuse you of what one might call Aggravated Gravy Abuse—and they will, they will—and if in fact you are innocent of abusing gravy, do not take the rap. Second: Those who would reject you because you are wearing the wrong shoes are not worth being accepted by. And third: Kneel before no man. Stand up for your rights.” The members of the class of ’96 skipped up to get their degrees, some barefoot, some with flowers in their hair, cheering, fist punching, voguing, uninhibited. That’s the spirit, he thought. It was as far from the formality of Cambridge as you could go, and much the better for it.

  His parents didn’t come to his graduation. His father said they couldn’t afford the airfare. This was untrue.

  There were novelists among his contemporaries—Martin Amis, Ian McEwan—whose careers took off almost as soon as they were out of the egg, so to speak, and they soared into the sky like exalted birds. His own early hopes were not fulfilled. He lived for a time in an attic on Acfold Road off the Wandsworth Bridge Road, in a house he shared with his sister Sameen and three friends from Cambridge. He pulled up the stepladder and closed the hatch and then he was alone in a triangular world of wood, pretending to write. He had no idea what he was doing. For a long time no book took shape. In these early days his confusion—which he afterward understood was a confusion in the self, a bewilderment about who and what he had become after being uprooted from Bombay—had a harmful effect on his personality. He was often sharp, often got into heated arguments about unimportant things. There was a claw of tension in him, and he had to work hard to hide his fear. Everything he tried went badly. To escape from the futility of the attic he joined fringe theater groups—“Sidewalk,” “Zatch”—at the Oval House in Kennington. He put on a long black dress and a blond wig, and kept his mustache, to play a male agony aunt in a piece by a fellow Cambridge graduate, Dusty Hughes. He was a member of the cast of a British revival of Viet Rock, the anti-Vietnam agitprop show created in New York by the La MaMa group. These performances were less than seminal, and to make matters worse, he was broke. A year after graduating from Cambridge he was on the dole. “What am I going to tell my friends?” Anis Rushdie had cried when he announced his literary aspirations
, and as he stood in the dole queue Anis’s son began to see his father’s point. In the house on Acfold Road there was much youthful misery. Sameen had an unsuccessful fling with one of his college friends, Stephen Brandon, and when it failed she left the house and went home. A young woman called Fiona Arden moved in and he found her one night half-conscious at the foot of the stairs, having swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. She clutched his wrist and wouldn’t let go, and he went with her in the ambulance to the hospital where they pumped her stomach empty and saved her life. He moved out of the attic after that and wandered from flat-share to flat-share in Chelsea and Earls Court. Forty years later he heard about Fiona again. She was a baroness in the House of Lords and had attained great eminence in the world of business. Youth was often wretched, the struggle to become themselves tore the young to shreds, but sometimes, after the struggle, better days began.

  Not long after he left Acfold Road a troubled local boy set fire to the house.

  Dusty Hughes got a job writing advertising copy at the J. Walter Thompson agency in Berkeley Square. Suddenly he had a comfortable salary, and was making shampoo commercials with beautiful blond models. “You should do this,” Dusty told him. “It’s easy.” He took the J. Walter Thompson “copy test,” done under exam conditions at the agency offices, wrote an ad for After Eight chocolates and a jingle promoting the use of seat belts in cars, to the tune of Chuck Berry’s “No Particular Place to Go,” and tried, as requested, to tell a visitor from Mars in fewer than one hundred words what bread was, and how to make a piece of toast; and failed. In the opinion of the mighty JWT, he didn’t have what it took to make it as a writer. In the end he got a job at a smaller, less distinguished agency called Sharp MacManus on Albemarle Street, and his working life began. On his first day he was asked to write an ad for a coupon-clipping magazine selling cigars packaged, for Christmas, inside red crackers. His mind was a blank. At last the kindly “creative director,” Oliver Knox, who afterward became a well-praised novelist, leaned over his shoulder and murmured, “Five cracking ideas from Players to help Christmas go with a bang.” Oh, he thought, feeling foolish, so that’s how.

  He shared an office at Sharps with a great dark-haired beauty, Fay Coventry, who was dating Tom Maschler, the publisher at Jonathan Cape. Every Monday she would tell him stories about their weekends with their amusing friends, “Arnold” (Wesker) and “Harold” (Pinter) and “John” (Fowles). How delightful these stories were; what fun they all had! Envy, resentment, longing and despair tumbled over one another in the young copywriter’s heart. There it was, the world of literature, so close to him, so horribly far away. When Fay left to marry Maschler and, later, to become a respected restaurant critic, he felt almost relieved that the literary world, into which she had given him such tantalizing glimpses, had moved further away again.

  He had left university in June 1968. Midnight’s Children was published in April 1981. It took him almost thirteen years just to begin. During that time he wrote unbearable amounts of garbage. There was a novel, “The Book of the Peer,” that might have been good if he had known how to write it. It was the story of a holy man, a pir or peer, in a country like Pakistan, who was used by three other men, a military leader, a political leader, and a capitalist, to lead a coup after which, they believed, he would be the figurehead while they wielded the power. But he proved more capable and ruthless than his backers and they realized they had unleashed a monster they could not control. This was many years before the Ayatollah Khomeini ate the revolution whose figurehead he was supposed to be. If the novel had been written plainly, as a political thriller, it might have served; instead the story was told in several different characters’ “streams of consciousness,” and was more or less incomprehensible. Nobody liked it. It came nowhere near publication. It was a stillbirth.

  There was much worse to come. The BBC announced a competition to find a new television playwright and he entered a play featuring the two criminals crucified with Christ, talking to each other before the great man gets to Golgotha, in the manner of Beckett’s tramps Didi and Gogo. The play was called (of course) “Crosstalk.” It was deeply foolish. It did not win the competition. After that there was another novel-length text, “The Antagonist,” so bad, in a sub-Pynchon kind of manner, that he never showed it to anyone. Advertising kept him going. He didn’t dare to call himself a novelist. He was a copywriter who, like all copywriters, dreamed of being a “real” writer. He knew, however, that he was still unreal.

  It was curious that so avowedly godless a person should keep trying to write about faith. Belief had left him but the subject remained, nagging at his imagination. The structures and metaphors of religion (Hinduism and Christianity as much as Islam) shaped his irreligious mind, and the concerns of these religions with the great questions of existence—Where do we come from? And now that we are here, how shall we live?—were also his, even if he came to conclusions that required no divine arbiter to underwrite and certainly no earthly priest class to sanction and interpret. His first published novel, Grimus, was published by Liz Calder at Victor Gollancz, before she moved to Cape. It was based on the Mantiq ut-Tair, or Conference of the Birds, a mystical narrative poem by the John Bunyan of Islam, the twelfth-century Sufi Muslim Farid ud-din Attar, born in Nishapur in present-day Iran four years after the death of that town’s more celebrated local son, Omar Khayyam. In the poem—a sort of Muslim Pilgrim’s Progress—a hoopoe led thirty birds on a journey through seven valleys of travail and revelation toward the circular mountain of Qâf, home of their god the Simurg. When they reached the mountaintop there was no god there and it was explained to them that the name “Simurg,” if broken down into its syllables si and murg, means “thirty birds.” Having overcome the travails of the quest they had become the god they sought.

  “Grimus” was an anagram of “Simurg.” In his science-fantasy retelling of Attar’s tale an “American Indian” crudely named Flapping Eagle searches for the mysterious Calf Island. The novel was met for the most part with dismissive notices, some of which bordered on the contemptuous, and its reception shook him profoundly. Fighting off despair, he quickly wrote a short—novella length—satirical fiction in which the career of the prime minister of India, Mrs. Indira Gandhi, was transposed into the world of the Bombay film industry. (Philip Roth’s satire about Richard M. Nixon, Our Gang, was a distant model.) The book’s vulgarity—at one point the Indira character, a powerful movie star, grows her dead father’s penis—meant that it was rejected as swiftly as it had been written. This was the bottom of the barrel.

  The sixth valley through which the thirty birds journeyed in Attar’s poem was the place of bewilderment, in which they came to feel that they knew and understood nothing, and were plunged into hopelessness and grief. The seventh was the valley of death. The young advertising copywriter and novelist manqué felt, in the mid-1970s, like the thirty-first despairing bird.

  Advertising itself, in spite of its reputation as the great enemy of promise, was good to him, on the whole. He was now working at a grander agency, Ogilvy & Mather, whose founder, David Ogilvy, was the author of the celebrated dictum “The consumer is not a moron; she is your wife.” There were a few hiccups, such as the time an American airline refused to allow him to feature black stewardesses in their ads, even though the women in question actually were members of the airline’s staff. “What would the union say if they knew?” he wondered, and the Airline Client replied, “Well, you’re not going to tell them, are you?” And there was the time he refused to work on an ad for Campbell’s Corned Beef because it was made in South Africa and the African National Congress had called for a boycott of such products. He could have been fired, but the Corned Beef Client did not insist upon it, and he was not. In the world of 1970s advertising the mavericks and oddballs never got sacked. The people who did were the dogged worker ants who were trying really hard to hang on to their jobs. If you acted like you didn’t give a damn, came in late and took long boozy lunches,
you got promotions and pay raises and the gods smiled down on your creative eccentricity, at least as long as you were, on the whole, delivering the goods.

  And for much of the time he worked with people who appreciated and supported him, talented people, many of whom were using advertising as he was, as a stepping-stone to better things, or a source of easy money. He made a commercial for Scotch Magic Tape that starred John Cleese demonstrating the merits of a sticky tape that disappeared on contact (“And here you see it, not being seen; unlike this ordinary tape, which, as you can see, you can see”), and one for Clairol’s gray-hair cover-up product Loving Care that was directed by Nicolas Roeg, the celebrated director of Performance and Don’t Look Now. For almost six months, during the British three-day week of 1974, caused by the miners’ strike and featuring daily power outages and much chaos in the Wardour Street world of recording and dubbing studios, he made three commercials a week for the Daily Mirror, and in spite of all the problems every single one aired on time. Filmmaking held no terrors for him after that. Advertising introduced him to America, too, sending him on a journey across the United States so that he could write tourism ads for the U.S. Travel Service under the slogan “The Great American Adventure,” with photographs by the legendary Elliott Erwitt. Longhaired and mustachioed, he arrived at the San Francisco airport, where a large sign read A FEW MINUTES EXTRA IN CUSTOMS IS A SMALL PRICE TO PAY TO SAVE YOUR CHILDREN FROM THE MENACE OF DRUGS. A fabulously rednecked American gentleman was noting this sign with approval. Then, with a complete change of heart and no apparent awareness of any internal contradictions in his position, he turned to the longhaired, mustachioed visitor—who looked, it must be admitted, suspiciously as if he intended to head straight for Haight-Ashbury, the world capital of the “counterculture” of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll—and said, “Buddy, I sure feel sorry for you, because even if you ain’t got nothing, they’ll find something.” However, no drugs were planted, and the young advertising writer was allowed to enter the magic kingdom. And when he finally reached New York, he was encouraged, on his first night in the city, to put on that strangest of uniforms, a suit and tie, so that friends could take him to have a drink at the Windows on the World bar at the top of the World Trade Center. This was his first and never-forgotten image of the city; those massive buildings that seemed to say We are here forever.