Joseph Anton: A Memoir

  He remembered J. G. Ballard’s great novel Crash about the deadly mingling of love, death and automobiles and thought, maybe we are all responsible, our hunger for her image murdered her, and at the end, as she died, the last thing she saw would have been the phallic snouts of the cameras coming toward her through the smashed car windows, clicking, clicking. He was asked to write something for The New Yorker about the event and he sent them something of this nature and in England the Daily Insult called it a “Satanic version,” in bad taste, as if the Insult had not been willing to pay a fortune for the photographs for which the paparazzi were chasing her, as if the Insult had the good taste not to publish the pictures of the wreck.

  Milton and Patricia Grobow knew everything now; they had read about the wedding in the local papers. They were delighted, and “proud,” and happy for the arrangement to continue in future years. Patricia had been the Kennedy children’s nanny, she said, she was “used to being discreet.” Milton was almost eighty and very frail. The Grobows said they might consider selling the Rushdies the house.

  A few days after they got back to London he flew to Italy to take part in the Mantova literary festival, but nobody seemed to have cleared his visit with the local police, who barricaded him in his hotel and refused to allow him to attend the festival sessions. Finally, with many of the other writers as a sort of honor guard, he tried to repeat his Chilean trick by just walking out into the street, and was taken to the police station and held for several hours in a “waiting room” until the mayor and the police chief decided to avoid a scandal by allowing him to do what he had come to their town to do. After the weeks of ordinary life in the United States this return to European skittishness was dispiriting.

  In London, the Labour home secretary, Jack Straw, always keen to ingratiate himself with his Islamic constituents, announced new legislation that would extend the archaic, obsolete, and fit-to-be-repealed blasphemy law to cover religions other than the Church of England, thus making it possible, among other things, for The Satanic Verses to be prosecuted again, and probably banned. So much for the “government of his friends” coming to power, he thought. Straw’s attempt would eventually fail but the Blair government continued to try to find ways of making it illegal to criticize religion—i.e., Islam—for several years. At one point he went to the Home Office to protest against this, accompanied by Rowan Atkinson (“Mr. Bean Goes to Whitehall”). Rowan, in real life a quiet-spoken, thoughtful man, asked the faceless men and junior minister about satire. They were all his fans, of course, and wanted him to love them back, so they said, Oh, comedy, we love it, satire, that’s no problem at all. He nodded lugubriously and said that recently, in a TV sketch, he had used footage of Muslims kneeling at Friday prayers in, he thought, Tehran, together with a voiceover that said, “And the search goes on for the ayatollah’s contact lens.” Would that be okay under the new law, he wanted to know, or would he in fact go to jail? Oh, yes, that would be fine, they told him, completely fine, no problem at all. Hmm, said Rowan, but how would he be able to be sure of that? It’s easy, they answered, you’d just submit the script to a government department for approval, and of course you’d get it, and then you’d know. “Why,” Rowan wondered mildly, “am I not reassured by that, I wonder.” On the day this appalling bill came before the House of Commons for the final vote, the Labour whips, believing the revolt against it was so great that it was lost, told Tony Blair there was no need for him to stay until the votes were counted. So the prime minister went home and his bill failed by one vote. If he had stayed the votes would have been tied, and the Speaker would have cast his vote for the government as he was obliged to do, and the bill would have become the law of the land. It was that close a thing.

  Life moved forward by small steps. Barry Moss, the head of Special Branch, came to see him to tell him that the new deal, under which he would employ Frank Bishop with Dennis Le Chevalier as backup, and the police would withdraw completely from the Bishop’s Avenue house, had been approved. From January 1, 1998, his home would be his own, and he would be able to make all “private movements” by himself with Frank’s help. He felt a great weight vanish from his shoulders. He, and Elizabeth and Milan, were about to have a private life in England, for the first time.

  Frances D’Souza called to say that the much-feared Iranian minister of intelligence, Fallahian, had been replaced by a certain Mr. Najaf-Abadi, a supposed “liberal, pragmatic type.” Well, let’s just see, he replied.

  Gail Rebuck agreed that Random House UK would take the Consortium paperback edition of The Satanic Verses into their warehouse immediately and put the Vintage colophon on it at the next reprint, which would probably be needed around Christmas. That was actually a very big step; the long-anticipated “normalization” of the novel’s status in the United Kingdom, nine long years after it was first published.

  Miss Arundhati Roy won the Booker Prize, as expected—she had been the odds-on favorite—and the next day she told The Times that his writing was merely “exotic” whereas hers was truthful. That was interesting, but he decided not to respond. Then news came from Germany that she had said much the same thing to a journalist there. He called David Godwin, her agent, to say that he did not believe it would be a good thing for two Indian Booker winners to be seen attacking each other in public. He had never said publicly what he thought of The God of Small Things, but if she wanted a fight, she could certainly have one. No, no, David said, I’m sure she was misquoted. Soon afterward he received a mollifying message from Miss Roy that made the same claim. Let it rest, he thought, and moved on.

  Günter Grass was seventy, and the Thalia Theater in Hamburg was planning a big celebration of his life and work. He flew to Hamburg with his new best friends, Lufthansa, and took part in the event along with Nadine Gordimer and just about every important German writer. After the public part of the evening was over there was music and dancing and he discovered that Grass was a great dancer. Every young woman at the after-party wanted to be twirled by him and Günter tirelessly waltzed, gavotted, polkaed and fox-trotted the night away. So now he had two reasons to envy the great man. He had always envied Grass’s skill as an artist. How liberating it must be to finish a day’s writing, walk over to an art studio and begin to work in a completely different way on the same themes! How great to be able to create one’s own dust-jacket images! Grass’s bronzes and etchings of rats, toads, flounders, eels, and boys with tin drums were things of beauty. But now there was his dancing to admire as well. It really was too much.

  The Sri Lankan authorities were sounding positive about the BBC Midnight’s Children project but, according to one of the BBC producers, Ruth Caleb, they were making it a condition of giving permission that he not attend the shoot. Okay, he said, nice to be so popular, and a few days later Tristram faxed him from Sri Lanka. “I am holding the permission document in my hand.” That was a happy moment. But as things turned out, it was another in the long series of false dawns.

  Milan was beginning to say, with great emphasis, “Ha! Ha! HA.” When his parents said it back to him, he was delighted and said it again. Was this his first word—the word representing laughter, not just laughter itself? He looked desperate to speak. But of course it was much too early.

  Elizabeth was going to see Carol for a few days and they had not made love since their wedding, not for many, many months. “I’m tired,” she said, and then stayed up until 2 A.M. sticking wedding photos in an album. But things between them were good, mostly very good, and that thing, too, stopped being ungood soon enough. The business of love is cruelty, which by our wills we transform to live together.

  When he looked back at the record he had made of his life, he understood that it was easier to make a note of an unpleasantness than a moment of felicity, easier to record a quarrel than a loving word. The truth was that for many years Elizabeth and he had got on easily and lovingly almost all the time. But not long after their marriage the ease and happiness began to diminish and
the cracks to appear. “Trouble in a marriage,” he later wrote, “is like monsoon water accumulating on a flat roof. You don’t realize it’s up there, but it gets heavier and heavier, until one day, with a great crash, the whole roof falls in on your head.”

  A woman named Flora Botsford was the BBC’s Colombo correspondent, but it was her mischief-making that, in the opinion of the producer, Chris Hall, was “the thing that dished us.” It was sometimes easy to believe that media people preferred things to go wrong, because EVERYTHING GOES WELL was not a catchy headline. Botsford’s willingness, as a BBC employee, to stir up trouble for a major BBC production was surprising, or, more depressingly, not surprising. She took it upon herself to call a number of Sri Lankan Muslim MPs, looking for hostile quotes, and she found one, and one was all it took. Writing in The Guardian, Botsford began: “At the risk of offending local Muslims, the BBC is to film a controversial five-part serial of Salman Rushdie’s book Midnight’s Children in Sri Lanka, officials confirmed last week.” Then her carefully unearthed MP had his moment of glory. “At least one Muslim politician in Sri Lanka is doing his best to put a stop to the project, raising the issue in parliament. ‘Salman Rushdie is a very controversial figure,’ said A. H. M. Azwar, an opposition MP. ‘He has defiled and defamed the Holy Prophet, which is an unforgivable act. Muslims the world over detest even the mention of his name. There must be a strong reason for India to ban the film, and we should beware of raising communal feelings here.’ ”

  The ripples spread quickly. In India there were many columns calling it a scandal that India had refused permission, but in Tehran the Iranian Foreign Ministry called in the Sri Lankan ambassador to protest. Chris Hall had written permission to film from President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga herself, and for a moment it seemed the president might keep her word. But then a group of Sri Lankan Muslim MPs demanded that she reverse her decision. Islamic attacks of quite remarkable venom were launched against the author of Midnight’s Children in the Sri Lankan media. He was a cowardly race traitor, and Midnight’s Children was a book that insulted and ridiculed his own people. A junior minister announced that permission to film had been revoked, but was contradicted by his seniors. The deputy foreign minister said, “Go ahead.” The deputy defense minister guaranteed “the full support of the military.” However, the downward spiral had begun. He could smell the approach of catastrophe, even though the Foreign Ministry of Sri Lanka and the film production board both confirmed that permission had been given to film. There was what Chris Hall described as a boozy meeting of local intellectuals at the BBC production office, and all of them were supportive. The Sri Lankan press was almost uniformly behind the production too. But the feeling of impending doom remained. One week later, permission to film was revoked without any explanation, just six weeks after written permission had been given by the president. The government was trying to pass politically tricky devolution legislation and needed the support of the small handful of Muslim MPs. Behind the scenes, Iran and Saudi Arabia had threatened to expel their Sri Lankan workers if the production went ahead.

  There had been no public outcry against the production in either India or Sri Lanka. But in both places, the project had been killed. He felt as if somebody had just hit him very hard. “I must not fall down,” he thought, but he was crushed.

  Chris Hall remained convinced that Flora Botsford’s article had lit the fire. “The BBC did not serve you well,” he said. President Kumaratunga wrote him a letter personally apologizing for the cancellation. “I have read the book titled Midnight’s Children and liked it very much. I would have liked to see it as a film. However, sometimes political considerations outweigh perhaps worthier causes. I hope there would soon arrive a time in Sri Lanka when people would begin once again to think rationally and when the true and deeper values of life will prevail. Then my country will once again become the ‘Serendib’ it deserves to be.” In 1999 she survived an assassination attempt by the Tamil Tigers, but was blinded in one eye.

  The final act of the tale of the filming of Midnight’s Children, the act with the happy ending, began eleven years later. In the fall of 2008 he was in Toronto for the publication of his novel The Enchantress of Florence and having dinner, on an evening off from book promotion, with his friend the film director Deepa Mehta. “The book of yours I’d really like to film,” Deepa said, “is Midnight’s Children. Who has the rights?” “As it happens,” he replied, “I do.” “Then can I do it?” she asked. “Yes,” he said. He gave her an option for one dollar and for the next two years they worked on raising the money and writing a screenplay. The scripts he’d written for the BBC now looked wooden and stilted and he was actually glad they had never been filmed. The new screenplay felt properly cinematic and Deepa’s instincts about the film were very close to his own. In January 2011 Midnight’s Children, now a feature film, not a TV series, returned to India and Sri Lanka to film, and thirty years after the publication of the novel, fourteen years after the collapse of the BBC TV series, the film was finally made. On the day principal photography was completed in Colombo he felt as if a curse had been lifted. Another mountain had been climbed.

  Halfway through the shoot the Iranians tried to stop it again. The Sri Lankan ambassador was hauled into the Foreign Ministry in Tehran to be told of Iran’s displeasure about the project. For two days permission to film was again revoked. Again, they had a letter of permission from the president, but he feared that this president too would prove spineless under pressure. However, this time the outcome was different. The president told Deepa, “Go ahead and finish your film.”

  The film was finished, and scheduled for a 2012 release. What a cascade of emotions that bald sentence concealed. Per ardua ad astra, he thought. The thing had been done.

  In mid-November 1997 John le Carré, one of the few writers who had spoken out against him when the attack on The Satanic Verses began, complained in The Guardian that he had been unjustly “smeared” and “tarred with the anti-Semitic brush” by Norman Rush in The New York Times Book Review, and described “the whole oppressive weight of political correctness” as a kind of McCarthyite movement in reverse.

  He should have kept his feelings to himself, of course, but he couldn’t resist replying. “It would be easier to sympathize with him,” he wrote in a letter to the newspaper, “had he not been so ready to join in an earlier campaign of vilification against a fellow writer. In 1989, during the worst days of the Islamic attack on The Satanic Verses, le Carré rather pompously joined forces with my assailants. It would be gracious if he were to admit that he understands the nature of the Thought Police a little better now that, at least in his own opinion, he’s the one in the line of fire.”

  Le Carré rose grandly to the bait: “Rushdie’s way with the truth is as self-serving as ever,” he replied. “I never joined his assailants. Nor did I take the easy path of proclaiming him to be a shining innocent. My position was that there is no law in life or nature that says great religions may be insulted with impunity. I wrote that there is no absolute standard of free speech in any society. I wrote that tolerance does not come at the same time, and in the same form, to all religions and cultures, and that Christian society too, until very recently, defined the limits of freedom by what was sacred. I wrote, and would write again today, that when it came to the further exploitation of Rushdie’s work in paperback form, I was more concerned about the girl at Penguin Books who might get her hands blown off in the mailroom than I was about Rushdie’s royalties. Anyone who had wished to read the book by then had ample access to it. My purpose was not to justify the persecution of Rushdie, which, like any decent person, I deplore, but to sound a less arrogant, less colonialist, and less self-righteous note than we were hearing from the safety of his admirers’ camp.”

  By now The Guardian was enjoying the fight so much that it was running the letters on the front page. His reply to le Carré ran the next day: “John le Carré … claims not to have joined in the attac
k against me but also states that ‘there is no law in life or nature that says great religions may be insulted with impunity.’ A cursory examination of this lofty formulation reveals that (1) it takes the philistine, reductionist, radical Islamist line that The Satanic Verses was no more than an ‘insult,’ and (2) it suggests that anyone who displeases philistine, reductionist, radical Islamist folk loses his right to live in safety.… He says that he is more interested in safeguarding publishing staff than in my royalties. But it is precisely these people, my novel’s publishers in some thirty countries, together with the staff of bookshops, who have most passionately supported and defended my right to publish. It is ignoble of le Carré to use them as an argument for censorship when they have so courageously stood up for freedom. John le Carré is right to say that free speech isn’t absolute. We have the freedoms we fight for, and we lose those we don’t defend. I’d always thought George Smiley knew that. His creator appears to have forgotten.”

  At this point, Christopher Hitchens joined the fray unbidden, and his reply would drive the spy novelist to greater heights of apoplexy. “John le Carré’s conduct in your pages is like nothing so much as that of a man who, having relieved himself in his own hat, makes haste to clamp the brimming chapeau on his head,” opined Hitch with his characteristic understatement. “He used to be evasive and euphemistic about the open solicitation of murder, for bounty, on the grounds that ayatollahs had feelings, too. Now he tells us that his prime concern was the safety of the girls in the mailroom. For good measure, he arbitrarily counterposes their security against Rushdie’s royalties. May we take it, then, that he would have had no objection if The Satanic Verses had been written and published for free and distributed gratis from unattended stalls? This might have at least satisfied those who appear to believe that the defense of free expression should be free of cost and free of risk. As it happens, no mailroom girls have been injured in the course of eight years’ defiance of the fatwa. And when the nervous book chains of North America briefly did withdraw The Satanic Verses on dubious grounds of ‘security,’ it was their staff unions who protested and who volunteered to stand next to plateglass windows in upholding the reader’s right to buy and peruse any book. In le Carré’s eyes, their brave decision was taken in ‘safety’ and was moreover blasphemous toward a great religion! Could we not have been spared this revelation of the contents of his hat—I mean head?”