Joseph Anton: A Memoir (10 page)

Some years later he learned that
Shame
had even been awarded a prize in Iran. It had been published in Farsi without his knowledge, in a state-sanctioned pirate edition, and then had been named the best novel translated into Farsi that year. He never received the award, nor was he sent any formal notification of it; but it meant—according to stories emerging from Iran—that when
The Satanic Verses
was published five years later, the few Iranian booksellers who sold English-language books assumed that it would be unproblematic to sell this new title, its author having already gained the mullocracy’s approval with his previous work; and so copies were imported and put on sale at the time of the book’s first publication in September 1988, and these copies remained on sale for six months, without arousing any opposition, until the
fatwa
of February 1989. He was never able to find out if this story was true, but he hoped it was, because it demonstrated what he believed: that the furor over his book was created from the top down, not from the bottom up.

But in the mideighties the
fatwa
was an unimaginable cloud hidden below the far horizon. Meanwhile, the success of his books had a beneficial effect on his character. He felt something relax deep within him, and became happier, sweeter natured, easier to be around. Strangely, however, older novelists gave him warnings in those balmy times of
worse days to follow. He was taken to lunch by Angus Wilson at the Athenaeum Club not long after Wilson’s seventieth birthday; and, listening to the author of
Anglo-Saxon Attitudes
and
The Old Men at the Zoo
speak wistfully of the days “when I used to be a fashionable writer” he understood that he was being told, gently, that the wind always changes; yesterday’s hot young kid is tomorrow’s melancholy, ignored senior citizen.

When he went to America for the publication of
Midnight’s Children
he had his picture taken by the photographer Jill Krementz and met her husband, Kurt Vonnegut; and they invited him out to their house in Sagaponack, Long Island, for the weekend. “Are you serious about this writing business?” Vonnegut unexpectedly asked him as they sat drinking beers in the sunshine, and when he replied that he was, the author of
Slaughterhouse-Five
told him, “Then you should know that the day is going to come when you won’t have a book to write, and you’re still going to have to write a book.”

On his way to Sagaponack he had read a bundle of reviews sent over by his American publishers, Knopf. There was an astonishingly generous notice by Anita Desai in
The Washington Post
. If she thought well of the book then he could be happy; perhaps he really had done something worthwhile. And there was a positive review in the
Chicago Tribune
, written by Nelson Algren.
The Man with the Golden Arm, A Walk on the Wild Side … that
Nelson Algren? The lover of Simone de Beauvoir, the friend of Hemingway? It was as if literature’s golden past had reached out to anoint him.
Nelson Algren
, he thought in wonderment.
I thought he was dead
. He arrived in Sagaponack earlier than expected. The Vonneguts were on their way out of the house to go to the housewarming party of their friend and neighbor … Nelson Algren. It was an amazing coincidence. “Well,” said Kurt, “if he reviewed your book I’m sure he’d like to meet you. I’ll go call him and tell him you’re coming over with us.” He went indoors. A few moments later he came back from the telephone looking shaken and gray. “Nelson Algren just died,” he said. Algren had prepared his party and then suffered a fatal heart attack. The first guests to arrive found the host dead on the living room rug. His review of
Midnight’s Children
was the last thing he ever wrote.

Nelson Algren. I thought he was dead
. Algren’s death darkened Vonnegut’s mood. His own thoughts were sober, too. The sudden, unforeseeable plunge toward the rug awaited us all.

The critical success of
Midnight’s Children
in the United States took Knopf by surprise. He had come to New York at his own expense just to be there when his book was published, and no interviews had been arranged for him, and none were, not even after the excellent notices appeared. The print run was small, there was a small reprint, a small paperback sale, and that was that. However, he was fortunate enough to shake hands, at the entrance to the offices at 201 East 50th Street, with the legendary Alfred A. Knopf himself, an elderly, courteous gentleman in an expensive coat and a dark beret. And he also met his gangling, intense publisher, Robert Gottlieb, who was something of a legend himself. He was taken to Bob Gottlieb’s office, which was decorated with fiftieth-birthday bunting and cards, and after they had spoken for a while, Gottlieb said, “Now that I know I like you, I can tell you that I thought I wasn’t going to.” This was shocking. “Why?” he said, fumbling for words. “Didn’t you like my book? I mean, you published my book.…” Bob shook his head. “It wasn’t because of your book,” he said. “But I recently read a very great book by a very great writer and after it I thought I wouldn’t be able to like anyone with a Muslim background.” This was, if anything, an even more astonishing statement. “What was this very great book?” he asked Gottlieb, “and who is this very great writer?” “The book,” said Bob Gottlieb, “is called
Among the Believers
, and the author is V. S. Naipaul.” “That,” he said to the editor-in-chief of Knopf, “is a book I definitely want to read.”

Bob Gottlieb didn’t appear to know how his words were being received, and, in fairness, he went on to be extremely hospitable toward the author he hadn’t thought he would like, inviting him to eat at his town house in Turtle Bay, the tony Manhattan neighborhood whose other residents included Kurt Vonnegut, Stephen Sondheim and Katharine Hepburn. (The septuagenarian movie star had recently showed up on Gottlieb’s doorstep after a snowstorm, carrying a shovel,
and offered to clear the snow off the publisher’s roof.) Gottlieb was also on the board of George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet and invited his new young Indian novelist—who had once seen Balanchine’s greatest love, Suzanne Farrell, dance in London with the Maurice Béjart ballet company after her quarrel with the great Russian choreographer—to watch a performance. “There is only one condition,” Bob said. “You have to forget about Béjart and agree that Balanchine is God.”

He offered literary hospitality, too. When Gottlieb left Knopf in 1987 to step into William Shawn’s shoes as editor of
The New Yorker
, the doors of that august journal finally opened to allow the author of
Midnight’s Children
to enter. Under Mr. Shawn’s regime those doors had remained resolutely closed, and Salman was not one of those who mourned the end of the great editor’s fifty-three-year reign. Bob Gottlieb published both his fiction and nonfiction, and was a brilliant, detailed and passionate editor of the long essay “Out of Kansas” (1992), a response to
The Wizard of Oz
, which, as Gottlieb rightly encouraged him to stress, was one of the sweetest of odes to friendship in the movies.

During the
fatwa
years he saw Gottlieb only once. Liz Calder and Carmen Callil gave a joint birthday party at the Groucho Club in Soho, and he was able to go for a while. When he said hello to Bob, the publisher said, with great intensity, “I’m always defending you, Salman. I always tell people, if you had known that your book was going to kill people, of course you wouldn’t have written it.” He counted very slowly to ten. It would not be right to hit this old man. It would be better to make an excuse and just walk away. He inclined his head in a meaningless gesture and turned on his heel. In the years that followed they did not speak. He owed a great deal to Bob Gottlieb but he couldn’t get those final words out of his head, and he knew that, just as Gottlieb hadn’t understood the impact of his words about Naipaul’s book when they had met for the first time, he also didn’t understand what was wrong with what he said at this, their last meeting. Bob believed he was being a friend.

In 1984 his marriage ended. They had been together for fourteen years and had grown apart without noticing it. Clarissa wanted a country life, and they had spent one summer looking at houses west of London, but in the end he realized that to move into the countryside would drive him insane. He was a city boy. He told her this and she acquiesced, but it was a difficulty between them. They had fallen in love when they were both very young and now that they were older their interests often failed to coincide. There were parts of his life in London that didn’t greatly interest her. One such part was his antiracist work. He had been involved for a long time with a race relations group, the Camden Committee for Community Relations, or CCCR, and his voluntary work there, overseeing the community work team, had become important to him. It had shown him a city he had previously known little about, the immigrant London of deprivation and prejudice, what he would afterward call
a city visible but unseen
. The immigrant city was right there in plain sight, in Southall and Wembley and Brixton as well as Camden, but in those days its problems were largely ignored, except during brief explosions of racial violence. This was a chosen blindness: an unwillingness to accept the city, the world, as it really was. He gave a lot of his spare time to race relations work, and used his experiences with CCCR as the basis of a polemical broadcast titled “The New Empire Within Britain,” an attempt to describe the growth of a new underclass of black and brown Britons, made for the
Opinions
slot on Channel Four, and it was obvious she didn’t much care for the rhetoric he used in that talk, either.

But their biggest problem was a more intimate one. Ever since Zafar’s birth they, and in particular Clarissa, had wanted more children, and the children had not come. Instead there was a series of early miscarriages. There had been one such miscarriage before Zafar’s conception and birth and there were two more afterward. He discovered that the problem was genetic. He had inherited (probably from his father’s side) a condition known as a
simple chromosome translocation
.

A chromosome was a stick of genetic information and all human cells contained twenty-two pairs of such sticks, as well as a twenty-third pair that determined gender. In rare cases a piece of genetic information broke off one chromosome and attached itself to another. There
were then two faulty chromosomes, one with too little genetic information and another with too much. When a child was conceived, half the father’s chromosomes, chosen at random, combined with half the mother’s, to create a new set of pairs. If the father had a simple chromosome translocation and
both
his faulty chromosomes were selected, the child would be born normally, except that it would inherit the condition. If
neither
of the faulty chromosomes were selected, the pregnancy would also be normal and the child would not inherit the condition. But if only one of the two problem chromosomes were to be selected, then the fetus would not form, and the pregnancy would miscarry.

Trying to have a baby became a kind of biological roulette. Their luck had not been good, and the stress of all those miscarriages, all those dashed hopes, had worn them both down. Their physical relationship came to an end. Neither of them could bear the idea of yet another attempt followed by yet another failure. And perhaps it was humanly impossible for Clarissa not to blame him for the end of her dream of a family of children running around her and becoming the meaning of her life. It was impossible for him not to blame himself.

Any long relationship that no longer included sex was probably doomed. For thirteen of their fourteen years together he had been unquestioningly faithful to her but in the fourteenth year the bond of loyalty had broken, or been eroded, and there were brief infidelities during literary trips to Canada and Sweden and a longer infidelity in London, with an old Cambridge friend who played the violin. (Clarissa had been unfaithful to him only once, but that was long ago, in 1973, when he was still writing
Grimus
, and although she was briefly tempted to leave him for her lover she soon gave the other man up, and they both forgot the episode; or almost forgot. He never forgot his rival’s name. It was, a little improbably, Aylmer Gribble.)

At the time he was idiotically certain that he had concealed his affairs so well that his wife knew nothing, suspected nothing. In retrospect he was amazed that he could have been so vain. Of course she knew.

He went by himself to Australia, to take part in the Adelaide Festival and, afterward, accompanied Bruce Chatwin into the Australian
desert. They were in a bookstore in Alice Springs when he saw a paperback copy of Robyn Davidson’s
Tracks
, an account of her solo trek across the Gibson Desert accompanied by camels she had caught and trained herself. His editor at Cape, Liz Calder, had praised the book and its intrepid author when it came out, and he had said, dismissively, “Why walk across the desert when you can go by Airbus?” But now he was seeing the places the book talked about and so he bought it and was impressed. “You should meet her when you go to Sydney,” Bruce said. “Let’s call her. I’ve got her phone number.” “Of course you do,” he replied. In Bruce’s famous Moleskine notebooks were the phone numbers of everyone on earth who had ever amounted to anything. If you had asked him for the queen of England’s unlisted personal line he would have found it in an instant.