Joseph Anton: A Memoir (12 page)

He didn’t know the beginning of the novel until a year later. In June 1985 Air India Flight 182, the
Emperor Kanishka
, was blown up by Sikh terrorists fighting to carve an independent Sikh state, to be called Khalistan, out of the Indian Punjab. The plane fell into the Atlantic Ocean to the south of Ireland and among the 329 people who died (mostly Canadian Indians or Indian citizens) was his childhood friend Neelam Nath, on her way to Bombay with her children to see her parents G. V. Nath (“Uncle Nath”) and Lila, his own parents’ closest friends. Soon after he heard about this atrocity he wrote the scene in which Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, traveling from Bombay to London, are in a plane that is blown up by Sikh terrorists. Gibreel and Saladin are luckier than Neelam was. They make a soft landing on the beach at Pevensey Bay, outside Rosa Diamond’s house.

The book took more than four years to write. Afterward, when people tried to reduce it to an “insult,” he wanted to reply,
I can insult people a lot faster than that
. But it did not strike his opponents as strange that a serious writer should spend a tenth of his life creating something as crude as an insult. That was because they refused to see him as a serious writer. In order to attack him and his work it was necessary to paint him as a bad person, an apostate traitor, an unscrupulous seeker of fame and wealth, an opportunist whose work was without merit, who “attacked Islam” for his own personal gain. This was what was meant by the much repeated phrase
He did it on purpose
.

Well, of course he had done it on purpose. How would one write a quarter of a million words by accident? The problem was, as Bill Clinton might have said, what one meant by “it.” The strange truth was that, after two novels that engaged directly with the public history of the Indian subcontinent, he saw this new book as a much more personal, interior exploration, a first attempt to create a work out of his own experience of migration and metamorphosis: To him, it was the least political book of the three. And the material derived from the origin story of Islam was, he thought, essentially admiring of the Prophet of Islam and even respectful toward him. It treated him as he always said he wanted to be treated, as a man (“the Messenger”), not a divine figure (like the Christians’ “Son of God”). It showed him as a man of his time, shaped by that time, and, as a leader, both subject to temptation and capable of overcoming it. “What kind of idea are you?” the novel asked the new religion, and suggested that an idea that refused to bend or compromise would in most cases be destroyed, but conceded that, in very rare instances, such ideas became the ones that changed the world. His Prophet flirted with compromise, then rejected it; and his unbending idea grew strong enough to bend history to its will.

When he was first accused of being offensive, he was genuinely perplexed. He thought he had made an artistic engagement with the phenomenon of revelation; an engagement from the point of view of an unbeliever, certainly, but a proper one nonetheless. How could that be thought offensive? The thin-skinned years of rage-defined identity politics that followed taught him, and everyone else, the answer to that question.

Anyway, his Prophet was not called Muhammad, lived in a city not called Mecca, and created a religion not (or not quite) called Islam. And he appeared only in the dream sequences of a man being driven insane by his loss of faith. These many distancing devices were, in their creator’s opinion, indicators of the fictive nature of his project. To his opponents, they were transparent attempts at concealment. “He is hiding,” they said, “behind his fiction.” As if fiction were a veil, or an arras, and a man might be run through by a sword if, like Polonius, he foolishly hid behind such a flimsy shield.

While he was writing the novel he received an invitation from the American University in Cairo, asking him to come and talk to their students. They said they couldn’t pay him much but they could, if he were interested, arrange for him to take a boat up the Nile for a few days in the company of one of their leading Egyptologists. To see the world of ancient Egypt was one of his great unfulfilled dreams and he wrote back quickly. “If I could just finish my novel and arrange to come after that, that would be best,” he suggested. Then he finished the novel, and it was
The Satanic Verses
, and a trip to Egypt became impossible, and he had to accept that he might never see the Pyramids, or Memphis, or Luxor, or Thebes, or Abu Simbel. It was one of the many futures he would lose.

In January 1986 the writing was not going well. He was invited to attend what became a legendary gathering of writers, the 48th Congress of International PEN in New York, and he was grateful to escape his desk. The congress was quite a show. Norman Mailer was president of PEN American Center back then, and had used all his powers of persuasion and charm to raise the funds that brought more than fifty of the world’s leading writers to Manhattan to debate, with almost one hundred of America’s finest, the exalted theme of “The Writer’s Imagination and the Imagination of the State,” and to be wined and dined at, among other tony locations, Gracie Mansion and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Temple of Dendur.

As one of the younger participants he was more than a little awestruck. Brodsky, Grass, Oz, Soyinka, Vargas Llosa, Bellow, Carver,
Doctorow, Morrison, Said, Styron, Updike, Vonnegut, Barthelme, and Mailer himself were some of the big names reading their work and arguing with one another at the Essex House and St. Moritz hotels on Central Park South. One afternoon he was asked by the photographer Tom Victor to sit in one of the park’s horse-drawn carriages for a picture, and when he climbed in, there were Susan Sontag and Czesław Miłosz to keep him company. He was not usually a tongue-tied individual but he said very little during that ride.

The atmosphere was electric from the start. Much to the chagrin of PEN members, Mailer had invited Secretary of State George Shultz to speak at the opening ceremony, at the Public Library. This prompted howls of protest by the South African writers Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee and Sipho Sepamla, who accused Shultz of supporting apartheid. Other writers, including E. L. Doctorow, Grace Paley, Elizabeth Hardwick, and John Irving, protested that writers were being set up “as a forum for the Reagan administration,” as Doctorow put it.

Cynthia Ozick circulated a petition attacking Bruno Kreisky, the Jewish ex-chancellor of Austria and a congress participant, because he had met with Arafat and Gadhafi. (Kreisky’s defenders pointed out that during his chancellorship, Austria had taken in more refugee Russian Jews than any other country.) During a panel discussion Ozick rose from the floor to denounce Kreisky, who handled the situation with such grace that the trouble quickly passed.

Many women at the congress demanded, with much justification, to know why there were so few women on the panels. Sontag and Gordimer, both panelists, did not join the revolt. It was Susan who came up with the argument that “literature is not an equal opportunity employer.” This remark did not improve the protesters’ mood. Nor did his own observation that while there were, after all, several women on the various panels, he himself was the sole representative of South Asia, which was to say, of one-sixth of the human race.

In those days in New York literature felt important, and the arguments between the writers were widely reported and seemed still to matter outside the narrow confines of the world of books. John Updike delivered a quietist paean to the little blue mailboxes of America, those everyday symbols of the free exchange of ideas, to a considerably
bewildered audience of world writers. Donald Barthelme was drunk and Edward Said was friendly. At the party at the Temple of Dendur, Rosario Murillo—the poet and companion of the Sandinista president of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega—stood next to the Egyptian shrine surrounded by a phalanx of astonishingly beautiful, dangerous-looking Sandinista men in sunglasses. She invited the young Indian writer (and member of the British Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign) to come and see the
contra
war for himself.

In one of the sessions he was dragged into the heavyweight prize fight between Saul Bellow and Günter Grass. He was sitting next to the German novelist, whom he greatly admired, and after Bellow—also one of his favorite writers—made a speech containing a familiar Bellovian riff about how the success of American materialism had damaged the spiritual life of Americans, Grass rose to point out that many people routinely fell through the holes in the American dream, and offered to show Bellow some real American poverty in, for example, the South Bronx. Bellow, irritated, spoke sharply in return. When Grass returned to his seat, he was trembling with anger.

“Say something,” the author of
The Tin Drum
ordered the representative of one-sixth of the human race.

“Who, me?”

“Yes. Say something.”

So he went to the microphone and asked Bellow why it was that so many American writers had avoided—or, actually, more provocatively, “abdicated”—the task of taking on the subject of America’s immense power in the world. Bellow bridled. “We don’t have tasks,” he said, majestically. “We have inspirations.”

Yes, literature still felt important in 1986. In those last years of the cold war, it was important to hear Eastern European writers like Danilo Kiš and Czesław Miłosz, György Konrád and Ryszard Kapuscinski setting their visions against the visionless Soviet regime. Omar Cabezas, Nicaragua’s deputy interior minister at the time, who had just published a memoir of his life as a Sandinista guerrilla, and Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian poet, were there to articulate views not often heard on American platforms; and American writers such as Robert Stone and Kurt Vonnegut did indeed offer their critiques of American
power, while the Bellows and Updikes looked inward into the American soul. In the end it was the gravity of the event, not the levity, that was memorable. Yes, in 1986 it still felt natural for writers to claim to be, as Shelley said, “the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” to believe in the literary art as the proper counterweight to power, and to see literature as a lofty, transnational, transcultural force that could, in Bellow’s great formulation, “open the universe a little more.” Twenty years later, in a dumbed-down and frightened world, it would be harder to make such exalted claims for mere wordsmiths. Harder, but no less necessary, perhaps.

Back in London he remembered the invitation to Nicaragua. Maybe, he thought, it would do him good to get away from his small literary difficulties and go and report on people with real problems. He flew to Managua in July. When he returned several weeks later he had been so affected by what he saw that he could not stop thinking or talking about it and became a Nicaragua bore. The only way forward was to write his feelings down. He sat at his desk in a sort of frenzy and wrote a ninety-page text in three weeks. That was neither one thing nor another, too short to be a book, too long to be an article. In the end, revised and expanded, it did grow into a short book,
The Jaguar Smile
. The day he finished it, he dedicated it to Robyn Davidson (they were still just about together then) and gave it to her to read. When she saw the dedication she said, “I suppose this means I won’t get the novel,” and the conversation spiraled downward from there.

His agent Deborah Rogers didn’t much care for
The Jaguar Smile
, but it was rush-published by Sonny Mehta at Picador UK and, soon afterward, by Elisabeth Sifton at Viking USA. On his U.S. book tour a radio talk-show host in San Francisco, displeased by the book’s opposition to the American economic blockade of Nicaragua and the Reagan administration’s support of the
contra
forces fighting to topple the Sandinista government, asked him, “Mr. Rushdie, to what extent are you a Communist stooge?” His surprised laughter—this was on live radio—annoyed his host more than any answer he might have given.

His favorite moments came when he was being interviewed by
Bianca Jagger, herself a Nicaraguan, for
Interview
magazine. Whenever he mentioned a prominent Nicaraguan, whether left- or right-wing, Bianca would reply, vaguely, neutrally, “Oh, yes, I used to date him once.” This was the truth about Nicaragua. It was a small country with a very small elite class. The warring combatants had all gone to school together, were all members of that elite and knew one another’s families, or even, in the case of the divided Chamorro dynasty, came from the same family; and they had all dated one another. Bianca’s (unwritten) version of events would be more interesting—certainly more intimate—than his own.

Once
The Jaguar Smile
had been published he returned to his troublesome novel, and discovered that the problems had largely disappeared. Unusually for him, he had not written the book in narrative sequence. The interpolated passages—the story of the village that walked into the sea, the account of an imam who first led and then ate a revolution, and the subsequently contentious dream sequences set in a city of sand named Jahilia (a name taken from the Arabic term for the period of “ignorance” that preceded the coming of Islam)—had been written first, and for a long time he hadn’t understood exactly how he should stitch them into the book’s main, framing narrative, the story of Saladin and Gibreel. But the break had done him good, and he began to write.