Joseph Anton: A Memoir (15 page)

I
N THE SMALL HOURS OF
F
EBRUARY
15, 1989,
HE LAY UNQUIET IN BED
beside his sleeping wife. In the morning he would be visited by a senior officer from “A” Squad of the Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police, which was in charge of all personal protection in the United
Kingdom (except for the protection of the royal family, which was the job of the Royal Protection Squad). The Special Branch had originally been the Special Irish Branch, created, in 1883, to combat the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and until recently the main threats against which it protected individuals—the prime minister, the defense secretary, the foreign secretary, the Northern Ireland secretary, and various outspoken members of Parliament—came from the Brotherhood’s descendants, the Provisional IRA. But terrorism had diversified and its opponents had to take on new enemies. Jewish community leaders required protection from time to time after receiving credible Islamist threats. And now there was this novelist, too, lying insomniac in the dark in Lonsdale Square. A mullah with a long arm was reaching out across the world to squeeze the life out of him. That was a police matter.

The man from the Branch would be accompanied by an intelligence officer and they would tell him what security decisions had been made concerning the threat.
Threat
was a technical term, and it was not the same as
risk
. The
threat level
was general, but
risk levels
were specific. The level of threat against an individual might be high—and it was for the intelligence services to determine this—but the level of risk attached to a particular action by that individual might be much lower, for example if nobody knew what he was planning to do, or when. Risk assessment was the job of the police protection team. These were concepts he would have to master, because threat and risk assessments would, from now on, shape his daily life. In the meanwhile he was thinking about the island of Mauritius.

Ten days after he delivered
The Satanic Verses
, Marianne finished her new novel,
John Dollar
, a novel involving cannibalism among characters marooned on a desert island that she insisted—unwisely, to his mind—on calling “a feminist
Lord of the Flies
.” On the night of the 1988 Booker Prize dinner, when
The Satanic Verses
finished runner-up to Peter Carey’s
Oscar and Lucinda
, she even described it in these words to William Golding himself. This was most definitely unwise. Two days after she delivered her book they flew, along with Marianne’s daughter Lara Porzak, a junior at Dartmouth and a budding photographer, to Mauritius on vacation. It was not a desert island, fortunately,
so there was no “long pork” on the menu. It was his first ever experience of an “island paradise” holiday, and he was ready for a little lazy hedonism; the novel had drained him more completely than anything he had written before. While they were on the beach, Andrew Wylie in New York and Gillon Aitken in London sent out copies of
The Satanic Verses
and the wheels of the publishing business began to turn. He swam in water so warm that when you walked into it there was no alteration in temperature, and watched tropical sunsets, and drank drinks with fruit and umbrellas in them, and dined on the delicious local fish called
sacréchien
, and thought about Sonny Mehta at Knopf, Peter Mayer at Viking, and editors at Doubleday, Collins and elsewhere reading his big, strange book. He had brought a sack of books to read or re-read to take his mind off the forthcoming auction. He was considerably anxious to know its outcome, but during those idyllic days lapped by the Indian Ocean it was impossible to believe that anything might go wrong.

He should have paid attention to the birds. The dead flightless birds who had been unable to soar away from their predators, who tore them apart. Mauritius was the world capital, the extermination camp and mass graveyard, of extinct flightless birds.

“L’île Maurice,” unusually for an island of its size, until the seventeenth century had no human population at all. However, forty-five species of bird had lived there, many of them unable to leave the ground, including the red rail, the solitaire, and the dodo. Then came the Dutch, who stayed there only from 1638 to 1710, but by the time they left all the dodoes were dead, slaughtered, for the most part, by the settlers’ dogs. In all, twenty-four of the island’s forty-five bird species were driven into extinction, as well as the previously plentiful tortoises and other creatures. There was a skeleton of a dodo in the museum in Port Louis. Its flesh had been revolting to human beings, but the dogs had been less picky. The dogs saw a helpless creature and ripped it to bits. They were trained hunting dogs, after all. They were unfamiliar with mercy.

The Dutch, and the French colonists who followed them, both imported African slaves to cultivate sugarcane. These slaves were not treated kindly. Punishments included amputations and executions. The
British conquered Mauritius in 1810 and in 1835 slavery was abolished. Almost all the slaves immediately fled the island on which they had been so cruelly used. To replace them the British shipped in a new population of indentured laborers from India. Most of the Indians living in Mauritius in 1988 had never seen India, but many still spoke an Indian dialect, Bhojpuri, which in a century and a half had undergone some local creolization but was still recognizable, and they were still Hindus and Muslims. To meet an Indian from India, an Indian who had walked real Indian streets and eaten real Indian pomfret instead of Mauritian
sacréchien
, who had been warmed by the Indian sun and drenched by the monsoon rains and who had gone swimming off the Indian coast in the actual Arabian Sea, was a kind of miracle. He was a visitor from an antique and mythic land, and they opened their homes to him. One of Mauritius’s leading Hindi-language poets, who had in fact recently been to India for the first time in his life to attend a poetry congress, told him that his reading had mystified Indian audiences, because he read to convey meaning, in the manner that was “normal” to him, instead of declaiming his lines rhythmically, in the habitual fashion of Indian Hindi poets. It was a small cultural shift in “normality,” a minor side effect of the migration of his indentured forebears, but it had had a profound impact on the distinguished poet, showing him that for all his mastery of India’s largest language, he could not truly belong. The émigré Indian author to whom this story was told understood that belonging was a big, uneasy subject for them both. They had to answer questions that immobile one-place one-language one-culture writers did not, and they had to satisfy themselves that their answers were true. Who were they, and to what and whom did they belong? Or was the idea of belonging itself a trap, a cage from which they had been lucky enough to escape? He had concluded that the questions needed to be rephrased. The questions he knew how to answer were not about place or roots, but about love.
Who do you love? What can you leave behind, and what do you need to hold on to? Where does your heart feel full?

Once, at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, at a dinner for the many Indian writers invited that year, he was told, apropos of nothing, by the Indian novelist Githa Hariharan, “Of course, your position in Indian literature is highly problematic.” He was shocked and slightly
hurt. “Really?” he replied, sounding foolish. “Oh, yes,” she said emphatically.
“Highly.”

On the beach outside their hotel he met a small, slightly built man in a natty straw hat, selling tourist trinkets with unusual fervor. “Hello, sir, buy something, sir,” the man said, smiling a huge smile, and adding, “My name is Body Building.” It was as though Mickey Mouse had introduced himself as “Arnold Schwarzenegger.” He shook his head. “No, it isn’t,” he said, and then switched into Hindi. “You must have an Indian name.” The effect of the language was dramatic. “You are proper Indian, sir?” Body Building asked, also in Hindi. “From India proper?” In three days’ time it would be Holi, the spring festival of colors, when all over India—and, apparently, in Mauritius too—people “played Holi,” that is, drenched one another with colored water and threw colored powders at one another. “You must play Holi at my house,” Body Building insisted, and the delighted laughter of the Holi players offered some release of the growing tension between himself and his companions. It was a good day in the five-week-old marriage that was already showing signs of strain. There were electric sparks crackling between Marianne and Lara, and himself and Lara, and himself and Marianne. The warm Indian Ocean could not wash that fact away, nor could the bright colors of Holi conceal it. “I’m in your shadow,” Marianne said to him, and he saw the resentment on her face. Andrew Wylie and Gillon Aitken were her agents too. He had introduced her and they had taken her on. But now
The Satanic Verses
was being sold and her novel had to wait in line.

When they got back from the festivities, soaking wet and colored pink and green, there was a message from Andrew waiting for him. He called New York from the hotel bar. Celebratory sunset colors exploded across the sky. The bids were in. They were high, almost shockingly high, to his mind, more than ten times higher than his previous highest advance. But the big money came at a price. Two good friendships had been seriously damaged.

Liz Calder, his first and only editor and his close friend for fifteen years, had resigned from Jonathan Cape earlier that year to become one of the founders of the new Bloomsbury publishing house. Because
of their friendship there was an assumption that he would follow her. At that time Andrew Wylie represented him only in the United States; his British agent was still the highly respected Deborah Rogers, also a close friend of Calder’s. Deborah quickly agreed with Liz that “the new Rushdie” would go to Bloomsbury for a modest fee, as the new publishing house couldn’t afford high advances. It was the kind of sweetheart deal that was common in British publishing, and he didn’t like it. Andrew Wylie told him that if he accepted a low figure in the United Kingdom it would ruin the book’s prospects in the United States. After much hesitation he agreed to allow Andrew, and his British counterpart, Gillon Aitken, to represent him worldwide. The sweetheart deal was canceled, Liz and Deborah were both deeply hurt, and the auction followed. It occurred to him to point out to Liz that, in fact,
she
had been the one who had left
him
by leaving Cape and going to Bloomsbury, but she wasn’t inclined to listen to such arguments. There wasn’t much to say to Deb. She was no longer his agent. There was no way to sugar-coat that pill.

Friendship had always been of great importance to him. He had spent much of his life physically distant from his family and also emotionally distant from much of it. Friends were the family one chose. Goethe used the scientific term
elective affinities
to propose that the connections of love, marriage and friendship between human beings were similar to chemical reactions. People were drawn to one another chemically to form stable compounds—marriages—or, when exposed to other influences, they fell apart from one another; one part of the compound was displaced by a new element and, perhaps, a new compound was formed. He himself didn’t much like the use of chemistry as metaphor. It felt too determinist and left too little room for the action of human will.
Elective
to him meant
chosen
, not by one’s unconscious biochemical nature but by one’s conscious self. His love of his chosen friends, and of those who had chosen him, had sustained and nourished him; and the wounds his actions had inflicted, even though they were justifiable in business terms, felt humanly wrong.

He had met Liz through Clarissa’s closest friend, Rosanne Edge-Partington, in the early seventies. Clarissa’s mother, Lavinia, had recently emigrated to the village of Mijas in the south of Spain, General
Franco’s favorite Andalusian beauty spot, a magnet for ultraconservative expatriates from all over Europe, and, eventually, the model for the fictional but not dissimilar village of Benengeli in
The Moor’s Last Sigh
. She sold her large house at 35 Lower Belgrave Street to the actors Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson, who later sold it—strangely enough—to the wife of the dictator of Nicaragua, Hope Somoza; but Lavinia kept the smaller maisonette, No. 37a, which had originally been attached to the main house, for her daughter to live in. Clarissa and he lived there for three and a half years until they bought the house at 19 Raveley Street in Kentish Town in north London, where he wrote
Midnight’s Children
, dreaming of heat-hazy Indian horizons while looking out at leaden English skies; and for most of those three and a half years Liz Calder was their lodger. Her then boyfriend Jason Spender was pursuing a doctorate at Manchester University while she worked in the publicity department at the publishers Victor Gollancz in London, and she was commuting between Manchester and London, spending three or four days a week in the office and the rest up north.

She was a gorgeous woman and one of the jobs she gave him was that when men drove her home from various book-world events, as men often did, he had to stay up and chat to them cheerfully until they went home. “Don’t ever leave me alone with them,” she ordered him, as if she were not perfectly able to handle whatever a man might try on her. One of these night visitors was the writer Roald Dahl, a long, unpleasant man with huge strangler’s hands, who gave him hate-filled looks that made him determined not to budge an inch. Finally Dahl stormed off into the night, barely saying goodnight, even to Liz. Another of her gentlemen callers was the
New Statesman
magazine’s film critic John Coleman, supposedly a reformed alcoholic, who opened his briefcase, took out a couple of seriously alcoholic bottles and announced, “These are for me.” Coleman stayed so late that in the end he betrayed her trust and went to bed, with Liz looking daggers at him as he went. The next morning she revealed that Coleman had torn all his clothes off in the living room and cried, “Take me, I’m yours.” She had gently made the eminent critic dress again and had shown him to the door.