Joseph Anton: A Memoir (31 page)

Soon after this conversation, the
Observer
mysteriously got a scoop, a very accurate account of the arguments over the paperback, slanted in favor of Penguin’s cautious approach. Penguin executives denied collaborating with the newspaper. However, Blake Morrison, who was the paper’s literary editor, told him that the paper had a “source inside Penguin” and believed that the purpose of the piece was to “scupper the paperback.” It seemed that a dirty war had begun.

Peter Mayer, a big, cuddly, tousle-headed bear of a man, famously attractive to women, soft-voiced, doe-eyed, much admired by his fellow publishers, and now caught up in the throes of what had become known as the “Rushdie Affair,” looked increasingly like a rabbit in the headlights. History was rushing at him like a truck, and there were two entirely contradictory discourses at war within him, bringing him to the point of paralysis: the discourse of principle and the discourse of fear. His sense of obligation was unquestionable. “How we responded to the controversy over
The Satanic Verses
would affect the future of free inquiry, without which there would be no publishing as we knew it but also, by extension, no civil society as we knew it,” he told a journalist years later. And when the danger was greatest, the fire at its hottest, he held the line. He received threats against himself and his young daughter. There were letters written in blood. The sniffer dogs and bomb-inspection machinery in the mailroom and the security guards everywhere made the publishing houses in London and New York look like no publishing house had ever looked; like a war zone. There were bomb scares, evacuations of office buildings, menaces and vilifications. And yet there was no retreat. It would come to be remembered as one of the great chapters in the history of publishing, one of the grand principled defenses of liberty, and Mayer would be remembered as the leader of that heroic team.

Almost.

Months of pressure took their toll on Mayer, eroding his will. He began to persuade himself, it seemed, that he had done what he needed to do. The book had been published and kept in print, and he was even willing to guarantee to keep the hardcover in print indefinitely, and the paperback could be issued at some date in the future, some
notional date, when safety had returned. There was no need to do any more for the moment and renew the danger to himself, his family and his staff. He was beginning to have union problems. He worried, he said, about the man standing next to him in the urinals at the warehouse. What would he say to that man’s family if some calamity were to befall his pissing partner? Letters began to fly back and forth between Andrew, Gillon, Mayer and the author of the beleaguered book. In Mayer’s letters it was possible to observe an increasing syntactical convolution that mirrored an apparently knotted inner state. The ceremonial reading aloud of the Mayer letters—in phone calls, or, very occasionally, when they could meet—became a black-comic ritual for Andrew, Gillon and Joseph Anton, a.k.a. Arctic Tern. It was a time when comedy had to be found in dark places.

Mayer was trying to explain why he wanted his lawyer and friend Martin Garbus at the meeting without admitting that he wanted him there for lawyerish, legal reasons: “It is more important for me to meet with you than to insist on any aspect of a meeting for every kind of reason, not the least of which is personal.… I know that sometimes people can get trapped in their own positions and I am not saying that of you in an exclusive sense; I am saying that just as equally about me or ourselves. I thought, as sometimes happens, that if there were to be a bog down (out of anyone’s best intentions) sometimes a sympathetic third person can propose a way forward, having heard both parties speak, advance an idea useful to everyone. It doesn’t always work this way, I know, but the last thing I want to do is to cut ourselves off from such an opportunity, especially when there is someone around as gifted an intermediary as this man is.… For the moment, therefore, I am going to ask Marty to fly to London as, if he isn’t here, there is no way for him to attend.” By this time their laughter had become hysterical and it was difficult to complete the ceremonial reading. “As you can easily spot from the above,” came Mayer’s punch line, “I’m looking forward to seeing you.”

He, the author Peter Mayer was looking forward to seeing, had asked that the paperback be published by the end of 1989, because until publication was complete the tumult about the publication could not die down. Labour MPs like Roy Hattersley and Max Madden had
focused on preventing the paperback publication to appease their Muslim constituents, and this was a further reason to proceed. Peace could not begin to return until the publication cycle had been completed. Nor were there any longer any commercial reasons for delay. The hardcover, having sold well, had all but stopped selling, had disappeared from all English-language bestseller lists, and was no longer stocked by many bookstores because of a lack of demand. In ordinary publishing terms this was the right time to publish a cheap edition.

There were other arguments. Translations of the novel were now being published across Europe, in, for example, France, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Portugal and Germany. Paperback publication in the United Kingdom and the United States would look like a part of this “natural” process, and, as the police had advised, that would in fact be the safest course of action. In Germany, after Kiepenheuer und Witsch had canceled their contract, a consortium of publishers, booksellers and prominent writers and public figures had been formed to publish the novel under the name Artikel 19, and that publication was to go ahead after the Frankfurt Book Fair. If Peter Mayer wished to construct such a consortium to spread the risk, so to speak, then that might be a possible solution. What he mostly wanted to say to Mayer, and did say when the meeting between them finally took place, was this: “You have done the hard part, Peter. With great steadfastness you, together with everyone at Viking Penguin, have jockeyed this publication around a danger-filled course. Please don’t fall at the last fence. If you leap that fence, your legacy will be a glorious one. If you don’t, it will always be flawed.”

The meeting took place. He was smuggled into Alan Yentob’s house in Notting Hill and Andrew, Gillon, Peter Mayer, and Martin Garbus were already there. No agreement was reached. Mayer said he would undertake to “try to convince his people to publish the paperback in the first half of 1990.” He would not give a date. Nothing else remotely constructive was said. Garbus, the “gifted intermediary,” had proved to be a royal pain in the neck, a person of immense self-satisfaction and imperceptible utility. It had been a waste of time.

Much of what Mayer had to say in other letters was not remotely funny. Some of it was insulting. Andrew and Gillon had told him that a new book,
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
, written for ten-year-old Zafar Rushdie as a gift from his dad, was being worked on whenever the author’s unsettled circumstances allowed. Mayer responded that his company was not prepared to consider publishing any new book by Rushdie until a finished text had been examined by them, in case it, too, sparked controversy. Nobody at his company, Mayer said, had known much about the “Koran” when they acquired
The Satanic Verses
. They could not acquire any more work by the author of that novel and then, when the trouble began, admit that they had not read a full manuscript. The author of that novel understood that Mayer had begun to think of him as someone who caused trouble, who was the cause of the trouble that had arisen, and who might cause trouble again.

This view of him went public when Mayer was profiled in
The Independent
. The anonymous profile writer, who had had extensive access to Mayer, wrote: “Mayer, a voracious reader who once said ‘every book has a soul,’ missed the religious time-bomb ticking inside its covers. Rushdie was asked twice, once before Penguin acquired the book and again afterward, what the now notorious Mahound chapter was supposed to mean. He seemed curiously reluctant to explain. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said at one point. ‘It’s not terribly important to the plot.’ ‘My God, this has come back to haunt us,’ a Penguin man said later.”

He called Mayer, who denied that he had anything to do with the newspaper’s insinuations, and did not believe that any other Penguin people had spoken to the journalist. “If you find out who said these things,” he said, “tell me, and I will fire that person.” He had his sources at the newspaper and one of them confirmed that the executive who had spoken off the record was the managing director of Penguin UK, Trevor Glover. He gave this information to Peter Mayer, who said he didn’t believe it. Trevor Glover was not fired, and Mayer still refused to talk about
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
until the book had been read and declared free of time bombs. The relationship between author and publisher was essentially at an end. When an author was convinced that his publishers were briefing the media against him, there was little more to be said.

Bill Buford had nailed down the house in Essex. It was in a village called Little Bardfield. It was expensive, but then everywhere had been expensive. “You’ll like it,” he said. “It’s what you need.” He was the “front man,” renting the place in his name for six months, with the possibility of an extension. The owner had “gone abroad.” It was an
old rectory, an early-nineteenth-century, Grade II–listed, Queen Anne building with modern accents. The police liked it because it had a secluded entrance, which would simplify comings and goings, and because it stood on its own land and was not overlooked. There was a mature garden with large shady trees, and a lawn sloping down to a beautiful pond in which a fake heron stood on one leg. After all the cramped cottages and cooped-up boardinghouses it looked positively palatial. Bill would come down as often as he could, to lend credibility to his “tenancy.” And Essex was far closer to London than Scotland had been, or Powys, or Devon. It would be easier to see Zafar; though the police still refused to bring Zafar to his “location.” He was ten years old and they didn’t trust him not to blurt it out at school. They underestimated him. He was a boy with remarkable gifts of self-control, and he understood that his father’s safety was at issue. In all the years of the protection he was never guilty of an incautious remark.

A comfortable prison was still a prison. In the living room there were old paintings, one of a lady-in-waiting at the court of Elizabeth I, another of a certain Miss Bastard, whom he liked at once. They were windows into another world but he could not escape through them. He did not have in his pocket the key to the house filled with reproduction antique furniture that he was paying a small fortune to rent, and could not walk out the front gate into the village street. He had to write shopping lists that a police officer would take to a supermarket many miles away so as not to arouse suspicion. He had to hide in a locked bathroom each time the cleaner came to the house, or be smuggled off the premises in advance. The tide of shame rose in him each time such things had to be done. Then the cleaning lady quit, saying that “strange men” were at the rectory. This was worrying, of course. Once again it was proving harder to explain the police’s presence than to conceal his. After the cleaner’s exit they dusted and vacuumed the house themselves. The police cleaned their own rooms and he cleaned his part of the house. He preferred this to the alternative.