Joseph Anton: A Memoir (32 page)

In those years he became aware that people imagined him living in some sort of isolation ward, or inside a giant safe with a peephole
through which his protectors watched him, alone, always alone; in that solitary confinement, people asked themselves, would not this most gregarious of writers inevitably lose his grip on reality, his literary talent, his sanity? The truth was that he was less alone now than he had ever been. Like all writers he was familiar with solitude, used to spending several hours a day by himself. The people he had lived with had grown accustomed to his need for such silence. But now he was living with four enormous armed men, men unused to inactivity, the polar opposites of bookish, indoorsy types. They clattered and banged and laughed loud laughs and the thump of their presence in his vicinity was hard to ignore. He shut doors inside the house; they left them open. He retreated; they advanced. It wasn’t their fault. They assumed he would like, and need, a little company. So isolation was the thing he had to work hardest to re-create around himself, so that he could hear himself think, so he could work.

The protection teams kept changing and each officer had his own style. There was a fellow named Phil Pitt, a giant of a man who was a crazy gun enthusiast and, even by Branch standards, an ace sharpshooter, which would be valuable in a firefight but was a little terrifying to live with in a vicarage. His nickname in the Branch was “Rambo.” There was Dick Billington, the polar opposite of Phil, bespectacled, with a sweet shy smile. Now that was the country parson you expected to find in a vicarage, but this one carried a gun. And there were the Only Fucking Drivers too. They sat in their wing of the Essex house and cooked sausages and played cards and were bored out of their minds. “My friends are really the ones protecting me,” he once said to Dick Billington and Phil Pitt in a moment of frustration, “lending me their homes, renting places for me, keeping my secrets. And I’m doing the dirty work of hiding in bathrooms and so on.” Dick Billington looked sheepish when he said things like this while Phil Pitt fumed; not a man of words was Phil, and given his size and his love of the firearm it was probably a bad idea to make him fume. They explained tolerantly that their line of work looked like inaction, but that was because the advent of action would be proof that they had made a bad mistake. Security was the art of making nothing happen. The experienced security officer accepted boredom as a part of the
job. Boredom was good. You didn’t want things to get interesting. Interesting was dangerous. The whole point was to keep everything dull.

They took great pride in their work. Many of them said to him, always using the same words, which were clearly an “A” Squad mantra: “We’ve never lost anyone.” It was a comforting mantra and he often repeated it to himself. The impressive fact was that nobody who had been under “A” Squad’s protection had ever been hit, in the long history of the Special Branch. “The Americans can’t say that.” They disliked the American way of doing things. “They like to throw bodies at the problem,” they said, meaning that an American security detail was usually very large indeed, dozens of people or more. Every time an American dignitary visited the United Kingdom, the security forces of the two countries had the same arguments about methodology. “We could take the queen in an unmarked Ford Cortina down Oxford Street in the rush hour and nobody would know she was there,” they said. “With the Yanks it’s all bells and whistles. But they lost one president, didn’t they? And nearly lost another.” Each country, he would discover, had its own way of doing things, its own “culture of protection.” In the years to come he would experience not only the manpower-heavy American system, but the scary behavior of the French RAID. RAID was “Recherche Assistance Intervention Dissuasion.”
Dissuasion
, as a description of how the RAID boys went about their work, seemed like one of the great understatements. Their Italian cousins liked to drive at high speed through urban traffic with Klaxon horns blaring and guns sticking out of the windows. All things considered, he was happy to have Phil and Dick and the softly-softly approach.

They weren’t perfect. There were mistakes. There was the time he was taken to Hanif Kureishi’s house. At the end of his evening with Hanif he was about to be driven away when his friend sprinted out into the street, looking very pleased with himself, and waving a large handgun in its leather holster above his head. “Oy,” Hanif shouted, delightedly. “Hang on a minute. You forgot your shooter.”

He began to write.
A sad city, the saddest of cities, a city so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name
. He too was a man who had lost his name. He knew how the sad city felt. “At last!” he wrote in his journal in early October, and, a few days later, “Completed Chapter One!” When he had written thirty or forty pages he showed them to Zafar to make sure he was on the right track. “Thanks,” Zafar said. “I like it, Dad.” He detected something a little less than wild enthusiasm in his son’s voice. “Really?” he probed. “You’re sure?” “Yes,” said Zafar and then, after a pause, “Some people might be bored.”
“Bored?”
This was a cry of anguish and Zafar tried to mollify him. “No, I’d read it, of course, Dad. I’m just saying that
some
people
might
 …” “Why bored?” he demanded. “What’s the boring bit?” “It’s just,” Zafar said, “that it doesn’t have enough jump in it.” This was an astonishingly precise critique. He understood it immediately. “Jump?” he said. “I can do jump. Give me that back.” And he almost snatched the typescript out of his worried son’s hands, and then had to reassure him, no, he wasn’t annoyed, in fact this was very helpful, it might, in fact, be the best piece of editorial advice he had ever received. Several weeks later he gave Zafar the rewritten early chapters and asked, “How is it now?” The boy beamed happily. “Now it’s fine,” he said.

Herbert Read (1893–1968) was an English art critic—a champion of Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth—and a poet of the First World War, an existentialist and an anarchist. For many years the Institute of Contemporary Arts on the Mall in London held an annual memorial lecture bearing Read’s name. In the autumn of 1989 the ICA sent a letter to Gillon’s office asking if Salman Rushdie might be willing to deliver the 1990 lecture.

Mail did not reach him easily. It was collected from the agency and the publishers by the police, put through tests for explosives, and opened. Even though he was always assured that no mail was withheld from him, the relatively small number of abusive letters he received suggested to him that some filtering process had been put in place. There was concern at the Yard over his state of mind—Could he take the pressure? Was he about to crack up completely?—and no doubt it
was thought best to spare him the literary onslaught of the faithful. The letter from the ICA made it through the net, and he replied, accepting the invitation. He knew at once that he wanted to write about iconoclasm, to say that in an open society no ideas or beliefs could be ring-fenced and given immunity from challenges of all sorts, philosophical, satirical, profound, superficial, gleeful, irreverent, or smart. All liberty required was that the space for discourse itself be protected. Liberty lay in the argument itself, not the resolution of that argument, in the ability to quarrel, even with the most cherished beliefs of others; a free society was not placid but turbulent. The bazaar of conflicting views was the place where freedom rang. This would evolve into the lecture-essay “Is Nothing Sacred?,” and that lecture, once it had been scheduled and announced, would lead to his first serious confrontation with the British police. The invisible man was trying to become visible again, and Scotland Yard didn’t like it.

He had begun work on another long essay. For the best part of a year he had not only been invisible but for the most part dumb as well, composing unsent letters in his head, publishing only a few book reviews and one short poem whose publication in
Granta
had displeased not only the Bradford Council of Mosques but, according to Peter Mayer, the staff of Viking Penguin too, some of whom were apparently beginning to believe, like Mr. Shabbir Akhtar, that he should be “removed from public knowledge.” Now he would have his say. He spoke to Andrew and Gillon. It would inevitably be a long essay and he needed to know what sort of maximum length would be acceptable to the press. Their view was that the press would publish whatever he wanted to write. They agreed that the best time for such a piece to appear would be on or around the first anniversary of the
fatwa
. It
would obviously be important for the context of the essay to be right, so the choice of publication would be crucial. Gillon and Andrew began to make inquiries. He began to think about the essay that would become “In Good Faith,” a seven-thousand-word defense of his work, and in thinking about it he made one crucial mistake.

He had fallen into the trap of thinking that his work had been attacked because it had been misrepresented by unscrupulous persons seeking political advantage, and that his own integrity had been impugned for the same reason. If he were a person of base morals, and his work lacking in quality, then it was unnecessary to engage with it intellectually. But, he convinced himself, if he could just show that the work had been seriously undertaken, and that it could honorably be defended, then people—Muslims—would change their minds about it, and about him. In other words, he wanted to be popular. The unpopular boy from boarding school wanted to be able to say, “Look, everyone, you’ve made a mistake about my book, and about me. It’s not an evil book, and I’m a good person. Read this essay and you’ll see.” This was folly. And yet, in his isolation, he convinced himself that it was achievable. Words had got him into this mess, and words would get him out of it.

The heroes of Greek and Roman antiquity, Odysseus, Jason, and Aeneas, were all sooner or later obliged to sail their ships between the two sea monsters, Scylla and Charybdis, knowing that to fall into the clutches of either would lead to utter destruction. He told himself firmly that in whatever he wrote, fiction or nonfiction, he needed to sail between his personal Scylla and Charybdis, the monsters of fear and revenge. If he wrote timid, frightened things, or angry, vengeful things, his art would be mangled beyond hope of repair. He would become a creature of the
fatwa
and nothing more. To survive he needed to set aside rage and terror, hard though such setting might be, and to try to go on being the writer he had always tried to be, to continue down the road he had defined for himself as his own. To do that would be success. To do otherwise would be dismal failure. This, he knew.