Joseph Anton: A Memoir (38 page)

He stopped smoking. Then he started again.

In the next days Iran denied it could lift the
fatwa
. Khamenei said that he “must be handed over to British Muslims to be killed for committing blasphemy” and that would solve the problems between the United Kingdom and Iran. Frances D’Souza went on the BBC program
Newsnight
and was confronted by the spectacle of Siddiqui’s “number two,” a Scottish convert called James Dickie, who had taken the name of Yaqub Zaki, welcoming hit squads to London. Rafsanjani gave a press conference in which he tried to lower the temperature, but offered no solutions to the
fatwa
crisis. And for the first time the British government offered him a contact man. He was to meet Duncan Slater, a senior Foreign Office type, over the weekend. In the meantime he spoke to the journalist John Bulloch,
The Independent
’s highly respected Middle East expert, who had recently returned from Tehran and confirmed that the Iranians were “desperate to settle issues … an
acceptable settlement is what’s needed.” After that the meeting with Slater was a letdown. Slater had no news of any back-channel initiatives, or any government activity to speak of. But it felt good to be in touch with the government and to be assured of its continued support. He had reached the point at which he was grateful for such crumbs.

The Afrasiabi initiative was dead. The Harvard man had written a letter changing the “shopping list” of demands. Publication should be totally suspended for twelve to fifteen months, and “Rushdie should simply go ahead and make his statement first; what does he have to lose?” Also, Andrew said, “I’m afraid he wants to be a novelist and is looking for an agent.” A week later Kamal Kharrazi, Iran’s man at the United Nations, told Mike Wallace: “It is not the time for this initiative to go forward.” Another back channel closed.

He had another meeting with Ambassador Busby, who was accompanied, on this occasion, by Bill Baker of the FBI. They asked him for a few more months’ grace before he made any visit to the United States, but remained cordial and sympathetic. Busby had a useful view on the Afrasiabi effort. “Maybe,” he said, “the intermediary was wrong for them.”

He gave Zafar an electric guitar for his eleventh birthday and spent the afternoon with him at Hermitage Lane, listening to him play it and recording his efforts. Just another ordinary day with the most important human being in his life.

Cosima had found a large, detached house in Wimbledon, much more comfortable than Hermitage Lane: an ample three-story brick home with an octagonal tower on its southern side. The police had looked at it and approved. Hermitage Lane was an awful place but it had given him seven stable months. Now it was time to prepare to move again.

The contract for
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
had not been signed by the publisher. Andrew went to meet Sonny Mehta and Alberto Vitale to ask the reason why. Before the meeting Sonny said to Andrew, “I
don’t think there’s a problem,” so clearly there was one. At the meeting, Vitale said he didn’t want the contract signed “for insurance reasons.” They were negotiating to buy their building and they didn’t want this book to become an issue. They were willing to pay two-thirds of the agreed advance to acquire an “option to publish,” and would hand over the final third after the author had discussed “editorial issues” with Sonny. “The author should sign,” Vitale said, “but we will wait.” Andrew called him to give him the news. “No,” he said, outraged. “Cancel the deal and tell them I’ll sue them for breach of contract. I’d rather go unpublished than be humiliated.” Later that afternoon Andrew met with Vitale and Sonny again and they capitulated. Yes, they said, they would sign. He was left with a bitter taste in his mouth, but at least he had won a round.

On his forty-third birthday Gillon brought him the contract to be signed. It contained a “confidentiality clause.” He was not to tell anyone about the deal until a later date to be agreed upon with Random House. This clause gave off the unmistakable scent of rat. He signed the contract. Almost at once the rat came out into the open. Sonny Mehta refused to publish
Haroun
unless it was rewritten to his specifications.

He had known Sonny Mehta for ten years, ever since Sonny had published the UK paperback of
Midnight’s Children
at Picador Books in London. For all that time he had thought of him as a friend, even though Sonny’s famous reserve made him a difficult man to feel close to. Sonny was a man of very few words and even fewer phone calls, given to smiling enigmatically behind his goatee and leaving the talking and socializing to his flamboyant wife, Gita, but he was a man of taste, integrity, deep loyalty to his authors, and elegance (high-quality blazers worn with drainpipe jeans). In the matter of
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
, however, he behaved like a different person entirely. On June 26, 1990, he called Andrew to insist that
Haroun
must be rewritten to change the setting. The “Valley of K,” he said, was obviously Kashmir, and Kashmir was a highly contentious place, wars had been fought over it, and Islamic jihadists were active there; so clearly that had to go—maybe, he proposed, the story could be set in Mongolia?—or there would be “bodies everywhere,” and “Salman will be in worse
trouble than he is now.”
Haroun
, he assured Andrew, was a more dangerous and provocative work than
The Satanic Verses
.

He tried to look at his children’s fable through that distorted lens. But even with that warped vision the book could surely only be read as “pro-Kashmiri”? The character of “Snooty Buttoo,” however, was a satirical portrait of an Indian politician and maybe that was what Sonny, who came from a high diplomatic family and whose wife was the daughter of the chief minister of Orissa, and who moved in Delhi’s elite political circles, really objected to? And if Sonny was so scared of a children’s book, how would he react to the adult fiction he might be offered in the future?

There was worse to come. Sonny’s plan was to go through the entire production process without putting the author’s name on the book. Alberto Vitale had bizarrely insisted on secrecy because one of Random House’s tenants was the Norwegian consulate, and to announce the publication of a Rushdie novel would make things too dangerous for the Norwegians. A false name would therefore be used and the real name substituted at the last minute, as the book was going to be printed. That was terrible. It looked like frightened behavior—it
was
frightened behavior—and when it leaked, as it would almost certainly leak, that Random House was too scared to name the author of this book, it would give the book a “controversial” aura before anyone had even seen it, and act as a clear invitation to the author’s adversaries to start another fight.

Sonny messengered clippings about Kashmir, taken from Indian magazines and newspapers, to Andrew’s office to illustrate his concern. There were characters in
Haroun
called Butt and a man called Butt had been hanged in Kashmir recently, “as Salman must have known.” So now this “Butt,” which had been his mother’s maiden name; and which, spelled as “Butt” or “Bhatt,” was the most common of Kashmiri names; and which, in
Haroun
, was not the name of a hanged man but of a genial bus driver and then of a giant mechanical hoopoe, had become a politically explosive name? It was absurd, but Sonny was in deadly earnest. Andrew suggested to him that he was not exactly behaving as Salman’s old friend and he retorted, “I don’t see what this has to do with friendship.” Then he added, “Andrew, nobody
on earth understands this book as well as I do.” Andrew answered, with commendable restraint, “I think Salman believes that he does.”

All this Andrew relayed to him from New York while standing in the street after leaving Sonny’s office. He told Andrew, “Please go back upstairs and put me on the phone with him.” Sonny got on the line and said he was “sure” their disagreements could be sorted out, if he could just fly to London to discuss them. But things had gone too far for that.

“What I need you to answer, Sonny,” he said, “is, will you publish my novel as I have written it—yes or no?”

“Let me come and talk to you about it,” Sonny repeated.

“There’s nothing to talk about,” he told Sonny. “Will you publish it as written, that’s the only question.”

“No,” said Sonny, “I will not.”

“Then,” he told his old friend, “please tear up that contract you have in front of you on your desk.”

“Okay,” Sonny said, “if that’s what you want, Salman.”

“It’s not what I want,” he said. “I want someone to publish
my
book, not some damn book you’ve got in your head.”

“Okay,” he said, “then we’ll tear it up.”

He learned that there had been a Random House UK board meeting some time previously and the possible publication of
Haroun
had been on the agenda. The vote had gone heavily against him.

In another universe, it was time for the World Cup. Bill Buford, who for some time had been writing a book about soccer hooligans, flew to Sardinia for the England-Holland match, not for the soccer but because the battles after the game between the rival gangs of thugs would be too good to miss. That night on the main British evening news the violence in Sardinia was the lead item. An army of British hoodlums was seen advancing on the camera position, brandishing fists and clubs and chanting “England!” In the very center of the first line of British thugs, yelling and chanting with the rest of them, was the editor of
Granta
magazine, taking the participatory techniques of the New Journalism
to a level that George Plimpton and Tom Wolfe had perhaps not envisaged. Later that night the Italian police had attacked the British “fans” and many of them were badly beaten, including Bill, who was kicked repeatedly in the kidneys while curled up in a fetal ball on the sidewalk. In spite of his injuries, he dedicated himself, on his return to London, to rescuing his friend’s literary career.

Haroun
was looking for a publisher. Liz Calder said that Bloomsbury would not wish to compete for it. Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson, who had just launched his own small, independent house, said that his operation was “too fledgling” to take this on. Christopher MacLehose at Harvill was prevented from bidding by Murdoch’s HarperCollins, Harvill’s majority shareholder. Faber and Faber was a possibility. But it was Bill who wanted it most, for
Granta
magazine’s new imprint, Granta Books. “You need someone who will publish you absolutely normally, with all the excitement and pizzazz that a new book from you deserves,” he said. “You need to be presented to readers as a writer all over again, and that’s what I want to do for you with this book.” Until the possibility of publishing
Haroun
arose Bill had been suggesting to him that Blake Morrison be allowed to write his authorized biography, to allow readers to get to know the man, rather than the scandal. Blake was an excellent writer and would do a fine job, he knew that; but he didn’t want his private life exposed. And if the time came when the story was ready to be told, he wanted to be the one to do it.
One day
, he told Bill,
it’s going to be me
.

Now the biography idea was forgotten. Bill was begging Gillon to be allowed to do
Haroun
. His enthusiasm was gratifying, and persuasive. Granta Books were distributed by Penguin. This, Gillon said, could be an “elegant solution.” A breach with Penguin, which could lead to damaging publicity, would be avoided, and yet the Penguin people would not be too directly involved. All of a sudden everyone at Viking Penguin got excited about this. They, too, liked the face-saving aspect. Bill said that the Penguin sales reps’ response had been “very positive.” Peter Mayer wrote a letter hoping this could be a fresh start and he replied that he, too, hoped it might be. Everyone in the UK office wanted to publish quickly, in September, to be able to benefit from Christmas sales, and Penguin USA agreed. The deal was done
and announced almost as soon as it was proposed. The speed was important. If Sonny had had time to explain to his many friends in publishing that he had refused to publish
Haroun
because its author had once again submitted a time bomb without coming clean about its dangers, then that author’s ability to publish books would have disappeared forever. Bill Buford, by his courage and determination, had prevented that from happening.

Gita Mehta told a mutual friend, “I think he’s a bit off us at the moment.”

He missed Marianne. He knew he must not try to go back to her after everything that had happened, after the CIA plot and the black journal, but, mind and body, he missed her. When they spoke on the phone they fought. Conversations that began I wish you well ended with I hope you die. But love, whatever he meant by love, whatever she meant by it, the word “love” still hung in the air between them. His mother had survived decades of marriage to his angry, disappointed, alcoholic father by developing what she called a “forgettery” instead of a memory. She woke up every day and forgot the day before. He, too, seemed to lack a memory for trouble, and woke up remembering only what he yearned for. But he did not act upon his yearning. She had left for America and that was for the best.

He knew that somewhere beneath the constant pressure of events he was deeply depressed and his reactions to the world had grown abnormal.
Pray do not mock me
, as Lear said.
I fear I am not in my perfect mind
. Perhaps he saw in her the physical reality of his old life, the
ordinary
that this present
extraordinary
had usurped. Perhaps this what remained of their love. It was the love of the vanished yesterday, the day-after yearning for the day before.

He was aware that the splitting in him was getting worse, the divide between what “Rushdie” needed to do and how “Salman” wanted to live. He was “Joe” to his protectors, an entity to be kept alive; and in his friends’ eyes, when he was able to see them, he read their alarm, their fear that “Salman” might be crushed under the weight of what had happened. “Rushdie” was another matter entirely.
“Rushdie” was a dog. “Rushdie,” according to the private comments of many eminent persons, including the Prince of Wales, who made these comments over lunch to his friends Martin Amis and Clive James, deserved little sympathy. “Rushdie” deserved everything he got, and needed to do something to undo the great harm that he had done. “Rushdie” needed to stop insisting on paperbacks and principles and literature and being in the right. “Rushdie” was much hated and little loved. He was an effigy, an absence, something less than human. He—it—needed only to expiate.