Joseph Anton: A Memoir (8 page)

Dusty Hughes got a job writing advertising copy at the J. Walter Thompson agency in Berkeley Square. Suddenly he had a comfortable salary, and was making shampoo commercials with beautiful blond models. “You should do this,” Dusty told him. “It’s easy.” He took the J. Walter Thompson “copy test,” done under exam conditions at the agency offices, wrote an ad for After Eight chocolates and a jingle promoting the use of seat belts in cars, to the tune of Chuck Berry’s “No Particular Place to Go,” and tried, as requested, to tell a visitor from
Mars in fewer than one hundred words what bread was, and how to make a piece of toast; and failed. In the opinion of the mighty JWT, he didn’t have what it took to make it as a writer. In the end he got a job at a smaller, less distinguished agency called Sharp MacManus on Albemarle Street, and his working life began. On his first day he was asked to write an ad for a coupon-clipping magazine selling cigars packaged, for Christmas, inside red crackers. His mind was a blank. At last the kindly “creative director,” Oliver Knox, who afterward became a well-praised novelist, leaned over his shoulder and murmured, “Five cracking ideas from
Players
to help Christmas go with a bang.”
Oh
, he thought, feeling foolish,
so that’s how
.

He shared an office at Sharps with a great dark-haired beauty, Fay Coventry, who was dating Tom Maschler, the publisher at Jonathan Cape. Every Monday she would tell him stories about their weekends with their amusing friends, “Arnold” (Wesker) and “Harold” (Pinter) and “John” (Fowles). How delightful these stories were; what fun they all had! Envy, resentment, longing and despair tumbled over one another in the young copywriter’s heart. There it was, the world of literature, so close to him, so horribly far away. When Fay left to marry Maschler and, later, to become a respected restaurant critic, he felt almost relieved that the literary world, into which she had given him such tantalizing glimpses, had moved further away again.

He had left university in June 1968.
Midnight’s Children
was published in April 1981. It took him almost thirteen years just to begin. During that time he wrote unbearable amounts of garbage. There was a novel, “The Book of the Peer,” that might have been good if he had known how to write it. It was the story of a holy man, a
pir
or
peer
, in a country like Pakistan, who was used by three other men, a military leader, a political leader, and a capitalist, to lead a coup after which, they believed, he would be the figurehead while they wielded the power. But he proved more capable and ruthless than his backers and they realized they had unleashed a monster they could not control. This was many years before the Ayatollah Khomeini ate the revolution whose figurehead he was supposed to be. If the novel had been written plainly, as a political thriller, it might have served; instead the story was told in several different characters’ “streams of consciousness,” and was
more or less incomprehensible. Nobody liked it. It came nowhere near publication. It was a stillbirth.

There was much worse to come. The BBC announced a competition to find a new television playwright and he entered a play featuring the two criminals crucified with Christ, talking to each other before the great man gets to Golgotha, in the manner of Beckett’s tramps Didi and Gogo. The play was called (of course) “Crosstalk.” It was deeply foolish. It did not win the competition. After that there was another novel-length text, “The Antagonist,” so bad, in a sub-Pynchon kind of manner, that he never showed it to anyone. Advertising kept him going. He didn’t dare to call himself a novelist. He was a copywriter who, like all copywriters, dreamed of being a “real” writer. He knew, however, that he was still unreal.

It was curious that so avowedly godless a person should keep trying to write about faith. Belief had left him but the subject remained, nagging at his imagination. The structures and metaphors of religion (Hinduism and Christianity as much as Islam) shaped his irreligious mind, and the concerns of these religions with the great questions of existence—Where do we come from? And now that we are here, how shall we live?—were also his, even if he came to conclusions that required no divine arbiter to underwrite and certainly no earthly priest class to sanction and interpret. His first published novel,
Grimus
, was published by Liz Calder at Victor Gollancz, before she moved to Cape. It was based on the
Mantiq ut-Tair
, or
Conference of the Birds
, a mystical narrative poem by the John Bunyan of Islam, the twelfth-century Sufi Muslim Farid ud-din Attar, born in Nishapur in present-day Iran four years after the death of that town’s more celebrated local son, Omar Khayyam. In the poem—a sort of Muslim
Pilgrim’s Progress
—a hoopoe led thirty birds on a journey through seven valleys of travail and revelation toward the circular mountain of Qâf, home of their god the Simurg. When they reached the mountaintop there was no god there and it was explained to them that the name “Simurg,” if broken down into its syllables
si
and
murg
, means “thirty birds.” Having overcome the travails of the quest they had become the god they sought.

“Grimus” was an anagram of “Simurg.” In his science-fantasy retelling of Attar’s tale an “American Indian” crudely named Flapping
Eagle searches for the mysterious Calf Island. The novel was met for the most part with dismissive notices, some of which bordered on the contemptuous, and its reception shook him profoundly. Fighting off despair, he quickly wrote a short—novella length—satirical fiction in which the career of the prime minister of India, Mrs. Indira Gandhi, was transposed into the world of the Bombay film industry. (Philip Roth’s satire about Richard M. Nixon,
Our Gang
, was a distant model.) The book’s vulgarity—at one point the Indira character, a powerful movie star, grows her dead father’s penis—meant that it was rejected as swiftly as it had been written. This was the bottom of the barrel.

The sixth valley through which the thirty birds journeyed in Attar’s poem was the place of bewilderment, in which they came to feel that they knew and understood nothing, and were plunged into hopelessness and grief. The seventh was the valley of death. The young advertising copywriter and novelist
manqué
felt, in the mid-1970s, like the thirty-first despairing bird.

Advertising itself, in spite of its reputation as the great enemy of promise, was good to him, on the whole. He was now working at a grander agency, Ogilvy & Mather, whose founder, David Ogilvy, was the author of the celebrated dictum “The consumer is not a moron; she is your wife.” There were a few hiccups, such as the time an American airline refused to allow him to feature black stewardesses in their ads, even though the women in question actually were members of the airline’s staff. “What would the union say if they knew?” he wondered, and the Airline Client replied, “Well, you’re not going to tell them, are you?” And there was the time he refused to work on an ad for Campbell’s Corned Beef because it was made in South Africa and the African National Congress had called for a boycott of such products. He could have been fired, but the Corned Beef Client did not insist upon it, and he was not. In the world of 1970s advertising the mavericks and oddballs never got sacked. The people who did were the dogged worker ants who were trying really hard to hang on to their jobs. If you acted like you didn’t give a damn, came in late and took long boozy lunches, you got promotions and pay raises and the
gods smiled down on your creative eccentricity, at least as long as you were, on the whole, delivering the goods.

And for much of the time he worked with people who appreciated and supported him, talented people, many of whom were using advertising as he was, as a stepping-stone to better things, or a source of easy money. He made a commercial for Scotch Magic Tape that starred John Cleese demonstrating the merits of a sticky tape that disappeared on contact (“And here you see it, not being seen; unlike this ordinary tape, which, as you can see, you can see”), and one for Clairol’s gray-hair cover-up product Loving Care that was directed by Nicolas Roeg, the celebrated director of
Performance
and
Don’t Look Now
. For almost six months, during the British three-day week of 1974, caused by the miners’ strike and featuring daily power outages and much chaos in the Wardour Street world of recording and dubbing studios, he made three commercials a week for the
Daily Mirror
, and in spite of all the problems every single one aired on time. Filmmaking held no terrors for him after that. Advertising introduced him to America, too, sending him on a journey across the United States so that he could write tourism ads for the U.S. Travel Service under the slogan “The Great American Adventure,” with photographs by the legendary Elliott Erwitt. Longhaired and mustachioed, he arrived at the San Francisco airport, where a large sign read
A FEW MINUTES EXTRA IN CUSTOMS IS A SMALL PRICE TO PAY TO SAVE YOUR CHILDREN FROM THE MENACE OF DRUGS
. A fabulously rednecked American gentleman was noting this sign with approval. Then, with a complete change of heart and no apparent awareness of any internal contradictions in his position, he turned to the longhaired, mustachioed visitor—who looked, it must be admitted, suspiciously as if he intended to head straight for Haight-Ashbury, the world capital of the “counterculture” of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll—and said, “Buddy, I sure feel sorry for you, because even if you ain’t got nothing, they’ll find something.” However, no drugs were planted, and the young advertising writer was allowed to enter the magic kingdom. And when he finally reached New York, he was encouraged, on his first night in the city, to put on that strangest of uniforms, a suit and tie, so that friends could take him to have a drink at the Windows on the World bar at the top of the World
Trade Center. This was his first and never-forgotten image of the city; those massive buildings that seemed to say
We are here forever
.

He himself felt painfully temporary. His private life with Clarissa was happy, and this had calmed the storm inside him a little, while another young man might have been pleased that his job was going well. But the troubles of the interior life, his repeated failures to be, or become, a decent, publishable writer of fiction, dominated his thoughts. He resolved to set aside the many criticisms others had made of his work and to make his own critique of it instead. He was already beginning to understand that what was wrong with his writing was that there was something wrong, something misconceived, about him. If he hadn’t become the writer he thought he had it in him to be, it was because he didn’t know who he was. And slowly, from his ignominious place at the bottom of the literary barrel, he began to understand who that person might be.

He was a migrant. He was one of those who had ended up in a place that was not the place where he began. Migration tore up all the traditional roots of the self. The rooted self flourished in a place it knew well, among people who knew it well, following customs and traditions with which it and its community were familiar, and speaking its own language among others who did the same. Of these four roots, place, community, culture and language, he had lost three. His beloved Bombay was no longer available to him; in their old age his parents had sold his childhood home without discussion and mysteriously decamped to Karachi, Pakistan. They didn’t enjoy living in Karachi; why would they? It was to Bombay what Duluth was to New York. Nor did their reasons for moving ring true. They felt, they said, increasingly alien in India as Muslims. They wanted, they said, to find good Muslim husbands for their daughters. It was bewildering. After a lifetime of happy irreligion they were using religious rationales. He didn’t believe them for a moment. He was convinced there must have been business problems, tax problems, or other real-world problems that had driven them to sell the home to which they were devoted and abandon the city they loved. Something was fishy here. There was a secret he
was not being told. Sometimes he said this to them; they did not reply. He never solved the mystery. Both his parents died without admitting that any secret explanation existed. But they were no more godly in Karachi than they had been in Bombay, so the Muslim explanation continued to feel inadequate and wrong.

It was unsettling not to understand why the shape of life had changed. He often felt meaningless, even absurd. He was a Bombay boy who had made his life in London among the English, but often he felt cursed by a double unbelonging. The root of language, at least, remained, but he began to appreciate how deeply he felt the loss of the other roots, and how confused he felt about what he had become. In the age of migration the world’s millions of migrated selves faced colossal problems, problems of homelessness, hunger, unemployment, disease, persecution, alienation, fear. He was one of the luckier ones, but one great problem remained: that of authenticity. The migrated self became, inevitably, heterogeneous instead of homogeneous, belonging to more than one place, multiple rather than singular, responding to more than one way of being, more than averagely mixed up. Was it possible to be—to become
good
at being—not rootless, but multiply rooted? Not to suffer from a loss of roots but to benefit from an excess of them? The different roots would have to be of equal or near-equal strength, and he worried that his Indian connection had weakened. He needed to make an act of reclamation of the Indian identity he had lost, or felt he was in danger of losing. The self was both its origins and its journey.

To know the meaning of his journey, he had to begin again at the beginning and learn as he went.

It was at this point in his meditations that he remembered “Saleem Sinai.” This West London–based proto-Saleem had been a secondary character in his abandoned manuscript “The Antagonist,” and had deliberately been created as an alter ego, “Saleem” in memory of his Bombay classmate Salim Merchant (and because of its closeness to “Salman”), and “Sinai” after the eleventh-century Muslim polymath Ibn Sina (“Avicenna”), just as “Rushdie” had been derived from Ibn Rushd. The Saleem of “The Antagonist” was an entirely forgettable fellow and deserved to drift up Ladbroke Grove into oblivion, but he
had one characteristic that suddenly seemed valuable: He had been born at midnight, August 14–15, 1947, the “freedom-at-midnight” moment of India’s independence from British rule. Maybe this Saleem, Bombay-Saleem, midnight-Saleem, needed his own book.