Joseph Anton: A Memoir (96 page)

He chose to believe in human nature, and in the universality of its rights and ethics and freedoms, and to stand against the fallacies of relativism that were at the heart of the invective of the armies of the religious (
we hate you because we aren’t like you
) and of their fellow travelers in the West, too, many of whom, disappointingly, were on the left. If the art of the novel revealed anything, it was that human nature was the great constant, in any culture, in any place, in any time, and that, as Heraclitus had said two thousand years earlier, a man’s
ethos
, his way of being in the world, was his
daimon
, the guiding principle that shaped his life—or, in the pithier, more familiar formulation of the
idea, that character was destiny. It was hard to hold on to that idea while the smoke of death stood in the sky over Ground Zero and the murders of thousands of men and women whose characters had not determined their fates were on everyone’s mind, it hadn’t mattered if they were hard workers or generous friends or loving parents or great romantics, the planes hadn’t cared about their
ethos;
and yes, now terrorism could be destiny, war could be destiny, our lives were no longer wholly ours to control; but still our sovereign natures needed to be insisted on, perhaps more than ever amid the horror, it was important to speak up for individual human responsibility, to say that the murderers were morally responsible for their crimes, and neither their faith nor their rage at America was any excuse; it was important, at a time of gargantuan, inflated ideologies, not to forget the human scale, to continue to insist on our essential humanity, to go on making love, so to speak, in a combat zone.

In the pages of a novel it was clear that the human self was heterogeneous not homogeneous, not one thing but many, multiple, fractured and contradictory. The person you were for your parents was not the person you were with your children, your working self was other than your self as a lover, and depending on the time of day and your mood you might think of yourself as tall or skinny or unwell or a sports fan or conservative or fearful or hot. All writers and readers knew that human beings had broad identities, not narrow ones, and it was the breadth of human nature that allowed readers to find common ground and points of identification with Madame Bovary, Leopold Bloom, Colonel Aureliano Buendía, Raskolnikov, Gandalf the Gray, Oskar Matzerath, the Makioka Sisters, the Continental Op, the Earl of Emsworth, Miss Marple, the Baron in the Trees, and Salo the mechanical messenger from the planet Tralfamadore in Kurt Vonnegut’s
The Sirens of Titan
. Readers and writers could take that knowledge of broad-based identity out into the world beyond the pages of books, and use the knowledge to find common ground with their fellow human beings. You could support different football teams but vote the same way. You could vote for different parties but agree about the best way to raise your children. You could disagree about child rearing but share a fear of the dark. You could be afraid of different things but love
the same music. You could detest each other’s musical taste but worship the same God. You could differ strongly on the question of religion but support the same football team.

This was what literature knew, had always known. Literature tried to
open the universe
, to increase, even if only slightly, the sum total of what it was possible for human beings to perceive, understand, and so, finally, to be. Great literature went to the edges of the known and pushed against the boundaries of language, form, and possibility, to make the world feel larger, wider, than before. Yet this was an age in which men and women were being pushed toward ever-narrower definitions of themselves, encouraged to call themselves just one thing, Serb or Croat or Israeli or Palestinian or Hindu or Muslim or Christian or Baha’i or Jew, and the narrower their identities became, the greater was the likelihood of conflict between them. Literature’s view of human nature encouraged understanding, sympathy, and identification with people not like oneself, but the world was pushing everyone in the opposite direction, toward narrowness, bigotry, tribalism, cultism and war. There were plenty of people who didn’t want the universe opened, who would, in fact, prefer it to be shut down quite a bit, and so when artists went to the frontier and pushed they often found powerful forces pushing back. And yet they did what they had to do, even at the price of their own ease, and, sometimes, of their lives.

The poet Ovid was exiled by Caesar Augustus to a little hellhole on the Black Sea called Tomis. He spent the rest of his days begging to be allowed to return to Rome, but permission was never granted. So Ovid’s life was blighted; but the poetry of Ovid outlasted the Roman Empire. The poet Mandelstam died in one of Stalin’s labor camps, but the poetry of Mandelstam outlived the Soviet Union. The poet Lorca was killed by the Falangist thugs of Spain’s Generalissimo Franco, but the poetry of Lorca outlived Franco’s tyrannical regime. Art was strong, artists less so. Art could, perhaps, take care of itself. Artists needed defenders. He had been defended by his fellow artists when he needed it. He would try to do the same for others in need from now on, others who pushed boundaries, transgressed, and, yes, blasphemed; all those artists who did not allow men of power or the cloth to draw lines in the sand and order them not to cross.

He delivered the Tanner Lectures at Yale. They were titled “Step Across This Line.”

As to the battle over
The Satanic Verses
, it was still hard to say if it was ending in victory or defeat. The book had not been suppressed, and nor had its author, but the dead remained dead, and a climate of fear had grown up that made it harder for books like his to be published, or even, perhaps, to be written. Other religions quickly followed Islam’s lead. In India, Hindu extremists attacked films and movie stars (the superstar Shah Rukh Khan was the target of violent protests merely for saying that Pakistani cricketers should have been included in a tournament in India) and works of scholarship (such as James Laine’s biography of the Maratha warrior-king Shivaji, which so “offended” that monarch’s contemporary admirers that they attacked the research library in Pune where Laine had done some of his research and destroyed many irreplaceable ancient documents and objects). In Britain, Sikhs attacked the Sikh author of
Behzti
(Dishonor), a play they disapproved of. And the Islamic violence continued. In Denmark, a Somali man with an ax and a knife, linked to the radical al-Shabab militia, broke into the home of the cartoonist Kurt Westergaard in Aarhus, after the publication of the so-called “Danish cartoons” that had aroused the ire of Islamic extremists. In America, Yale University Press, publishers of a book discussing the case of the “Danish cartoons,” would be too cowardly to include the cartoons in that book. In Britain, the home of the publisher of a book about the Prophet Muhammad’s youngest wife was letter-bombed. A much longer struggle would be necessary before the age of menaces and fears could be said to have come to an end.

As 2001 drew to a close the Royal Shakespeare Company’s stage adaptation of
Midnight’s Children
was on its way to America, to be staged in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and then at the Apollo Theater in Harlem; one night during the New York run he would be interviewed on stage after the performance and so achieve something beyond his craziest dreams—to play the Apollo. At the same time he was working on
Shalimar the Clown
. This in the end was who he was, a teller of tales, a creator of shapes, a maker of things that were not. It would be
wise to withdraw from the world of commentary and polemic and rededicate himself to what he loved most, the art that had claimed his heart, mind and spirit ever since he was a young man, and to live again in the universe of once upon a time, of
kan ma kan
, it was so and it was not so, and to make the journey to the truth upon the waters of make-believe.

From his Dickensian, let’s-tie-up-the-loose-strings seat in the future he saw the flowering of his niece Mishka’s musical talent; his niece Maya contentedly moving into a life teaching little children; and the marriage of his niece Meena, his estranged sister Bunno’s daughter. He saw Zafar doing good work and being happy, and Milan growing into another fine young man. And Elizabeth and he on good terms again. Bill Buford divorced, remarried more happily, and became the successful author of books about food. Nigella Lawson became a gigantically successful author of books about food and married the art collector Charles Saatchi. Frances D’Souza became a baroness and then, in 2011, the Speaker of the House of Lords. William Nygaard retired and his son Mads took over his job at Aschehoug. Marianne Wiggins taught literature at the University of Southern California. James Fenton and Darryl Pinckney left Long Leys Farm and moved to New York. Pauline Melville was assaulted by a murderous intruder at her home in Highbury Hill but managed to wriggle free and escape through a window. The intruder was caught and jailed. Human life continued. Things worked out as well as things ever did, and far better than he had been able to hope on that dark Valentine’s Day in 1989.

Not everything ended well. In August 2005 Robin Cook had a heart attack on a mountain in the Scottish Highlands and died.

And what of his Illusion, his Phantom of Liberty? On March 24, 2002, he took Padma to the
Vanity Fair
dinner and party in Hollywood on the day of the Academy Awards. They arrived at Morton’s and as he watched her pose and pirouette for the human wall of screaming photographers, burning with the bright flame of her youth and beauty, he looked at the expression on her face and suddenly thought,
She’s
having sex, sex with hundreds of men at the same time, and they don’t even get to touch her, there’s no way any actual man can compete with that
. And in the end he lost her, yes, but it was better to lose one’s illusions and live in the knowledge that the world was real, and that no woman could make it what he wanted it to be. That was up to him.

Two days after the Oscars he flew back to London and was met off the plane by Nick Cottage, a genial Special Branch officer with an old-fashioned mustache, who told him that one of the higher-up officers, Bob Sait, himself the owner of a fine Lord Kitchener–like growth on his upper lip, wanted to come and see him the next morning. “If I were you,” Nick added mysteriously, “I’d make your own arrangements for later in the day.” He refused to explain what he meant but smiled an enigmatic secret policeman’s smile.

He was driven to the Halcyon Hotel in Holland Park, an elegant pink edifice, where he had booked a suite. Jason Donovan had taken his Pembridge Mews house back at the end of the year’s rental. Before he flew to L.A. for the Academy Awards he had found another Notting Hill house to rent, in Colville Mews, across the way from the young designer Alice Temperley’s rapidly burgeoning fashion house. The new place was available in a couple of weeks, so he had put his stuff in storage and booked the Halcyon to cover the gap, initially for just two nights. Milan’s Easter holidays were beginning the next day, and he had planned a week in France with both the boys. They would drive down to friends in Courtoin in Burgundy, and then visit Paris and EuroDisney on the way back.

At 10
A.M.
sharp on the morning of Wednesday, March 27, 2002, Bob Sait and Nick Cottage met him at the Halcyon Hotel. “Well, Joe,” said Sait, and then corrected himself, “Excuse me—Salman, as you know, we’ve been maintaining this protection on advice from the intelligence services, until such time as they felt it was right to lower their assessment of the threat against yourself.”

“It’s been a little strange, Bob,” he said, “because in America I’ve been acting like an ordinary citizen for years, but when I’ve come back here you’ve insisted on going on.…”

“I hope you’ll be pleased, then,” Bob Sait said, “that the threat level has been reduced, quite drastically, in fact, and we would not normally offer protection to anyone assessed at the new level.”

His heart had begun to pound but he tried to remain outwardly controlled. “I see,” he said. “So you’ll be withdrawing the protection, then.”

“I just wanted to give you the opportunity,” Bob Sait said, “of saying if that would be acceptable to you. It would be in line with what you’ve been arguing, would that be correct to say?”

“Yes,” he said, “it would, and yes, it would be acceptable.”

“We’d like to give a party for you at the Yard as soon as it’s convenient,” said Nick Cottage. “To get as many of the lads as possible who have worked with you over the years. It’s been one of our very longest prots and there’s a lot of pride in what’s been done. And a lot of appreciation of what you endured as well, a lot of the team have said they know they couldn’t have stuck it out the way you did, so it would be good to have a chance to celebrate, if you’re agreeable.”

“That would be lovely,” he said, the blood rising in his face.

“We’d like to ask some of your close friends too,” Nick said. “The ones who have helped so much over the years.”

Then there was nothing more to say. “So what happens now?” he asked. “How do we go about this?” Bob and Nick stood up. “It’s been a privilege, Joe, excuse me, Salman,” Bob Sait said, and stuck out his hand. “Good for you, mate,” said Nick. He shook their hands, and they turned, and left. That was it. More than thirteen years after the police walked into his life, they spun on their heels and walked out of it. The abruptness of it made him laugh out loud.

The Special Branch party did take place soon afterward. One of the officers who attended it was Rab Connolly, who had completed the degree course in postcolonial literature he had begun during the prot. “I’ve got something for you,” he whispered like a stage villain, and slipped a small metal object into his palm. “What is it?” he asked Rab. “It’s the bullet,” Rab said, and so it was. The bullet that poor Mike Merrill had accidentally fired inside the Bishop’s Avenue house while cleaning his gun. “That was a close one,” Rab said. “I thought you might like it as a souvenir.”