Joseph
Anton: A Memoir
By Salman Rushdie
Random House, 636
pages, $30)
Like British pounds, British knighthoods have lost much of their
value in the last few decades. In the halcyon, pre-decimal 1950s,
one pound was equal to nearly three American dollars; receiving a
knighthood in those days meant you were Churchill or Attlee. Now
when I write for a British magazine, I ignore the libra and tell
myself I’m being paid in dollars instead: by the time I cover my
bank’s wire fee, I might as well be. As for today’s parfit gentil
knights, take your pick: Sir Elton Hercules John, Sir Michael
Philip Jagger, Sir Richard Charles Nicolas Branson, Sir Ahmed
Salman Rushdie.
Still, I join the Mayor of London in objecting to Rushdie’s 2007
knighthood on strictly literary grounds. If “service to literature”
is now sufficient for such honors, surely Britain can do better.
The official honors committee who decides these things — one can
be fairly certain that Her Majesty does not trouble her aging eyes
with The Satanic Verses any more than she pesters her
royal ears with The Joshua Tree — might start with A.N.
Wilson. Anyway, it is better for them to err on the side of
exclusivity: T.S. Eliot, the greatest poet and literary critic of
the 20th century, was never offered a knighthood, and Anthony
Powell, ever-perceptive, knew which way the wind was blowing and
turned one down.
My opposition to Rushdie’s knighthood puts me in a somewhat
uncomfortable position, namely, that of having to admit that the
enemy of my enemies is not my friend. Islamic fascists, from
Khomeini to Cat Stevens, have called for Rushdie’s death: but what
boots it? The Enchantress of Florence is still
one of the most tedious pieces of fiction I have ever read, and
pretending otherwise would be as silly as praising Innocence of
Muslims. No rest for the wicked, I say, and no affirmative
literary action for writers whom the mullahs dislike.
Joseph Anton: A Memoir — could there be a more risibly
Obamesque gesture than selecting the first names of Europe’s two
greatest writers of short fiction for one’s nom de guerre?
— runs to well over 500 pages of overwrought third-person prose.
Flowery, some might call it, but if these are flowers, they are
Amorphophallus titanum: formless, gigantic, colorful,
foul-smelling. (There is even an overabundance of exclamation
points!) From Hobbes to Henry Adams, third-person autobiography has
occasionally been done well, but it requires a sense of both
detachment and irony, neither of which Rushdie seems to possess.
Instead, throughout the Joseph Anton, he is smug,
self-indulgent, dropsical. The book is filled with the passages of
the sort that only a wealthy, more or less non-introspective sort
of person can produce (“But the world’s unkindness was never far
away”). Name-dropping:
Bill Clinton was even bigger and pinker than he had
anticipated…
They went out to eat with Jay McInery…
Willie Nelson was there!…
They had dinner at Antonia Fraser and Harold Pinter’s house…
Almost at once there was a call from Fiona Millar, Cherie
Blair’s right-hand person…
Renée Zellweger stuck to her English accent all the time, even
off-camera…
He had lunch with Christopher Hitchens and Christopher’s big fan
Warren Beatty at the Beverley Hills Hotel…
and self-aggrandizement:
It was revealed that he had been awarded the Austrian State
Prize for European Literature two years
earlier [italics Rushdie’s]…
The eight-city U.S. tour went off without alarms…
Elizabeth and he [Rushdie] did not remarry… but they were able
to be better parents, and also the best of friends, and their true
characters were shown not in the war they fought but in the peace
they made…
His journal was full of doubts. “How can I stay with this woman
whose selfishness is her most
prominent characteristic?”…
Hollywood was a small town inside a big city and for five
minutes a new arrival such as himself became the flavor of the
month…
and conspicuous consumption:
There was an apartment on Sixty-fifth Street and Madison across
the street from the Armani store…
The commute between West Hollywood and Pembridge Mews was
brutal…
But this [Telluride] was a mountain paradise…
are the order of the day — or rather the week, which is how
long it took me to make my way (reluctantly) through the entire
book.
Joseph Anton is meant to be an account of Rushdie’s
life following the 1989 fatwa issued by the Ayatollah
Khomeini, which drove him into hiding. It covers, then, roughly a
single decade in twice the amount of pages with which Winston
Churchill, in My Early Life, covered three. One would
think that Rushdie’s exile would have given him time to think hard
about, say, the relationship between politics and literature or the
vagaries of fate. Rushdie offers, however, no insight, not even
about his own time spent underground: the extensive police
protection he received here becomes largely a matter of cataloguing
the various Jaguars, BMWs, and Range Rovers in which Rushdie was
chartered around at taxpayers’ expense; pointless stories like his
account of a feud with Martin Amis that lasted only a single day,
or his much longer (and more public) exchange of hostilities with
John le Carré, take up scores of pages, and are treated with equal
significance. Elsewhere he moos at length about politics (“He chose
to believe in human nature, and in the universality of its rights
and ethics and freedoms”), fiction (“Literature tried to open
the universe”), and human nature (“heterogeneous not
homogenous”). In the book’s final chapter he compares himself to
Ovid, Mandelstam, and Lorca in the space of a single paragraph.
This book has already come in for multiple drubbings, most
notably by Zoë Heller in the December New York Review of
Books. Too little, one thinks, and too late. Books like
Joseph Anton are the rule, not the exception, in the
Rushdie oeuvre. Where were the Zoë Hellers of the world when
Rushdie published The Moor’s Last Sigh or Shalimar the
Clown? Why is it a literary sin to be orotund or mawkish in a
memoir but not in a novel? Many writers whose fiction I can’t stand
have written very good autobiographies; in fact, a distinctly
flashy novelist usually makes a point of unplugging the wah-wah
pedal and dialing down the overdrive for the memoirs: see Anthony
Burgess’ plainspoken (if somewhat fescennine) Confessions.
In Rushdie’s case, I sat down at the table expecting, well, not
much, but certainly something more appetizing than this cold,
overspiced spring navarin.
