If books could kill

Author Salman Rushdie uses a striking image to open his memoir, oddly titled Joseph Anton (the alias he came up with during his days of protection under the British Secret Police). He compares the fatwa issued against him to the first black crows quietly massing on the jungle gym behind Tippi Hedren in Hitchcock’s The Birds: first a few, then a flock, then hundreds of birds, squawking and rumbling, while the ice blonde Hedren sits and smokes, oblivious.

You may have also asked yourself, at some point over the past 20 years, “Whatever happened to that death sentence against Salman Rushdie?” Joseph Anton: A Memoir provides a detailed, often fascinating account.

The writer of The Satanic Verses remains a writer, even in unfurling his own improbable tale, a true story so fantastical — A writer sentenced to death for scribbling fiction! — that it could have been penned by Rushdie himself.

One of Rushdie’s formative lessons in storytelling came from his father reading him 1,001 Arabian Nights as a child; certainly, the Mumbai-born Muslim absorbed the lesson that stories, like Scheherazade’s endless unspooling of yarns, can save your life. Ironically, when Rushdie published The Satanic Verses in 1988, it had the opposite effect: the book’s continual vilification, year after year — among people who would probably never read it — threatened to shorten the writer’s life.

In Joseph Anton, Rushdie presents a peculiar quandary: by writing a book denounced by the Ayatollah Khomeini as heretical, he became the most hated man in the Islam world; at the same time, he immediately became, because of the fatwa, the most famous (or infamous) writer in the world.

Rushdie doesn’t quite draw a direct line from the fatwa issued by Iran in 1989 to the events of 9/11, but he was in a good position to spot such trends: during his years of police protection, he noticed a shift toward more radical Islamic policy, resulting, he feels, in the deaths of dozens of people — translators, publishers, Iranian dissidents and such — directly connected to his controversial novel. Yet Rushdie still breathes, still writes.

On meeting his New York publisher, Bob Gottlieb, for the first time, Rushdie (who pens his account, curiously, in the third person, using “he” instead of “I”) is scolded: “I’m always defending you, Salman. I always tell people, if you had known that your book was going to kill people, you wouldn’t have written it.”

Rushdie himself enters police protection shortly after Iran issues the fatwa. What follows is 13 years of torture, says the author. His freedom was drastically curtailed, he writes: every move he makes in the first years has to be approved by Britain’s Special Branch; they live in his home, go with him everywhere. The media quickly turns against him, bemoaning the costs of protecting an author described as “arrogant,” who won’t even “apologize” for writing such an “awful” book. He can’t fly except on military planes, because commercial airlines won’t risk him onboard. His marriages — three of them in a row — crumble under the weight of the world’s scrutiny.

Yet there are positives, too. Rushdie at first spends his protection years like an ostrich with his head buried in the sand; he makes one misguided effort to appease the Iran clerics by issuing a mea culpa essay called “Becoming a Muslim,” in hopes that this will take the heat off him. It doesn’t; the bounty on his head stands.

So Rushdie finds a new resolve in life: he will no longer shrink from the mullahs, the police saying what is “allowed” for him and what is not; the press pundits suggesting he should just die and get it over with. Instead, he seeks fellow writers and takes up the cause of free speech. His list of famous pals during the years of fatwa exile reads like a gossip column: famous writers, of course, like Susan Sontag, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon (another self-exile whom Rushdie dines with in New York), Don DeLillo, Doris Lessing, and of course Brit pals like Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens; then there’s the pop stars, like Damon Albarn of Blur and U2’s Bono, who borrows lyrics from Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet to write a song; he hangs with TV stars like Nigella Lawson, movie stars like Warren Beatty, comedians like Jerry Seinfeld, not to mention Bill Clinton.

That doesn’t sound too bad. But Rushdie had to bark very loudly to get critics to stop blaming him for the fatwa and see that protecting a book — even one that enflames a particular religion — is sometimes necessary. The attacks against Rushdie focused on his character: they said he was “egotistical,” “pompous” and endangered British police by requiring constant protection. In truth, Rushdie does come across in Joseph Anton as somewhat arrogant at times, a little too concerned about getting his paperback rights for The Satanic Verses for instance (few publishers wanted to put it out and start the flames of protest again), and even grouchy about his round-the-clock protection. Strangely, though, the writer’s choice of using third person makes him seem less distant and aloof; it actually humanizes his foibles. And whatever else Rushdie is, he can really write well; many passages in Joseph Anton sparkle.

And many also plod along. The fatwa drags on for 13 years, during which, despite his encampment in London, he still manages to knock out books, meet with (often reluctant) publishers and keep himself in bookstores. This is inspiring, but also seems a bit self-serving.

I confess, at a certain point I skipped ahead in the narrative to find out how he hooked up with his fourth wife, Padma Lakshmi, the gorgeous model, host of Top Chef and cookbook writer. Their marriage lasted only three years, but Rushdie has some prime dish on her. (“How long can I stay with this woman whose selfishness is her most prominent characteristic?”) The Delhi-born Padma is depicted as fickle and ambitious, a girl with a “bad me” inside who “takes what she wants,” whatever the consequences. Rushdie was still married when he started dating her in New York, at a time when America seemed like a breath of freedom from his British protectors; later, he writes, “she broke his heart.”

In fact, this is a persistent lament by Rushdie: that beautiful, giving women, who must have found something in the writer to trigger their maternal, protective instincts, flocked to him; and eventually they couldn’t handle the strain of living under a 24/7 fatwa. Yet he’s never foolish enough to turn them away from his door.

The book takes us up to a few fateful days: Sept. 11, 2001, a day when Rushdie says “the birds were screaming in the air,” vindicating his view that indulging Islamic fundamentalist hate leads only to destruction; and not long after that, the novelist, after 13 years with the Secret Police, finally has his terror threat downgraded to Level 4. In the final pages, he is seen leaving Halcyon Hotel in London after the news, a newly threat-free man, about to hail a cab, presumably off to live a more fulfilling, if still unpredictable, life.