Salman Rushdie’s “Joseph Anton” is a memoir of the roughly 10 years he spent in hiding, under police protection, after the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini called for his death in 1989 because his novel “The Satanic Verses” was deemed offensive to Islam. The memoir’s title, cobbled together from the first names of Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov, is the alias he used while under the fatwa. In the book, which is written in the third person, Anton emerges as a character Mr. Rushdie regards both fondly and critically.
The book carefully documents his political struggles during this period and his efforts to get the fatwa lifted, but also describes his personal life in great detail, including the breakup of three marriages: to Marianne Wiggins, Elizabeth West and Padma Lakshmi. (A first marriage, to Clarissa Luard, ended in 1987.)
The fatwa was officially lifted in 1998, and since settling in New York in early 2000, Mr. Rushdie has moved around freely. He has become a man about town and something of a party animal, in fact.
Of the recent news that a religious foundation had renewed the fatwa, he wrote by e-mail: “I’m not inclined to magnify this ugly bit of headline grabbing by paying it much attention.” Last month, before embarking on a three-month publicity tour promoting both the new book and the coming film version of his 1981 novel, “Midnight’s Children,” he discussed “Joseph Anton” over lunch at a Midtown restaurant. What follows is an abridged version of that conversation.
Q. This all happened a long time ago. What made you decide to write about it now, so many years later?
A. It was largely a matter of instinct. For a long time I did not want to write this book. I felt that it would be upsetting to have to emotionally re-enter that time and immerse myself in it. But I knew always that I would have to. You know how it is — if you have the disease of being a writer there’s a little bit of you, even in the worst moments of your life — there’s a little bit of you sitting on your shoulder and saying, “Good story!” That’s why I started keeping a journal through this time. I just thought that the weight of events, the speed of events, the complexity of what was happening was so great that even with the best memory in the world there was no way to remember it in detail.
Q. Why the third person?
A. I had always thought that I don’t want this to be a diary or a confessional or a rant. I don’t want it to be a revenge book, a getting-even book. I knew all sorts of things I didn’t want it to be, but I didn’t know what I did want it to be. Each time I tried, it didn’t work and so I put it aside. And then I realized that one of the things I was really disliking was the first person, this endless “I,” things happening to “me,” and “I felt” and “I did” and “people said about me” and “I worried.” It was just absurdly narcissistic. So at a certain point I thought, “Let me just see what happens if I write it novelistically, in the third person.” And the moment I started doing it was like the kind of “open sesame” that gave me the book.
Q. This device makes the book read at times like a novel, or as you say yourself in the book, like a bad Rushdie novel, full of melodrama and stuff that’s slightly surreal.
A. One of the ways I expressed it to myself was that my picture of the world got broken. We all have that — we all have a picture of the world we live in and we think we know what shape it has and where we are in it. Another word for that would be sanity. And then suddenly it was very difficult to know what shape the world was and where I stood in it and how to act. All these decisions we make and suddenly I didn’t know anything. Another name for that is insanity. I do think there was a period there when my sanity was under intense pressure and I didn’t know what to say or do or how to act. I was literally living from day to day.
Q. If “Joseph Anton” is like a novel, it’s not just a Kafkaesque story about a guy forced into hiding. It’s also a sort of marital tragicomedy, about a guy a little bit hapless as a husband and lover. You go into a lot of detail, especially about your relationship with Marianne Wiggins, about whom you’re pretty tough. People may feel that some of this detail is unnecessary.
A. What’s unnecessary? I have the sort of Rousseau view that if you’re going to write a book like this — I mean nobody is making you write, you know? If you’re going to write it, tell as much truth as you can. But I’ve tried to be fair. In the case of Elizabeth, she’s read the book and said it was O.K. In the case of Padma, I’ve told her everything about her that’s in it. There’s one thing she asked me to take out, which I took out. And so on. Marianne I haven’t shown it to.
Q. But the book also has a bigger agenda. It’s meant to document something important?
A. I found myself caught up in what you could call a world historical event. You could say it’s a great political and intellectual event of our time, even a moral event. Not the fatwa, but the battle against radical Islam, of which this was one skirmish. There have been arguments made even by liberal-minded people, which seem to me very dangerous, which are basically cultural relativist arguments: We’ve got to let them do this because it’s their culture. My view is no. Female circumcision — that’s a bad thing. Killing people because you don’t like their ideas — it’s a bad thing. We have to be able to have a sense of right and wrong which is not diluted by this kind of relativistic argument. And if we don’t we really have stopped living in a moral universe.
Q. How long did the book take to write?
A. Two-and-a-half years. And given that it’s 600-some pages, for me that’s fast. But a book like this is a little faster to write because you know what happened. One of the things I was very clear about from the beginning was that I knew the arc of it. I knew the first scene and I knew the last scene: me literally going out and hailing a cab, the return of ordinary, banal life.
Q. Do you think what happened to you changed anything?
A. Some of the British Muslims now say, “We think we were wrong.” Some of them for tactical reasons, but others are actually using the free-speech argument: “If we want to say what we want, he has to be allowed to say what he wants.” So I think some little bit of learning has happened.
Q. Did you learn anything useful during your time in hiding?
A. I learned counter-surveillance driving. If you’re on a freeway and want to know if you’re being followed, what you do is enormously vary your speed. You accelerate to 100 and slow down to 30 and then accelerate again. In a city you make a lot of turns against the stream of traffic. You go around a roundabout twice. Basically, you drive like an idiot and if anybody else is driving like an idiot, there’s a reason.
Q. What advice do you have for someone who might find himself under a similar threat?
A. Two bits of advice, really. One has to do with the head and the other is practical. The thing in the head is: Don’t compromise. It’s a question of self-knowledge, knowing who you are And why you did what you did. Stand up for it. The other thing is that if I were to do it again, I would refuse the hiding. I’d say: “I’ve got a house, I’m going home. Protect me.”