Salman
Rushdie
Interviewed by Jack Livings
The Paris Review
- The Art of Fiction No. 186 - Summer 2005, No. 174
Part One
Salman Rushdie was born in
Bombay in 1947, on the eve of India’s independence. He was educated there and
in England, where he spent the first decades of his writing life. These days
Rushdie lives primarily in New York, where this interview was conducted in
several sessions over the past year. By coincidence, the second conversation
took place on Valentine’s Day 2005, the sixteenth anniversary of the Ayatollah
Khomeini’s fatwa against Rushdie, which proclaimed him an apostate for writing The
Satanic Verses and sentenced him to death under Islamic law. In 1998,
Iran’s president, Mohammed Khatami, denounced the fatwa, and Rushdie now insists
that the danger has passed. But Islamic hardliners regard fatwas as irrevocable
and Rushdie’s home address remains unlisted.
For a man who occasioned
such furor, who has been lauded and blamed, threatened and feted, burnt in
effigy and upheld as an icon of free expression, Rushdie is surprisingly
easygoing and candid—neither a hunted victim nor a scourge. Clean shaven,
dressed in jeans and a sweater, he actually looks like a younger version of the
condemned man who stared out at his accusers in Richard Avedon’s famous 1995
portrait. “My family can’t stand that picture,” he said, laughing. Then, asked
where the photograph is stored, he grinned and replied, “On the wall.”
When he is working, Rushdie
said, “it is rather unusual of me to come out in the daytime.” But late last
year he handed in the manuscript for Shalimar the Clown, his ninth
novel, and he has not yet started a new project. Although he claimed he’d
exhausted his resources finishing the book, he seemed to gain energy as he
talked about his past, his writing, his politics. In conversation, Rushdie
performs the same mental acrobatics that one finds in his fiction—snaking
digressions that can touch down on several continents and historical eras
before returning to the original point.
The fatwa ensured that the
name Salman Rushdie is better known around the world than that of any other
living novelist. But his reputation as a writer has hardly been eclipsed by the
political assaults. In 1993, he was awarded the “Booker of Bookers”—a medal
honoring his novel Midnight’s Children as the best book to win the Man
Booker Prize since it was established twenty-five years earlier—and he is
currently the president of the PEN-American Center. In addition to his novels,
he is the author of five volumes of nonfiction, and a short-story collection.
On Valentine’s Day, as he arranged himself in a padded chair, a light snow
fell, and the incinerator stack of a building a few blocks east blew a column
of black smoke into the sky. Rushdie drank from a glass of water and talked
about finding his wife the right gift before settling into questions.
INTERVIEWER
When you’re writing, do you
think at all about who will be reading you?
SALMAN RUSHDIE
I don’t really know. When I
was young, I used to say, No, I’m just the servant of the work.
INTERVIEWER
That’s noble.
RUSHDIE
Excessively noble. I’ve
gotten more interested in clarity as a virtue, less interested in the virtues
of difficulty. And I suppose that means I do have a clearer sense of how people
read, which is, I suppose, partly created by my knowledge of how people have
read what I have written so far. I don’t like books that play to the gallery,
but I’ve become more concerned with telling a story as clearly and engagingly
as I can. Then again, that’s what I thought at the beginning, when I wrote Midnight’s
Children. I thought it odd that storytelling and literature seemed to have
come to a parting of the ways. It seemed unnecessary for the separation to have
taken place. A story doesn’t have to be simple, it doesn’t have to be
one-dimensional but, especially if it’s multidimensional, you need to find the
clearest, most engaging way of telling it.
One of the things that has
become, to me, more evidently my subject is the way in which the stories of
anywhere are also the stories of everywhere else. To an extent, I already knew
that because Bombay, where I grew up, was a city in which the West was totally
mixed up with the East. The accidents of my life have given me the ability to
make stories in which different parts of the world are brought together,
sometimes harmoniously, sometimes in conflict, and sometimes both—usually both.
The difficulty in these stories is that if you write about everywhere you can
end up writing about nowhere. It’s a problem that the writer writing about a
single place does not have to face. Those writers face other problems, but the
thing that a Faulkner or a Welty has—a patch of the earth that they know so
profoundly and belong to so totally that they can excavate it all their lives
and not exhaust it—I admire that, but it’s not what I do.
INTERVIEWER
How would you describe what
you do?
RUSHDIE
My life has given me this
other subject: worlds in collision. How do you make people see that everyone’s
story is now a part of everyone else’s story? It’s one thing to say it, but how
can you make a reader feel that is their lived experience? The last three
novels have been attempts to find answers to those questions: The Ground
Beneath Her Feet and Fury and the new one, Shalimar the Clown,
which begins and ends in L.A., but the middle of it is in Kashmir, and some is
in Nazi-occupied Strasbourg, and some in 1960s England. In Shalimar, the
character Max Ophuls is a resistance hero during World War II. The resistance,
which we think of as heroic, was what we would now call an insurgency in a time
of occupation. Now we live in a time when there are other insurgencies that we
don’t call heroic—that we call terrorist. I didn’t want to make moral
judgments. I wanted to say: That happened then, this is happening now, this
story includes both those things, just look how they sit together. I don’t
think it’s for the novelist to say, It means this.
INTERVIEWER
Do you have to restrain
yourself from saying, It means this?
RUSHDIE
No. I’m against that in a
novel. If I’m writing an op-ed piece, it’s different. But I believe that you
damage the novel by instructing the reader. The character of Shalimar, for
example, is a vicious murderer. You’re terrified of him, but at certain
points—like the scene where he flies off the wall in San Quentin—you’re rooting
for him. I wanted that to happen, I wanted people to see as he sees, to feel as
he feels, rather than to assume they know what kind of man he is. Of all my
books this was the book that was most completely written by its characters.
Quite a lot of the original conception of the book had to be jettisoned because
the characters wanted to go another way.
INTERVIEWER
What do you mean?
RUSHDIE
Moment by moment in the
writing, things would happen that I hadn’t foreseen. Something strange happened
with this book. I felt completely possessed by these people, to the extent that
I found myself crying over my own characters. There’s a moment in the book
where Boonyi’s father, the pandit Pyarelal, dies in his fruit orchard. I
couldn’t bear it. I found myself sitting at my desk weeping. I thought, What am
I doing? This is somebody I’ve made up. Then there was a moment when I was
writing about the destruction of the Kashmiri village. I absolutely couldn’t
bear the idea of writing it. I would sit at my desk and think, I can’t write
these sentences. Many writers who have had to deal with the subject of atrocity
can’t face it head-on. I’ve never felt that I couldn’t bear the idea of telling
a story—that it’s so awful, I don’t want to tell it, can something else happen?
And then you think, Oh, nothing else can happen, that’s what happens.
INTERVIEWER
Kashmir is family territory
for you.
RUSHDIE
My family’s from Kashmir
originally, and until now I’ve never really taken it on. The beginning of Midnight’s
Children is in Kashmir, and Haroun and the Sea of Stories is a fairy
tale of Kashmir, but in my fiction I’ve never really addressed Kashmir itself.
The year of the real explosion in Kashmir, 1989, was also the year in which
there was an explosion in my life. So I got distracted, and . . . By the
way, today is the anniversary of the fatwa. Valentine’s Day is not my favorite
day of the year, which really annoys my wife. Anyway, Shalimar was a kind of
attempt to write a Kashmiri Paradise Lost. Only Paradise Lost is
about the fall of man—paradise is still there, it’s just that we get kicked out
of it. Shalimar is about the smashing of paradise. It’s as if Adam went
back with bombs and blew the place up.
I’ve never seen anywhere in
the world as beautiful as Kashmir. It has something to do with the fact that
the valley is very small and the mountains are very big, so you have this
miniature countryside surrounded by the Himalayas, and it’s just spectacular.
And it’s true, the people are very beautiful too. Kashmir is quite prosperous.
The soil is very rich, so the crops are plentiful. It’s lush, not like much of
India, in which there’s great scarcity. But of course all that’s gone now, and
there is great hardship.
The main industry of
Kashmir was tourism. Not foreign tourism, Indian tourism. If you look at Indian
movies, every time they wanted an exotic locale, they would have a dance number
in Kashmir. Kashmir was India’s fairyland. Indians went there because in a hot
country you go to a cold place. People would be entranced by the sight of snow.
You’d see people at the airport where there’s dirty, slushy snow piled up by
the sides of the roads, standing there as if they’d found a diamond mine. It
had that feeling of an enchanted space. That’s all gone now, and even if
there’s a peace treaty tomorrow it’s not coming back, because the thing that
was smashed, which is what I tried to write about, is the tolerant, mingled
culture of Kashmir. After the way the Hindus were driven out, and the way the
Muslims have been radicalized and tormented, you can’t put it back together
again. I wanted to say: It’s not just a story about mountain people five or six
thousand miles away. It’s our story, too.
INTERVIEWER
We’re all implicated in
it?
RUSHDIE
I wanted to make sure in
this book that the story was personal, not political. I wanted people to read
it and form intimate, novelistic attachments to the characters and if I did it
right it won’t feel didactic, and you’ll care about everybody. I wanted to write
a book with no minor characters.
INTERVIEWER
Were you keenly aware of
Kashmiri politics when you were growing up?
RUSHDIE
When I was probably no
older than twelve we went on a family trip to Kashmir. There were beautiful
hikes you could take with little ponies up into the high mountains, onto the
glaciers. We all went—my sisters, my parents, and I—and there were villages
where you could spend the night at a government rest house, very simple places.
When we got to our rest house my mother discovered that the pony that should
have been carrying all the food didn’t have the food on board. She had three
fractious children with her, so she sent the pony guy off to the village to see
what could be had, and he came back and said, There’s no food, there’s nothing
to be had. They don’t have anything. And she said, What do you mean? There
can’t be nothing. There must be some eggs—what do you mean nothing? He
said, No, there’s nothing. And so she said, Well, we can’t have dinner,
nobody’s going to eat.
About an hour later we saw
this procession of a half-dozen people coming up from the village, bringing
food. The village headman came up to us and said, I want to apologize to you,
because when we told the guy there wasn’t any food we thought you were a Hindu
family. But, he said, when we heard it was a Muslim family we had to bring
food. We won’t accept any payment, and we apologize for having been so
discourteous.
I thought, Wow. This is in
Kashmir, which is supposed to have this tradition of tolerance. I would go all
the time, and the moment they heard the name Salman, which is a Muslim name,
they would talk to me in a way that if I were called, you know, Raghubir, they
might not. So I would have long conversations about their lives and their
resentments. But when I went back to Delhi or Bombay and relayed this
information there was a desire even amongst the Indian intelligentsia not to
acknowledge how deep those resentments had become. People would say, You
shouldn’t talk this way because you’re sounding communalist. Me, the Muslim
communalist!
INTERVIEWER
Could you possibly write an
apolitical book?
RUSHDIE
Yes, I have great interest
in it, and I keep being annoyed that I haven’t. I think the space between
private life and public life has disappeared in our time. There used to be much
more distance there. It’s like Jane Austen forgetting to mention the Napoleonic
wars. The function of the British army in the novels of Jane Austen is to look
cute at parties. It’s not because she’s ducking something, it’s that she can
fully and profoundly explain the lives of her characters without a reference to
the public sphere. That’s no longer possible, and it’s not just because there’s
a TV in the corner of every room. It’s because the events of the world have
great bearing on our daily lives. Do we have a job or not? How much is our
money worth? This is all determined by things outside of our control. It
challenges Heraclitus’s idea that character is destiny. Sometimes your
character is not your destiny. Sometimes a plane flying into a building is your
destiny. The larger world gets into the story not because I want to write about
politics, but because I want to write about people.
INTERVIEWER
But in American writing
there seems to be a rift of sorts—politics over there, fiction over
here—because what an American novelist writes is not going to influence policy
in Washington.
RUSHDIE
Yes, but who cares about
that?
INTERVIEWER
Do you think that in India,
for instance, fiction is politically relevant?
RUSHDIE
No. If only it was. But
what does happen is that well known writers are still considered—in a way that
American writers are not—to be a part of the conversation. Their opinions are
sought out. This happens in England, too. It happens in Europe. In America it
was true not so long ago. It was true in the generation of Mailer, Sontag,
Arthur Miller—
INTERVIEWER
What happened?
RUSHDIE
I don’t know. At the height
of the British Empire very few English novels were written that dealt with
British power. It’s extraordinary that at the moment in which England was the
global superpower the subject of British power appeared not to interest most
writers. Maybe there’s an echo of that now, when America is the global
superpower. Outside this country, America means power. That’s not true in the
United States itself. There are still writers here who take on politics—Don
DeLillo, Robert Stone, Joan Didion, and so on. But I think many American
writers are relatively uninterested in the way America is perceived abroad. As
a result there’s relatively little written about the power of America.
INTERVIEWER
Alongside your interest in
politics and power, there’s a lot of fantastic invention in your work. In fact,
you’ve said that The Wizard of Oz made a writer of you.
RUSHDIE
After I saw the film, I
went home and wrote a short story called “Over the Rainbow.” I was probably
nine or ten. The story was about a boy walking down a sidewalk in Bombay and
seeing the beginning of the rainbow, instead of the end—this shimmering thing
arcing away from him. It had steps cut in it—usefully—rainbow-colored steps all
the way up. He goes up over the rainbow and has fairy-tale adventures. He meets
a talking Pianola at one point. The story has not survived. Probably just as
well.
INTERVIEWER
I thought your father had
it.
RUSHDIE
He said he had it, but when
we looked through his papers after he died, we never found it. So either he was
bullshitting or he lost it. He died in ’87, so it was a long time ago, and
certainly nothing’s going to come to light now. There are no trunks in the
attic. I think it’s gone, along with a much later thing, the first full-length
piece of writing that I did. When I was eighteen, and I’d just left
school—Rugby, in England—I had a gap of about five months before I was due to
go to Cambridge. In that period I wrote a typescript called “Terminal Report”
about my last term or two at school, thinly fictionalized. I went to Cambridge
and forgot about it, and then about twenty years later my mother said that
they’d found this manuscript. It was like a message from my eighteen-year-old
self. But I didn’t much like that self, who was very politically conservative,
and in other ways a fairly standard product of an English boarding-school
education. The exception was the material about racism, which was incredibly
sophisticated. That eighteen-year-old boy knew everything I know now, except he
knew it more sharply because it had just happened to him. Still, I had such a
negative reaction to that text that when my mother asked if I wanted it, I told
her to keep it. And then she lost it. When she died, we didn’t find it.
INTERVIEWER
An act of kindness?
RUSHDIE
Maybe. It was absolutely
terrible. But I regret its loss because it was like a diary. If I ever wanted
to write about that period it would have given me raw material I couldn’t
otherwise get. Now I feel really stupid to have left it at home.
INTERVIEWER
You had a bad time at
Rugby?
RUSHDIE
I wasn’t beaten up, but I
was very lonely and there were few people that I thought of as friends. A lot of
that had to do with prejudice. Not from the staff—I was extremely well taught.
I remember two or three teachers who were inspirational teachers of the kind
that you see in Robin Williams movies. There was a sweet, elderly gentleman
called Mr. J. B. Hope-Simpson, who apart from being a good history teacher was
also the person who introduced me to The Lord of the Rings when I was
fifteen. I completely fell in love with it, somewhat to the harm of my studies.
I still remember it in uncanny detail. I really responded to the language
project, all the imaginary languages. I got quite good at Elvish at one point.
INTERVIEWER
Did you have anyone to
speak Elvish with?
RUSHDIE
There were one or two other
Lord of the Rings nerds.
INTERVIEWER
What else were you reading?
RUSHDIE
Before I came to England,
my favorite authors were P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie. I used to devour
both. My grandparents lived in Aligarh, not far from New Delhi, where my
grandfather was involved with the Tibbiya College at Aligarh Muslim University.
He was a Western-trained doctor, trained in Europe, but he became very
interested in Indian traditional medicine. He would take me on the back of his
bike to the university library and turn me loose. I remember it as a place with
giant stacks disappearing into the dark, with those rolling ladders that you
could climb, and I would come down out of the gloom with these big heaps of P.
G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie, which my grandfather would solemnly check out
for me. I’d take them back and read them in a week and come back for more.
Wodehouse was very popular in India, and I think still is.
INTERVIEWER
Why is that?
RUSHDIE
Funny is funny. Wodehouse
has something in common with the Indian sense of humor. It may just be the
silliness.
INTERVIEWER
So between the age of ten
and the time you left for Rugby, when you were thirteen and a half, were you
writing stories?
RUSHDIE
I don’t have any memory of
much besides that “Over the Rainbow” thing, but I was good at English. I
remember a particular class in which we were asked to write a limerick about
anything. If we managed one, we should write two. And during the course of this
class, when everyone else had been fighting to get down one or two that didn’t
even scan properly, I wrote maybe thirty-seven. The teacher accused me of
having cheated. The sense of injustice still lingers. How could I cheat? I
didn’t just happen to have a copy of Edward Lear with me, nor had I spent the
last five years memorizing limericks in anticipation of this possible task. I
felt I should be praised, and instead I was accused.
INTERVIEWER
Bombay has many languages.
What is your mother tongue?
RUSHDIE
Urdu. Urdu is literally my
mother’s tongue. It’s my father’s tongue, too. But in northern India one also
spoke Hindi. Actually, what we spoke was neither of them, or rather more like
both. I mean, what people in northern India actually speak is not a real
language. It’s a colloquial mixture of Hindi and Urdu called Hindustani. It
isn’t written. It’s the language of Bollywood movies. And some mixture of
Hindustani and English is what we spoke at home. When I went to England for
school, when I was thirteen and a half, I would have been more or less exactly
bilingual—equally good in both languages. And I’m still very colloquially
comfortable in Hindi and Urdu, but I wouldn’t consider writing in them.
INTERVIEWER
Were you a good student?
RUSHDIE
I wasn’t as smart as I
thought I was. In general that was a good school, Cathedral School in Bombay.
When I came to England I didn’t feel behind, but if you look at the school
reports, I’m not doing that well. Before Rugby my father, like many Indian
fathers, would assign me extra work. I remember having to do essays and things
at home and resenting them colossally. He’d make me do précis of Shakespeare.
It is not unusual in an Indian household that children, especially eldest and
only sons, should be driven that way. At Rugby, partly because of the social
unhappiness, I plunged into work. It wasn’t so much creative writing, though; I
was more attracted in those days to history. I won prizes for long theses and
essays. I don’t know why it was, given my love of reading, that it never
occurred to me, either at school or at university, to study literature. It
didn’t really seem like work to read novels. Actually, my father didn’t think
history was work, either. He wanted me to do something sensible at
Cambridge—economics.
INTERVIEWER
You resisted him?
RUSHDIE
My life was saved by the
director of studies, Dr. John Broadbent. I went to see him and said, Look, my
father says that history is not useful and that I should switch to economics,
otherwise he won’t pay the fees. Broadbent said, Leave it to me. And he wrote
my father a ferocious letter: Dear Mr. Rushdie, your son has told us this.
Unfortunately we do not believe that he has the qualifications to study
economics at Cambridge, therefore, if you insist on making him give up the
study of history, I will have to ask you to remove him from the university to
make room for somebody who is properly qualified. That was a very strange
moment, because I’d left the subcontinent for Cambridge in the middle of a
war—India and Pakistan, September ’65. I couldn’t get through on the phone
because all of the lines had been taken over by the military. Letters were all
being censored and took weeks to arrive, and I was hearing about bombings and
air raids. But after Broadbent’s letter my father never said a word about
economics again. When I graduated and told him I wanted to write novels he was
shocked. A cry burst out of him: What will I tell my friends? What he really
meant was that all his friends’ less intelligent sons were pulling down big
bucks in serious jobs and what—I was going to be a penniless novelist? It would
be a loss of face for him because he thought of writing as, at best, a hobby.
Fortunately, he lived long enough to see that it might not have been such a
dumb choice.
INTERVIEWER
Did he say so?
RUSHDIE
He somehow couldn’t praise
the books; he was curiously strangled emotionally. I was the only son, and as a
result we had a difficult relationship. He died in ’87, so Midnight’s
Children and Shame had come out, but The Satanic Verses had
not, and he never said a kind word to me about my writing until a week or two
before he died. But he’d read my books a hundred times. He probably knew them
better than I did. Actually, he was annoyed about Midnight’s Children
because he felt that the father character was a satire of him. In my young,
pissed-off way I responded that I’d left all the nasty stuff out. My father had
studied literature at Cambridge so I expected him to have a sophisticated
response to the book, but the person who did was my mother. I’d thought that if
anybody was going to be worried that the family in the book is an echo of my
family, it would be her. But she understood it at once as fiction. My father
took a while to, as he put it, forgive me. Of course, I got more annoyed about
being forgiven than I had about him being pissed off.
INTERVIEWER
But, as you say, he didn’t
live to read The Satanic Verses.
RUSHDIE
I’m absolutely certain that
my father would have been five hundred percent on my side. He was a scholar of
Islam, very knowledgeable about the life of the Prophet and the origins of
early Islam, and indeed the way in which the Koran was revealed, and so on, but
completely lacking in religious belief. We would go to the mosque once a year.
Even when he was dying there was not a single moment when he took refuge in
religion or called out to God, nothing. He never was under any illusion that
death was anything other than an ending. It was very impressive. So the fact
that I decided to study the origins of Islam at university is not an accident.
It’s partly to do with having that kind of example at home. And he’d have seen
that what I was doing in that book was a nonreligious person’s investigation
into the nature of revelation, using Islam’s example because it’s what I knew
most about.
INTERVIEWER
Where did you go after
Cambridge?
RUSHDIE
First, I tried to be an
actor. I had done all this undergraduate acting and I thought I might like to
go on doing it, especially while I was trying to be a writer. I didn’t find it
at all easy to begin. I was living in an attic room in a house I was sharing
with four friends in London, just futzing around. I didn’t know what I was
doing. I was pretending to write. There was a kind of panic inside me, which
made me quite a nervous person at that time. I had some college friends who
were in London, involved in fringe theater groups. There were a lot of
interesting writers working there—David Hare, Howard Brenton, Trevor
Griffiths—and some very good actors, too. I learned from working with good
actors that I wasn’t as good as they were. A good actor will make you look
better on stage, but you know that they’re doing it, not you.
Partly because of that, and
partly because I just had no money at all, I decided after a while that I
needed to do something else. One of my theatrical friends with whom I’d been at
Cambridge, a writer called Dusty Hughes, got a job at the J. Walter Thompson
advertising agency in London. Suddenly he had this office overlooking Berkeley
Square and he was doing photo shoots for shampoo with supermodels. And he had
money. He had a car. And he said, You should do this, Salman, it’s really easy.
He arranged for me to have a copy test in the J. Walter Thompson agency, which
I failed.
The question I remember is:
Imagine that you meet a Martian who speaks English but doesn’t know what bread
is—you have a hundred words to explain to him how to make a piece of toast. In
Satyajit Ray’s film Company Limited, one million people apply for the
same job. The protagonist is one of the million, and the interviewers, not
knowing how to choose between a million people, start asking increasingly
lunatic questions. The question that finally destroys his chances of getting
the job is: What is the weight of the moon? The Martian question was a question
like that.
Eventually I got a position
at a much smaller agency called Sharp McManus, on Albemarle Street. That was my
first job, and I really had no idea how to approach it. I was given a project
for a cheap cigar made by Player’s. It was a Christmas offer; they were going
to have a little box of Christmas crackers—you know, those classic British
party favors—and inside each cracker there’d be a little tube with a cigar in
it. I was told to write something for this, and I blanked. Eventually I went to
see the creative director, Oliver Knox—who later in his life wrote three or
four novels himself—and said, I don’t know what to do. And he immediately said,
Oh—six cracking ideas from Player’s to help Christmas go off with a bang. That
was my education in advertising.
INTERVIEWER
Were you writing fiction at
the same time?
RUSHDIE
I was beginning. I was very
unsuccessful. I hadn’t really found a direction as a writer. I was writing
stuff that I didn’t show anyone, bits that eventually came together into a
first novel-length thing that everybody hated. This was before Grimus,
my first published novel. I tried to write the book in a Joycean stream of
consciousness when really it needed to be written in straight, thrillerish
language. It was called “The Book of the Peer.” A peer in Urdu is a saint or
holy man. It was a story about an unnamed Eastern country in which a popular
holy man is backed by a rich man and a general who decide that they’re going to
put him in power in order to pull his strings; and when they do, they discover
that he’s actually much more powerful than they are. It was, in a way, prescient
about what happened afterwards with Khomeini, about the ways in which Islamic
radicalism rose as a result of people thinking they could use it as a facade.
Unfortunately, the book is almost unbearable to read because of the way it’s
written. Really, nobody—even people who were well disposed towards me—wanted
anything to do with it. I put it away and went on working in advertising.
INTERVIEWER
All novelists seem to have
at least one in the drawer that’s just garbage.
RUSHDIE
I have three. Until I started
writing Midnight’s Children, which would probably have been about late
’75, early ’76, there was this period of flailing about. It was more than a
technical problem. Until you know who you are you can’t write. Because my life
had been jumbled up between India and England and Pakistan, I really didn’t
have a good handle on myself. As a result the writing was garbage—sometimes
clever garbage, but garbage nonetheless. I think that also goes for Grimus.
To me, it doesn’t feel like my writing. Or only fitfully. It makes me want to
hide behind the furniture. But there we are. It’s in print, I’ve never
withdrawn it. If you make the mistake of publishing something you have to leave
it out there. It’s steadily found a readership, and there are even people who’ve
said good things about it, much to my mystification.
But one of the novels that
I abandoned—“The Antagonist,” a dreadful sub-Pynchon piece set in
London—contained the germ of what became Midnight’s Children, a marginal
character called Saleem Sinai who was born at the moment of Indian
independence. That’s the only thing that survived. I threw away a year’s work
and kept that germ.
After the critical beating Grimus
took, I completely rethought everything. I thought, OK, I have to write about
something that I care about much more. I was very scared all the time. See, I
thought my career as a writer had gone nowhere at all. Meanwhile, many people
in that very gifted generation I was a part of had found their ways as writers
at a much younger age. It was as if they were zooming past me. Martin Amis, Ian
McEwan, Julian Barnes, William Boyd, Kazuo Ishiguro, Timothy Mo, Angela Carter,
Bruce Chatwin—to name only a few. It was an extraordinary moment in English
literature, and I was the one left in the starting gate, not knowing which way
to run. That didn’t make it any easier.
INTERVIEWER
What was it about Saleem
Sinai that released you?
RUSHDIE
I’d always wanted to write
something that would come out of my experience as a child in Bombay. I’d been
away from India for a while and began to fear that the connection was eroding.
Childhood—that was the impetus long before I knew what the story was and how
big it would become. But if you’re going to have the child born at the same
time as the country, so that they’re twins in a way, you have to tell the story
of both twins. So it forced me to take on history. One of the reasons it took
five years to write is that I didn’t know how to write it. One early version
opened with the line, “Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our
absence.” I meant that children don’t come naked into the world, they come
burdened with the accumulated history of their family and their world. But it
was too Tolstoyan. I thought, If there’s one thing this book is not, it’s Anna
Karenina. The sentence is still there in the book somewhere, but I buried
it.
The third-person narration
wasn’t working, so I decided to try a first-person narrative, and there was a
day when I sat down and I wrote more or less exactly what is now the first page
of Midnight’s Children. It just arrived, this voice of Saleem’s: quite
savvy, full of all kinds of arcana, funny but sort of ridiculous. I was
electrified by what was coming out of my typewriter. It was one of those
moments when you believe that the writing comes through you rather than from
you. I saw how to drag in everything from the ancient traditions of India to
the oral narrative form to, above all, the noise and the music of the Indian
city. That first paragraph showed me the book. I held onto Saleem’s coattails
and let him run. As the book developed, as Saleem grew up, there were moments
where I felt frustrated by him. As he got older, he became more and more
passive. I kept trying to force him to be more active, to take charge of
events—and it just didn’t work. Afterwards, people assumed the book was
autobiographical, but to me Saleem always felt very unlike me, because I had a
kind of wrestling match with him, which I lost.
INTERVIEWER
Have you written another
book where the voice just arrives like that?
RUSHDIE
Each book has to teach you
how to write it, but there’s often an important moment of discovery. The only
thing that’s comparable was when I was writing Haroun and the Sea of Stories,
in which the big problem was tone of voice, how to walk the line that would
allow both children and grownups to get pleasure out of it. There was a
particular day when, after some false starts, I wrote what is now the beginning
of the book. And again I thought, Oh, I see, you do it like this: “There was
once, in the country of Alifbay . . .” I had
to find that once-upon-a-time formula. Because the thing about the fable is
that the words used are very simple but the story is not. You see this in
Indian fables like the Panchatantra stories, in Aesop, and even in modern
fables, like Calvino’s books. You say something like, Once upon a time there
was a cat who wore boots as high as his knees and used a sword. Words of one
syllable, but the thing created is very strange.
Joseph Heller said that
once in a while he would find a sentence that contained a hundred more
sentences. That happened to him when he started Catch-22, the moment he
wrote the sentence about Yossarian falling in love with the chaplain. That
sentence told him where the rest of the novel was going. That happened to me
when I wrote the beginning of Midnight’s Children and Haroun. I
had that lightbulb moment. But when I wrote The Satanic Verses I had
hundreds of pages before I wrote the scene that is now the beginning of the
novel, these people falling out of the sky. When I wrote that scene I thought,
What’s this doing here? This doesn’t belong here.
INTERVIEWER
And there was your
beginning.
RUSHDIE
It’s a funny thing, that
scene. When the book came out, a lot of people really hated it. That’s when the
joke started about there being a page fifteen club of Rushdie readers—you know,
people who couldn’t get beyond page fifteen. I myself thought it was a good
opening and I still do. You almost always discover that the book you’re writing
is not quite the book you set out to write. When you discover that, you solve
the problem of the book. When I was writing Fury the title changed every
day, and I was uncertain for a long time what the book was about. Was it about
dolls, or New York, or violence, or divorce? Every day I’d wake up and I’d see
it a slightly different way. Not until I figured out the title did I understand
the central idea behind the book. Same thing happened with Midnight’s
Children. I didn’t know what it was called at first. When I started writing
it, I just put “Sinai” on the cover. Then there was a moment when I thought, If
I don’t know what the title is, I don’t know what the book’s about. I stopped
writing prose and started writing titles. After several days of fooling around
I ended up with two: “Children of Midnight” and “Midnight’s Children.” I typed
them out manically, one after the other, over and over again. And then, after
about a day of typing, I suddenly thought, “Children of Midnight,” that’s a
really boring title, and “Midnight’s Children,” that’s a really good title. And
it showed me the center of the novel. It’s about those children. With The
Satanic Verses I didn’t know if it was one book or three. It took me quite
a while to be brave enough to decide it was a single work. Even though it would
have to be a novel of discontinuities, I decided that was the book I wanted to
write. I must have been feeling very confident. I’d had these two very
successful books, and that put a lot of fuel in my tank, and I thought I could
do anything.
INTERVIEWER
With fame, and with the
fatwa, there has come to be almost a cult of Rushdie. Does that ever follow you
back to the desk?
RUSHDIE
No. Writers are really good
at creating that quiet space. When I’m in my room with the door shut, nothing
signifies except what I’m trying to wrestle with. Writing’s too hard, it just
requires so much of you, and most of the time you feel dumb. I always think you
start at the stupid end of the book, and if you’re lucky you finish at the
smart end. When you start out, you feel inadequate to the task. You don’t even
understand the task. It’s so difficult, you don’t have time to worry about
being famous. That just seems like shit that happens outside.
What’s harder to deal with
is hostility from the press. It was a strange feeling to be characterized by
some in the British press as an unlikable person. I’m not quite sure what I did
to deserve it. I understand that in a literary life there are cycles when it’s
your turn to be praised and your turn to be hammered. It was clear that when Fury
came out it was my turn to be hammered. I felt that a lot of the critical
response was not about the book at all—it was about me. It was bizarre that so
many of the reviews of Fury were headed with a picture of me with my
then-girlfriend, now my wife. I thought, What’s that got to do with it? Do you
put John Updike’s wife next to him at the top of a review? Or Saul Bellow’s
wife?
INTERVIEWER
In Fury, Solanka is
born in Bombay, educated at Cambridge, and lives in Manhattan. Maybe that’s why
reviewers assumed it was about your own life in New York.
RUSHDIE
Yes, I was saying I’m over
here now. It felt scary to write so close to the present in time, and to my own
experience, but both were deliberate choices. I wanted to write about arrival.
I didn’t want to pretend that I was Don DeLillo or Philip Roth or anyone who’d
grown up in these streets. I wanted to write about the New York of people who
come here and make new lives, about the ease with which stories from all over
the world can become New York stories. Just by virtue of showing up, your story
becomes one of the many stories of the city. London’s not like that. Yes,
there’s an immigrant culture in London that enriches it and adds to it, but
London has a dominant narrative. There is no comparable dominant narrative in
New York; just the collected narratives of everyone who shows up. That’s one of
the reasons why I am attracted to it.
As for
Solanka, he’s a grumpy bastard. I put the world’s
grumpiness about America into Solanka, and then surrounded him with a kind of
carnival. Whereas I love being in New York, I’m as interested in the carnival
as in the grumpiness. And even Solanka—you know he may be someone who bitches a
lot about America, but it’s to America that he’s come to save himself. I
thought it was silly the way the book was read as being about me. It’s not my
diary. You can start close to your life, but that’s a starting place. The
question is, what’s the journey? The journey is the work of art. Where do you
finish up?
INTERVIEWER
You’ve lived in—and
between—very different parts of the world. Where would you say you’re
from?
RUSHDIE
I’ve always had more
affinity to places than nations. I suppose if you were asking me formally, I
would still think of myself as a British citizen of Indian origin. But I think
of myself as a New Yorker and as a Londoner. I probably think of those as being
more exact definitions than the passport or the place of birth.
INTERVIEWER
Will you ever write a
memoir?
RUSHDIE
Until the whole fatwa thing
happened it never occurred to me that my life was interesting enough. I’d just
write my novels and hopefully those would be interesting, but who cares about
the writer’s life? Then this very unusual thing happened to me, and I found
myself keeping an occasional journal just to remind myself what was happening.
When things went back to normal, it occurred to me that a memoir would be a way
of being done with it. Nobody would ever ask me about it again. But then I
realized I’d have to spend a year researching it, at least a year writing it,
and at least a year talking about it. So I’d be sentencing myself to three or
four more years of the thing I’d just got out of. I didn’t think I could bear
that.
INTERVIEWER
Did the fatwa shake your
confidence as a writer?
RUSHDIE
It made me wobble a lot. Then, it made me take a
very deep breath, and in a way rededicate myself to the art, to think, Well, to
hell with that. But at first what I felt was: That book took me more than five
years to write. That’s five years of my life giving my absolute best effort to
make a thing as good as I can possibly make it. I do believe that writers, in
the act of writing, are altruistic. They’re not thinking about money and fame.
They’re just thinking about being the best writer they can be, making the page
as good as it can be, making a sentence the best sentence you can write, the
person interesting, and the theme developed. Getting it right is what you’re
thinking about. The writing is so difficult and makes such demands of you that
the response—sales and so on—doesn’t signify. So I spent five years like this,
and what I got for it was worldwide vilification and my life being threatened.
It wasn’t even so much to do with the physical danger as with the intellectual
contempt, the denigration of the seriousness of the work, the idea that I was a
worthless individual who had done a worthless thing, and that, unfortunately,
there were a certain number of Western fellow travelers who agreed. Then you
think, What the fuck am I doing it for? It’s not worth it. Just to spend five
years of your life being as serious as you can be, and then to be accused of
being frivolous and self-
seeking, opportunistic: He did it on purpose. Of
course I did it on purpose! How do you spend five years of your life doing
something accidentally?
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