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Interview with Salman Rushdie

Dan Webster
Staff writer
April 20, 2005

If you know the name Salman Rushdie, you likely know it because of the Ayatollah Khomeini, the late leader of Iran.

It was the Ayatollah who condemned the British novelist to death following the publication of "The Satanic Verses," a ribald, fantastic novel that ends up examining the nature of belief by, at least to followers of Islam, blaspheming both the Quran and the prophet Muhammad.

But Rushdie, a featured guest at Get Lit! 2005, was a successful writer long before 1989, the year the Ayatollah issued his fatwa calling for Rushdie's death.

The 57-year-old Bombay-born novelist won the Booker Prize in 1981 for his novel "Midnight's Children." And even during the years that he lived underground, dodging the death threats that came his way, Rushdie continued to be productive. He published eight books, novels such as 1995's "The Moor's Last Sigh" and 2002's collection of nonfiction writing, "Step Across This Line."

Rushdie's life has been one of bridging cultures. His family left India in 1964, choosing to live in Pakistan. Rushdie left Pakistan at age 14 to be educated in England, earning a degree from King's College in 1968.

He worked in Pakistani television, but until 1981 mostly made money working as a freelance ad copywriter.

Through it all he pursued his main artistic pursuit: writing. His first published novel, the blend of science-fiction and fantasy "Grimus," debuted in 1975. It wasn't until 1981, with the publication of "Midnight's Children, that Rushdie was able to earn a living as a novelist.

The time that he lived in seclusion ended several years ago, a fact that he says hasn't been publicized nearly as much as the fact of the fatwa itself. But even though he has said he is tired of talking about the controversy, he proved to be surprisingly candid about the effect that it has had on his life in a recent half-hour interview - an interview that, in fact, began 90 minutes late.

As Rushdie explained while graciously apologizing, his literary agency had double-booked him.

Rushdie: I'm really sorry to put you to the inconvenience. But, anyway, here I am now.

Webster: Thanks you. Where are you?

R: I'm actually at this time at my literary agency in New York.

W: And so you are in New York. Do you split time between London and New York these days?

R: Yeah. Yeah, I do. But I have a home here, and I'm here probably more than anywhere else.

W: I was curious about that. I've been trying to read as much as I can about you online and elsewhere, and the one thing that I haven't seen addressed is … after all the problems that happened after "The Satanic Verses," have you been able to go back to Asia at all? To India or Pakistan?

R: Yes. I go back all the time. I was in Indian three times last year. Really, the whole thing has … I don't think that I'm going to go and take any vacations in Iran anytime soon. But, you know, other than that the situation has been completely back to normal for many, many years now.

W: I hadn't read anything beyond '95, which was the last time I could find any real reference to it. But then I go to other places, and they say they still have rewards put out as late as last year.

R: There's really nothing of consequence anymore, and there hasn't been for years.

W: That's, actually, very nice to know.

R: Yeah. Trouble is, people don't write the good news. As I'm sure you know, one of the natures of journalism is, "People want to kill so-and-so" is a news story. And "People don't really want to kill him anymore" isn't a news story. So what happened is that the end of this, the period of non-threat, was much less well-reported than the period of threat itself. You know, so it leaves people with the impression that something is still going on.

W: Yeah. And that's hardly the worst of the offenses that are being committed, I think, by journalists around the world, especially right here in the United States.

R: But anyway, other than the occasional rhetorical noise coming out of Iran - which there are unpleasant people there who occasionally say unpleasant things - there haven't been any real, actual threats for probably seven years now.

W: Well, it's interesting that during the years that there were threats you were still able to put out some really, well-written, critically acclaimed books. I've always been curious as to how that period of seclusion affected your writing habits.

R: Well, you know, I think that writers are quite often disciplined people. And I think that one of the things as a novelist that you do have is the discipline of a daily habit and a daily routine to do your work. You know, just simply because a novel is a long piece of work that if you don't have the kind of discipline, it never gets written. I think most novelists that I know, in some degree, are very good at simply buckling down and simply getting on with it. And one of the feelings that I had very strongly during those years was that I wished to simply continue down the path I'd set for myself as a writer. And in a way, it was an aspect of my resistance, you know, to not be silenced, to not in anyway be deformed by it as a writer. I though it would have been easy for me to not write or to writer very embittered books or to writer very frightened books. And all of that seemed to me to be a terrible defeat. And I thought the best thing I can do is to go on trying to write the kind of books that I've always wanted to write. And go on being myself. And I guess I found in myself the bloody-mindedness to do that (laughs).

W: Yeah, I've read in certain place that you can be an obstinate kind of guy.

R: Well, I think writers are obstinate, aren't they? If you're going to spend four or five years of your life writing a book, which I have several times done, you've got to be pretty damned determined to do it. It doesn't happen by accident (laughs). And so I think novelists are quite a bloody-minded breed. And I certainly would plead guilty to it.

W: Of course, your situation has been different than almost anybody else's in critically acclaimed writing over the past couple of decades. But what I've noticed, and I'm not the only one, is the growing oppression - particularly in the United States - in terms of these countermeasures toward terrorism.

R: Yes.

W: The so-called Patriot Act and everything. Do you think that the world is getting harder for authors to express themselves freely because of these things?

R: Well, I think not just authors, actually. I think journalists, too. I don't think it's just books, is it? I do think there's a narrowing of what is possible to say in the major information media. The spectrum of available points of view is now not nearly as wide as it used to be. And I think that is very regrettable. This doesn't even have to do with the Patriot Act of the government. It has as much to do with who own the major information media.

W: And that's going back to what you were saying before. The good news about there being no story about the fatwa is less newsworthy than the fact that there might have been something negative about it. And that has to do with either a perception of what people want to read …

R: Yes.

W: … or it's a true reading of what they want. Which one is it? Is it the tail chasing the rabbit or what?

R: It has something to do with that curious thing called news values. You know, what is considered to be newsworthy. And, you know, bad news allegedly sells more newspapers than good news. See, I did think that what happened in the case of "The Satanic Verses" is that, in the end, it was pretty much a victory. That there was this attempt to murder a writer who was not murdered. There was an attempt to suppress a work, which was not suppressed. And in the end, the people issuing those threats were forced by international opinion and by political realities to withdraw those threats. And it seems to me that's a remarkable achievement, not just of mine but of many, many people working on my behalf and with me and, indeed, of the American and British governments working together. Really a collective achievement by publishers, by booksellers, readers, politicians and just ordinary people who got very agitated about this matter. And I think, you know, it would have been, in my view, a news story worth writing that it's possible to defeat these threats. You know, you don't always have to lose. It's actually possible to win. In the end, there were some articles like that. But here we are, as I say, seven years after the end of the threats, I'm still having to explain that there haven't been any threats for seven years.

W: I think that it's probably an unfortunate part of the history that 20 years from now, 30 years from now, long after both you and I are dead - and we're both the same age - you're still going to be connected with that.

R: I know, I know. I can't avoid that. But I think one of the things that I really have been pleased about in recent years - and even during those bad years - that when my books would come out, broadly speaking, people did me the favor of responding to them in their own terms as books rather than as aspects of some political scandal. So when "Haroun and the Sea of Stories" or "The Moor's Last Sigh" or "The Ground Beneath Her Feet," you know, when those books came out, the response to them was gratifyingly literary. No, it wasn't all favorable, but what I'm saying is that it was about writing, you know. And I think that those people who have written about and read my books and cared about my books, have done me the favor of allowing me to go on being a writer above all. And I think now that the news stuff is fading into the background, that literary self, which was the only self I ever wanted, has begun to reassert itself. So that's a huge relief, I can't tell you.

W: Speaking of that kind of literary description, I think it's one of the bad parts of criticism of anything is that we tend to channel people into certain groups or certain areas or certain descriptions. We don't understand this, so we put it here. And one of the terms that I've always heard applied to you is "magical realism" …

R: Yeah.

W: " … as if that explains you. What would you call your style?

R: Well, first of all about magical realism, I think the problem with that phrase is that it's now used rather lazily as a label. And when people use it, they tend to mean magical and not realism. You know, what the phrase tends to mean is the use of fantasy rather than a different approach to the realistic novel. Which is what it really meant.

W: "One Hundred Years of Solitude."

R: Yeah, exactly. And I think magical realism means something in that South American context, in the sense that it describes the work of a certain group of writers at a certain period. French surrealism is really the same thing as South American magical realism, and surrealism has some meaning in that French context of that time. North American fabulism of the 1970s, of the kind of Pynchon/Coover kind, is essentially the same thing as magical realism as well. But it has a meaning in terms of a North American context. I think there's always been, in the history of literature from the "Arabian Nights" and "Don Quixote" to the present day, a tendency amongst writers to seek to encompass the real world without necessarily using only naturalistic techniques. And I think, I hope, that I am part of that tradition. But I also think that my books are also very different, one from each other. And in some of them, the level of the fantastic, surrealistic elements are quite relevant, and in others they're really almost absent. For example, in the last novel, "Fury," it's almost entirely a realistic novel. There's a little bit of science fiction in there, but the science fiction in there is the story within the story. The actual action in the novel doesn't have a trace of magical realism. What my interest as a writer is to never repeat myself. Not to do again what I've done before. So in that sense I resist all labels, because it might not be what I do next time.

W: Absolutely. You've written novels, essays, travel literature, even a children's book. Is there type of writing that you haven't done that you're thinking of giving a shot.

R: Never written a movie.

W: I was wondering about that.

R: I should say that's not entirely true. I've written a couple of film scripts, but they never got made, which is the fate of people who write film scripts.

W: But did you get paid for them?

R: (laughs) In one case, yes.

W: That's always the important thing.

R: In one case I got paid, and in the other I didn't. But that also is the story of the screenwriter. I've always loved movies. I've often said this, that I've probably been as affected by what I've experienced in movie theaters as by what I've read in books. And so in a way, it's kind of surprising to me that I've never become more involved in movies. And I'd like to be, especially right now since I've just finished a novel, which is coming out in the fall.

W: What is the name of it?

R: It's called "Shalimar the Clown."

W: And how would you describe that?

R: The simplest way to describe it, which is, of course, not necessarily the best way to describe it, is it's a murder story. I decided to murder an American ambassador (laughs).

W: How does he die?

R: The novel actually begins in California. He's a retired, very elderly, very distinguished gentleman who suddenly, out of the blue, gets knifed to death by his Indian-Kashmiri chauffeur on the doorstep of his grown-up illegitimate daughter. And the novel becomes the story of those three people, the story of the murderer, the man and his daughter.

W: You've already got me intrigued.

R: So, there it is. It starts, as I say, in L.A. and then it goes into the back story because it seems like a political murder but it turns out to be entirely personal, and so we have to find out some of their story. And some of that goes back into India and Kashmir, and then it comes back to America for the denouement.

W: A couple of days ago I was down in Walla Walla, Wash., at Whitman College, giving a presentation, and I stopped into a bookstore to look for one of your books. I couldn't find one, but I went up to the owner and I said, "Have you got any?" And she said, "No, we don't at the moment. But are you looking for a good one to read? 'Haroun,' you have to read 'Haroun,' it's so good." And that got me to thinking, which of your books would you recommend people to read to get a good feel for your work.

R: That's not a bad one to start. What I've found is that … you can write books that are well-admired and well-received and so on, but only some of your books are books which you could say that people actually love. And you're lucky if you write one or two books that people actually love, rather than admire or respect. And I think that of my books, the ones of which that is most true, would be "Haroun," "Midnight's Children" and "The Moor's Last Sigh."

W: Those are the ones that I put down.

R: Those are the three that I think people have most affection for. And I think if you're going to start reading a writer that you've never read before, you may as well read one that you have a chance of loving, you know, rather than admiring. Myself, I don't have favorite children, if you know what I mean. But I've noticed that the responses to those three books have had a quality of deep affection, which is very gratifying. So I would say any of those three in no particular order.

W: Well, I immediately, since I hadn't read it, went and found "Haroun and the Sea of Stories," and one of the things that I love in there is the sense of humor. It's just so totally dry. This quote particularly: "This created certain difficulties because many interesting and some important things take longer than 11 minutes. Meals, for example, and some mathematics examinations." I laughed out loud at that. It was very funny.

R: (Laughs) Well, you know it's a book that was written for my son, who was 11 at the time it was written and whose middle name is Haroun. Now he's 26, and really in a way I wrote it for him at two ages. I wanted to write a book that could be read by an 11-year-old boy and from which he would get 11-year-old pleasure. And then to think that, "Well, one of these days he's going to grow up and read it again. And I want that there to be enough depth in it so that when he reads it as an adult he gets adult pleasure from it." And certainly in the case of that audience of one, it seems to have worked. Then I thought afterward, you know, many of the books that we think of as children's books were not really written as children's books. I mean, "Grimm's Fairy Tales," for instance. Those weren't children's stories. Those were very dark, in many ways, traditional folk tales.

W: If you read anything by Roald Dahl …

R: Exactly.

W: … those are children's books, but at the same time you say, "Boy this is dark." I mean, "James and the Giant Peach"?

R: Exactly. Or "Lemony Snicket." You couldn't get any darker than that, and yet children and adults like them. And I wanted to write a book that would have that kind of double appeal. Think of "Alice in Wonderland." That's a very sophisticated book, in which very complicated philosophical ideas are introduced. You know, when the Caterpillar discusses the difference between saying what you mean and meaning what you say, that's not a trivial thing.

W: Not at all. I have to ask you, what do you think of the way you've been represented in popular culture, particularly American popular culture. I mean, did you ever see the sitcom episode of "Seinfeld" …

R: Yeah, I did.

W: … in which one of the characters claimed to have seen you in a steam bath?

R: Yes, then they go to the steam bath. I did see it. Actually, in that particular case I liked it a lot because I thought that it was very funny. I thought, "If you're going to get into this stuff, then at least get into the funny stuff" (laughs). I mean, if it's going to be a joke, let it be a good joke. And actually a few years ago, many years after that episode ran, I ran into Jerry Seinfeld. And he immediately said, "Did you see the episode?" And I said, "Yeah, I did." And he was very pleased that I'd liked it. And he said, "You know, when we did it, it was really controversial. And I said, "Yeah, but, you know, the point is not that. The point is that it was funny.

W: Well, I don't want to keep you forever, and I thank you for calling me, but I wanted to ask you one last question. I teach a class of beginning journalists, Journalism 110. What advice would you give to young writers? Not necessarily journalists, but journalists and/or writers. What advice would you give them?

R: Well, I mean I guess the best advice I can give has to do with perseverance. You know, my writing career did not begin easily. I graduated from college in 1968. The first time I really had any success as a writer was "Midnight's Children," which was in 1981. So there was like 12½ years of paying my dues. Some writers are lucky that they get there right away with their first book, like Joe Heller with "Catch-22" or whatever. But one of the things that I found was essential to the business of becoming a writer was to have that determination and perseverance to keep trying in the face of failure and without any guarantee of success. And if I look back at my young self, battling away for a dozen years, I'm very proud of that. And I'm not sure now, if somebody asked me would I start work in some field where it would take you 12½ years without any guarantee at the end of it that you would be any good at it, I mean I would not do that.

W: You'd be crazy to do it.

R: You'd be crazy to do it. But I think writers, when starting out, are crazy in exactly that way (laughs).

Interview held April 8, 2005.

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