Salman Rushdie Interview: A Chance of Lasting

my parents used to say that I would always say I wanted to be a writer when I from from when I was quite a small child and I've got no memory myself of saying it but they said that I said it I think maybe he just starts with the love of reading you know I think that you I was a child who loved to read and and I lived in a very different media world you know I mean in India when I was growing up there was there was no television you know it didn't exist we had radio and and movies and books so so books were a natural very large part of of my growing up and I think I was somebody who responded very strongly to that entering the world of imagination you know somebody else's imagination and and I think when when a small child says I want to be a writer when I grow up maybe what he means is I love reading books you know and I want to do that thing that I love when other people do it so maybe that was it there were a number of different kinds of books that that and stories that I can remember liking first of all I mean I heard many of the most famous let's say Arabian Nights stories or Eastern fables in fact I heard them really orally from my father who would tell them to us as bedtime stories in his own versions of them obviously you know we wouldn't read them he would just simply tell us stories so what the first time I heard about you know Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves or Sinbad the sailor or or Aladdin whatever you know was in these versions of my father I think even before I knew that there was a book that they came from you know I just thought my father was a very good storyteller these great stories to tell so there was that and I mean I think it's I've said a lot but it's true that to come from that background with this incredible storehouse of fantastic tales as your first literary inheritance know that was important you know and I've carried that that those stories around with me you know all my life I think really but children's stories I mean apart from that Eastern tradition in terms of Western children's stories some of them showed up and some of them didn't you know I mean as it happens I was Christian Anderson did show up would be some of them the famous stories you know in a in an anthology and so I did read those as a child and was particularly struck by I mean in my memory the two that I remembered that really affected me were the Snow Queen and the shadow which as you can see that even as a child I had an interest in the dark side you know cuz I they're both frightening stories one with the happy ending and one without one but also there was the much more banal children's books that showed up I mean there were a lot of English children's books about children at boarding school you know it's like Harry Potter without the magic just school stories and I remember reading a lot of those and I suppose they had something to do with with why I said yes when my father asked me if I wanted to go to an English boarding school and it's because I had read all these stories about English boarding schools they seem like great places and then of course when I showed up there they weren't at all like that they were much more unpleasant Alice in Wonderland that showed up that had a big effect on me still does really and yeah so it was erotic and I remember there was a English children's writer called Arthur Ransome who wrote books about these two families of children in the Lake District who would who had boats little little sailing boats to sail around on the lakes and the thing that I remember thinking about reading those books was the incredible amount of personal freedom these children were given you know to to go off by themselves all day on the water you know I'm not on a in a boat and to make camp on an island in the middle of the water I thought why do their parents let them do that here the idea that Indian parents would allow their children that much latitude you know to just go off and have their summer over there somewhere while the parents were busy doing their own thing that seemed like that seemed like a fantasy I think certainly reading books from elsewhere you know is something I've always enjoyed and and I think it's one of the great gifts that literature gives us is that it opens to us worlds which are not our world you know but which by reading these great books can feel to us as if they become our world you know and I I know nothing about Russia really you know I mean I've spent maybe two days of my life in Russia and yet because I spend a lot more than two days of my life in Russian literature you know Pushkin Bulgakov Chekhov Tolstoy Dostoevsky I feel that I do know something about I understand something about Russia you know from that I've never been to Japan and yet I love Japanese literature and I feel that through reading people like tamazaki and so on that I know something about how Japan works as a as a culture you know so and it was the same for me when I first read Latin American literature I had never been to Latin America you know but but I felt that I had been through the books that even America or even North America I mean I had become a devotee of American literature you know Saul Bellow Philip Roth Malamud Kurt Vonnegut Thomas Pynchon you know long before I'd ever visited the United States and so I've always felt that books have given me that you know they are like doors opening into another world which by stepping through that door bit becomes your world so I was very interested in in in language but also in film you know and of course advertising involves the use of both you know both forms but I mean that you know that's not really where I started writing that's what I had to do to our living you know so because I had after I left University and was living in London and and trying to begin as a writer you know I had to write a slow beginning there are writers who take off right away you know and that wasn't my case so you know I I graduated from Cambridge in 1968 and Midnight's Children came out in 1981 so there was a period of 12 and a half years let's say before I finally had you know got somewhere as a writer did something worth doing as a writer and during that time I you know I needed to earn some money so advertising seemed to me that at least it was it was writing of a sort you know and maybe I could do that and it turned out I could do that and and I think but it turned out right for me to be more to do with my interest in cinema that in writing you know that I was more attracted and interested in the making of television commercials you know and in fact if I think back to those years the moments that I remember with most satisfaction or interest you know are the are those moments of making little pieces of film no and and interestingly I mean I was essentially working in advertising as a means to an end you know I was working in it so that I could pay the bills while I wrote my novels a lot of film makers in England in the 70s we're doing the same thing I mean film makers who afterwards became a kind of golden generation of British film makers so there were people like Nicolas Roeg you know Hugh Hudson Alan Parker Ridley Scott Tony Scott now all these people making advertising commercials you know part-time as a way of same things way of sort of earning a living and while they were setting up movies over the course of a year or two they would to pay the bills do a few commercials I mean I made hair care commercials with Nicolas Roeg so in my memory of those advertising years I remember that aspect because I felt that here were other creative people you know very very brilliant creative people who like me were kind of biding their time you know trying to trying to make their real life happen you know and that's what I felt as well it's interesting isn't it because it was a time when the cinema was extraordinarily creative and I loved all that it was a time when the music industry was incredibly important in the lives of young people you know it was the time of well first of the great moment of the of the late 60s with you know with the Beatles and Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan and and and you know other more rachet groups like The Velvet Underground and the you know the Jefferson Airplane and so on and and after that punk and so on but so I mean that was very interesting to it I mean I looking back on it think that I could easily have been knocked this way or that way into trying to write for films or make films or trying to write I mean I have friends who wrote music I could have collaborated on on songs you know but I think partly it's to do with having some form of solitude in your nature that that you prefer to do it by yourself you know I mean I discovered in the end that that's what was most pleasing to me was just to sit in a room and do something and when I had done whatever it is I was doing in that room it was finished that was it the thing where as you know a screenplay is only a step on the way to a film and some people would argue it's not even the most important step and even the stage play is only the step a step on the way to an actual production and I just thought I like to do it by myself you know and I think it's that I mean I was good at English you know I was good at writing and so people tend to gravitate towards what they're good at and that I knew that I had a facility for writing and and so it became natural to think that I would do that but it took me a very long time to find out who tried out how to do it you know is one thing to want to be a writer it's quite another thing to be a writer looking back today what kind of how do you reflect upon Midnight's Children what state was in Europe well I mean you know it was a book that changed my life and it was first of all it did I remember when I finished it which took me five years I felt pretty sure that it was a good book you know I thought I remember thinking as far as I can tell this is a good book no but because my career had been completely obscure up to that point and and not marked by any kind of success I had really no confidence that anybody else would agree that it was a good book and so there was a lot riding on it I mean I feel I'm sure that if that book had not been well-received that it would have been very difficult for me to go on and write another one miss because my my confidence would not have been there no I was really in need of some validation let's say you know and and of course the great pleasure of Midnight's Children is it is that I it told me that I was in fact the writer that I hoped I could be you know and and gave me the confidence to go on you know and now I mean now it the thing that I never in a million years expected was what was the phenomenon of that book you know and what it became and so now I mean looking back I'm very I'm first of all I'm very proud of it as a book and I'm very proud of that young man who you know struggled for five years to find out how to do it without any guarantee that it would even be published you know let alone be successful let alone become the thing that it's become so the other thing is I you know you if you're my kind of writer if you're if you're a writer of what is now called a tree fiction used just to be called literature you're writing books which you hope will endure you know I mean that's that's a large part of the of the thing you think you're doing is to write something that will last that will sit on a bookshelf and and will outlast the author and in the same way as that as a reader I read books by people from a hundred 200 300 years ago with pleasure you hope that you're going to put a book on a shelf which will stay there you know and then another one another one beside it you know so well it's not a hundred years but I mean it is now what 33 years since since Midnight's Children came out and the fact that people still read it the fact that people still find it has some meaning for them you know that young people anybody under 34 you know is basically younger than the book you know and the fact that young people still read it and find that it has something to say to them you know that's that's very satisfying because that means that it's it's done the first generation leap you know it's it's a managed to leap the boundary into the next generation if it can do a couple more of those generation leaps then it has a chance of lasting you know I mean I won't be around to see it but at least at least I've lived long enough to see it jump the first hurdle you know and that I've been there's great pleasure in that never book you you put on the on the shelf as you say is this attaining versus and of course there that is a book that changes your life not in another direction change my life now that there's men I mean how do you look upon this book today I said well I think a number of things about it first of all I think that one of the things that's almost uncanny reading the book now is the way in which there are you crop up you come across lines in it that seem to have been written with the knowledge of what happened to the book but were in fact written before that happened you know so there's a character in the book who is told by somebody else that he's endangering himself by setting his word up against the Word of God said that so there there are there are all kinds of moments when the book seems to understand what happened to it you know in a way that's a little bit spooky no I mean what I do think is that the book was deliberately misdescribed it wasn't it wasn't misunderstood it was deliberately misdescribed in order to mislead people so that they would become angry and rise up you know I mean that was a deliberate project to distort the book what is good I think with with the passage of time is that that project I think can now be seen to have failed you know that the book is now sitting there and people read it and study it you know and and they begin to see that the actual book the words on the page somewhat somewhat different than what was said of the book at the time one of the things for instance that nobody ever said about The Satanic Verses when at the time of the trouble was that it's quite funny no and but it is in parts quite funny I think and it was as if because the attack on the book was so lacking in comedy because that wasn't funny how could the book be funny so somehow the characteristics of the attack on the book were perceived as being the characteristics of the book so because the attack wasn't funny the book wasn't funny because the attack was religious the book must be about religion you know because the attack was sort of comprehending comprehensive all and obscure who could understand what they were upset about the book must be incomprehensible and obscure you know and I think some of the damage that was done for a time was of that kind that people were led to believe that the book was other than it was because of the nature of the attack against it and I mean that's what's good about time passing you know because now as I say I think the book has more or less I don't think it'll ever completely be just a novel you know because of that that history will attach itself to that book like it's on a footnote at least you know but hopefully only as a footnote because now people are just reading the book you know and it's finally able to have the ordinary life of the book and and you know some people like it a lot some people like it a little some people don't like it much some people hate it and that's that's just what happens with books you know and and I'm just pleased that it's finally able to be a novel instead of being all these other things you that it was made me to bed made out to me yeah well well that's one of the things that I immediately thought when you talked about your daughter being nine years old because my son was nine years old at that time you know at the time when the trouble really began he had not yet reached his tenth birthday he was about nine more just nine and a half Carol and so I always felt that this didn't just happen to me it also happened to him no there was this boy having to deal with the fact that every time he turned on the television there were these mobs around the world wanting his father to be killed a lot for a nine-year-old boy to face no and and suddenly there was a great intrusion of of security policemen guns you know into into our private life and one of the one of the things that I had to do in those years was he his mother and I had to do was to try and help him deal with them and and one of the things I did was to try and be as to treat him so to treat him more like an adult than I should have perhaps but what I'd learned quickly was that if I was trying to explain things to him if he heard them from me first you know if I said this happened today and obviously I would try and put the most positive spin on whatever I was telling him but I would try and make sure that he heard the news from me you know and as long as he was doing that it seemed he was able to deal with it that when kids in the school playground would come up to him and saying do you know see what happened to you but your father he would say yes I know about it this is what happened and this is what it means you know and it would actually give him tools with which to deal with the problem and he the times when he would get very scared were times when I was somehow not able to reach him in order to tell him about something and somebody would tell him something about what was happening to me that he didn't know then it would freak him out so so part of what I did was to just try and help him through it and and the other way that I did that was to write a book for him now and that became a very close bond between him and me because he knew that I was writing the book for him and he he commented on the book as I was writing it and and he became very proud of it but it was written and so you know there was an important book for us as a family apart from apart from for me as a writer I was for a long time separated from my library you know I mean I because I was not living in my own houses at least for the first few years you know after that I did have a house of my own and I was able to bring my things there but for the first few years I really didn't know so I had to really specifically ask for certain books to be brought so that I could look at them know and and those were books of two kinds on the one hand I really as a way of trying to say I'm still here and still functioning I agreed with the newspaper in England to to write book reviews so then contemporary books you know what would arrive I remember you know Philip Roth's autobiographical text the facts was all the books that I reviewed and and things like that just with so on the one hand I was trying to stay in touch with new work and and by expressing my my writing about it to express my continued existence as a writer you know so that was one kind of thing and the other was well I mean I tried to read books which which would help me think about the situation I was in you know so so I found myself reading again a lot of the writers of the French enlightenment you know so I found myself reading again Montesquieu and Voltaire Diderot and so on and and philosophers you know I found myself reading John Stuart Mill on Liberty and you know these all the all these classic texts Milton's Areopagitica you know that the hold the famous body of texts which which expresses what we've come to think of as the modern idea of free expression and and they were very helpful and then I you know I tried to especially when I was going starting to write fiction again when I started to write what became her own embassy of stories I wanted I often when I'm writing a novel I tend to read like around the novel you know so I tend to to read texts which have some relationship to what I'm thinking about you know so so then I started reading again this world of Eastern myth and fable you know the Panchatantra animal fables the Ramayana my parrot and even some some less well-known things like there's a wonderful adventure stories I think Farsi in origin which is the hums on ARMA 2 The Adventures of this Prince Hamza you know which are partly real world adventures you know here's fights Wars and falls in love with girls and so on and then there's fantastic elements to it that he also fights dragons and and there's a point where he goes to fairyland and marries a princess and has a child buyer and then comes back to the real world so anyway so I've read a lot of those that stuff because that was obviously useful as a way of thinking about the book I was writing and and so on and then and then you know then at certain point it became easier for me to have my books and then it then it was better mostly in those years I was very touched and impressed by the degree of solidarity that there was you know mostly I mean there's you know nothing is ever 100% you know so there are always some people who fall short of what you would your expectation is you know there were some some publishers in some countries who were not courageous there were some writers from I would have hoped for solidarity from whom I didn't receive it you know but those were not that many in number is the truth you know and the great mass of writers and book world people you know actually behaved really very well you know that she understood that something very serious was happening here in which in which they were all implicated you know they could all see there wasn't just about me you know that this was a moment when you know when a line had to be held but you couldn't concede the fight it was that Maurepas at stake was too big that that this this line had to be defended you know and and I think one of the great reasons why we managed to defend the book was that very wide belief that it needed to happen not because the book was particularly this or that you know but but but for the you know for this old reason of the freedom of speech and that's why so many people that I never met went went to bat for me you know so booksellers put the book in the window people working in publishing companies who were receiving threats on the telephone were not cowed into submission you know the book was published everywhere the book was kept in print people went and bought it as an active support and solidarity you know ordinary readers think you know that was their way of saying I'm on this side you know and I think that that was that sort of collective act of ordinary people you know politicians as is often the way came very late to the party but that defense of the right of not just the right of writers to write and publishers to publish but the right of readers to decide what they want to read and not to have that decision made for them by you know a mad old priest stood there on that was a lot of the reason why we were able to succeed now and and I'm looking back at it you know I look back at two things one is the book itself as a book and the other is the story of what happened to the book you know and the story of what happens the book I think I feel very proud to be a part of that resistance you know and nowadays I think people are much weaker you know and I wonder if such adds such an act of collective solidarity would happen again you know because recently things happen like like happened in India recently where penguin books withdrew a major work of scholarship just because a couple of Hindu extremists objected to it and this is the same penguin books that defended the Satanic Verses you know so I think we have fallen a long way short of that of the strength that people collectively showed back in the late 80s and early 90s I always knew that the book was there to write you know and that that there was a good story to tell you know and and that I wanted to be the person to tell it first I didn't want to give my story to somebody else because because that's what I do for a living so I always wanted to do it but I always also knew for a long time I thought that I would just wasn't ready to do it I wasn't ready emotionally to do it I didn't feel that I would be the master of the story you know I would I would still in some way be the subject of the story to emotionally in the power of the story and I wanted to wait until I felt that I was the one in charge you know and in the end I just thought I would this to Instinct know that I'm going to write my books and one day maybe the voice in my head that tells me what to do we'll say maybe it's time to think about doing this and then that's more or less what happened you know and I I was helped by the fact that I had given my literary archive to Emory University and they had gone through a mammoth job of sorting it out you know so suddenly instead of all my papers being in a mess everything was very neatly catalogued I had the master catalog you know and I could simply say send me this this this and this and the next day BAM I would have that those documents so so it it's enormous Lee simplified the work of research I would have had to do you know to re-enter that story in order to tell it properly because if if they hadn't done that for me I would have had to do that you know and I probably would never have done it which means possibly I would never felt like writing the book but because that work had been done so that it became possible for me to write the book with a kind of minimum of difficulty then I thought well okay well if it's now reached that point where I can do it maybe I should do it nobody really that I know of never particularly compares my work to either Conrad or Chekhov you know and I mean there's something interesting about Conrad in that he was a writer who crossed a language frontier you know and I've always been interested in writers who did that I mean he never wrote in his mother tongue of polish and I never wrote in my mother tongue nor do we both found a voice in in the English language no so there's always been that and and his stories are adventurous and go into strange worlds you know and I that was interesting but it was really more that I felt somehow in those years that I was writing about that there were aspects of both Conrad and Chekhov in those in that world I found myself in you know first of all Conrad Conrad wrote a lot about secret agents and spies and conspiracy in danger and revolution and violence etc and and I found myself in that kind of a Conrad Ian's world a little bit you know and check off I felt particularly even more in his MO and his stories more in his plays than in his stories you know wrote a great deal about isolation melancholy yearning to be somewhere else know and whether it's the three sisters or Uncle Vanya or whatever you know there's that sense that life is elsewhere you know and and if only you could be elsewhere then you could be part of life except that you can't and that certainly was how I felt a lot you know at that time and so I thought in some strange way if the worlds of Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov were to be fused that was where I lived and and I mean that's a cat a very surrealist image or the idea of Conrad and Chekhov becoming the same book you know but that that was the book I was in I remember during those years people would ask me if I would write about it and I would say I don't know how to write about it because I don't know the ending and it's true I mean at one more than one point I thought that it was quite possible that it would have a terrible ending and then I would not be the person available to write the book you know and in some ways as bad was the idea that it would not have an ending that it would just that my life would just drag on and on and on and on in this way with no way out of the trap no way out of the cage no resolution no settlement you know and that that would have had I think in the end would have had a very bad effect on me it would psychologically would would have damaged me a great deal so there was that possibility and then the third possibility was that we would you know that we meaning my family and I and friends and publishers and translators would all come out from under this cloud and be able to you know live in the sunshine again and and and you know by a combination of luck and determination that's what happened you know so so yes I'm telling a story which is in some way the story of a victory you know but one of the questions I asked at the end of the book is is that really true you know uh is this the story of a victory or a defeat or somewhere in the middle no and the answer is that if you're talking about my story just the story of me and what happened to me and my family and friends and publishers cetera then yes you can see it as a victory because there was an attempt to suffocate a book and to destroy a writer and that attempt failed the book is available now in whatever it is you know 45 languages or something and as in print everywhere in the world and the author is also available so in several locations of the world including right now here in Denmark and and you know the publishers did their job and published and yes there were tragedies there was the Japanese translator of the book was murdered the Italian translator was seriously attacked and survived and and the Norwegian publisher of the book was sharp and miraculously survived so yes they were casualties you know and there was a lot of fear and there was a lot of you know there were there was a lot of trouble but at that local level of our battle on behalf of the Satanic Verses we didn't do so badly you know and we can take pride in that but if you look at the larger subject of where the world has reached since then I think it's a much more fearful mode you know I think even in the world of books I think publishers booksellers maybe even writers are more fearful now to take on material which could lead to them being endangered nobody wants to go there again and so there has been a kind of chilling effect you know that the message of the Satanic Verses is don't go anywhere near Islam now and and so maybe on the their arse fortunately there are still writers courageous enough to do so I mean I haven't read the work of this young boy here in Denmark but I but you know he's clearly he's very young but he's apparently very talented I have to read his work but but you know good for him but now and he's facing some dangers as a result Yahya Hassan and and there are still writers around the world who do take it on there are still publishers brave enough to publish it there are still booksellers who are prepared to do sell so it's not a total defeat but there is fear there's a lot of fear and we live in a very fearful world and and so at that level the level of the of the story beyond my immediate story I'm not so sure that it is a victory you know but I think what the immediate story shows I hope is that if you do keep your nerve you know you collectively I mean all of us if you keep your nerve and you stand up for what you believe to be right it is possible to succeed you do not have to fail it is possible to succeed and this was one example in which people did keep their and in the end did succeed now maybe other people would do the same yeah it is much more than entertainment yes but it has to be entertainment as well you know I don't believe it can just not be entertainment because I I don't know to speak as a reader I have a very low boredom threshold you know I'm easily bored and as a writer I want to make sure I'm not writing books that will easily more people you know because I don't want to be making the thing that would bore me if I was reading it so so that means that that that element of being attractive to the reader you know is is important to me you know and one of the great questions of literature is how can you be attractive to the reader when you're writing about unattractive things you know if you're talking about terrorism monstrosity you know terrible actions you know of dark moments we live in quite a dark moment you know if you were if you want to write about these things how can you write about it without creating an atmosphere on the page which people don't want to breathe you know people don't want to be there or do you have to so much sugarcoat what you're writing about that in some ways you become dishonest about the thing you're writing about because you're making it too attractive you know I mean these are the one of the big problems I think for literature always has been about how you write about the darkness I thought about my duty to challenge those narratives but it's my inclination but I think there are as many ways to be a writer as there are writers you know there there are many very fine Rogers who don't challenge the status quo you know who work within that in order to tell their stories and do so very well so it's to be as challenging and subversive and so on and so on it's not the only way of being a writer it just happens to be my way being a writer I also to have become very wary of over claiming what literature can be you know I mean it's very tempting for writers to make very grand statements about literature and its place in the world you know I think actually books mostly can't do very much you know I'm not sure how much responsibility I can take for what the Satanic Verses became in the world but it certainly didn't become what I meant it to be so so whatever it became it wasn't by my design No and I get it you know it made its it's kind of noise but it wasn't the noise I wanted it to make so so writers agency in terms of how their books function in the world is quite limited in the number of books which directly affect events in the way that the writer hopes that they will that's a very small number you know I mean I need right now if I think about it the book that first comes to mind is Uncle Tom's Cabin you know but which did have a considerable effect on American readers and what they thought about the slavery question in the years coming up to the Civil War and but I think books can do a lot if you like to reframe the way in which questions can be asked the way in which the world can be interrogated the writer can say I think of it this way it may not be the way you think of it I think of it this way what do you think about the way I think of it and that's the gamble of literature in a way is that the writer sitting in his room will ask that question to the best of his ability and then send it out into the world and hopes that the world has a favorable answer to the question you know and that becomes the dialogue between the book and the world and I'm not interested in that I'm no control over it really but I'm interested in asking those questions they're clearly two things that you do as a writer one is what you do inside your writing and the other is what you do outside your writing you know what you do outside your writing has more to do with your sense of your responsibility as a citizen you know as a citizen of a of a city or a country or the bottom or the planet and again yes of course it's impossible for any individual writer to take up every cause and fight every battle you know or at least very difficult to do that if you want to actually get on with your own life and work that takes over but I would I have felt the need to do that quite often because because I remember how important it was for me that people stood up for me I know how much it means to a writer in distress to feel that there is a sense of support and solidarity out there you know and so yeah I mean I do it in a very kind of ad hoc way I mean when when I I'm introduced to cases or both learn about cases which which seem to need highlighting you know then then then I sometimes do try and I mean I think sometimes these are very celebrated cases and sometimes not so much but um I mean I don't have if you like a kind of strategy of it you know I just I just do it when I can you

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Length: 46min 19sec (2779 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 15 2014