Last week, at long last, Rushdie was interviewed at the Y by writer Francisco Goldman. The questions focused on Rushdie’s literary life and novels. The author talked freely, personally and iconoclastically about everything from the New York Yankees-he’s a fan-to a discussion of President Bush."
So what did we learn that we did not know about the man and the artist? That he’s messy, that he gets to work first thing in the morning before brushing his teeth or hair, that he’s never had writer’s block, and that the “sign of a book coming to life is that it begins to offer up possibilities that I hadn’t thought of.”
Egged on by Goldman and the audience, Rushdie looked back on his early career. Well before the Booker-prize winning “Midnight’s Children”-the 1981 book that first established the author-he labored long hours, abandoned many projects, published a book that nobody liked, and produced writing that was “rubbish.”
Halfway into writing “Midnight’s Children” (it took five years to complete), he grew depressed. He did not know how to “get the story out.” Then one day, he let his protagonist become the narrator. “I just hung on his coattails and went along for the ride,” he recalled. “That was the day I became a writer.” When it was published, The New Yorker’s iconic critic V.S. Pritchett gave the book “the rave review you’d write in your dreams.”
Rushdie acknowledged other debts as well: India for the rich material at his command (“you don’t have to make [anything] up”), William Faulkner for language, Gunter Grass for the idea of the child against history that is central to both “The Tin Drum” and “Midnight’s Children,” Charles Dickens for his larger-than-life characters, and Jane Austen for her brilliant women. What about his young protagonists, who are lonely, picked upon, monstrous? “That’s what we writers call metaphor.”
As for “The Satanic Verses,” which brought him so much grief, Rushdie insisted that it was actually his least political novel. “It’s about the act of migration that I myself had made, about transformation, about coming from over there and ending up here,” he said. “It was written from deep inside myself about things that were personal.” Without rancor, he admitted, “Guess I was wrong about that. It became a 500-page slogan.” But, “It’s a funny book, I’m a comic writer.”
Indeed, that characteristic humor was evident at the event. Lashing out against ideological purity as the most dangerous social concept (“it kills”), Rushdie quipped: “Impurity is what we want, I’m in favor of dirt. So I write these dirty books.” Applause and laughter followed.
He extolled rock and roll, the subject of “The Ground Beneath Her Feet” (his 1999 novel), as an influence. The music connected his three worlds-India, England and America. Identifying the defining movements in his work as “home and away,” or “roots and rootlessness,” Rushdie summed up, “There’s Kansas and Oz and we struggle between the two.”
Conceivably, that struggle could end with “Fury.” Written very fast, soon after he moved to New York in 2000, it’s about the city at a peak of success and decadence. Rusdhie tells a spooky tale about it. “I had some profound creative instincts that were not conscious or rational, like a force saying, ‘Stop writing what you’re writing, start writing this.’ This book insisted on being written.” He wrote it in ten months. “I never thought that the age it was describing would end on its publication date, that a book written to be a contemporary satirical novel would become a historical novel. It describes something that was, and is not the same any more. This is Sept. 10. ‘Fury’ contains the sense of an ending.”
“Fury” is about his new love (portrayed in the heroine Neela) and his new home. “I like it here, I’m not planning to go anywhere soon,” Rushdie told the crowded auditorium. “This is a great city and I feel closer to it since September 11. I feel comfortable here, I’m not a stranger.” Rushdie first visited New York in the early ’70s, when the Twin Towers were being built. “Here, layer after layer of people arrive with their stories from elsewhere-Serbia, Afghanistan, Fiji-that’s the city culture,” he said. “I like it. There’s no dominant culture, so I’m normal-I’m not used to being like everyone else. I feel at home.” And for a man who once had a $2.8 million price on his head, that must feel pretty good, indeed.
