Sir Salman Rushdie, writer

0:00Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast from BBC Radio 4. Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury, that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. For rights reasons, the music's shorter than on the original broadcast, but you can find a version with longer music tracks on BBC Sounds. Listeners will also get access to episodes 28 days earlier than everyone else. I hope you enjoy listening.

0:46My castaway this week is the author Sir Salman Rushdie. His literary talent and his tenacity have earned him global success. He's published more than 20 books and his many awards include A Knighthood for Services to Literature and the Booker Prize, which he won for his 1981 novel Midnight's Children. It also topped the polls for the 25th and 40th anniversaries of the prize, making it the most lauded novel in Booker history. Like the book's hero, he was born in Bombay in 1947. His stories are in the fabulous tradition of the Arabian Nights tales his father told him while he was growing up. It was in 1989, following the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses, that his life took on the epic proportions of one of his stories.

1:31Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, declared a fatwa, an order to kill its author and anyone involved in its publication. Riots and a series of horrifying attacks followed. The book's Japanese translator was murdered and Sir Salman was forced into hiding for many years. Still, he kept writing and defending his and other authors' freedom to publish. He moved to America and got on with his life. Then, in 2022, he was attacked on stage in New York. He was stabbed multiple times, but defied the odds to survive. Again, he returned to his desk, writing about the attack and his recovery in the best-selling memoir, Knife.

2:11He says, Art is not a luxury. It stands at the essence of our humanity, and it asks for no special protection except the right to exist. It accepts argument, criticism, even rejection. It does not accept violence, and in the end, it outlasts those who oppress it. So Salman Rushdie, welcome to Desert Island Discs. Thank you. Thank you. Very nice to be here. Salman, despite everything that you've been through, you say that you've kept hold of your optimism. How? I'm not sure exactly. I think it's somehow ingrained. There'll be quite a lot of efforts to beat it out of me. And it just hasn't worked.

2:50It just hasn't worked. It's still sticking. Where do you find that optimism today? What helps you stay positive? Writing books is an optimistic act. You know, you sit alone in a room for long periods of time doing something which you hope is going to please people. You know, so that requires optimism. You can't do it without that. You've written about notions of home and also having multiple identities and you're an example of that yourself. I mean, born in India, spent many years living in the UK and you're now based in New York. but the land of the imagination is another place where you've spent much of your time, isn't it?

3:27Yeah, it is, and sometimes feels most of all like home, because nobody bothers you when you're making things up. But I just think it's my advantage as a writer to have belonged to many places. I sometimes have envied the opposite kind of writer, the kind of writer who's deeply rooted in one place and could make a lifetime of work out of that place. I'm not like that, and I sometimes wish I was, but, you know, you make the best of what you have, and what I have is this multiple self. We first cast you away, Salman, in 1988, and I'm looking forward to hearing today's list. What's disc number one?

4:12Well, it's Lou Reed's Walk on the Wild Side. It's kind of extraordinary to be able to say that I was friends with Lou Reed, because when I was at college, I kind of worshipped the Velvet Underground. And the idea that I would end up with Lou Reed's phone number, that's kind of never occurred to me. And so he told you about this story behind the song? Yeah. I mean, originally it was written to go as the title track of this Nelson Algren musical based on Nelson Algren's novel, Walk on the Wild Side. And then the musical fell apart, never happened. And so he rewrote, I mean, the music is, the same, but he rewrote the lyrics, dropping the characters from the novel and replacing them with characters from the Warhol factory.

4:57It's very strange because Nelson Algren, I almost met, he reviewed Midnight Children when he came out, he reviewed it in the Chicago Tribune, and I had gone out to spend a weekend with friends on Long Island, and they had been invited to Nelson Algren's housewarming party. And they said, well, you better come because I'm sure he'd like to meet you. But then the tragedy happened. It was discovered that he had died. As you were on the way to the party? The party was all laid out and prepared and yet a colossal heart attack had died on the rug in the middle of the room. Oh my goodness. And the first guests to arrive found the host dead on the floor.

5:36So I never met Nelson Orgrim, but almost. And at least he liked your book. He liked my book.

5:45Holly came from Miami FLA Hitchhiked her way across USA Plucked her eyebrows on the way Shaved her legs and then he was a she She says, hey babe, take a walk on the wild side Said, hey honey, take a walk on the wild side

6:14Lou Reed and Walk on the Wild Side. Salman Rushdie, tell me about your father, Anis. He was, I think, a volatile character in a lot of ways, wasn't he? Yeah, he had a bad temper. He was also a very good father of young children. He was, like, magical. He was enormous fun. I think he had trouble with grown-up children when children developed their own mind and points of view which were not always his. What about those happier memories of him then? Your memories of him when you were little. You were, you know, the eldest son, the only son, so it must have been a special status in the family. Yeah, I mean, I think that's true, yes.

6:52I have memories of going to the beach. Juhu Beach, which was the beach of Bombay. We used to go there at the weekends and eat coconuts and have camel races. My sister and I had camel races on the beach. I mean, not alone on the camel. There would be a camel guy on the camel as well. So, you know, you had fun and happy times with your dad. But, you know, when it was difficult, what was behind that? What was going on with him? To put it simply, he drank too much. And when he drank too much, he became somebody else, really. And it drove us apart from each other, you know. And there was a lot of his life, a lot of my life, when we didn't see much of each other.

7:34But towards the end of his life, that changed and we kind of made it up. and I'm actually very glad that that happened. Your dad had come from quite a wealthy family, quite well-to-do. What was his line of work? My grandfather really made all the money and had a big textile factory in Delhi. Before the independence of India, before the partition of India and Pakistan, my father kind of rightly thinking that there might be violence in Delhi, and there was. So he sold the factory and invested it in property in Bombay and did very well. And then he spent the rest of his life not doing so well and gradually lost all his money.

8:16So by the time he died, he had hardly anything left. And did that feed into his drinking then? Yeah, because I think he felt like he had failed in some way. I think he was a disappointed man. Salman, one of the things that your dad was very good at was telling stories happily. And that is one of the great gifts that he gave you. When did he read to you? What kind of stories did he tell? Well, there's usually bedtime stories. It was usually his version of some of the great storehouse of fantastic tales that are available in India. The animal stories of the Panch Tantra and the great epic stories of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana.

8:54And the tales of the fantastic, like from the Thousand and One Nights, but also from the Indian collection. There's a collection that's actually even longer than the Thousand and One Nights. whose name translates as the ocean of the streams of story. And I actually, many, many years later, used the idea of an ocean of stories to write a book. So it's stuck in my head. And what about your mother? She was a storyteller, but of a different kind. You've described her as a world-class gossip. Yeah, my mother knew where all the bodies were buried.

9:30Tell me more about that. At a certain point, she said that she was going to stop telling me things. she said because I tell you things and you put them in your books and I get in trouble Did she stop? Nope Couldn't help herself And your dad's character was more volatile how would you describe your mum what kind of personality did you have? She was a very sweet natured person and I think it was hard for her because she had to bear most of the brunt of my father's anger and she tried to keep us children sheltered from it So, yeah, I think her life was hard in that way. But when he died, she was absolutely distraught.

10:11So in spite of everything, there actually was some real love there. Salman Rushdie, it's time to go to the music, your second choice today. What are we going to hear and why are you taking it with you? This song is one of the songs I deeply associate with childhood. It's called Yeher Bombay Mirijan, which translates as This is Bombay, my darling, or Bombay, my dear. I mean, like many Indian popular songs, it was born in a movie called CID and became a kind of anthem of the city. This is Bombay. Actually, the song is quite critical of the city. It says it's in the first line of the song, it says it's a hard town to live in.

10:53And then that's the male voice. and then the male voice is interrupted by a female voice which rejects the male voice's description of the city. It says, actually, it's very nice. And it was very, very catchy and everybody sang it but then I still have it in my head.

11:40Ye He Bombay, Mary Jan by Mohamed Rafi and Geeta Dutt. Salman Rushdie, you were brought up in a secular Muslim household. Was faith or its absence discussed much at home? Not very much, really. Every so often, like maybe once a year, my father would take me to the big Eid prayers. And I had no idea because they were all in Arabic. And my Arabic is zero. And it was all rote learning. And I didn't know what to do. And I was a little boy. He just said, just do what I do. Go up when I go up. Go down when I go down. The extent of my mother's religion was that she didn't want people to eat pig. Right.

12:22So there was never any bacon or ham or any of that in the house. And the city of that generation was very secular. I mean, I remember as I grew up in my teenage years that my parents' circle of friends was of every possible background. You know, Hindus and Sikhs and Parsis and other Muslim families and so on. So it was very, very diverse. And all of that seemed available to all of us. So there are all these different festivals. And when we were kids, we thought we could have all the festivals. It just gave us more festivals. But, I mean, I think the thing I've always wondered is that, you know, I remember my childhood in Bombay as being quite happy.

13:04I had lots of friends. I liked my school. I was quite good at school. I won prizes. And then when I was coming up for, I think I must have been just over 12, when my father said, would I be interested in going to boarding school in England? He said there's this one school, which was rugby school, which says that if you can pass the exam at the right level, that they're willing to offer you a place. And neither of my parents forced me to do it. My mother actually was completely against it. And my father said, look, it's only if you want to go, then we'll follow it up. And if you don't want to go, then you don't have to go.

13:42I've always wondered what was it in that young fellow that made him want to cross the world? And what was it? I don't know. Some spirit of adventure, I guess. You mentioned your dad's, the other side that your father's character had, you know, when he drank too much. Was that part of the decision to go with him? It was part of wanting to get away from that, yes. I think that had something to do with it. But I do think it was just that I was attracted to the idea of the adventure. I mean, I remember reading the Swallows and Amazons books. And I thought, here are these kids. They've got their own boats and they're allowed to sail around the Lake District by themselves.

14:19There's no grown-up in sight. The amount of personal freedom that these children had, I thought, was kind of sensational. So the level of expectation pretty high when you set off. Yeah. How did you get on when you arrived? Well, first of all, it was winter. It was January 1961, and I'm a boy from the tropics, so it was shockingly cold. And then, I mean, there was a certain amount of racial prejudice that I was a victim of. My first experience of feeling like I was somebody's other and not very, you know, not very welcome. And I mean, some bad things happen to me, like people coming into my little cubicle of a study and tearing up work that I'd done and writing racist slogans on the wall.

15:08Did you tell anyone what you were experiencing? No, I didn't, actually, because I thought, you know, my parents have made all these sacrifices. They've sent me halfway around the world. It's an expensive school and et cetera. and I thought I can't disappoint them. Like my first fictions were my letters home where I would say, you know, I had a great game of cricket today, scored 23, not out, took two slip catches. And you would just make it up? All complete nonsense. And I actually wasn't very good at cricket. But I was quite good at school, I was quite good at the studies and I thought that would be my revenge is just to kind of beat everybody in class.

15:44And so I did, more or less. Let's have some more music Salman Rushdie Your third choice today What's next? Well One of the things that happened More or less at the same time As I started being at rugby Was the arrival of Bob Dylan And I remember One of the boys In my boarding house Who was actually One of the nicer ones Had a little record player And he got a copy of The Freewheeling Dylan album And he said Come in here and listen to this And I listened to a track or two and I wanted to speak. He said, no, you can't say anything until you've listened to the whole thing. So he made me listen to the whole album, both sides.

16:22What did you think of it? I was blown away. And then I started saying that and he said, no, you have to listen to it all again. So we listened to the whole album twice and then I was allowed to say that I liked it. The reason I chose Blowing in the Wind is because many, many years later, living in New York, I went to a Dylan concert at Madison Square Garden, and he sang Blowing in the Wind as his final encore, but instead of singing it in the tinkle-tinkle way that we all know it to be, he sang it as if he was Johnny Rotten, screamed it as if it was a punk song, and it actually made you understand that it's actually a very angry song.

17:04If you listen to its words, how many times must a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn't see? So he just revisited the song in a way that revealed its anger. How many roads must a man walk down Before you call him a man How many seas must the white dove sail Before she sleeps in the sand Yes, and how many times must the cannonballs fly Bob Dylan and Blowing in the Wind. Salman Rushdie, in 1965, you took up your place to read history at Cambridge University and you had a much happier time there. So you were sort of in your element by the sounds of it. So who were you hanging out with?

17:58What kind of thing were you doing? Well, I did do a little bit of writing for the university newspaper called Varsity, that's what it used to be called. But mostly what I did was get involved with student theatre. Footlights. Footlights? I was a very small bulb in the footlights. The big bulbs were like Jermaine Greer and Clive James. But I was in plays. I was in Brecht and Ben Johnson and UNESCO and all sorts. And you said you were writing. What kind of things were you writing? There had been a spate of thefts from student rooms in the university. And I was asked by the editor, could I write something about this?

18:40I'd kind of just heard about new journalism. And so I thought, OK, well, new journalism dictates be the thief. So I thought what I would do is choose half a dozen staircases in different colleges and go up them and knock on the doors. and if nobody answered, see if the door was unlocked. And if the door was unlocked, go in and see what I could steal. Make a list of it. And so I did that. So not actually stealing it, just here's what I could have stolen. Here's what I could have stolen because people leave their doors unlocked and here's their expensive stereo equipment. And unfortunately, one of the rooms that I looked in was the editor's room.

19:20And it was unlocked and it had to have a lot of very expensive stuff in it. And to his credit, he ran the article. He ran the piece again. But he never hired me again. And what about your course? I mean, how did you get on? How easy did you find it? It sounds like you were... I mean, a history degree, I mean, you know, I love the study of history. And in your final year, it came, the history degree. What you have to do is choose three special subjects. They offer you a range of about 60 or something. And so the three that I chose that ended up being very useful to me. One was the last 90 years of the British in India, let's say from 1857 to independence in 1947.

19:58The second subject, which was the United States from the Declaration of Independence, 1776, until the end of Reconstruction after the Civil War in 1877. And the third was the life of Muhammad and the rise of Islam. that's where I first heard about this incident known as the incident of the satanic verses where it's recorded in a couple of the so-called traditions the hadith, the traditions of the prophet where it seems that he was asked to accept three winged bird goddesses as being part of the Islamic tradition not at the same level as Allah, as God but at the level of the angels and according to the tradition he came down from the mountain with verses that seemed to accept these three goddesses and then we don't know what happened we don't know how long an interval there was but he went back up the mountain and came back down and rejected those verses and said that the devil had appeared to him in the guise of the archangel and that these were satanic verses anyway I thought that this story first of all is a really good story Secondly, it corresponded to the idea of the temptation of the prophet, of which there are many examples in many religious traditions.

21:17So I thought, well, that's interesting that there's one of those in the Islamic tradition. And put it in the back of my head, that was 1968. 20 years later, I found out how good a story it was. You graduated in 1968, but your parents didn't come to your graduation, Salman. Why not? I don't know. Didn't they tell you at the time why they weren't coming? No, they just said there was, I don't remember being communicated with, except that they weren't coming. Yeah, I mean, I still mind. Yeah, well, I'm not surprised. I mean, your father died in 1987. You said that, you know, your relationship improved with him later in his life.

21:56How did you find your way back to each other? Well, he got, he had cancer and I went back to be with him. And we started talking honestly to each other. So it meant that the relationship was left in a very good place. I know that you've said that one of the things that sustained you in the difficult years that followed the fatwa was that you felt that your father would have supported you. Yeah, and there's no question. I mean, about that, there's no question. I mean, I think he, a lot of what I know about that subject of Islam, for example, I got from him. I mean, this is actually a thing I should stress because we've been talking about difficulties with him.

22:35But the cast of his mind was not at all dissimilar to mine. So after you graduated, you stayed in Britain, you moved to London and worked in advertising. But you did keep writing in your spare time. Yeah, by then I was thinking that I would like to be a writer. I mean, you know, you really had to sustain this dream because it took 13 years. It took a long time. And after the poor reception, let's say, to put it mildly, of my first novel, I had to really rethink what I thought I was doing. And out of that process of rethinking came what became Midnight's Children. Salman Rushdie, it's time for your next piece of music, your fourth choice today.

23:16What are we going to hear next and why? Well, we're going back to the 60s, really. Yeah, I mean, I think there was this false dichotomy that people had in those days, but you had to choose between the Beatles and the Stones. You wouldn't choose? No, I thought I liked them both, you know. But Satisfaction felt like defining that moment more than anything else. I can't get no Satisfaction I can't get no satisfaction Cause I tried, and I tried, and I tried, and I tried I can't get no, I can't get no When I'm trying to get in my car The Rolling Stones' I Can't Get No Satisfaction Salman Rushdie, after the success of Midnight's Children you gave up copywriting, working in advertising to become a full-time novelist and your third book, Shame, came out in 1983 your fourth, The Satanic Verses, followed five years later take me back to publication day did you have any idea of the storm that the book would unleash?

24:34No, truthfully I didn't I thought the dream sequences, which people took exception to I thought, well, first of all, it's a dream, and the dream is taking place in the mind of somebody who is described as losing their mind. And in the dream, the prophet is not called Muhammad, the city is not called Makkah, and the religion is not called Islam. I thought that's called fiction, and it got treated as if it was non-fiction. I mean, I thought probably some people of conventional religious belief might not care for it. So you thought it would ruffle feathers but not profoundly insult people. You don't have to read it.

25:11That's the reason why there are lots of books in bookstores. You can read ones you like. But it was a real shock. But even then, it was a two-stage shock because when the book first came out, the kind of opposition that it aroused didn't feel dangerous. It felt like an argument. And I didn't mind that. I thought I went on television and radio to argue against people who had points of view. I didn't feel there was any physical danger. For many months, the book came out in September of 1988. And it was until Valentine's Day. And it was February of 1989. But once the Iranian threats arrived, I thought, oh, that's actually very dangerous.

25:56And well, within 24 hours, I was offered police protection, having to stay in all sorts of places which were not my home because they thought it was too difficult to protect me in my own house. You know, I had to find ways of seeing my son. I had to find ways of... Because he was, what, 10 at the time? He was, yeah, just about 10. So, and where was he? How were you able to get him? Well, he was living with his mother, and we had to go through a whole performance of bringing us together because we had to make sure that we didn't want any danger to move in his direction. So we had to not tell people that I was actually managing to see him.

26:35And then friends lent me their houses and all kinds of people kind of rallied round. There were critics. Some people said it's too expensive to pay for this protection. Other people said you should have anticipated a backlash. How did you respond to those kinds of comments? One of the things you have to learn is that you can't fight every battle. I mean, leaving aside the radical Islamic criticisms, there was quite a lot of non-radical, non-Islamic criticisms. And some of that came from other writers. John Berger, for example. I think Jermaine Greer was quite critical. Jermaine, yeah. How did you feel about that?

27:15Well, not great. I mean, I remember when I got an issue of The Guardian, which had John Berger's op-ed. And I thought, oh, good, John Berger's writing about it. and opened the paper to the op-ed page and there was him denouncing me. I mean, I'd met him a couple of times. I thought we got on perfectly well, but apparently not. And of course, Salman, it wasn't just you. I mean, over the years, several people associated with the book have been attacked and the Japanese translator of the text was killed tragically. Yeah, there was a lot of violence. And, you know, it would be weird not to feel responsible for that.