Salman Rushdie - ‘I’d rather have had a different life’

27:55even if the previous night had been quite difficult because my father had this relationship with Johnny Walker Red Label and he would sometimes drink a bottle a night which in the tropics is a lot. I mean, it's a lot anyway, but in heat it sort of magnifies the effect. But she shielded us from it quite well when we were little children. I mean, as we grew up, obviously, we knew what was going on. And my father was a very good father of little children. He was great fun and loving and attentive, etc., when we were little. As we grew up and started having minds of our own, he was less successful as a parent.

28:39And the problems became more evident. But yeah, certainly the first 10, 11 years of my life, I remember being pretty nice. And I understand that at rugby, it's the first time you experimented with fiction because the letters that you wrote home... Yeah, were fiction. Yeah, I would pretend to be good at games. Who were you protecting? My parents. They'd sent me across the world and they were sad about it and it was costing a lot of money. I couldn't write back and say, I'm miserable and having an awful time and I'm bad at cricket. So I would write back and say, all these things are good and I got top marks in the Latin test and I scored 27 not out and took three slip catches.

29:21All nonsense. And then long, long time later, my mother showed me that she'd preserved the letters. And I looked at them, but there wasn't a word of truth in any of them. And then when I left school, I told them that I'd had really quite a difficult time. And they were really upset, but they were also a little bit angry. They said, why didn't you tell us? You know, if you'd told us, we would have taken you out. You know, you didn't have to be there. It never occurred to me that that was a possibility. So you go to Cambridge, you read history, and it's much, much better. You even meet E.M. Forster, which I'm extremely excited about.

29:59This was kind of such a complete piece of luck. He was in residence at King's, and I was at King's. One year, kind of, we had rooms on the same staircase. I mean, that's to say a staircase at King's. The kind of piano nobile, you know, was very grand rooms. And then when you went higher up, it was more kind of student rooms. But you went up the same flight of stairs. I ran into him, you know. And on the ground floor of A Staircase was the student's common room, a little bar place. And he would sometimes come and sit there with a half of Shandy and was very approachable. But people were scared because, you know, E.M.

30:34Forster. But because I was of Indian origin and India was so important to him, we had a few chats, you know. I once was in his rooms and they were full of Indian memorabilia. There was a day when I played croquet with the M. Forster in King's Fellows Garden, which is unforgettable. Had you read A Passage to India by that stage? Yes, I had. Yeah, I had. And I was very impressed by it. And then I was super impressed to meet him. What I hadn't read was his nonfiction book about India, The Hill of Devi, which he wrote about his time in India. I didn't know, therefore, that the two people he had been most deeply in love with were both Indian men, one of whom he met before he went to India and who actually is the dedicatee of passage to India, but was straight.

31:21It was a friendship rather than anything more. But then he went to India and met somebody else who he had a long relationship with. And so his two deepest loves were from India. And so that as well as the fact that he'd had such important years there and that he'd written this great book. He was very engaged with India, even after all those years. And very generous towards me when I very shyly confessed that maybe I would try and write something. He said, yes, you must. He was very nice about it. Thank you for telling me that. He's one of my favourites. I know he's not quite up there as one of your favourites.

31:59No, no, I mean, I think Passage to India is a great book. I'm not in love with some of the others. Yes, that's fine. But you do love, as you describe them, those great Indian novelists Charles Dickens and Jane Austen. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, well, Charles Dickens, you know, that Dickensian city, London as described by Dickens, it's quite like Bombay kind of now. And Jane Austen's women, these kind of brilliant women circumscribed by the social convention of their time and forced into husband hunting. There's lots of those. Yes. Lots of those in India. And so I thought, yeah, these are great Indian writers.

32:34They've helped me understand the world I was from. I have to say, you write female characters so well, and it's not something that you can always say about your male contemporaries. I'm thinking of Shame or the ground beneath her feet. Do you think that comes from having three sisters? Yes, partly from having three sisters and partly from the fact that in the extended family, there were a lot more aunts than uncles. There were a lot more female cousins than male cousins. And so I grew up, I thought, in quite a female world. I think it did help me write about women much later on because I didn't see them as weird, strange creatures that you were incomprehensible and to be worshipped or hated.

33:19I didn't think about it, but I thought about them as people. Yeah, and you don't sexualise them first. You think of their character first. Yeah. You know, one of the things that I was taught by this great historian, Arthur Hibbert, who was one of my tutors, he said about writing history. He said, you should never write history until you can hear the people speak. He said, if you can't hear them speak, you don't know them well enough and you can't tell their story. Goodness. Well, that's so informed your work. Yeah. Yeah. I thought that's great advice for novelists. Before I think about sex or anything, I think about how do they talk?

33:53Do they have a big vocabulary or do they have a limited vocabulary? Do they use bad language? Are they voluble or are they taciturn? You know, all these questions you ask about how people speak, what's their accent? You know, by the time you've answered all those questions, you know the person pretty well. It all arises out of that one question, how do they speak? What an extraordinary piece of advice. Your second failure is before you became a novelist, you dreamt of being an actor. Yeah. Yeah, that was the real dream. When I was at Cambridge, I spent almost all my time involved with student theater.

34:28I mean, so much so that I had a minor scholarship, what they call an exhibition at Cambridge. And after two years, I was called in. I was summoned up to the powers that be and told that unless I focused more on my studies, they were going to cancel my scholarship. And I thought, OK, cancel the scholarship. I mean, it was like 40 pounds a year. It was just a token thing. And after I left Cambridge, in that moment, the late 60s, early 70s, there was this very, very highly creative and active fringe theatre scene in London, in places like the Oval House in Kennington, where a lot of, first of all, a lot of writers who became the great writers of the generation were kind of cutting their teeth.

35:11So you had people like David Hare and Howard Brenton and Trevor Griffiths. And so I got involved with fringe theatre. I actually played at least one role in drag. A friend of mine had written a play in which there was an agony aunt. And the joke was that most agony aunts are men, you know, pretending to be women. He cast me as the agony aunt and I had to wear a long black dress and a blonde wig. And I had a moustache. Did you enjoy drag? I was so embarrassed. I wasn't very good at it. Mercifully, no photographs survive. But anyway, one of the things that I learned, I learned that I wasn't good enough.

35:46Because I was around some very, very good actors. And one of the things that you can see when you're around really, really good actors is you notice your own lack of talent. And I thought, OK, maybe this is not the way to go. Then I thought, OK, do the other thing you thought about. Is that when you got into copywriting? Yeah, yes, about the same time, yes. Because you were a phenomenally gifted copywriter. You came up with Irresistible for Aero. I did, yeah, and Naughty But Nice. For Cream Cakes. For Cream Cakes, yeah. And I remember pitching that idea to the cream cakes client. And he said, no, but you're telling people that cream cakes make them fat.

36:23I said, well, actually, they know that. You should focus on the but nice. Yeah. I mean, I mentioned in the introduction that you had that cameo in Bridget Jones and that you did this fantastic curb your enthusiasm, which, I mean, I imagine most of it was improvised. All of it. All of it. You were so good. Thank you. It was so funny. It was very scary because, of course, the people on the show are masters of improv. And I didn't want to be the only person who wasn't any good. But I guess I got away with it. But what happened was, I mean, I didn't really know Larry David. I mean, I very casually met him, shake hands, say hello.

37:00But that was it. But then he, out of the blue, or his agents called my agents and said he'd like to talk to me. So we spoke on the phone and he said he had this idea. And did I want to do it? And I said, well, can I see a script? And he said, well, that's difficult because there's no script. So then we just discussed it on the phone. And then I thought, you know, if we've reached the point at which we can make fun of, because this was all about Larry David wanting to, getting a fatwa against him. Yes. And wanting my advice. I said, if we could have fun with it, then actually that's a kind of victory.

37:34And so I thought, okay, I'll do it. And I was only there for two days, but it was very, very enjoyable. It's what they call guided improv. So they would say, here's the setup. You're in this scene and this is what's happening. And during the course of the scene, you've got to reach this point. But how you get there is up to you. And that was scary. And then the most frightening thing is that when you do it and they say, yeah, that was great. That was great. We've got that. Now do it differently. Do it differently? I mean, it just was really hard to do it at all. Yes. What they do is they overshoot a lot.

38:08And I think that's because if you're no good, they can cut you out. But they didn't cut me out. You were very good. Thank you. You say that your failure as an actor taught you about the limit of your talent in that particular area. Do you think it taught you anything about storytelling? Yeah, because I think acting is inhabiting somebody who's not you. You know, a lot of actors will say that they feel like the representative of the character, like have to act on behalf of the character. And I think writing a book is a bit like that. You have to be able to enter a way of thinking and a way of being that is not yours.

38:44And you have to make that convincing. You have to sell the character on the page as opposed to on the stage. So, yeah, I think that did help. Would you describe that as empathy or is it something more muscular? It is empathy, sure, but it's not only empathy. It's actually losing yourself and finding, as we were saying, another voice, another behaviour pattern, another way of thinking. Otherwise, if all you can do is write versions of yourself, not very interesting, is it? It's not very interesting for anyone to read either. You say that imagination is one of your skills, it's in your skill set, and then you imagine a conversation with the A in Knife.

39:20I'm also imagining that you haven't gone to the extent of feeling empathy with the A. I'm not on his side. I mean, unlike what we were saying about fictional characters, that you kind of have to be on their side when you're writing them. I didn't think that. But I did think that there was a hole in his story that I wanted to try and fill, which is that I remember saying to my editor in New York, if I wrote a character like this, you would tell me it's under motivated. Yes. Here's a 24-year-old kid with no criminal record, not on any terrorism watch list, not kind of hanging out with weird people, just a 24-year-old kid in his mother's basement in New Jersey who knows nothing about me, doesn't take the trouble to find out anything about me, but decides to go from that zero position of no crime to murder.

40:10That's a very big jump. What we know about him, which is not very much so far, kind of doesn't explain it. I mean, yes, to an extent you could say, yes, he went to Lebanon and got radicalized and he watched, you know, radical priests on YouTube and doesn't quite add up to a credible character. And I thought, let me just see if I can ventriloquize him, you know, get inside his head. I also quite liked the idea of making him a character of mine. Yes. It was a kind of way of getting my revenge.

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41:24Sierra, let's get moving.

41:32Your final failure are your early writing failures. Which is a lot, by the way. Tell us about them. There's three unpublished novels for a start. Do you still have them somewhere? I gave my archive to Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. They've done an amazing job of it. Because the papers were just in cardboard boxes any old way. It took them like two and a half years to sort them out. But they're now very neatly catalogued, et cetera. And they're in Atlanta, Georgia. And that's where those manuscripts are. But they were really awful. Well, there are two reasons why they're awful. One was that they were derivative.

42:09There was one manuscript, just kind of like 300-page novel, called The Antagonist, which in retrospect was so over-influenced by Thomas Pynchon that it was kind of embarrassing. That was one thing, being derivative. And the other thing was, I think, not really knowing myself well enough. after having spent, you know, four and a half years at rugby and three years at Cambridge and so on, almost eight years away from home and then deciding that I wanted to try and stay in England and be a writer is that there was a moment when I was kind of lost. I think I didn't know where I fitted in or how I was going to go forward in life, etc.

42:47And I think the books read like that. How interesting. They read like they're written by somebody who doesn't know who he is. You do publish your first novel, Grimace. Yeah, and that's also, I think that has the problem too, you know. I mean, what happened there was the publishing company Victor Golangs, together with, I can't even remember which newspaper, one of the, you know, like the Times, or I think it might have been the Times, had a competition for a new science fiction novel. And that's why I wrote that for. And I entered it in the competition. And the editor at Galang's, Liz Calder, read it.

43:24And she thought, well, it's not exactly the kind of thing we're looking for in the competition. But she wanted to publish it anyway. So that's how I got published, by not winning the competition. But it was terrible, especially, as I say, there'd been all these other unsuccessful books that never even made it that far. It was very, very deflating to have a book come out and be so dismissed. And it stopped me. It stopped me in my tracks. I thought, what am I supposed to do now? And then, in a way, I learned everything from that failure. Because what I learned from that was find out who you are.

44:00And what I understood was that I was somehow losing touch with my origins. And so I thought, well, I better do something about that. But, you know, the advance I got for Grimas was like 800 pounds. In 1974, you could put a zero on that maybe, you know. So I took this small amount of money and I went to India with no plan except to stay as long as I could, travel as widely as I could, as cheaply as I could, and reconnect. And I went all over the place. I went to places that I knew and loved, like Bombay. And I went to some places that I didn't know but I wanted to find out about, like Benares. And I came back with the germ of Midnight Children.

44:38Then I got myself another job in advertising. But in those days, you could do, I think you can't do it anymore, but you could get part-time jobs, you know, where you worked like two or three days a week. And so I would have sometimes four, sometimes five days a week to be at home to write. And that's how I wrote it. And that feeling of reconnecting is what made me a writer, I think. Wow. Thank you for explaining that so beautifully. You sent the manuscript for Midnight's Children to Liz Calder. Yes, who had moved. She was no longer at Golang, she was at Jonathan Cape. And she commissioned a reader's report.

45:12Yeah, terror. What happened? Well, I only found out about this after Midnight Children won the Booker. Like the day after the Booker Prize, there was a little piece in the newspaper saying how the book had had this terrible reader's report. And I thought, this is just newspaper nonsense. So I called, Liz called her and I said, what is this garbage in the newspaper? And she went, well, actually, not completely garbage. And it turned out that there had been this very short report which said something like the novel is a fat ramble through the author's mind. And the author shows signs of talent that should concentrate on short stories till he has mastered the novel form.

45:58That's it for this huge novel. I thought, who wrote that? And Liz was very, very discreet. She wouldn't tell me who wrote it. She wouldn't tell me if it was a man or a woman. She wouldn't tell me if it was somebody I knew. What happened in the end is that the author incriminated herself. It was somebody I knew. Anyway, she wrote to me and said, my fault, I'm an idiot. I just didn't, I couldn't see it. And I'm very sorry. Wow. And I said, well, as it happens, no harm done. Yes. Because what happened is that Liz commissioned a second reader's report from Susanna Clapp, who's now eminent in her own way.

46:34And Susanna really liked it. And then what happened is that Tom Mashler, who was the boss at Cape at the time, asked Liz what was on her desk. And she said, well, there's this novel and one person doesn't like it and one negative reader's report and one positive one. And Tom said, give me a piece of it. And so she gave him, I can't, I don't know, 100, 150 pages of it. And he took them away overnight and he came back the next morning. and he put them on her desk and he said, if you haven't bought that in one hour, you're fired. And you were off. And that's after 13 years of struggle. You know, I remember talking to the great German novelist, Gunter Grass, who was talking about writing about World War II from the perspective of the losing side.

47:20And he said, you know, it's always been my view that you learn more from failure than from success. Almost as if I've primed you to say exactly the right thing. That's exactly it. And you had to learn who you were. I know that we're coming to the end of our time and I'm so sad about it because there's so much I want to talk to you about. I suppose it would be remiss of me not to ask about the Satanic Verses. I'm sure that you feel rather intolerant of multiple questions about it because your work is not defined exclusively by what happened after that book. No, but the book itself, I think it pretty much stands the test of time.

47:58Two things happen when people read the book now. One is that people say to me, kind of, where's the problematic bit? Because I can't find it. And I say, well, it's because it's kind of not there. And the other thing they say is, who knew that it was funny? And I say, well, people who read it knew that it was funny. And I think somehow because the thing that happened to it was not funny, people assumed that the book itself must be like the thing that attacked it. Yes. and couldn't possibly be enjoyable or amusing. And, you know, it used to be the case before the attack on the satanic verses that whenever people wrote about my work, they talked about the humor in it, always.

48:40After the fatwa, nobody ever talked about me as having any sense of humor. But I was still the same person. And that was in a way the most frustrating thing, that in the public mind, I got turned into a kind of writer that's not the kind of writer that I am. First of all, I'm not actually that interested in writing about religion all the time. And actually, The Satanic Verses isn't about religion mostly. It's mostly a novel about London. And I thought of it as my London novel. I'd just written Midnight's Children, which is primarily about India, and Shame, which is primarily about Pakistan. And I thought, let me write a novel about where I came to rather than where I came from.

49:19and I thought of it as the third in that set of books, the two books about my places of origin and a third book about the place that I landed up. And nobody thinks about it as a London novel, but that's what it is. I'm sure you don't regret the book itself and how you wrote it. Do you regret anything around it? Yeah, I'd rather have had a different life. I mean, there have been plenty of things about the last, I mean, 1988 is a long time ago. And a lot of that time was made much more difficult by the consequences of the attack on the satanic purses. And then I managed to get my life back, mostly in America, but more than two decades.

50:01I was leading a perfectly okay life. And then this attack, in a funny way, sort of dragged me back into the past. So, you know, here I am with security again. Three years ago, if I'd been interviewed by you, there would have not been security here. So I don't know how long that's going to go on. And I hope that it doesn't take people's attention entirely away from all these other books that I've written. So my recommendation would be, yes, please read and buy this book. But then maybe read a novel. Yes. Because some of them are okay. Read Midnight's Children. It's so funny. Again, I've never heard you express that before, the fact that all of this stole this sense of your humour.

50:46I wanted to end on a quote from someone else, V.S. Pritchett, who, when he reviewed Midnight's Children, wrote, the book is really about the mystery of being born and the puzzle of who one is. Salman, have you solved the puzzle of who you are? I think by now, yeah, I think I'm pretty clear. I think one of the things that happens to a writer during the course of what is now quite a long writing life, I mean, since I sold my first novel, it's 50 years, so half a century. But I think more or less when I wrote Midnight's Children and the books, one or two books that came after that, you begin to have a fairly clear idea of the sort of road you're on.

51:30You think, I'm going this way, and then you try and go that way. And one of the things I had to work hardest at after the attack on the Satanic Verses was to stay on that road, not to be deflected into something else which would have been, again, not really me, and would have been a way of falling off that direction that I'd discovered for myself. I think I've managed to stay on the road. And who am I? I'm the author of my books. There's a moment in Midnight Children when Salim asks himself the question of who he is. And he says, I can't quote verbatim, but he says that he is the sum total of everything that he's done and everything that has happened to him.

52:11He is the product of what came before him, you know, his mother, parents and grandparents. And he is also the things that would happen after him, which would not have happened had he not been there. And that's what we are. You know, we're people in a river and we take things from behind us and we give things forward. And we're the thing in between. I think, you know, as I say, you do this for long enough and you get a pretty clear sense of what that thing in between is. Long may that river flow. I will see you at your 100th birthday party. Absolutely. It has been an astounding privilege to meet you.

52:46Thank you so, so much, Sir Salman Rushdie. Thank you. Even better, you've played an agony art in drag, but now you're going to get to play one in real life on Failing With Friends. I learned that the level of bullshit in the film industry is higher than anywhere else in the world that I've experienced. Remember to follow us to get new episodes as they land, wherever you get your podcasts, or on Spotify, Amazon Music, or Apple Podcasts. And please do share a link with everyone you know. This is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment original podcast. Thank you so much for listening.

53:29Thank you.