SALMAN RUSHDIE: Because I always wanted to. Acutally long before the fatwah trouble began. Before The Satanic Verses was published, I had been thinking of coming here. When The Satanic Verses was finished, it was still the first time I was ever paid a really big advance for a book. And I thought, what will I do with all this money? And then I thought, well maybe I'll use it to buy a place in New York and then I can have a base there,. I hadn't necessarily thought of migrating fully, but that I would have like my own place here so that when I came here I didn't have to stay in hotels or I didn't have to borrow my friend's spare bedroom and so on, but I'd have my own. That had been my desire and then it became impossible for obvious reasons in my life for a ten-year period or so.
And then it became possible again. And so I thought, okay, well, I'd better keep this promise to myself. And the promise to myself was really based on two things. One was, both of which are quite obvious things. One was that I'd always suspected that some kind of work would arise out of it. I always thought that.
There are places to which you have a strong response, and there are other places to which you don't. And when you feel the strong response, then as a writer that if you spend long enough there that some work will come, I don't know what the work is but that some work will come out of because your feeling towards the place is such that that it will result in doing something.
So I always felt I should come to New York because there's some, I have business here, . And the other reason was the equally simple reason which is that it's an immigrant city, a city made up not only by immigrants from the rest of the world, but also by immigrants from the rest of America. It's the city to which everyone comes, from both inside and outside America and so that the character of the city is created by the people who come here, not by the people who are born here.
And as you read the statistics and you have amazing statistic like whatever it is, 80 percent of the population of New York was not born in New York. , it's an amazing figure. , even if it's 70 percent, I mean it's a huge figure. And for somebody who's been a migrant or immigrant in England, all his life, it's very interesting to be in a city where there is no host culture. , where really in England, even though of course there are large immigrant communities and they enrich the society in many ways, there is a very dominant host culture. And there is, as we know, periodically friction between that culture and the people that come from elsewhere. Here the culture of migration is the culture of New York. So I feel at home. I feel I fit even.
And since when I began to be a writer one of the things that interested me was to try and make an English which had a kind of Indian hint, . It was very inspiring to see how the Irish and the Americans had done it before. And so I had always responded very strongly to the great writers of America, William Faulkner and Saul Bellow and Philip Roth and , Hemingway and so on and so on.
INTERVIEWER: What did American language bring to literature?
SALMAN RUSHDIE: Just different music. And a kind of freedom from a certain classical definition of form and formal definitions of good writing, because American English is very much rooted in popular speech. It's very much, it starts with listening to how people talk and then it makes a literary version of it rather than deciding how a sentence should be written and how people should talk, and then putting that sentence into the mouths of people. In that sense it's not classicist at all. It's very empirical. And it of course listens to the, then, in America of course, English formed such remarkable variant forms as it interacted with many other languages and with all sorts of different realities as the country was developed. But all these different Englishes came into being and gave literature the possibility of being all sorts of different things and I think, so it's been a great literature for that reason if no other. Just the language project of American literature is quite extraordinary.
And poetry as well. If you read the poet like Whitman you hear a noise you haven't heard in English poetry before which is the noise of a technological hero, the noise of the big cities, the noise of the country being made not at the level of, not in the age of the pioneers but in the age of the metropolis. And Whitman, he was of course very drawn to the pioneering spirit of America. But he is talking about, he is seeing the body electric. He talks about America; he talks from that America which was in love with machines.
So there again a new kind of spirit comes into English poetry. And I know a lot of English poets who really don't like American poetry, don't like it at all. It's not liked, because it often doesn't obey the classical laws of poetry.
INTERVIEWER: But isn't it a very European fear? In Europe, the difference between high brow and low brow cultures is still made. Unlike here in America.
SALMAN RUSHDIE: No, it's not made here. In Britain I think that distinction is eroding. And I think it's a generational thing. If you look at writers younger than me they don't make that distinction nearly so much. And I always rejected the distinction completely because I grew up in an age when, first of all, in India if you grew up in Bombay, and lived in a city which was full of extremes of culture, it's a great poet, great city of poetry but it's also, of course, the city of Bollywood. And both those things were central to the life of the city and so, you didn't feel the need to choose between them.
I was in England when I was a teenager, it was the great moment of the Beatles and so on and so on, and certainly very high claims were being made for the Beatles at the time, in terms of their musicality and so on.
And one of the things about the '60s was that it was a moment in which popular culture took over the commanding heights of the culture. And that was a moment at which the distinctions began to break down.
INTERVIEWER: But these distinctions are not made. When you wrote about Rock'n'Roll in The Ground Beneat Her Feet the critics really didn't like it.
SALMAN RUSHDIE: Oh yes, I'm not supposed to do that. It's true but fuck that. It's true that there were people who thought that it wasn't the proper subject for a serious novel. But what that reminds me of, there's a famous review written by Virginia Woolfe of James Joyce's Ulysses in which she basically criticizes the novel because of the social class of its characters. She says how these kind of common people, why does, how could we believe that they should be worthy of tragedy? And it reflects very badly on her now, of course. But it feels a little bit the same to, how can you believe that these people are worthy of the weight that you're putting on them, pop stars and such?
And my answer is that it's, that one of the great cultural phenomena of the modern world was the first globalized cultural phenomenon at a time when culture was not globalized and the mass media were not globalized, and much harder for it, to spread across the world than it might be now. So I mean just for that it's interesting.
And of course at its worst pop music is rubbish. I mean it's disposable nonsense. But frankly, at its worst so is the modern novel. Most novels are terrible.
INTERVIEWER: Novels often have this attitude of being written for eternity while pop music is, it might be for eternity, has been written for three minutes.
SALMAN RUSHDIE: Yes, that's true. But you see, if you look at the other end of pop music, if you look at the non-disposable end, I don't believe that people, songwriters like Bob Dylan or Lennon-McCartney thought there work was disposable. I think they may have had to play the kind of rock and roll game, but I think they were writing things which they thought were good music, and that would, I mean they are built to last, those songs.
INTERVIEWER: Does this sense of time and whatever, immortality, do you think that even figures into the work of somebody like Lennon and McCartney?
SALMAN RUSHDIE: I don't think it did at the beginning but I think they came to, what is interesting about Lennon and McCartney is how much they developed as writers. They started out really very simply and commercially and very influenced by Motown and so on. And as we know that in the middle of the career of the Beatles there's a big shift. , the second half of the Beatles, Rubber Sole, Revolver, Sergeant Pepper, White Album, Abbey Road, part of the Beatles. I mean that is musically much more interesting than the early Beatles.
And so I think what happened is they began to take themselves seriously. Instead of just turning out hits, which they were doing at the beginning, they started writing more viciously. I think the songs on Rubber Sole show that, Tax Man, these are much more much more musically ambitious, lyrically ambitious. Suddenly they're reaching for more, than they were in Beatles for Sale or With the Beatles, those early albums where all they're trying to do is to make good pop music, and succeeded. I think what happens to them is that they discovered that they had it in them to reach further, and then they did.
With Dylan I think he was trying to write, he was after all writing initially out of the folk tradition of songs that had endured for a long time. , that, and he felt that he wanted to develop that tradition into a more modern voice. But, the people he was listening to like Woody Guthrie and so on, well certainly they were trying to write songs that connected to deep things in the culture and would survive. And I think they all thought the same thing. But again, as he found his feet and found his voice became more and more and more ambitious as a writer.
INTERVIEWER: Do you think you have to develop a sense of yourself in the context of time and history?
SALMAN RUSHDIE: I think so because I think any writer, whether of songs or prose, knows that the hard thing to do as a writer is to try and, your voice that is not anyone else's voice, what is it that you do that sounds like you and that nobody else sounds like? And that's not just a question of technique. It's a question of finding out what it is in yourself that is original and can be expressed in a certain form which embodies it. It's not just technique. It's also to do with knowing yourself as an artist too.
But I think if you look the greater the artist the clearer the voice. And the more individual the voice. So I think, as I say, that's true of songwriters, it's true of filmmakers, it's true, anyone you care to mention. The greater filmmakers, the greater songwriters, nobody else is like them. the difference between a Fellini movie and a Bunuel movie, . And you would probably know that it was a Bunuel movie even if you didn't see the titles, and so on. That's the quality of great art. It looks to be individual in that way.
And if you are lucky enough to find that, then of course you feel that that is something that will endure because it's unique. And that's the best thing.
INTERVIEWER: Do you see feel your own work changing when you came here? Just the sound or the rhythm?
SALMAN RUSHDIE: I felt my own voice changing with every book. I mean I think, I think if you look at the books from Midnight's Children to now, no two of them sound the same.
INTERVIEWER: You just wrote an essay for the Washington Post about V.S. Naipaul's support for the Hindu fundamentalists. What was that about?
SALMAN RUSHDIE: Well he's, Naipaul has had that position for some time. It's just that in the aftermath of the Nobel Prize his voice is obviously magnified as a result of being a Nobel Laureate. But it's, for several years now Naipaul has said that, what he said recently is that Muslims were a catastrophe for India and that the Muslim invasion which began about 1,000 AD had destroyed the culture of India at that point. And that they had run essentially a slave civilization inside India. All rubbish, but , that's what he says.
And that the growth of Hindu nationalism as represented by the BJP and its more sinister sidekicks, is what he calls an outburst of, what did he say? Of self consciousness, coming to self consciousness of the Hindu nation. And he's in favor of it. And then BJP has been for some time, before he won the Nobel, Xeroxing his speeches and handing them out as recruiting material.
And then what happened was that after the Nobel Prize there was an event, sort of literary event set up in Delhi, more or less to honor him for the Nobel Prize, and he came there and then he writes as a Nobel Prize winner and so on, and he created an uproar by repeating these absurd remarks. And one week later there were these atrocities.
INTERVIEWER: What's his point?
SALMAN RUSHDIE: He feels that the Muslim empires in India were the catastrophe for India. And that's to say he's taken a kind of Hindu nationalist point of view. It's an absolutely untenable position. Very foolish for a man in his position to make such statements. And as I said in my piece, I felt that it, disgraced the Nobel award because what he's doing is basically joining ranks with the Hindu fascists, the kind of fanatics who are trying to destroy the buildings of Islam in India and burn the people. He's an odd man, Naipaul. He's a very odd man. Leave it at that. But I do think, I, objected to what he's been saying in terms of Indian politics for many years, but I never publicly said so but I think the combination of the Nobel Prize and therefore the magnification of his voice about that, and these atrocities in India, meant that I felt I had to say that I see it's completely unacceptable to speak in this language because real people are actually dying and being burnt to death in their homes.
INTERVIEWER: Do you think that Nobel Prize bestows kind of a responsibility on the bearer of the awarded person?
SALMAN RUSHDIE: I don't know about responsibility; it increases the power of your voice. It doesn't, I think it doesn't bestow any responsibility on you as an artist. You just go on doing whatever it is.
INTERVIEWER: But as a human.
SALMAN RUSHDIE: As a human being I think you have to. Well I think you have to. I don't know if Naipaul would call himself a humanist but what I'm saying is that when you suddenly have a megaphone put in your hand, so that everybody in the world will hear what you say, you have to think about what you're going to say. And I'm sure he does think about it because he's a very intelligent man. So he's not just shooting his mouth off. He's saying what is his considered opinion.
INTERVIEWER: Did he respond to your essay?
SALMAN RUSHDIE: It would be interesting to see if he does. I haven't heard anything. I'm sure he will. Or maybe he won't. Maybe he'll rise above it and sort of think he's too grand to reply. I don't know. I have no way of knowing whether he'll feel the need to reply. But if he does, fine. Maybe I'll reply to his reply.
INTERVIEWER: Why is it that literary criticism for the past two novels turned against you?
SALMAN RUSHDIE: I don't know. People don't like the fact that I didn't get killed, I think. I think I was supposed to die. I wasn't supposed to survive the attack against me and begin to have a better life. I think that's what's awful.
INTERVIEWER: Some reviewers seem to hold it against you that you were protected from the fatwa for so long and then you leave Britain at the first chance.
SALMAN RUSHDIE: What does that mean, that now that I'm jailed? , because I got protection in England it means I can't take a plane to New York? What kind of nonsense is that?
INTERVIEWER: And then that you took a beautiful young wife here in New York.
SALMAN RUSHDIE: So? It's just extraordinarily pathetically petty. I thought what happened in the fatwah issue is that we fought a great battle for a very, very important principle and actually we did quite well. We upheld the principle. We kept the book in circulation. The writer is not dead. The attempt to censor thought in this way did not succeed. And you would have thought we should be pleased about that. I mean that's something which many of us fought, not just me, but ordinary people who grouped together and campaign committees and publishers and booksellers and readers, journalists who fought in their way. I mean this was a, it was a big thing.
And I mean not a big thing compared to what is happening in the world now but in its moment it was a thing worth fighting for. In my view we fought for that and we did well.
INTERVIEWER: It was the fight for secularism.
SALMAN RUSHDIE: Exactly. And for freedom of thought and, these are not small things. These are what set us apart from the Taliban. And we did quite well. We defended the values which make it possible to write and publish books.
INTERVIEWER: Is it then a strange, maybe a strange, old fashioned, almost anachronistic, leftist way of thinking that they see you as a victim and a victim has the responsibility of kind of an old fashioned morality?
SALMAN RUSHDIE: What do you mean old fashioned morality? I'm a completely moral person. I write, I think my books are informed by all kinds of moral principles. Doesn't mean that I can't fall in love. I mean what's that about? So I don't know. I mean it was a very unpleasant and very personal and sort of gossipy attack which makes me feel all the better about not being there. INTERVIEWER: I had a talk with John Brockman, the agent who's representing a lot of the Third Culture writers. He claims that science writers are now the true intellectuals and that they have the answers to the big questions in the world.
SALMAN RUSHDIE: I'm interested in science writing too. I mean there's a sense in which here's a lot of truth in what they're saying. I mean I think that , big physics and little physics, I mean that's to say, the physics of the universe and the physics of the microcosm are two of the most valuable, interesting areas of human activity at the moment and in a way raise questions of the kind that philosophy used to raise. And very fascinating and enriching to study it.
I think that the developments in mind science tell us a great deal more in a new way about how we actually function and how we make choices and, etceteras, etceteras. And of course, it's really interesting to know it.
So yeah, there's, I mean I think it's a genuine new dimension to our understanding of ourselves, the world, the information we've been given. But just the information, but the new structures of thought that are being made possible as a result of this incredible scientific revolution of the last half century. And they're just beginning. I mean now that we, now that the human genome product is completed, goodness knows what this is going to tell us about ourselves. I think we're just at the beginning of knowing what that will tell us about ourselves.
So yes, they're right. There is an absolutely radical change in our knowledge of ourselves, a kind of existential knowledge of ourselves, made possible by the scientific improvements. But if they think or if they argue, because I haven't really followed this argument. If they're arguing that, therefore, there is no room for imagination in this mixture, then they're just wrong because. Steven Hawking said something similar at the end Brief History of Time where he says, we're on the edge of knowing everything. And I thought, oh no we're not. Every age of the sciences, scientists have tried to tell us that now we know. And a hundred years later, all we know is that they were wrong because we now know better, . And I'm sure that we will a hundred years from now know a lot better than we know now and that what seemed like the great scientific discoveries of today will seem like they're outdated in some ways and in other cases will not be outdated but will be the basis of further discoveries. And discovery is endless.
INTERVIEWER: I'm assuming you're at a place in your life where can live wherever you want to. Why did you choose New York of all places?
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