Salman Rushdie At New York's 92nd Street Y

Will Salman Rushdie's life ever cease being intertwined with world events? In 1989, just when he was toread from his novel Satanic Verses at the 92nd St. Y, the mecca of literary readings for New Yorkintellectuals, the fatwa forced him into exile. The event was cancelled. Last year, when the invitation wasrenewed, Sept. 11 caused a postponement. Eerily, that was also the publication date of Fury, his latestnovel, set in New York. At long last, on April 23, Rushdie was interviewed at the Y by writer FranciscoGoldman. Afterwards, he wowed the audience with his dramatic reading and signed books for fans who had passedthrough specially set up metal detectors.

Goldman's questions focused on Rushdie's literary life and eight novels. Rushdie enjoyed answering freely,personally, and iconoclastically. He admitted that he's messy, that writing requires the best energy of theday: he gets to work before even brushing his teeth, he won't take phone calls or read the newspaper in themorning. He sits at his desk till he's exhausted and then -- writes some more. The idea for a novel takesyears to gestate and the "sign of a book coming to life is that it begins to offer up possibilities thatI hadn't thought of."

Laughingly he confessed that life had not been "world fame, beautiful women, pots of money."Quite the contrary. Before the Booker prize winning Midnight's Children, he'd abandoned several books,published one that nobody liked, and wrote much "rubbish." Halfway into the five years of writing Midnight'sChildren, he grew depressed. He could not "get the story out because [the protagonist] Salim takes solong getting born." Luckily, Salim became the narrator. "His voice had such energy, I was never ableto shut him up. I just hung on his coattails and went along for the ride." The first draft, longer thanthe finished book, was completely rewritten. That big gamble paid off: the New Yorker's iconic critic V.S.Pritchett gave it "the rave review you'd write in your dreams."

Humorously, Rushdie recalled Indians' responses to the book. A Bombayite told him, "I could havewritten this book, I know all that stuff." Another, smacking him playfully, said, "Naughty boy,putting me in your book!" Rushdie insists, "I didn't know her -- she had imagined herself in thebook and wasn't getting out of it!" The audience was charmed.

He acknowledged his debts to William Faulkner, Gunter Grass, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. "Austen'sbrilliant women, confined by what was expected of them when they were up to much more than husband hunting,seemed reminiscent of Indian society." From Dickens, he got larger-than-life characters and learned to"never abandon the roots of reality-flights of fancy only work when they begin in the real world."The rich material came from India: "You don't have to make anything up." As for his young, lonely,picked-upon protagonists, they were not self-portraits but pure "metaphor."

But if Rushdie is the child of Independence, he's also a child of the religious bloodshed of Partition:"You grow up with the knowledge that that possibility is always there in human beings." Rushdiedubbed Shame, his novel about Pakistan, "evil" ("nobody's nice in it, everybody'sawful") but technically successful. "It has characteristics of high tragedy but the people do nothave tragic stature-- it's cast with clowns."

And Satanic Verses, which brought him so much grief, is not political. "It's about the act ofmigration that I myself had made, about transformation, about coming from over there and ending up here. Itwas written from deep inside myself about things that were personal....and it's a funny book, I'm a comicwriter."

In The Moor's Last Sigh, written in exile during the first outbreak of Hindu nationalism, Rushdiecreated a hero, half Kerala Jew, half Christian, to show that a minority need not be marginal or inauthentic."You can create India from anywhere, not just from inside Brahmin culture. The Moor satirizesHindu fundamentalism because Bombay, my hometown, had been free of the cancer of communalism; now it isn'tbecause of Bal Thackeray and Shiv Sena and Hindu fanaticism. The city I remember as a wonderful place isdifferent and darker now. I was angry about that."

Of exile, Rushdie said, "I used to go to India all the time, my relationship with India was brokenwhen I couldn't go for 10 years. It was like going mad." Then, he realized, "I don't have to go toBombay, I can close my eyes and I know every street, I know how people think, talk and respond. I was proudthat the book hadn't been scarred by exile -- many Indians thought I'd tricked them and slipped into thecountry! Writing is a process of discovery, when you do it you find out what you know."

What he clearly knows is, "There are two movements in my writing -- home and away, going back to Indiaand away from it. The Ground Beneath Her Feet is about that." It's about Rushdie's three worlds --India, England, America -- and about roots and rootlessness. "Music allowed me to portray the rootlessspirit in counterpoint to rooted life."

Goldman asked about sex and love, both notoriously hard to write about. Rushdie confessed, "I wasincredibly shy. It's a culture problem. I come from the time when Indian movies weren't allowed to showphysical contact. My books have gotten braver about sex as I've got older...it's scary but you have to doit."

Turning finally to Fury, Rushdie told a spooky tale: "It's about New York at its peak ofsuccess and decadence. I had some profound creative instincts that were not conscious or rational, like aforce saying, 'Stop writing what you're writing, start writing this.' This book insisted on being written, itwas written very fast (10 months). I never thought that the age it was describing would end on its publicationdate, that a book written to be a contemporary satirical novel would become a historical novel. It describessomething that was, and is not the same any more. This is Sept. 10. Fury contains the sense of anending."

Personally, Fury is about his new love (portrayed in the heroine Neela) and his adopted home."I like it here, I'm not planning to go anywhere soon. It's been a long journey getting here. I feelcloser to this great city since Sept. 11. I feel comfortable here, I'd visited here in the '70s when the TwinTowers were being built. Here, layer after layer of people arrive with their stories from elsewhere -- Serbia,Afghanistan, Fiji-that's the city culture. There's no dominant culture, so I'm normal -- I'm not used to beinglike everyone else. Here, everyone has a story that involves a journey in someway. I feel at home. Or, asabnormal as anyone else."