Revisiting a conversation: Salman Rushdie discusses his years in hiding

A week ago, the renowned writer Salman Rushdie was attacked before an event in New York state. He was repeatedly stabbed and remains hospitalized, though, according to his agent, he is on the road to recovery.

Earlier this week, a 24-year-old man pleaded not guilty to second-degree attempted murder and assault charges.

OPB’s Think Out Loud is bringing back a conversation we had with Salman Rushdie in 2013 after he’d written a memoir about the most famous period of his life.

On Valentine’s Day, 1989, Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini introduced a new word to many people in the western world: “fatwa.”

Khomeini called on “the proud Muslim people of the world” to kill the author of “The Satanic Verses,” and all people involved in its publication.

Rushdie’s novel, which had come out a few months earlier, is about exile and identity and includes – but isn’t focused on – a story about the Prophet Mohammed.

In the years after the Ayatollah’s declaration, bookstores were bombed, the book’s Japanese translator was killed, its Italian translator survived a stabbing, and its Norwegian publisher survived a shooting.

Rushdie himself spent about ten years in hiding, living in a bewildering succession of makeshift safe-houses all over the U.K. and the U.S.

At the beginning of the fatwa years, Rushdie was asked by security officers to come up with an alias. He took the first names of two of his favorite writers — “Joseph,” from Conrad, and “Anton,” from Chekhov. So, for ten years, Rushdie was also “Joseph Anton.” That’s the name he gave to his memoir.

We talked to Salman Rushdie about “Joseph Anton” in 2013 in front of an audience at the Literary Arts space in downtown Portland.

Note: The following transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. One week ago, the renowned writer Salman Rushdie was attacked at an event in New York state. He was repeatedly stabbed and remains hospitalized. Yesterday, a 24-year-old man pleaded not guilty to second degree attempted murder and assault charges. Today we’re going to spend the hour listening to a conversation we had with Rushdie back in 2013. That was after he’d written a memoir about the most famous period of his life. On Valentine’s day, 1989, Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini introduced a new word to many people in the western world: fatwa. Khomeini called on quote, ‘the proud Muslim people of the world,’ unquote, to kill the author of ‘The Satanic Verses’ and all people involved in its publication. Rushdie’s novel had come out a few months earlier. It’s about exile and identity. It includes – but isn’t focused on – a story about the Prophet Mohammed. Bookstores were bombed, the book’s Japanese translator was killed, its Italian translator survived a stabbing, its Norwegian publisher survived a shooting. Rushdie himself spent about 10 years in hiding, living in a bewildering succession of makeshift safehouses all over the U.K. and the U.S. – some borrowed, some rented, some bought. At the beginning of the fatwa years, Rushdie was asked by security officers to come up with an alias. He took the first names of two of his favorite writers: ‘Joseph’ from Conrad and ‘Anton’ from Chekhov. So, for 10 years, Rushdie was also ‘Joseph Anton.’ That is the name he gave to his memoir. We talked in 2013 in front of an audience at the Literary Arts Space in downtown Portland. I started by asking how familiar he was with the term fatwa before February of 1989.

Salman Rushdie: I hadn’t really registered it, no. Of course one of the difficulties is that, because I have enough of the language to know that the word doesn’t really mean ‘death edict,’ which it was used like that immediately, and I wanted to say it doesn’t mean that. Fatwa is just a, it’s the saying. It comes from the verb ‘to speak,’ so fatwa is like an edict. It’s an utterance. It has really nothing to do with death, as a word, but it immediately acquired that meaning, for everybody. And for me, I guess.

Miller: One of the curious things is about how that word has taken on its own life. It’s not uncommon to hear it now, divorced from any kind of Ayatollah Khomeini context, for when anyone talks about any kind of a relatively violent, even jokingly violent, edict that they present.

Rushdie: Well, I hope that it may be the Ayatollah Khomeini’s only contribution to history. [audience laughs] That there’s this, he left this word behind. This five-letter, dirty word.

Miller: I want to go back to the beginning, the place where you actually start your memoir, a really beautiful description of your introduction to stories. Do you mind explaining that to us? How you were introduced to the world of stories.

Rushdie: Well, my parents were both very gifted storytellers, of different kinds. My father introduced me to, through his versions, to the Great Wonder Tales of the East. So they were his versions of Arabian Nights stories, his versions of the Panchatantra animal fables, his versions of stories plucked from the Rāmāyana and Mahābhārata or whatever. So all these magnificent, really fantasy stories became bedtime listening from my dad.

Miller: When you say his version of all of those, what do you mean?

Rushdie: I mean he was telling… He wasn’t reading it. He was just telling the story and embellishing it in his own way. He was just telling a bedtime story to his kids and that’s what we got.

Miller: Did you know where they came from, and did you know what he was doing? That he was putting his own spin on these?

Rushdie: I mean, as we grew up, he said that you have to see where all this came from. In fact, there’s a wonderful Sikh series of comic books in India which make comic books out of the classic stories. They’re incredibly popular. All children have huge stacks of them. In many ways it’s the way in which kids are introduced to those stories now, as well as through their parents. My mother was a storyteller of a different kind. As I say somewhere in the book, she was a world class gossip. [audience laughs] She knew where all the bodies were buried. And like everybody who has that knowledge, she couldn’t resist telling you. There was a point at which she said to me, she said, ‘I am going to stop telling you stories because you put them in your books and I get in trouble.’ [laughter] But she couldn’t stop.

Miller: Was she saying that you’re a gossip, too?

Rushdie: Well, I suppose novels are a form of higher gossip maybe, sometimes, occasionally, a little bit. [audience laughs]

Miller: What are the lessons you learned from your parents, from your two parents’ different versions of storytelling styles?

Rushdie: Well, I mean one of the things also connected later on. I became very interested in the fact that India has such a living, vibrant tradition of oral storytelling. There’s still parts of India in which thousands of people will gather to hear somebody tell them a story. If you go to one of these things, which I’ve done, the storytelling breaks all the rules of storytelling. That’s to say, the advice given, I think, by the Red King to the White Rabbit in court when the White Rabbit is flustered and doesn’t know how to give evidence. King says, ‘Start at the beginning. Go on until you reach the end and then stop.’ [laughter] That’s supposed to be how you should tell a story. But these, the oral storytellers, don’t do that. They go in great circling loops and digressions, and they introduce bits of song and bits of autobiographical anecdote and dirty jokes and bits of a dance and etcetera. There’s about five or six different kinds of thing going on at the same time. This is what we are taught would make it complicated to hear and difficult to follow. But instead, it’s mesmerizing because after all, the oral story is a form in which you can tell at once if you’ve lost your audience because it gets up and walks away. [laughter] Or if it’s really cross, it starts throwing things. So, it seemed to me that this form had actually developed over thousands of years because that was the way that it was most enjoyable to listen. Not because it was the way in which it was hardest but actually most fun. Then I thought, well there must be a kind of written down version of that. And that turned into ‘Midnight’s Children’ I suppose.

Miller: I mentioned in the intro that one of the sections – and by no means one that takes up the most pages – but one of the sections of ‘The Satanic Verses’ is about a historical story, that’s part of the Islamic tradition, of the temptation, you could say, of Mohammed. It was that section that created the furor. What was it about that story that made you want to include it in a book, to make your spin on it?

Rushdie: Well, it’s partly what you said in the introduction about it being the temptation story. In the story of almost every profit, there’s a temptation story. This happens to be the Islamic version of that. I was interested in that small… Remember, this is maybe 75, 80 pages out of a 600 page book, so it’s very much not the story of the book. It’s a dream sequence, or a couple of dream sequences, in the mind of somebody who is essentially having a crisis of faith, who’s losing their religion. In that state, he has these dreams reimagining the origin story of Islam. But, in the novel, the profit’s not called Mohammed, the religion’s not called Islam, the city is not called Mecca, and it’s a dream in the mind of somebody who’s schizophrenicly insane. This is what we in the trade call fiction. [audience laughs] It was read as if all those distancing devices didn’t exist.

Miller: What was the point of those distancing devices? I mean, you say that this is fiction, but clearly it’s based…

Rushdie: It’s based on that, yes, no question. But the reason was that I wasn’t trying to… What I was really trying to get at was to write something about the nature of revelation. To say, ‘What is the phenomenon?’ because we have many accounts of revelation – not only Islamic ones – Saint John the Divine, Joan of Arc, etcetera; and all of them speak very similarly about it. If you look at what the Prophet Mohammed says himself in the traditions that have survived, it’s very similar to what Joan of Arc said. It’s very similar to what Saint John the Divine said, and many other people. So the question is – if you, like me, are not a believing person – if you had been standing on the mountain next to the Prophet at the point at which the archangel appeared to him, would you have seen the archangel? He describes the archangel as being extremely large. The archangel Gabriel, he says, stood on the horizon and filled the sky. That’s a big angel. [laughter] So, if this is objective reality, then somebody standing next to him would have seen it. And maybe several 1000 other people. My view is that I probably would not have seen the angel. But at the same time, it’s quite clear that he’s not making it up, that he’s saying something completely honestly and sincerely about an experience that he’s had, a vision. Now the question is, what is that? How does that happen? How do we understand that? That was part of the reason for trying to write that story, to try and understand the nature of revelation. One of the big themes of “The Satanic Verses” is the question of how new things come into the world, how new ideas come into the world. The novel suggests, not only in those bits, that basically a new idea has to answer two big questions. One is the question of weakness. When you are weak, will you compromise? Will you bend with the wind? Will you be accommodating and appease people just in order to survive? Or, will you not? Because, if you don’t, then 99 times out of 100 you’ll be destroyed. But the 100th time you change the world. That’s the first question. The second question is what do you do when you’re strong, when your enemies are at your mercy? Are you merciful? Or vindictive? Are you wise or foolish, in strength? In the story of the life of the Prophet, both those moments happen. The temptation in the so-called story of “The Satanic Verses” is, if you like, the question of weakness is answered; and later on, when he is victorious over his enemies and so on, the question of strength. I thought he came out of it rather well in both cases.

Miller: Showing mercy when he was strong and holding to principle when he was weak.

Rushdie: Yeah. So I thought, that seems like a perfectly reasonable way of portraying him. But I guess there were people who disagreed.

Miller: I guess so. Which we should get to right now. One of the common misunderstandings – especially common in England throughout your time in hiding – was that the British government was providing you these houses to stay in and you were costing the crown a lot of money because they were putting you in houses. It turns out it was very different from that. How did it work out in terms of where you were actually living?

Rushdie: Well, first of all you see, nobody thought this would go on for very long. Certainly the police didn’t think so. I mean the idea that a foreign head of state could order the execution of a British citizen living in his own country and send killers to carry it out was outrageous. What everybody thought was that this had to be sorted out. This could not be allowed to stand. I remember what the police said to me was, ‘The temperature is very high right now. You need to just lie low for a few days. Let the politicians and diplomats do their work, and this is going to be fixed.’ And we all thought that. So, at the point at which I did this thing of sort of going underground, I assumed that it was a short-term thing. And it took 12 years. That was a surprise to everybody. I don’t think the police were thinking that they were going to have to look after me for 12 years. Many of them were not delighted with that, but that’s how it worked out.

Miller: If you’d known that in advance, obviously an impossible kind of knowledge to have…

Rushdie: I would have stayed home. I mean I said to them…

Miller: You’d have stayed home.

Rushdie: Yeah, I said, ‘Look, I’ve got a house, why do we have to go somewhere when I’ve got a house?’ The answer to that was essentially economic. They said that it would cost a lot of money to protect not only my house but the street. So it was financially not viable. They said, ‘Just go away, stay in a hotel in the countryside, lie low, let people sort it out.’ When it turned out that this was not going to be a quick fix, it was going to be a kind of long haul, they made it very clear to me that they were not going to provide accommodation. Then I was in the situation where I couldn’t live in the house that I owned, and they were not going to find me places to live. So I had to do that. But I was also supposed to be invisible. That creates a sort of logistical problem. [audience laughs] I mean, ‘Invisible Man Rent’s House.’ [laughter] It’s not easy. So I had to rely on other people, had to rely on friends and family and agents and so on. A lot of people did wonderful things for me.

Miller: Do you have a sense for how many different places you stayed in over those dozen years?

Rushdie: I don’t know, it wasn’t as many… I mean it was a lot. It was a lot in the first two years, and then it sort of settled down after that. The first year it was probably 15 or 16 places, which is more than one a month if you think about it. That’s a lot of upheaval. If I got to stay anywhere for a month or five-six weeks, I felt very privileged. That felt like a luxury at that time. As I say, it gradually eased up.

Miller: One of the words that you use over and over in the book, always in quotation marks, is ‘allowed’ – what you were allowed to do and what you weren’t…

Rushdie: Yeah, because it’s the word the police would use all the time. And I thought, ‘I’m not in jail. What do you mean, allowed? Either I’m in jail or I’m a free individual needing the help of security people, but you don’t tell me what to do.’ But they tried, some of them. There was a big divide in the British police between the officers on the job, the ones who were actually looking after me, who were all… I mean almost all… I probably knew over 100 of them in the course of the decade. I would say, with the exception of about one or two, I got on really well with all of them. They were great. They were very supportive and amazingly good at their job and understanding the hardship that I was in and very at pains to try and alleviate it if they could. So I have nothing but admiration for them. In fact many of them became friends and have remained friends. One of the things I didn’t expect was to end up with a bunch of friends in the British secret police. [laughter]

Miller: What is your friendship like now?

Rushdie: Well, when we launched the book last year in England, the publishers threw a launch party and we invited lots of them, and they all came! [audience laughs] And had a very good time. [laughter]

Miller: You write that at a certain point you got invited to what are really Secret Policeman’s Balls, and you went to them. And the Prime Ministers go to them.

Rushdie: Yeah. In the middle of Scotland Yard there’s the… really it’s a kind of office canteen of Scotland Yard, which is called Peelers, named after Sir Robert Peel who invented the British police force. So it’s Peelers, which was an old name. The police used to be called that. They used to be called the Bow Street Runners because that was the first police station, and they were also named after Robert Peel. Anyway, Peelers Bar: They take it over once a year, and they have this thing which I call the Secret Policeman’s Ball, where they invite all the people to whom they offer protection and all the people to whom they have offered protection in the past. It’s a very hot ticket. [audience laughs] I mean like they would invite a few of my close friends who had been helpful to them in various points and so on. Everybody tries to go, because it’s a way of saying thank you to the officers who have been looking after you all year. So everybody’s there, the present Prime Minister, past Prime Ministers. The first time I met Margaret Thatcher was at the Secret Policeman’s Ball. So it’s quite a thing. One of the things I realized when I got there is that the only thing to drink is very large quantities of spirits. [audience laughs] So, ‘What would you like to drink, sir?’ they say. And you say, ‘Can I have a glass of wine?’ And they bring you a tumbler of whiskey, just that much whiskey. [laughter]

Miller: It’s a little insight into the way the secret policemen actually party I guess.

Rushdie: Actually party, yeah, exactly. But there are some very interesting little… I mean that’s one thing. The other thing that’s very unusual in Scotland Yard is there’s a place there called The Black Museum, which is not open to the public but is used as a training facility for police officers. It’s a museum containing… everything in it has been used to commit a murder. What you find is that all the James Bond weapons, these sort of fantasy weapons like umbrellas that shoot like machine guns; they’re all there, and they’ve all been actually used. Somebody actually made that an umbrella and shot somebody with it. There are pens that fire bullets, etcetera. Everything that Q could give to James Bond, it’s already there for real.

Miller: I imagine a pen that fires a bullet is something you might have wished you had at some point.

Rushdie: Yeah. You know, they offered me firearms practice. And I mean these guys are astonishing shots.

Miller: What did you say?

Rushdie: I said no. I mean the point about having a gun is you have to be prepared to use it. If you’re not prepared to use it, it will be used against you. It’s as simple as that. It will be taken from you and used against you. And I thought I just didn’t feel able to be somebody who was going to shoot somebody. I mean, I could have. In retrospect, I slightly regret it because it would have been great practice because their requirement is very, very high. I mean they have to have a very high level of accuracy. And it’s not just target practice. They have to be able to shoot off balance. They have to be able to shoot moving targets in a crowd, etcetera. So the tests that they have to pass are very, very stringent. And they told me this. Here is a very funny thing. They said the difference between where American officers carry their guns, which tend to be in the jacket under the armpit, and the British who carry the gun on the hip behind the buttock; they said the difference about this is that, when an American police officer draws a gun, he has to draw it through a 90 degree arc, right? So it’s going from his armpit to straight ahead. It’s going through 90 degrees. If he happens to squeeze the trigger a fraction too early, he could hit anybody in a 90 degree arc. So the risk factor is very high that you’re going to hit somebody that you’re not trying to hit. Whereas, if you’re drawing from your hip, you’re essentially drawing in a straight line, up. So your degree of targeting is much more accurate. They said, however, there is a snag, which is the most common injury of having your gun on your hip is that you shoot yourself in the behind. And that happens. [laughter]

Miller: I’m talking right now with the writer Salman Rushdie, who is giving us some shooting advice among other things. [laughter] His latest book is the memoir, ‘Joseph Anton.’ I wonder if you could read a short section from this memoir, but it actually comes from your novel ‘The Moor’s Last Sigh.’ It’s about the character’s relationship to fear.

Rushdie: Yeah. I mean, something I had to think about, and this is what the title character in ‘The Moor’s Last Sigh’ says about it:

“‘I’ll tell you a secret about fear,” said the Moor. “it’s an absolutist. With fear, it’s all or nothing. Either, like any bullying tyrant, it rules your life with stupid blinding omnipotence, or else you overthrow it, and its power vanishes in a puff of smoke. And another secret: the revolution against fear, the engendering of that tawdry despot’s fall, has more or less nothing to do with ‘courage’. It’s driven by something much more straightforward: the simple need to get on with your life. I stopped being afraid because, if my time on earth was limited, I didn’t have seconds to spare for funk.”

Thanks.

Miller: You make it seem sort of simple there, that it’s a question of just getting on, but…

Rushdie: It’s not quite as simple as that.

Miller: Yeah.

Rushdie: But it is essential because… I’ve talked to people who have been in much more frightening positions than myself. I was able to talk to several of the British hostages in Lebanon after they were freed. They were in horrifying circumstances most of the time. But they all said that they had to come up with sort of mind games to play as a way of sidelining the terror of the situation. So they would have little fantasy worlds. One of them had a farm in his head, and he would spend most of his day at the farm looking after the sheep and mending fences.

Miller: It does sound there though, in that example alone, that the way to escape from fear is to escape into an unreality. It’s a little bit of a break with reality.

Rushdie: Well, in their case, yes because they had nowhere else to go. You know what I mean? Their physical circumstances were so restrained.

Miller: Where could you go?

Rushdie: Well, I’m fortunate in that I have this job that I do where I make things up.

Miller: Your job is to escape into unreality.

Rushdie: Yeah, and it was no doubt very helpful to me that the kind of writer that I was, was a novelist. I think if I had been, for instance, a screenwriter, I would have been screwed. I mean, I would not have been able to work in the movies. If I had been a playwright, it would have been very hard to get my plays put on because people would be afraid for the theater, etcetera. At least I could do a thing which I could just simply be in a room and do, and then it would be done. And that was very helpful.

Miller: We have to take a quick break. When we come back, we’re gonna talk about, among other things, how the fatwa itself, though, affected what you wrote and the way you thought about words and writing. We have a lot more coming up with Salman Rushdie. Stay tuned.

Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. If you’re just tuning in, we’re listening back today to our 2013 conversation with Salman Rushdie. We talked in front of an audience at the Literary Arts Space in downtown Portland. This was after he published a book called Joseph Anton. It’s a memoir, largely about his years in hiding after Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini called for his death. We’re listening back to this conversation today, because one week ago he was attacked and seriously injured before an event in Western New York state. Let’s get back to that conversation now. Here’s a question from a member of our audience.

Audience member: Hi, I’m [inaudible] from Linfield College. So after creating hundreds of fictional characters, you have now become a fictional character yourself, entering your own memoir, not a Salman Rushdie, but in third person, as Joseph Anton. Has it been a literary advantage in exploring your own life as Joseph Anton, rather than Salman Rushdie?

Rushdie: Well, I wanted the book to read like a novel. I thought the great advantage of the novel is that it draws you into the lives of its characters and it makes you hopefully care about them, makes you like them or dislike them or whatever, but have feelings towards them. And when you have feelings towards characters, you care about what happens to them, you know? And if you don’t then you don’t. So, I thought to write it like a novel and make these people who –  including myself – come alive on the page in the way that a fictional character does so that it would have affect, it would be something which touched people. So that was the reason for doing it.

Miller: But if I may interrupt, that’s the reader’s perspective, in a sense, putting yourself in the head of the reader, and how they’re going to respond to this character. But what about from the writer’s perspective, did it change your relationship to yourself to write about “he”?

Rushdie: No, in a way it was the liberation, because I started off trying to write the book in the first person. That’s what you think, you think it’s an autobiographical text, you say? I just really didn’t like it, I didn’t like the tone of voice of it. It was all this ‘me, me, me, I, this happened to me, I thought, he said to me, I wondered, I thought…’. I thought, SHUT UP! [Audience laughter]

Miller: Do you not like memoirs in general?

Rushdie: No, not really, no, I don’t very much, no. I’m not a great reader of the form. I mean, some of them, yeah, there are some wonderful memoirs now. And I really admired Dave Eggers’ memoir, for example. I’m a great admirer of Mary Karr. There are some wonderful memoirists around.

Miller: So why write one?

Rushdie: Well, because I had this story to tell that actually happened, and I just thought that the thing that was interesting about what happened to me, was that it really happened. That if this was fictional, it would be less interesting, you know?

Miller: That’s the opposite of what I can imagine someone arguing, the exact opposite, and especially somebody who is a champion of fiction and the importance of fiction and the importance of imagination, that the fact that it happened can be inconsequential.

Rushdie: Yeah, but I don’t know that this was how I thought about it. I just thought it’s so remarkable that at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, something like this can happen, not in some remote corner of the world, but in London, and change somebody’s life completely because of this almost medievalist threat, which was backed up by cutting edge contemporary technology and weaponry. So this kind of strange marriage of medieval mindset and contemporary, murderousness. I mean, murderousness has always been with us, but we have better weapons nowadays.

Miller: Here we are. We’re surrounded by books flanking us on the wall in back of us, and an interested literary audience of readers in front of us. But in a lot of parts of the world and a lot of parts of this country, books are not a particularly important part of people’s lives. This story is one where words matter an incredibly large amount, where people wanted to kill you because of what you’ve written. Is there any part of you that celebrated at least that words still have the power to enrage?

Rushdie: Well, I would be more inclined to feel that if I felt that the people who were enraged had actually encountered the words. [Audience laughs]. But very large numbers of cases, people demonstrating and gesticulating, had never seen a copy of anything I wrote. There was a wonderful moment, I remember, when one of the British Muslim leaders of the campaign against the book was interviewed on television, and he admitted that he had not read ‘The Satanic Verses’ and the interviewer said, ‘had he read anything I’ve written?’, because after all, this was my 5th book and I published stories and newspaper articles and so on, and he had never read anything I’ve written, and he said rather sweetly and honestly disarmingly, ‘he said books are not my thing’.

Miller: Could you laugh when you saw that? You can laugh now. I think he died. I think you called him the garden gnome, right?

Rushdie: That wasn’t him actually, he was altogether a more ferocious creature. But this was another bearded gent. It was black comedy even at the time, potentially lethal black comedy.

Miller: What was at stake in this for you? And not just for you, but, but for the world, in your standing firm?

Rushdie: Well, I mean, look, there was of course, a personal issue, which is that I wanted to come out the other end in one piece, and I was worried about my family and my publishers and translators and so on. There were a lot of people in considerable danger, and I wanted them to be out of danger. There was that, but also I thought, it was impossible to consider losing this fight because of what one would lose. What would it mean to lose this argument? It would mean that the fanatical leader of a tyranny in Iran could dictate what people everywhere else in the world were allowed to read. Because it’s not only the rights of writers who are at stake here, it’s also the rights of readers to choose what they want to read. The reason there are many different kinds of books in a bookstore is so that readers can exercise that choice, and if they don’t like my book, they can read somebody else’s book. That’s the right that they all have, but to have that right denied them and to have their reading material dictated from outside, I just thought I don’t wanna live in that world. So it was very important to win it. And I think when there was somewhere along the way, there was a book published first in French and in English, in which over 100 writers from the Muslim world spoke out in my defense, which was very brave of them because they weren’t protected, they were actually living in these countries, which had often had been had bad history of attacking intellectual freedom. And many of them said that they felt that to defend the case of ‘The Satanic Verses’ was to defend themselves, because if this was lost, if the religious fanatics were able to say, ‘look, we could take that writer who’s already very famous and he’s in England, he’s a prize winning writer, and everybody celebrates him and we can shut him up, imagine what we could do to you’. And so there was a lot at stake, and the fact that they were unable to do that, is something which many writers in the Arab world have taken strength from that, at least this was a fight that they lost.

Miller: So, you’re talking about the political fight and why it was important. But a few years in you write about the lowest point where, in a sense, and briefly, you capitulated. Can you describe what happened?

Rushdie: Well, this is about 2, 2.5 years into the story. And first of all, remember, I wasn’t in a very good state of mind. I didn’t believe that this was going to end.There was all kinds of issues like the British willingness to continue the protection, was a question mark. There was a lot of political opposition from the Conservative Party, which was in power, because I was seen as quite rightly as not a supporter of the Conservative Party, and so it wasn’t a supporter of me either, so there was a kind of resentment that they were having to defend somebody who had attacked them. And then there was a large section of the British media which found it easy to make me responsible for the problem. Remember this was a time when we knew much less about Islamic radicalism, than we do 25 years later, and there was much less of a context for this kind of an attack. And therefore it was easy to say, well, if people are so upset, he must have done something really bad, and the argument was, you broke it, you fix it, and there was an enormous pressure on me to do something which brought this to an end. Meanwhile, there were various Muslim leaders who as I discovered to my cause completely dishonestly claimed that if I made some kind of rapprochement towards them, then they would work in order to get everybody to calm down. And I made the mistake, this appeasement mistake, it’s the appeasement mistake. It’s a terrible, terrible mistake and a very easy one to make. And one of the reasons you make it, the chapter in the book that deals with this is called the trap of wanting to be loved, and it’s a terrible trap. We all suffer from that, we all want people to like us and we want to be the nice guy and we want people to understand us. And I thought for a long time that somehow language could get me out of this.That if I could just talk to people and explain to them and show them that they were wrong, that they’d been misinformed and they formed an incorrect opinion of me that we could all be friends and shake hands and get on with our day. I mean, it was delusional. Aand in that frame of mind, I made this attempt to make a compromise with Islam and immediately felt, first of all felt incredibly stupid.

Miller: What did you say?

Rushdie: Well, I had to say that I was, you know, I come from a Muslim family background, so I had to claim that I was somehow a member of the religion, which I deeply not.

Miller: And so, in a sense, you lied to yourself and to the world?

Rushdie: Yes, this is something that never happens in politics.

Miller: When did you know that you had made a mistake?

Rushdie: Five seconds later. I left the meeting in which this took place, and I was physically sick, because I felt that I had somehow betrayed myself. And I almost immediately had to start trying to unsay it, especially because it turned out that all these Muslim leaders who were going to solve the problem essentially had no intention of doing so. And what they had wanted me to do was to do what I’ve done for them, which is to tie myself in knots, and in some way to discredit myself. And so they said, ‘see there, look at him, this worthless individual’. But it was an awful moment and of course, people who cared about me who know perfectly well that I have less religion than a mosquito, started asking me what the hell I was doing. My sister, who I am very, very close to,called me up and said, what the hell is wrong with you? Have you lost your mind? And I thought, yes, maybe I have. At that moment I thought I was pretty close to losing my mind. But in retrospect, I see it as a very, almost like a helpful, like a learning moment, because the thing about hitting the bottom is that then, where the bottom is and you know that you never want to go there again.

Miller: And the way you described bottom, and you said just a few seconds ago there, is realizing that what what got you into that particular problem was wanting to be loved too much and thinking that you could by your words, you could actually make people if not love you, at least not want to kill you understand. So, are you really at a point now where you don’t care if people love you or not, people write good things about your books or not?

Rushdie: I really don’t care. Or at least I care much, much less than I used to. I mean, one of the things, you know, just to move this into the realm of the literary, one of the things I know about writing is that when people like your books, they like your books for the exact reason that the people who don’t like your books don’t like your books. And that will actually come down even to the level of the sentence. I’ve had book reviews, in which a particular sentence has been admiringly quoted as an indication of what a good writer I am. Whereas in another review of the same book, the same sentence is quoted as proof of what a bad writer I am.

Miller: What does that tell you?

Rushdie: It tells you that there is such a thing as taste.

Miller: It tells me that there are certain lines or aspects of work that really stand out, and then some people like those or not, but there’s something interesting about this phenomenon that you’re describing, that the same parts could be loved or hated.

Rushdie: For instance, people who like my writing often say that they think it’s very pictorial, that it’s very visual, and they like that about it. And there are other people who find that exactly what they don’t like about my writing, that it’s too visual and pictorial. So at this point I’m not going to stop. There’s a moment in which I think you learn very little as a writer from experience. This is the bad news, that it doesn’t get easier. You don’t sort of feel more confident.  Every book you write is terrifying all over again, as if you’re a kid. But one of the things you do learn, is that you get to understand who you are as a writer, and what sort of a journey you are on. I think I know that I sort of know where I want to go as a writer. And then of course I want people to come along with me and to enjoy the journey, but if they can’t, or don’t want to, I’m still going that way. And when you know that about yourself, it’s a kind of liberation. I remember Kazuo Ishiguro, great friend of mine, British-Japanese writer, had these beautiful early novels culminating in “The Remains of the Day,” which made him very famous and very admired. And then he wrote a bizarre, kind of Kafkaesque dark, fantastic novel, that everybody was very shocked by, called The Unconsoled. Because it seemed so unlike the Ishiguro that they’ve all got to know and love. And I said to him, was he concerned about the response to this novel? And he said, no, I’m just gonna write three more novels like this, and then people will see what I’m doing. And three novels later he wrote Never Let Me Go, which was also acclaimed as a masterpiece. But in this very, very other vein, a much more surrealistic Kafkaesque vein, which is quite unlike his early work. So, I think he knew where he was going, and he went there.

Miller: And he’s playing the long game. Let’s take another question from our audience.

Audience member: Hi, I’m Daniel Pollack from Linfield College, and one of the things that I love about your writing is its polyglot quality, and your ability to mash up Bombay street slang, and British literary tradition and advertisements and oral storytelling. I’m wondering if this kind of mixed language that you use has always been a voice that you felt entitled to, or comfortable in as a writer, or if there were steps in moving yourself to that voice that we love.

Rushdie: Well, I had to learn how to do it. But the truth is, if you grew up in an Indian city as I did in Bombay, everybody is polyglot, because you have to be. I invented this language called Hugme, which is Hindi-Urdu-Gujarati-Marathi-English, because those are the five languages most commonly spoken in Bombay. And I grew up with Urdu as a mother tongue, with English as the language at school, with Gujarati and Marathi as the regional languages, and Hindi as the national language. And you had to have some knowledge of all of them in order to function. And then on top of that, just to make things fun, Bombay has the most individual and unusual street slang, which even people from other parts of India find bizarre and incomprehensible. A slang called Bombaya, which is very, very much a language of its own in a way. And everybody speaks that too. And then there’s another language which is really a mashup of Hindi and Urdu, which is the language which doesn’t exist, Hindustani, which everybody speaks, which is the language of the movies, right? So,  if you’re going to an Indian movie, they speak in the study, which I’ve said, slightly to the irritation of some people, is basically spoken with a Hindi accent.You all grow up with many languages rattling around in your head, and it’s very common when speaking to each other, that you that a sentence will contain words from more than one language, that you find the word that’s most useful from the language that it’s in, and now of course, you can’t do that in a book. You can’t really write a book in five languages, otherwise nobody can read it. But I wanted to have it to have something of that quality. That quality of that English was informed by the rhythms of other languages. And sometimes with words dropped in in the way that the great American Jewish writers, Bellow and Roth and Singer, and so on would drop bits of Yiddish into the book, unexplained. I remember reading, I think it’s “Portnoy’s Complaint,” but there’s I think early Roth. And one of his characters at one point receives what is described as “a zets in the kishkas.” And I’m thinking: “zets?” “kishkas?” It’s clearly some kind of a blow, because he says, “ouch.” But what kind of a blow? And where are your, you know, your kishkas? [laughs]

Miller: That’s the stuff of literature. [laughs]

Rushdie: That’s the stuff of literature. [laughs]

Miller: Let’s take another question from our audience.

Audience member: There’s a saying, if it doesn’t kill you, it will make you stronger. Do you think you’re stronger and if you had a choice, would you not write those 70 pages?

Rushdie: I saw a version of that saying the other day which said, ‘what doesn’t kill you will probably try again’. [Rushdie & audience laughs]. And I think there’s some truth in that too. I do think that it was useful to me, let’s say, to find out that I was tougher than I thought I was. I think if you’d asked me In February 1989 if you’d said, here’s what’s going to happen to you in the next decade, what sort of shape do you think you’ll be in at the end of it? I would probably have assumed that I would be some kind of basket case, that I discovered somehow that I was able to resist. Part of that is me, part of it is an incredibly supportive group of friends and family who were there for me throughout that time. But yeah, it’s useful to know that I didn’t break.

Miller: There are still people who would like to kill you or have you killed for what you’ve written, the fatwah sort of ended, and the security threat ended as far as the British were concerned, it sort of fizzled out slowly. I wonder now that when you write, if there’s a little Ayatollah in your head who says, ‘oh don’t write that …’

Rushdie: Just the opposite.

Miller: You have a little Christopher Hitchens in your head.

Rushdie: The idea of a little Christopher Hitchens is very strange.

Miller: It’s funny that you’d rather that little idea of little Ayatollah, you didn’t say that.

Rushdie:  No, it’s just I think this whole experience just bred in me a deep stubbornness. I think I thought I’m not going to be the person they want me to be. So it has the opposite effect on me. Look, I think of writing as a privilege. I think of it as a vocation, not as a job. I think of it in the way that a teacher would think about teaching or a nurse would think about nursing. I think it’s a calling. If you’re lucky enough to be able to do it, it’s a privilege and you have to be worthy of it, and I think self censorship is unworthy. I think, then don’t do it, nobody’s making you do it. It’s not compulsory to be a writer. If you’re going to be the kind of chicken shit writer who’s scared to say what you think, don’t do it. Go and get a different kind of job. But if you’re going to do it, then do it.

Miller: On the last pages of the book, a palpable sense of joy as you go about without your minders, for the first time in a very long time. This is about 15 years ago now. Do you still, can you still tap into that 15 years away from that sort of cloistered life? When you walk out the door here, can you still feel the excitement of not having men with guns walking around you?

Rushdie: Yes, it’s not a taste that I acquired, having men with guns around me. And until this happened, I had never lived in a house in which there was a gun, and suddenly I was living in houses with very, very, very heavy duty weaponry. There was one moment which I describe in the book when one of the police officers accidentally fired his gun and he was he was cleaning his gun and and didn’t realize there was a bullet left in the chamber. And it was on his lap, and he fired it, and it went across the room he was in. There was a door that was about an inch and a half thick, that went through the door, made a hole in it, went across the hall of the house, hit the wall on the other side of the hall and went through THAT. That’s a high velocity weapon. And what’s more, what’s being used is what’s called soft nosed bullets. Soft nosed bullet is a very dangerous kind of bullet, because it flattens on impact so it makes a bigger hole. And anybody who had been in the way of that would be dead. As it happened at the time, my wife was pregnant with my younger child, and just fortunately she was out of the house. And I was upstairs in her room working and I heard this huge noise, and came down, there were a lot of very embarrassed looking police officers, and there were all these holes in the wall. And I thought I don’t want to live like this, I don’t want to live in a world where this could happen.

Miller: We have to leave it there. Salman Rushdie, thanks very much for joining us.

Rushdie: Thank you.

Miller: That was the author Salman Rushdie in 2013. In case you missed the news, Rushdie was attacked and repeatedly stabbed while on stage before an event in New York state one week ago. Today, according to his agent, he is no longer on a ventilator and he is on the road to recovery. But it will be a long road. Thanks very much for tuning in to Think Out Loud on OPB and KLCC.

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