Author Salman Rushdie on his new book of essays
I'm trying to say there are many ways that lead to the truth. They are important to explore, given that this is a time when the idea of truth is so much under attack.
(My parents) could see that I was a keen reader and they avoided censoring my reading. They were OK if I was just reading a comic. They didn't tear it out of my hand and say that it was trash. Salman Rushdie
If you really want to understand what makes Salman Rushdie tick, it helps to look back to his childhood in Bombay and his love for Superman.
To be sure, he has his cerebral side — his latest essay collection, Languages of Truth, includes a chapter that sees him navigating his way confidently through the tortuous waters of Samuel Beckett's fiction. Yet, only a few pages separate this display of intellectual prowess from his homage to the comic book.
“Superman and Batman, Wonder Woman and Aquaman, entered my life at an early age, and to this day I can tell a Joker from a Riddler and I know the difference between green and red kryptonite,” he writes.
Rushdie, now 73, cherishes these memories. They are crucial to the book's stimulating reflections on two driving forces in his life — the importance of storytelling and the need for “magic” in the real world. And for Rushdie, born in India to a liberal Muslim family, this repeatedly pulls him back to the youngster he once was.
“I'm grateful to my parents,” he says from London. “They could see that I was a keen reader and they avoided censoring my reading. They were OK if I was just reading a comic. They didn't tear it out of my hand and say that it was trash. So yes — I read a lot of Batman but I also read other things. So what happened was that I acquired a love of reading, which was the warmest gift of my life — and I got it in part because of Superman and Wonder Woman.”
Rushdie wants to be defined by moments like this, not by the personal nightmare that engulfed him in 1989 when his controversial novel The Satanic Verses (first published in the U.K. in 1988) forced him into a decade of hiding after Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini called for his death. (A fatwa that officially remains in place.) An obliging interview subject, he doesn't forbid questioning about those days — but, he says politely, “you can imagine I don't like it.”
Yet, the subject is unavoidable when he talks about his commitment to free speech and the book's eloquent tribute to the international writers organization, PEN.
“After what happened with Satanic Verses, I was enormously appreciative of the immense support given me by PEN chapters in various countries including America and — very much — Canada. So when things got better for me, I really felt the need to repay that kindness and work on behalf of other writers in the way that fellow writers had worked on my behalf. So yes, my commitment to freedom of expression was deepened unquestionably by what had happened to me.”
He knows this freedom remains under siege, recently with efforts by various factions to suppress books by the likes of Woody Allen, Mike Pence (Rushdie is no fan of the former U.S. vice-president) and Jordan Peterson. Rushdie, who has lived in New York for the past two decades, feels compelled to speak out against the culture of “offendedness,” which he defines as “the idea that being offended somehow gives you rights.” He has a simple solution: “I think we need to be less thin-skinned. If you don't like that book, read another one. If you don't like what someone's saying, go listen to someone else. Don't try to prevent expressions that you disapprove of — because that's a very slippery slope.”
Rushdie is an engaging conversationalist. His chat, like the contents of his book, reveals a magpie mind driven by a wide-ranging intellectual curiosity. That's why, in the autumn of his career, he has dared to write a verse drama about Helen of Troy and is currently in London to discuss its stage debut there.
It's typical of him that in a few sentences he can move nimbly from playwright Tom Stoppard to the Bible, Oprah Winfrey to The Beatles, and in other chapters deliver affectionate but clear-eyed memoirs of close friendships with playwright Harold Pinter, journalist Christopher Hitchens and Star Wars legend Carrie Fisher. There are mischievous pop-up observations that always enliven things: “Joe Cocker singing With a Little Help From My Friends achieves the feat of singing a Beatles song better than The Beatles did — which becomes a less impressive achievement when you remember that the original singer was Ringo Starr.” There is also unvarnished candour: “At the risk of offending the enormous army of Tolkien fans, I would suggest that Peter Jackson's films surpass Tolkien's originals, because, to be blunt, Jackson makes films better than Tolkien writes.”
Now that the book is out, Rushdie worries that those Tolkien comments may be misunderstood.” I am speaking as a deep fan of Lord of the Rings.” he says firmly.
Indeed Tolkien, a consummate storyteller who created a world in which magic and sorcery assert their own reality, helped shape Rushdie's own creative identity.
His beloved breakthrough novel, Midnight's Children, was a sprawling, exhilarating portrait of the Indian subcontinent at a crucial juncture after independence. It was messily, irresistibly alive — even when it came to its strange, otherworldly moments. Rushdie remains amused by the way two different cultures interpreted it.
“The reception in the West was to treat it as a kind of fantasy novel,” he says. “Whereas the reaction in India was to treat it as kind of history book. They saw it as a completely realistic novel. And in my view, that's closer to the truth.”
Rushdie acknowledges the power of the realist tradition in literature, so it's with a captivating sense of mission that his new book defends “the other great tradition” — one in which magic and mystery are part of the fabric of life in such seminal works as Homer's Odyssey, Shakespeare's Hamlet (“audiences of the day entirely accepted the reality of that ghost on the ramparts of Elsinore”), Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Tolkien's Middle-earth.
The Cambridge-educated Rushdie knows his Western culture, but he is also infused with the wonderland of his own upbringing, one “steeped in the tradition of the wonder tale, including the heroic myths of the warrior Hamza and the adventurer Hatim Tai, wanderers who married fairies, fought goblins, slew dragons and sometimes faced enemies who flew through the air riding on giant enchanted urns.”
Rushdie, calling himself “a traveller in wonderlands,” believes such worlds still have something to say to a contemporary society that might benefit from listening more to its children.
“Children have a very great gift for understanding the fictionality of fiction and what it tells us about real life,” he says. “They can revel in stories about flying carpets and magical happenings, but also know they're reading something that is totally make-believe … and be aware that it can tell still them something about the world in which they live.”
Rushdie's new book, an enticing grab-bag drawn from a fascinating life, is ultimately driven by a concern for truth. Hence the title — Languages of Truth.
“I'm trying to say there are many ways that lead to the truth,” Rushdie says. “They are important to explore, given that this is a time when the idea of truth is so much under attack.”