SALMAN RUSHDIE: LA CADUTA DEI GOLDEN

[Archivio]

Nel 2017 era stato distribuito - anche in Italia per Arnoldo Mondadori Editore - il romanzo La Caduta dei Golden di Salman Rushdie. Il 2 agosto 2019 Open pubblicava una lunga intervista concessa due anni prima dallo scrittore ad Aatish Taseer. “That the world that you knew, and that in a way made you - that world vanishes. I don’t think I’m alone in that,” says Salman Rushdie:

'It is that way with Rushdie: there is the work, dazzling and copious, but there is also the life, which has run like ‘a purple thread’ through our times. Indian independence; the Partition; the Emergency; demagogues on both sides of the border, and the rise of every species of fanaticism: they are part of the work; but they are also, in an almost freakish way, part of his life. History - and the pressures of the past - is his great theme; but he is also a plaything of history. It has used him in its story; it has made him seem like a character out of a Salman Rushdie novel, the creation of an imagination no less outlandish than his own. Writers normally sit at an oblique angle to the flow of events, quietly recording their passage. Not Rushdie. He has been swept up in the current, held aloft by the tide. He is a symbol of our times, forced forever to look in on himself, as if at another, and there must be something utterly weird about being Salman Rushdie. (...) He is forever bleeding off the page, and events in the outside world are forever seeping into his fiction. The new book, The Golden House, is no different. (...) The house whose garden we are sitting in once belonged to Bob Dylan. It has, now for many years, belonged to our mutual friend the painter Francesco Clemente. He, along with his wife, Alba, are the dedicatees of Rushdie’s new novel. (...) 

What struck me most forcefully as I read your new book - what I found very moving - was a kind of euphoria about escaping the past, and what America could mean in this context. (...) Have you known a euphoria akin to this yourself?

Not exactly in that way. But, of course, if you change countries, there’s a part of yourself that you leave behind. And I mean, that’s happened to me twice in my life. (...) The question you ask yourself, when that happens to you twice, is: what exactly has been left behind? (...) You know there’s always loss, but hopefully there’s also gain. I have thought a lot about both those things. Clearly my life would have been something else, if at the age of 21, I hadn’t decided that I wanted to stay in England, and try to write. (...) My parents had recently - to my mind, mistakenly - moved to Karachi. And so, the family home in Bombay was not there anymore. I’ve always thought that if my parents had still been living in our house in Bombay that I would have gone back, and I would just have continued there. (...) I felt deeply rooted in Bombay, and as far as I was concerned going to school [in England] had been an unhappy experience, going to university had been a much happier experience... but I thought of myself as from there. And had they not done this strange thing of moving (...) I think I would have just gone back there, and seen what I could do. But given the choice between Karachi and London, I felt much more at home in London than in Pakistan, where I’d never lived. But that clearly was a big fork in the road. And, in a way, Midnight’s Children came out of that. Because after some time of living in the West, I became quite aware of this probability, or the possibility, of losing touch with where I come from, especially since my family was not living there anymore. And I didn’t like that feeling, so writing that book was in a way an effort at reclaiming that past. And it meant a lot to me that the book was so well received there. (...)

America was something else...?

Well, America was two things. It was first a youthful dream. I had come here as a kid. I came to America for the first time when I was maybe 25, 26 or something like that. And that was very different. New York of the 1970s, this area, was completely unlike what it is now, much more run down, and dirty... Anyway, I kind of fell in love with it, partly because it was very youthful. New York in those days, because it was so cheap, was around here full of young artists. So, you came here and you met young writers, young painters, young film makers, young musicians. I thought: this is kind of amazing. This is a city of young people trying to do creative work. And then I came over the years, and I came to know it much better, and made many friends here. So, I told myself: one of these days... I want to just go and put myself there, and see what happens. I think it might be good for me. And when I actually did, towards the turn of the century, sort of around 1999, early 2000, when I finally did it, I truthfully didn’t set myself any limits. I thought this could be a few months, or it could be the rest of my life. I’m just going to go and see. I didn’t initially buy a place here. I only rented a place. (...)

But also, on the abstract level of the idea of America... you kind of fell in love with that too, didn’t you? I mean, you believed it? It has a hold on you.

Ya. But I’ve always thought the thing that has a hold on me is cities more than countries. I mean, I feel much more attached to Bombay than to India. And, in the same way, I felt a sense of belonging in London... And here...

You say that, but unlike certain writers, who write in very small ways about cities, you inhale countries. You deal in the grand format...

But the point of view is from the city. The point of view of America that one has from this city is very different than if we were, you know, sitting in Dallas... And there’s plenty of America that I don’t feel I would be at all at home in. But here, I did feel at home, and very quickly. Very quickly. That was what was interesting to me. I wasn’t a stranger here. I knew a lot of people. So, it wasn’t a cold entry. But I did quite unusually find myself feeling comfortable, feeling at home here at a very high speed, in a few months, and I thought: Oh. And I stayed, and then it became clearer to me that I would stay.

You spoke earlier about an anxiety about losing touch when you were in England, what about the anxiety of a writer whose entire subject is history, who adores history... What was it like to be in a place like America that is almost willfully ahistorical?

But you see, my whole training was as a historian, and I’ve never lost that way of looking at the world. In your final year in Cambridge, in a history degree, you do three special subjects. It’s all you do. They offer you 75. And you just have to choose three, and that’s all you do. And the three that I chose have in their own way ended up being very significant in my life: One was Indian history from 1857-1947, that was one. The second was: Muhammad, and the rise of Islam, the early caliphate. The third was the United States, or America, from 1776-1877, the end of reconstruction. (...) So, I was really quite deeply interested in American history from then, and have remained so. (...) Having come from a very old country, and then to quite an old country, and then to arrive in a young country, it’s different. You know, a house in New York that’s two hundred years old is really old. Whereas in London, everybody lives in houses that are two hundred years old. So even on that level your relationship with the past is different. And this is a very unsentimental town about the past. It tears down the past all the time. Every day you drive somewhere and you see a missing block. And what is interesting is that people immediately forget what was there. It is an immediate erasure of the past. (...) I have also suffered from the same kind of amnesia. This city tears itself down, and immediately people forget what was there. (...)

There’s this feeling - and it runs right through this book, and the rest of your work as well - of release from the past, and then on the other side there’s this Cassandra-like voice of caution that keeps reminding people of the dangers of that loss. In Midnight’s Children, you talk about ‘the clouds of amnesia’. That forgetting is on the one hand a very troublesome thing, but it’s also a liberating thing...

Yes, as long as you know that it’s both. One of the things I tried to do in this book [The Golden House] - it’s related to your question about the ahistorical - is to do something, which is quite dangerous, which is to write up against the present moment. To write about the day before yesterday. It’s very dangerous, of course. Because you can be wrong, you can be very rapidly outdated. There are all kinds of elephant traps about doing that. It also seemed very exciting, and right about the kind of place I was writing about, just to try to engage with the absolute contemporary, and see if you could get some kind of handle on it, and capture it. I did it before, you know. One of the things that happened with Midnight’s Children was that the later parts of Midnight’s Children were being written as the events were taking place. I was writing about the Emergency while the Emergency was still happening. And I remember thinking that I didn’t want the book to end like that, but I thought I can’t end the Emergency in the novel if it hasn’t ended in the world. So, when Mrs Gandhi called that election, and lost it, I felt kind of grateful to her. She gave me the end of the book! She allowed me to allow the book not to end in that moment. But I was really writing right up against it, you know... and there’s actually a passage in Midnight’s Children, in which Salim talks about this question of approaching the present, he talks about it using the metaphor of a movie screen, that the closer you get to the screen, the images break up, and I was very aware that that was what I was doing. And I’m doing it again. (...)

I feel that if intellectually-speaking we were to talk about Trump, or the political situation, you would regard it with a certain amount of dismay; but artistically, you’ve dealt with demagogues all your life. (...) There is a kind of artistic excitement in dealing with Trump, isn’t there?

I mean, you know, monsters are interesting... [chuckles under his breath, then aloud.] There are all kinds of awful things one can say, for example, the arc of history that goes from Obama to the election of Trump is actually quite pleasing: to go from a moment of complete hope and optimism to its absolute negation. That’s actually satisfying. I mean, I kind of guessed right; but I always also knew that if the other thing had happened [that is, had Hillary got elected], which would have been much more preferable to all of us, I would have had to shift the ending of the book around, and maybe it would have been less aesthetically pleasing... Somehow the thing that is very good for the book is very bad for us.

He likes you, doesn’t he? Trump?

No. I don’t know. He likes himself. But I’ve met him a couple of times. And he was very friendly. Terrifyingly. [Guffawing, and general laughter] (...) The most obvious demonstration of his affection was that - it was right about this time of year, when it was coming up to the US Tennis Open - and in that way that we’ve all become slightly too familiar with, he said, you know, that he had the best box - that his box was better than all the boxes. [more laughter]. And that if I - you know - wanted, I would be welcome to use his box at the US Open whenever I wanted...

Did you?

No, of course I didn’t! I immediately thought this would be like a career-ending move. (...) I’ve met him in passing two or three times, but I’ve never had a real conversation with him.

Well, we have this little background of history, and the past. So, when you see somebody like that [Trump], does he represent to you a politicised nostalgia for the past? Or is he quite an ahistorical creature? Where does he stand in relation to this idea of history?

Well, one of the things (...) I thought when I was writing Shame, which I thought again when I thought about Trump etc, was that sometimes you have very big historical events, which you can even describe as being tragic, but that the people are not of tragic stature, you know. (...)

It seemed to you like a Shakespearean play with...

With clowns! And I remember thinking that about Zia and Bhutto and all that. What would happen if you would perform King Lear, with everybody in it, like, circus outfits. It would still be King Lear, but it would acquire some horrible black farcical quality. And that’s sort of what I think about this. And that’s why in a novel [The Golden House] which is otherwise completely realistic, I introduce this idea of comic-book figures to represent these powerful combatants. I mean, just to put it simply: the Trump and the Joker are both unusual playing cards. [laughter]. So, I thought: well if not this one, then that one. Many people have talked about Trump coming from a reality show background, and about the country being debased into a kind of reality show mentality, and I think there’s a lot of truth in that. But I also think - in the way cartoons, whether Marvel or DC, have taken over the movies, things like that - I thought, in a way: here we are, three-dimensional, flesh and blood, realistic people, being ruled by cartoons. (...) 

With that Burmese diplomat in the novel there’s this moment when he says, ‘I’m never going home,’ there’s a point when you recognize that the journey stops here. Are you at that point?

Yes, yes I am. In the previous novel, there’s this moment, when my gardener, you know, who’s in love with his Djinn princess, where she tries to re-create him for the fantasy of the past, she sort of brings him back into old Bandra, and it upsets him. He says, ‘Stop it. I don’t want this.’ That realization that the sense in which you can’t go home again is: that it’s not there to go home to. That the thing that felt like home to you has changed so much that going back there doesn’t give you that feeling. And I think... Bombay, there’s still little bits of what is now called South Bombay, where I grew up. Many of those little bits are still there, and they still have a kind of evocative nostalgic force, but they don’t have more than a nostalgic force. They don’t have the sense of telling me that this is where I belong. They just don’t anymore.

There’s this moment in the novel where a character says to Nero [the main protagonist], ‘The city of my dreams is long gone. You yourself have built over it and around it and crushed the old under the new. In Bombay of your dreams everything was love and peace and secular thinking and no communalism, Hindu-Muslim bhaibhai... Such bullshit... Men are men and their gods and these things don’t change and the hostility between their tribes also is always there.’ And then there is this chilling bit: ‘Just a question of what’s on the surface and how far beneath is the hate.’ Well, the hate has come right to the surface...

Well, yes. That’s a global phenomenon. The rise of hate to the surface.

But wait, let’s stay with India...

Yes. I mean, it’s shocking to me... but you can be shocked, and not surprised. I don’t think it’s surprising. The way in which for many years - since the Emergency - politicians of all parties have used communal language in order to play this strange vote bank politics. They let that demon out of the bottle, and it doesn’t go back in.

Is Modi an embodiment of that demon?

No. Not only him. I think, everybody. The thing that is more alarming than Modi is the popularity of Modi. The fact that he is very, very popular. And that means that it ain’t just him. (...) The point is that there’s craziness bursting out all over. (...) All these countries that I’ve been so deeply connected with - the post-Brexit Britain, the post-Modi India, and the post 2016 election America - it’s all a question of what’s the matter with us. It’s too easy to put it all on the shoulders of one person.

But in Britain and America, there’s a difference. The two sides have held. The pendulum could swing again. India has been completely remade, don’t you think?

Yes, I think that’s true. It’s partly to do of course with the absolute Anschluss of the Congress party, the way there isn’t an opposition, which gives the government a very free hand, and yes: they’re embarking on a project of remodeling the nation, starting with text books... I haven’t been there, so I’m a little reluctant to say too much. Because the last time I was there was before the Modi election. Four years I haven’t been there. And that’s been a conscious choice, because I had a really horrible time the last time I was there.

How so?

I got surrounded by so much security that it became almost impossible for me to move. And, you know, if you’re in Bombay and you have a hundred men with machine guns going everywhere you go, you can’t say to your friends, ‘let’s meet for a coffee,’ and such and such, because you’re arriving with all that. It became almost like house arrest. I mean, in a hotel suite... But it was very, very difficult to deal with. Because you know I’ve had periods in my life when I’ve had to succumb to some of that, and for a long time now I’ve not had to, and having got out of that trap, the idea of putting yourself back into the trap is anathema. There was a strange moment. I was supposed to go to Calcutta to talk about the film [Midnight’s Children] there, and then I was informed that the government in Calcutta had instructed the police to refuse to allow me to enter. And I was told that if I landed in Calcutta, I would be put on the next plane out. I thought: apart from anything else, it’s incredibly insulting. And I thought, I don’t need to be treated like this.

We’ve been talking history. What do you think is the deeper historical urge that is expressing itself in India right now?

Well, it’s just that idea that the Hindutva people talk about all the time. Which is that in some way the Muslim arrival in India, and the many centuries of Muslim rule, and therefore, the spread of Muslim (rather than Islamic) culture, whether artistic, or architectural, or poetic, whatever - that, that is all somehow to be rejected. Because it was in some way inauthentic, and damaging of the - quote-unquote - ‘real India.’ And that the real India, which is Hindu India, must assert itself, and erase all that. Can any good come from that? Because when I go there, and I see young people who are very proud, I find myself very susceptible - not necessarily to their politics - but to their feeling of hopefulness... This is why I’m reluctant to say too much, because I haven’t been there. And so, I don’t know the answer. But what I do see has been unleashed is a kind of brute force, which is very worrying. And again, there are echoes everywhere. Like here, there are certain kinds of attacks that the President doesn’t condemn. (...)

Have you worried about your place as a writer in America, [or for America], even just how to write about America? Do you worry that America might not know what to do with someone like you?

No, no. I’m too long in the tooth. At this point, I just say what the hell I think, and people can make of it what they like. There are people who seem to willfully misunderstand what I think. I can remember, to name only one person, very unpleasant personal attacks on me from Pankaj Mishra, for example, to my mind completely misrepresenting my politics, and my way of thinking about the world. But that’s ok. I can argue back. But on the whole...

Well, since you brought him up, is there a certain kind of Left that is guilty of the things that it’s being accused of? There’s very nice discussion of transgendered identity in this book, and of identity in general, and the question of whether identity is a choice at all; or rather, as you say, a discovery...

Well, first of all, the question of identity is at the centre of the book. But what we mean when we talk about that is different. Here, the identity question is most often expressed in terms of gender identity, and of sexual politics. Whereas in India, for instance, it is much more in terms of religious identity, and communal politics. So, identity shifts. In England, the identity question had much more to do with whether England wanted to be part of Europe. So, the subject of identity is very heated these days, but the location of it varies in different places. I’m kind of amazed that there isn’t a Museum of Identity that I made up in the book. And I suspect there will be...

Are there excesses of the Left that worry you...

Yes. I think those Left-Right terms are beginning to matter less to me; but I do think it is easier to see the excesses of the Right because they are so in your face. (...) But I’m not impressed by the unwillingness of the Left to call things by their true names. And this idea, which started with Obama here, of trying to somehow... for example, trying to separate the words Islam and terrorism, as if the people performing the terrorist attacks could not, ipso facto, be Muslims. That seemed to me like nonsense. Someone who shouts Allah Hu Akbar before he blows himself up, and somebody who says that everything he does is done in the name of Islam - why should we not take that seriously? Now quite clearly it’s an idea of Islam that many Muslims might reject, you know, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a kind of Islam. And to say that it must be considered to be Not-Islam in order to maintain the idea that Islam is a good thing, it just seems disingenuous. I know that one of the things that happened with me in India was that there were many people on the Left who were unwilling to be supportive of me...

Because you had offended Muslims?

Because I had offended Muslims. And I think that’s still the case. And, actually, when you look at the world - just casting one’s eye out - yes there are moderate Muslims, but really the story is of the unraveling of that old Islam, the Islam you grew up with. The terrorists might be a tiny exception, but the change in the religion... is very real. It’s very real, and it’s partly fueled by enormous amounts of money for schools and priests, mullahs, to come and propagate this new Arabized, Salafi-Wahabi Islam.

So, here’s a question: do you feel that what we’re seeing in these countries - in the West, certainly in India - do you feel it’s a reaction to what happened to Islam? (...)

There is some of that. I think certainly some of what elected Trump has to do with fear (...) which he expertly manipulated. I think again in the Brexit vote there was a fear, but oddly it was a different fear. I mean, one of the things that has been unleashed in Britain is a hostility towards people with brown skins. Actually, they were more afraid of Polish immigrants than Muslim ones. But there was certainly xenophobia, and there’s certainly xenophobia here, and here there is also always the continuing story of racism towards African-Americans, and I think all of that elected Trump. There was just a whole bunch of Americans who could not stand it that for eight years there was a black man in the White House. (...)

There’s almost a feeling of emasculation related to exile. At one point in the book it is said, ‘maybe a woman’s life gains its meaning through such metamorphoses... but for a man it is the opposite... The abandonment of the past makes a man meaningless... An exile is a hollow man trying to fill up with manhood once again... Such men are easy prey.’ Do you feel like you are easy prey? Has exile made you vulnerable to women?

No, because I don’t feel like an exile. There’s a difference between a migrant and an exile. (...) The bits of the world I can’t go to, I don’t care about. The bits of the world I do feel connected to, I can go to. As I say, there’s a kind of problem that arose in India because of security, but that’s a solvable problem. And I’m in the process of talking to people to solve it. No, it’s not that kind of exile; it’s not a physical exile. I remember reading.... I don’t know if this is true, or not, because this was only one news article... that the Indian Academy had refused to allow any of my work to be on the syllabus because apparently I was insufficiently Indian. That feels offensive, that feels more like being excluded from something...

But what about just the fact of your carrying around the broken pieces of different societies that don’t exist anymore. (...)

That’s quite true, that’s quite true. But I think that happens to many people if you have a longish life. That the world that you knew, and that in a way made you - that world vanishes. I don’t think I’m alone in that. I think previous generations probably had that feeling too.

Yes, but there are people who have also known a feeling of wholeness...

I’ve always envied writers who have remained deeply rooted in one place all their lives, and just written from that knowledge. Like Faulkner. You live in this tiny corner of the world, and it’s enough. You can make a lifetime of art out of your deep knowledge of that little place. I’ve always thought that would be nice. But that hasn’t been what happened to me. And so, you have to use what your life gives you. And yes, I do feel that the India I grew up in - and loved - is vanishing at high speed. That the England that I thought I knew turns out to be a different place. One of the things that all of the people who were on the other side of the Brexit campaign have to recognize is that the country isn’t what we thought it was. And all this little England nostalgia behind Brexit - it’s the same as Make America Great Again - comes out of that same nostalgia for a non-existent past. When was it that America was great? (...)

You’re seventy this year. In the years that you’ve been alive, we have seen the phenomena of the rise of America, of a country on the up. Do you feel that the years you have left in America will be a time of pessimism and decline?

This is a time of pessimism and decline; but, beneath that, there is another thing happening. Which also partly explains the Trump phenomenon: which is that the country is changing very dramatically. That White Americans are like a minority, and that Hispanic and other Americans are rapidly becoming a majority. And also, where the social attitudes of the next generation are much more progressive.

So, it’s just a question of waiting for some old white people to die. Really?

Really, it is that. It’s that Gramsci thing: the old refuses to die so the new cannot be born. It feels like a transition moment. There’s old White America clinging on for dear life...

So, this seems to you much more like a last gasp, a death rattle...

I hope so. I hope so. Yes, it does feel like that... because it’s so crazy. The things being clung on to are so before-the-flood, sort of ancient idea... and one of the things that are puzzling about this country is that in the last few years, whenever there have been national surveys about the social attitudes of Americans, progressive attitudes have a very large majority. So, if you ask most Americans what they think about gay rights, or climate change, or gun laws, or immigration reform, on all these issues there are very large progressive majorities. The one exception is abortion, which is fifty-fifty. But, apart from birth control, there are progressive majorities on most social issues, and yet this country just elected the most regressive government that there’s been in a century. And that’s partly because nobody goes to vote.

Now you say that you love cities, but when you venture out of New York, do you feel that Nabokovian love for the great bosom of America...

In a way, yes I do. One of the things I’ve been thinking since I finished this book. You know you’re always thinking: what next? The truth is I don’t know what next, but I do know that I want to get out of the bubble. And, you know, if New York is this rather unusual place in America; I mean, I love it, but it’s unusual, then I think maybe, you know, I have to get on the road. (...) Sometimes you have to go and find the story. (...)

Now, we’ve talked about the past; we’ve talked about India and America; we’ve talked about Trump, I want now to talk about women and love... (...) 

It is difficult being physically separated from my family. Not just both my sons, but my sister, and her daughters. That’s not easy, but it’s easier now that the boys are older. Because when Milan was little I felt the need to zoom back and forth a lot. Now they can do the zooming back and forth. They like the idea of having a place to stay in New York City. It kind of works out, but it’s difficult. But there we are! It’s just the way things are. As far as the rest of it is concerned, ya, everybody wants love. And I’ve been lucky and unlucky, and no doubt the next thing will let me know which one I am.

Is it different with age? Does that stuff make a difference? Or do you feel exactly as you did when you were 45?

Well, I feel the same, but it’s quite clear to me that what people see is not the same. [Laughter] So it is different, ya. But you have to play the cards you’re dealt. And it’s alright. I’m not unhappy. I have a good life. [Pause] Don’t ask me to tell you more because I’m not going to tell you. Not on the record, anyway...[Laughter]'.