From the issue dated September 13, 2002
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The Domestic Verses of Salman RushdieBy MARY KARRSalman Rushdie's new place in New York is vacant but for the books stacked in columns that cover every inch of floor space in a room lined with dark library shelves from another century. It's the first time in months that the novelist's 5,000 books have been gathered in one room, at his disposal. It's evening, and he's been sorting them for nearly 12 hours, barefoot and with shirtsleeves rolled up. He's convinced that anyone he hired to do this would fail to understand his odd taxonomic system. Each book he picks up prompts a story, and, maneuvering piles of them around like this, he looks like a boy building a fort. He's been on the move for months at a time the past few years and is thrilled, he says, to be home. Home -- the word has a moan and a quick hum in it. It physically infuses your mouth with longing and a brief music. Rushdie, whose entire oeuvre is threaded through with the leitmotifs of homelessness and exile, manages -- more than anyone I know -- never to appear displaced. He adapts to any locale, sucking up idiom as a plant does water. Yet he's no chameleon. He never seems to erase a single line of himself in the process. His now legendary wanderings began by chance, when he left Bombay for a British boarding school at 13. Then his parents sold his family home. "I simply had no place to go back to," he says. "I accidentally became unstuck." In Rushdie's hands, this "unstuckness" has become an opus, translating an emigrant's fractured journey -- with the attendant mysteries and disjunctures and metamorphoses -- into a model for the human condition. The protagonist of his latest novel, Fury, Professor Solanka, seeks American shores for reasons of reinvention. "He had come to America as so many before him, to receive the benison of being Ellis Islanded, or starting over. Give me a name, America, make of me a Buzz or Chip or Spike. Bathe me in amnesia and clothe me in your powerful unknowing. Enlist me in your J. Crew and hand me my mouse ears!" Though books have been perhaps Rushdie's most reliable home, as a young man he for a while fancied being an actor, and his face is a fluid marvel -- switching gears, as his novels do, to reveal both a rich interior life and appreciation for the passing panoply. It's an elegant face, a warrior's face, as history's circumstances have required, and it radiates intelligence. When he enters into a disquisition on a book, he spontaneously conjures embroidered sentences in midair, complete with semicolons and subjunctive clauses, the whole convincing spiel nailed shut with an exclamation point. (Rushdie rarely feels halfway about anything. He lives in exclamation points.) He picks up The Master and Margarita -- a fantastic narrative by Mikhail Bulgakov in which a man can turn sideways to disappear, and people fly through the air as they do in Chagall paintings. Like The Satanic Verses, it makes a vague watercolor of the boundary between the real and the fabulous. The novel also borrows from a famous religious narrative, weaves together several disparate plots, and it was banned and suppressed for political reasons in the writer's homeland. Rushdie hefts it and pronounces it a great book. I'm about to go back to pawing through the poetry when, from the corner of my eye, I see him crack the volume wide and briefly lower his nose into it. The British papers have made a caricature of Rushdie's nose, drawing it into the malevolent sneer of some imperious pasha, but the fine arch of his nostrils has always struck me as an elegant pair of commas, tilted slightly to frame the nose itself. He now dips this regal nose into the pale valley of Bulgakov's pages and seems, briefly, before he snaps the book shut, to breathe it in, as if he were snuffling up the savor of some stew he hasn't had a whiff of in a while. The title of Rushdie's newest book of essays, Step Across This Line (just out from Random House), suggests the dare of a standoff, a line drawn in the dirt, but it's an ironic wording since the essays inside -- which became my favorite reading this summer -- tend to mock the stark propositions of hard-liners. They mostly celebrate the blurriness of our characters, whether national, religious, or personal, often taking a smudge stick to such boundaries. Rushdie's love of the mongrel sensibility has seeds in his earlier nonfiction collection, Imaginary Homelands. "Melange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world," he writes in "In Good Faith." "Like many millions of people, I am a bastard child of history. Perhaps we all are, black and brown and white, leaking into each other, as a character of mine once said, like flavors when you cook." The new book includes Rushdie's political columns from The New York Times and The Guardian, which often nudge at closed national borders -- the partitioned India, for instance. But he also tackles writers of varying stripes, along with an eccentric range of cultural phenomena, from Gandhi to the rock group U2. His memoirs and columns on the nine years he lived under the fatwa are collected in a central section titled "Messages From the Plague Years." They're historical artifacts that can read like a Steven Seagal script -- firebombings, men who speak into their cuff links, windows buttressed with mattresses. In an open letter in 1992, on the anniversary of his Japanese translator's murder, he described the fugitive existence this way: "I am forty-five years old, and I can't leave my place of residence without permission. I do not carry keys. Sometimes there are 'bad patches.' During one 'bad patch,' I slept in 13 different beds in 20 nights. At such times a great wild jangle fills your body. At such times you come unstuck from yourself." The essays also continue to tinker -- as in past essays -- with notions of home and our departure from it; with how, in the course of our journeys, our histories vanish behind us like vapor. The emigrant's story in Rushdie's hands cuts a pathway into the human psyche, the way social life did for Jane Austen or consciousness for Joyce or memory for Proust. And by Rushdie's measure, we're all emigrants of sorts, since "the past is a country from which we have all emigrated. ... Its loss is part of our common humanity." He spoke about those themes as central to his literary enterprise before a sold-out crowd of some 1,500 souls at Syracuse University last March. "There are two great and adversarial myths inside which we live: the dream of staying and the dream of leaving," he said. "The dream of staying has been incredibly privileged, because it relates to the idea of belonging, of roots, of nation, of tribe, of clan. All kinds of very important cultural constructs require us to think that staying put is a very good idea. ... [But] the itch to leave home -- the dream of away -- is actually as important as the countervailing dream of home, though it gets much less cultural airtime." He went on to point out how many artworks deal with the archetype of the wanderer, the outlaw or bandit -- the entire cowboy ethos being predicated on the detached hero's mobility. In his whip-smart analysis of The Wizard of Oz (the film version) in "Out of Kansas," Dorothy stars as just such a displaced champion. Rushdie declares the film, which he saw when he was 10, his first literary influence. After he saw it, he wrote his first story, about a boy who finds a rainbow (conveniently cut into stairs) arching up from a Bombay street and subsequently heads to the end of the arc for the requisite pot of gold. But an artist's simple coming-of-age story wouldn't provide elaborate enough a scope for a Rushdie essay. He's a master at nurturing the small seeds of traditional forms till they blossom in myriad directions. His novels marry the oral Vedic tradition to the wet saris and shoddy production values of Bollywood. "It is the leap to the All," V.S. Pritchett said of a similar impulse in Gabriel Garcia Márquez -- the need for each work to encompass nothing less than the whole universe. Rushdie follows Dorothy's journey (and suggests parallels to his own) out of the black-and-white world, with its blank horizon and gray-faced adults (who, he points out, are in the process of grimly permitting, with almost pathological resignation, a plan to murder Dorothy's "hideous little toupee of a dog"). We endure the terrific storm (Gale also being Dorothy's last name), emerge into a Technicolor wonderland, watch Dorothy grow up (as "the wicked witch grows down"), and wind up back in Kansas. Rushdie also burrows into L. Frank Baum's original book, the nature of cinematic art, and comments at length on the Hollywood culture that spawned the film. Rhetorically, the essay also constructs a machine with which to grind up the movie's sappy moral, "There's no place like home." Rushdie abhors that saccharine homily, and the gears of the essay's later paragraphs gnaw it to dust. He spoke about it at the Syracuse lecture: "The truth is, Kansas sucks. Kansas is black and white. Oz is fantastic, and it's in Technicolor, and anybody with any brains who'd spent some time in Oz, when offered the chance to go back to Kansas, might not think that that was such a hot ticket." The great emotional moment in the film, according to Rushdie, isn't Dorothy's return to Kansas, where her devoted companions have devolved from magical creatures into bland farmhands. He places as the film's centerpiece "Over the Rainbow," the song in which the Kansas girl sings about wanting to get the hell out of there. "'Over the Rainbow' is, or ought to be, the anthem of all the world's migrants, ... a celebration of Escape, a grand paean to the uprooted self, a hymn -- the hymn -- to Elsewhere." In the process of refuting the film's tidy maxim, the essay also makes the rather strong claim that home itself doesn't even really exist, that growing up forces us to learn "not that 'there's no place like home,' but rather that there is no longer any such place as home." At first that sounds too easy, but Rushdie's notion of home differs from the maudlin adage we got via Thomas Wolfe -- you can't go home again, which bemoaned a homestead afloat in a golden past. We've seen that idea too often replicated in commercials filmed using Vaseline on the lens. In Rushdie's argument, the past is abolished rather than longed for. It has to be, for us to become adults who actively shape our fates. We do make homes, he contends, but only in places like Oz, the dreamed-of city, "which is anywhere, and everywhere, except the place from which we began." So home becomes (to warp the words of the novelist Mona Simpson) anywhere but back there. Without Rushdie's reminiscences, a reader might coolly admire the essay's virtuoso intellectual moves without feeling much, while the psyche that shaped the ideas would stay politely shrouded behind the curtain. But his childhood story makes a magic revelation of humanity -- presto, here I am! -- that lends emotional conviction to the ideas. He gives us that 10-year-old kid slumped in the cavern of a Bombay theater in the 1950s as he first enters into the thrall of the Emerald City and starts thinking, England must be like that. So that film started to erect in the boy, still so deeply entrenched in his ancestral home, some dream of capital-A Away that would shape him into both an artist and a drifter, would bless him with a polyglot's multiple vantage points, but also doom him to wander, making him a kind of Huck Finn or Don Quixote. In this same essay, Rushdie also furnishes us with what every budding writer needs for his or her future labor -- a complicated father. "My father Anis Ahmed Rushdie was a magical parent of young children, but he was also prone to explosions, thunderous rages, bolts of emotional lightning, puffs of dragon smoke, and other menaces of the type also practiced by Oz, the great and terrible," he writes. "It took me half a lifetime to discover that the Great Oz's apologia pro vita sua fitted my father equally well; that he too was a good man, but a very bad wizard." When young Salman announced after Cambridge that he planned to become a novelist, his father exploded. "What burst out of him -- viscerally, he was completely unable to control it -- was this pitiful cry, this howl of anguish. Then he said, 'What will I tell my friends?'" Asked if his father ever recanted, Rushdie says, "I think it's fair to say that my father never had a kind word to say about my writing -- until I left the room. Then he could be quite proud." And yet, when Rushdie's father first appears in "Out of Kansas," a few years before his death in 1987, it's as a rescuer of his son's work. He told Salman that his very first story, presumed lost "somewhere along my family's mazy journeyings between India, England, Pakistan," had bobbed to the surface. "But despite my pleadings," Rushdie writes, "he never produced it." "Maybe he never really found my story, in which case, he succumbed to the lure of fantasy, and this was the last of the many fairytales he told me. Or else he did find it, and hugged it to himself as a talisman and a reminder of simpler times, thinking of it as his treasure, not mine -- his pot of nostalgic, parental gold." Thus, in the essay, Rushdie finally earned, after his father's death, what might have been more stingily doled out during the old man's lifetime: undiluted paternal approval. Rushdie also describes a rich and continuing dream relationship with his father. "And believe me, it's much better. When he arrives, he's wise and understanding and giving me advice -- very loving. And he likes my books now." Rushdie's place in New York is meant to be the dot on the map where he pushpins a period at the end of the long and winding sentence his life has been. He talks about the city with enormous feeling, claiming that it offers him a sense of belonging to a specific geography for the first time in decades. He came here partly for the freedom America allows. Here, he notes, people far better known than he travel around with all the freedom that a pair of sunglasses affords. "Writers can be anonymous here, because America has so many celebrities for the paparazzi to stalk," he said at Syracuse. "If there were more movie stars in England, I'd be irrelevant." New York is also a city predicated on the mongrel sensibility that Rushdie finds so appetizing: ["It's] a culture made up of migrants. Everyone is from somewhere else. And so I finally have the amazing experience of feeling normal," he said. The realization of belonging came to him last September 11, as he stood in his bathrobe before a hotel TV -- where his book tour for Fury had stranded him -- and watched the second airliner crash into the second tower. "For hours, I found myself unable to sit down," he said at the Syracuse talk. "I just stood there. It seemed disrespectful not to stand." Rushdie didn't occupy any piece of New York real estate at that time; he was waiting to move. But watching the heroic fight of New Yorkers to keep their way of life from disintegrating like so many pixels on national TV, "I desperately wanted to be there," he said. "I realized on September 11th that I'm finally becoming stuck somewhere," he added, almost sheepishly, "and it's New York." It also is Oz. "There never was a metropolis quite like the Emerald City. It looks from the outside like a fairytale of New York, a thicket of skyscraping green towers," he writes in "Out of Kansas." But New York is Rushdie's second Oz -- England being the first, since he became a British citizen in his teens. He remains grateful to the British for his protection, while still expressing, as many emigrants do, an uneasy relation to the country that tried to absorb his homeland into its empire for so many years. "I was actually born ... eight weeks to the day before [Indian] independence, and it used to be a joke in my family that there was some relation there, as if I got born and the British felt they had to leave." "I always felt like a foreigner in England," he says. "I've got news for you, Salman," I shoot back. "You're a foreigner here." "Yes, but this place is predicated on being foreigners." If the butt-whipping delivered by the British press to Rushdie over the decades has helped deliver him to our shores, then we in the United States should be glad of it. For those who don't read the British papers regularly, the attacks are vicious and frequent. When Rushdie announced that he was leaving Britain, this headline ran in The Daily Mail (a right-wing newspaper with an enormous circulation, particularly in middle England): "And good riddance Rushdie (you have cost us 10 million pounds and you can't even say thank you)." This complaint about the cost of his defense during the fatwa is a common one in the British press. But it won't translate into American terms. Take a great literary writer, maybe even one of color -- Toni Morrison, say -- and imagine that white supremacists have burned her books and set flaming effigies of her atwirl. Let's posit that people have been murdered in support of her cause. What American would lodge a public complaint about the tab for her defense? Most of the invectives aimed at Rushdie in print are less political than venomously ad hominem. Allegedly serious papers stoop to the sort of character assault that I haven't seen since my sixth-grade slam book. Some of it seems to grow from bitterness at the beauty of his girlfriend of three years -- the American actress Padma Lakshmi -- or some perceived sexual threat he poses. One tabloid captioned a photograph: "Rushdie: Ugly." Another article said a study proved that beautiful women could love ugly men -- "must be great news in the Rushdie household." Often the journalists cudgel him based on what they imagine he's thinking. Several had whole paragraphs that begin, "What really infuriates Rushdie ..." or "Rushdie deludes himself that ..." Martin Amis alludes to a distinct strand of anti-Americanism in the attacks -- due in part to the setting of Fury or to his girlfriend's nationality. One review, in Dublin's Sunday Business Post, says Rushdie's latest novel -- a hymn of praise to and biting sendup of American vernacular -- takes a scalpel to "the cadaver of American culture. ..." [Some] of his newly found New York chums think the style is really groovy, man." Since last September, Rushdie has defended the United States in his columns more than once. In The Washington Post in October, he describes "the savaging of America by sections of the left": "A country which has just suffered the most devastating terrorist attack in history, a country in a state of deep mourning and horrible grief, is being told, heartlessly, that it is to blame for its citizens' deaths. ('Did we deserve this, sir?' a bewildered worker at 'ground zero' asked a visiting British journalist recently. I find the grave courtesy of that 'sir' quite astonishing.)" Bill Buford, fiction editor of The New Yorker, who used to run Granta in England, claims that anti-intellectualism is also partly at work. "The word 'uppity' gets used a lot," he says. "The English can resent high achievement as being uppity -- behaving above one's station." Last December, in The New Statesman, Jason Cowley noted a similar desire in the British media to favor the dumbed-down writer above the intellectually adroit one: "Those of our major writers, such as Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie, who have worked to document their times in fiction ... have also become our most consistently reviled, perhaps because their cartoonish brand of social realism demands too much of us, as if it is somehow an affront to our culture of complacency." Amis frequently gets paired with Rushdie as the other uppity British writer (he's Oxford-educated and hugely accomplished) who's been bludgeoned by the British press. Still, he says that what he's endured "isn't a thousandth of what they've done to Salman." Rushdie agrees: "Martin is definitely the silver medalist in the ass-whipping category, but he's a distant second." To me, the assaults often stink of ethnic bigotry. There's that malevolent stench of absolute hatred that emanates from people intent on finding in Rushdie's folder some grotesque offense he's committed in order to justify a spite in themselves that's innate. It's worth mentioning that the British columnist A.N. Wilson, who found Fury "nauseating," recently decried a list from Norway of the 100 best English-language novels of all time. Specifically, he was outraged to see included the following three contemporary writers: Rushdie, Morrison, and the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe. We're to presume, I suppose, that he didn't notice that those were all writers of color. Amis agrees that Rushdie-bashing derives in some measure from a "semiconscious racism." He describes the cartoon on the cover of The Times of London in which an Englishman in a bowler sits on a pub stool holding a paper with the headline RUSHDIE WINS BOOKER! next to a kid in a National Front T-shirt. The caption reads, "They come over here and marry our women and win our literary prizes ..." Read this account of a conversation that Rushdie had on a national radio show that he described in Imaginary Homelands. "Recently, on a live radio programme, a professional humorist asked me, in all seriousness, why I objected to being called a wog. He said that he had always thought it a rather charming word, a term of endearment. 'I was at the zoo the other day,' he revealed, 'and a zookeeper told me that the wogs were best with the animals; they stuck their fingers in their ears and wiggled them about and the animals felt at home.'" In the United States, Rushdie's critiques of that kind of bigotry seem less like blasphemy or national betrayal or "lack of a sense of humor" (an accusation he's suffered in Britain) than part of a much-needed conversation. Britain has been my home in the past, and the press treatment of Rushdie there feels like a flaw in a culture and among a citizenry I revere. It's small wonder that the man moved to our side of the pond. In Rushdie's New York home, he's spent months preparing a room for his 5-year-old son. The boy comes soon, and Rushdie's currently got propped in his foyer a massive mirror with an ornate border of clouds and birds in pale blue and gilt. He found it at an antique market, and he's wondering how it will look in the boy's room. "Whaddya think?" he says. It's a marvelous object, one that might serve as a doorway into some Oz-like kingdom or warped wonderland. But as a kid, I always found mirrors scary. You can never catch the kid inside, and the mystery of what you are versus what you imagine floats on a hard silver surface that's as uncertain as mercury. Even when I was very young, my fingertips pressed against those of the other seemed like some powerful schism that I'd eventually have to concoct a meaning for, or drown in. "Mirrors spook a lot of kids," I say, and vote for placement in the foyer. Rushdie painted his son's room a pale sky-blue and bought a red armchair that rocks and Spiderman bedding. For weeks, he's been scouring shops and toy stores, with the intensity he brings to any activity. "I just want him to feel at home here," he says. There's that word again: "home," with its indigenous little moan. And, of course, it's children who force most cultures to encourage what Rushdie calls "the dream of staying." What's so ineffably sad about a divorced man preparing his child's room alone? It's a sexist response, I know, one that I apologize to the planet's dads for having. Dozens of men I know (including my son's father) have assembled children's rooms alone with perfect competence. Still, a man putting together something for a kid gives off a wavering hesitance, mixed with a keen desire to please, that strikes me as poignant. Rushdie's been at it for weeks. In the course of that time, he's installed a toy train and found stuffed animals to occupy the bed and the top of the bureau. The room strikes me as an altar where he can actively long for his son every day. This craving to please a child, palpable as thirst, fuels one gorgeous hairpin turn in "Out of Kansas." At the very end, Rushdie locates us in that wobbly vortex between generations, where he's father and son simultaneously. He's famous for moments of double vision or twin vantage points like this one. "Now, as I look at the movie again, I have become the fallible adult," he writes. "Now I am a member of the tribe of imperfect parents who cannot listen to their children's voices. I, who no longer have a father, have become a father instead, and now it is my fate to be unable to satisfy the longings of a child. ... This is the last and most terrible lesson of the film: that there is one final, unexpected rite of passage. In the end, ceasing to be children, we all become magicians without magic, exposed conjurers, with only our simple humanity to get us through." One of the last gadgets Rushdie installs in his son's room is a special nightlight set to project a whirling pattern of stars and planets across the ceiling. So his father has sent swimming over the boy's head nothing less than an entire universe. Mary Karr is a professor of English at Syracuse University and the author of three books of poems and two memoirs, most recently Cherry (Viking, 2000). http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 49, Issue 3, Page B7
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Copyright © 2002 by The Chronicle of Higher Education