How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - Salman Rushdie - ‘I’d rather have had a different life’

Episode Date: June 5, 2024

TW: this episode contains graphic descriptions of violence and injuries.  Two years ago, Sir Salman Rushdie, one of the most celebrated and famous authors in the world was on stage at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York, when a figure dressed in black clothes and a mask rushed onto stage and stabbed him numerous times. He nearly died.  Today, I’m so honoured that this extraordinary man joins me to talk about what this experience taught him - and how the forces of love ultimately triumphed over the forces of hatred. We talk about his new book, Knife: Meditations on an Attempted Murder, as well as his early failures at boarding school where he was bullied for being a foreigner who was too clever and bad at games. Plus his failure to be an actor and his early writing rejections. There is some amazing advice in here for anyone involved in the act of creativity about leaning into the messy imperfections and getting to understand who you really are in the process. And…what Margaret Thatcher was *really* like. As always, I’d LOVE to hear about your failures. Every week, my guest and I choose a selection to read out and answer on our special subscription offering, Failing with Friends. We’ll endeavour to give you advice, wisdom, some laughs and much, much more.  Knife by Salman Rushdie is available to buy now.  Have something to share of your own? I'd love to hear from you! Click here to get in touch: howtofailpod.com Production & Post Production Manager: Lily Hambly   Studio and Mix Engineer: Gulliver Tickell and Josh Gibbs Senior Producer: Selina Ream Executive Producer: Carly Maile How to Fail is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment Production.   Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts To bring your brand to life in this podcast, email [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamx. Benefits vary by card, other conditions apply. Hello and welcome to How to Fail with me, author and broadcaster Elizabeth Day. This is the podcast where we flip the traditional interview format on its head, celebrating failure rather than success. Because what we learn from the former is often far more important than anything that comes from the latter. It's how we respond to failure that defines our character and helps us grow. Every episode, I ask a very

special guest to discuss three failures and how they emerged on the other side to be the person we see today. Before we begin, I just wanted to remind you about my subscriber series, Failing With Friends. Today, Sir Salman Rushdie and I look at your questions and give our advice. We covered dating emotionally avoidant guys. We covered the messiness of glorious imperfection in art and what to do if you're stuck in a creative rut. There are some great pieces of practical advice from him in there. The eminent writer Sir Salman Rushdie once described his books as an attempt to come to terms with the various component parts of myself. His identity is indeed multifaceted.

Born in Bombay, as it was then, into a secular Muslim family, his first language was Urdu. He went to boarding school in rugby aged 13, then to Cambridge to read history, and his later work, with all its textual pyrotechnics and verbal exuberance, is written in English. He is an American citizen and a knight of the British realm, a song lyricist and a former advertising copywriter. advertising copywriter. He won the Booker Prize for his 1981 allegorical post-colonial epic Midnight's Children, published when he was just 34. His fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, led to the Iranian Ayatollah issuing a fatwa against him, a death sentence that forced Rushdie into hiding under police protection for almost a decade. His courageous defence of free speech

and the values of enlightened, tolerant secularism have defined much of his life and have ensured a position in the pantheon of literary greats. He has been translated into over 40 languages, written 16 works of fiction, five works of non-fiction, as well as short story and essay collections. His reputation is such that it transcends the literary world. This is a man famous enough to have had a cameo in the first Bridget Jones movie and curb your enthusiasm. The dangers of the fatwa appeared to be in the past, but in August 2022, Rushdie was viciously attacked while delivering a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in New York State. He was stabbed multiple times in the neck, the abdomen, the cheek.

The assault lasted 27 seconds and almost cost him his life. Against all expectations, Rushdie survived, although he had to undergo extensive and painful rehabilitation and lost one eye. It is an experience movingly recounted in his latest book, Knife, in which he reflects, we would not be who we are today without the calamities of our yesterdays. So Salman Rushdie, welcome to How to Fail. Hello. Yeah, very nice to be here. I'm honoured that you are here sitting opposite me. Thank you so much.

Great pleasure. You subtitle your book Knife, Meditations After an Attempted Murder, You subtitle your book, Knife, Meditations After an Attempted Murder, and you have described this book as an account of the forces of love triumphing over the forces of hatred. Tell me about the love. Well, it's various kinds of love. I mean, the most important part is my wife, Eliza, the writer, Rachel Eliza Griffith. A wonderful poet, very fine novelist. Too many talents, really. Videographer, you forgot. Videographer, photographer.

Anyway, but she and I had been together for, I guess, close to five and a half years before the attack. And, you know, we've been very happy. So, I mean, she wrote this very nice piece about what happened in the, which was in The Guardian recently. And she said that it was as if we were in, we were already in a story. We were in a love story. And then this attack tried to turn that into a murder story.

And what we've had to do in the, whatever it is, 20, 21 months since the attack is to try and reconstruct the love story. And I mean, the person who's done most of that reconstructing is her, not me, because she just took over. And when I was at my really lowest ebb, you know, physically, but also psychologically and emotionally, she just took charge of everything. Everything had to go through her. If the FBI came in the room, they had to be interviewed by her before they could do anything else. She dealt with the doctors. She dealt with everything.

And she took care of me, you know. And I think, in a way way the hardest thing that she did was not to show me her own trauma you know so when she was in the room with me she was like strong and loving and caring and attentive and every so often she would go out of the room to scream but i she never showed me that part you know and anyway so we we've managed to do it, I think. We managed to rebuild the love story. So it feels like there's a love story with a murder story in the middle.

And then, you know, my children, my sons both came to be with me and my sister. And that was all very important. And then beyond that, there was this kind of outpouring of affection from all over the place, all over the world, you know, people, total strangers. And actually, when you're lying in a trauma ward of a hospital, very, very close to not staying alive, and you feel that, you know, it actually does give you the strength to fight back. I always have been very grateful for that. It was kind of this kind of tidal wave of solidarity, which was very nice to be on the receiving end of. Why did you call it knife? Well, I mean, just two reasons.

One is the obvious reason, which is that it starts with a knife attack. My head works in a very pre-associative way. So I started thinking about knives that I knew about in art and film and books and so on. And then I thought language itself is a kind of tool which I can use to fight back, if you like. So I began to think of language and this book as being kind of my knife, not in order to injure anybody, but in order to, as it were, cut things open and understand and explain them. You make the decision not to name the assailant, the would-be assassin, you call him the A. And you also made the decision to write knife in the first person. Your previous memoir, Joseph Anton, was written in the third.

Can I ask why you made those decisions? Well, not naming him was, I just didn't want his name in my book. Yes, fair enough. Yes. And I actually remembered this thing that Margaret Thatcher used to say about the IRA. She said, don't give them the oxygen of publicity. And I thought, okay, you know, let's not give this guy the oxygen of publicity. It is one of the few moments in my life when I've been inspired by Margaret Thatcher.

There's more than one. Well, you know, actually, back in the bad old days when there was this major police protection here, I mean, I met her a couple of times when she was prime minister. And the most unexpected thing about Margaret Thatcher is that she's very touchy-feely. With men, I hear. Yeah, she puts her hands on your arm and shoulders and how are you, dear, etc. It's very kind of, in a way, auntie-like, but very unexpected and quite disarming. And the third person, well, you know, when I wrote that earlier book, Joseph Anton, it was quite a long time after the events that were described in the book.

It was several years later. after the events that were described in the book. It was several years later. And what I thought is that the me who was writing that book was sort of slightly different than the me who was being written about. I mean, I was in a better place. I was in a better spirit. Life had improved. And the person being written about was in a very difficult situation

and under a lot of stress and so on. So I thought there's a little distance between the two me's. And the third person, in a way, dramatized that difference. This time, there's no distance at all. But the thing about that is if somebody attacks you with a knife, I thought there's no way this can be written except in the first person. Because also it's a very kind of very unguarded and kind of undefended book. And I think it doesn't require the distance of the third person. We chatted a bit before we started recording about whether talking about this re-traumatizes you and you've been kind enough and generous

enough to say that you're okay with it. Yeah. That's got a little switch in my head has flipped so that instead of me talking about the attack, I'm talking about the book about the attack. Yes. So I'm talking about a book. And that, I think, is a way of defending myself from the risk of re-traumatizing. Let's talk about the book then and that opening account of what happened to you. Would you mind telling us your memory of seeing the assailant? Yeah, the Chautauqua Institution is this very pretty, beautiful, peaceful place in upstate New York. It's kind

of sylvan and peaceful and full of silver-haired liberal retirees. Nobody locks their door. It's the last place on earth where you'd expect an act of violence to occur. There's this amphitheater space, which is actually quite large. I mean, it seats like 4,000 people, but on this occasion, there are probably 1,500 people in the audience. And we had just come out on stage to have a conversation about my friend Henry Reese, who runs an organization in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which gives refuge to writers from various parts of the world who need refuge. So they were celebrating the 20th anniversary of his project.

And so I was there for him. I wasn't there to talk about me. I was there to talk about him. And we'd just come out and been introduced and sat down in our chairs. And I saw this person get up from the auditorium, not very far back, six or seven rows back, wearing dark clothes and wearing a face mask, a black COVID face mask. And he started running. I was on the right-hand side of the stage, and to my right there was a small flight of four steps down from the stage level to the audience level.

And he just sprinted up the steps and rushed at me. I had a pretty good idea of what it was. You recount in the book that idea of, oh, it's you, that sort of familiarity of, oh, this has come at last. Yeah, because I had, I mean, back in the early days, after the initial threats, obviously, I had thought about it. You know, I thought about the possibility of an attack like that happening. And then I'd stop thinking about it. Because, you know, I moved to New York City just after the millennium, I mean, like January 2000.

And I'd been living there at that moment for more than 23 years. And I'd been leading the ordinary life of a writer. I'd been doing things that writers do. I'd been going on book tour, I'd been doing the ordinary life of a writer. I'd been doing things that writers do. I'd been going on book tour. I'd been doing readings and going to literary festivals and giving lectures and writing books. There had never been a moment of trouble. And so I thought, you know, okay, that's over.

And then it wasn't. You recount this thought process and you also write that the thought of death you were quite matter-of-fact about, but you didn't feel pain, or at least you can't remember feeling the pain. Yeah, it's very strange that. I mean, as part of the work of writing the book, I had to read about other people's witness,

evidence of what they saw and heard. And quite a lot of the people who were interviewed said that they'd heard me screaming with pain. Oddly, I have no memory of pain. It's, I guess, some kind of shock reaction. So I remember being on the ground and seeing a lot of blood and seeing people rushing to help. What I don't remember is pain.

So there's this curious disconnect between outside me and inside me. So I tried to write about that. You do, however, remember, as part of your extensive rehabilitation process, your eyelid being sewn up and that being excruciating. Oh, yeah. They said if we stitch the eyelid shut,

then the eye will be able to moisturise itself and will allow it to heal. And I said, that sounds really painful. They said, no, no, there'll be a very powerful local anesthetic. All I can say is either they lied or if that's how much it hurt with the anesthetic, I can only imagine how much it would have hurt without the anaesthetic, because it was agonising. Picture to yourself a needle going through your eyelid. Actually, one of my worst fears.

I mean, I salute you for getting through it, and thank goodness you did, and thank goodness you're here. I wonder how your relationship with your body has changed through this process. Well, I mean, really, that's a great question because, you know, if you're a novelist, you don't really pay a lot of attention to your body. And this was such an intensely physical experience that it connected me in a way to my physicality. It showed me the kind of miracle of this thing we live in and its ability to heal. I mean, for example, my liver was badly damaged, but the liver regenerates. So boom, it's just back. I also lost an enormous amount of weight.

You look extremely well, I have to say. In the years before the attack, I'd put on a lot of, much too much weight. This thing happens and I lost 55 pounds. I mean, not a diet technique to be recommended. Is that your next book? It's the Rushdie Diet? Exactly. It's like Jane Fonda's workout book. Yes. One of the many, many extraordinary things about this is you are someone whose secularism is a core value of your life. You have staked your own life on it. The fact that you don't believe in a god of any sort is a key part of you.

And yet there are so many quirks of serendipity, preitions prophecies that you have around this two nights before you dream about being in a gladiatorial amphitheater you take a photograph of the moon and you're reminded of a film in which the moon has something through its eye all of this stuff 15th of august is the day that you realize you're going to live and that is the day on which your protagonist is born in midnight's children the day of Indian independence, all of this stuff. What do you make of it now? Well, what I think is that the world is weird. The world is not realistic.

Realism is the fiction. Actually, the world we live in is surreal. And it's full of these things that you say, full of incredible coincidence and chance parallels. And that's why my books are like that, you know, because I think that's real life. I mean, it's true that my books exaggerate it so that there's people who levitate and live for 247 years and turn into monsters at night and rip people's heads off and so on. But it's not only a metaphor. I think what's happened is that the world has stopped being realistic. It's become so weird that everything is possible. When did it stop being realistic?

Well, it's got worse and worse, you know, but I think in the last couple of decades, it's certainly become a pretty surreal environment. If you live in the United States, you have to face the surrealism of the person, the other person whose name I don't like using, who seriously suggested in a moment of bad weather that the way to deal with hurricanes was to detonate a nuclear weapon inside them. He wasn't kidding. a nuclear weapon inside them. He wasn't kidding. If that's somebody who can be president of the United States, that's what I mean, that the world has ceased to be realistic. So the surreality of it, do you believe that's simply chaos?

One of the things my close friend, Paul Auster, we just lost him. So sorry. But one of the things he was very seriously concerned with was the operation in human life of chance. We all think that our lives are planned and they go according to a certain strategy, etc. But the random, the absolutely out of left field chance event is as important in human life as planning.

And a lot of Paul's books were about that, about the intervention of chance into human life. And that's what I think what happened to me is a series of lucky accidents. Well, first of all, a very unlucky thing. But then, for example, the weather was good that day. If it had been a rainy day, the helicopter couldn't have flown. And if the rescue helicopter couldn't have flown, I would be dead. So one of the reasons I survived was because it was a sunny day. There's a whole chain of events like that, which collectively are the result, which is why I'm sitting here. My final question before we get on to your failures. why I'm sitting here. My final question before we get onto your failures, you mentioned Paul Auster there, and I'm very aware that many of your great friends have died. Martin Amis,

who I also had the honour of interviewing, Christopher Hitchens, many people who, as you put it so beautifully in an interview I heard with you, they've left great holes in the world. Yeah. And I think, you know, I'm about to be 77. This happens. You know, it's not going to be less of it as I go forward. People are going to start leaving. And it's terrible because you also lose versions of yourself. You know, you lose the way in which your friends see you.

And, yeah, it's very sad. You know, Martin and Paul were two of the closest people you know and family

they were like family you know and yeah that's not good but what to do as I say there's not going to be I was talking to

Ian McEwan on the phone the other day and I said there's not going to be less of this is there and he said no but he and I we agreed that we not going to be less of this, is there? And he said, no. But he and I, we agreed that we would live forever.

Oh, thank goodness. That is relief for the rest of us. There we are, yeah. There's an old interview with Woody Allen that I once saw in which a very psychophantic journalist was saying to him how he must be proud that he would always live on through his art, through his movies. And he said, no, I would prefer to live on in my apartment. But is it scary being Salman Rushdie? No, it's just scary getting old. And also, you know, I got a really good look at death. You know, when you've seen the trailer, you really don't want to see the movie. Right. It hasn't given you a sense of peace.

No, I just, what it does is it leaves a little shadow. As I say, I had a good look at it, so I know what's coming. And I'm just trying to make sure it doesn't show up for really quite a long time. My wife, Eliza, and I decided that we're going to start planning my 100th birthday party that's a great idea and we thought dance party yes of course that's not even a question so we're looking for an appropriate DJ

are you a good dancer? compared to what? I think that means you are a good dancer what's your favourite piece of music to dance to? please say Jump Around House of Pain or something well if you like but I think probably the you are a good dancer. What's your favourite piece of music to dance to? Please say Jump Around, House of Pain or something. Well, if you like, but I think probably the truthful answer is Motown. Okay, okay. Because it's actually good music to dance to.

Yes. Oh, gosh, I can't wait for your 100th birthday. You're invited. Thank you so much. I'll hold you to that. It's recorded now. Yeah. Peyton, it's recorded now Peyton it's happening we're finally being recognized for being very online it's about damn time I mean it's hard work being this opinionated and correct you're such a Leo all the time so if you're looking for a home for your worst opinion if you're a hater first and a lover of pop culture second then join me

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or on Apple Podcasts. Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest? This is a time of great foreboding. These words supposedly uttered by a king over 800 years ago. These words supposedly uttered by a king over 800 years ago. These words, supposedly uttered by a king over 800 years ago, set in motion a chain of gruesome events and sparked cult-like devotion across the world. I'm Matt Lewis.

Join us as we unwrap the enigma and get to the heart of what really happened to Thomas Beckett by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. I couldn't help but notice that all three of these failures date from when you were before, before you were 34, which is the date that your professional life changed markedly for the better. Yeah. What was your relationship with the idea? I think what happened is that I had a very slow start as a writer. Slow? Yeah.

You were 34. Yeah, I know. But a lot of my generation had got off to a flying start. People like Martin and Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes and so on, boom. Just out of college, they already had their first successes and they kind of knew who they were as writers. And I mean, I left, you know i graduated in in 1968 and midnight children came out in 1981 you know so that's 13 years of struggle and to be an overnight success yes you know so but after that i thought you know it would be unfair to complain okay well we're going to come back to those early writing failures,

but your first failure is your sporting failure throughout your school days. You know, if you grew up in India, the sports you're expected to be good at are certainly cricket and certainly hockey. Because in those days, India and Pakistan were kind of used to take it in turns to be Olympic champions at hockey, or what the Americans call field hockey. And then there were other sports, badminton. And I was lousy at everything, which my schoolmates very rapidly discovered. There was a moment when I first came to England, when I was first at rugby, where they thought, oh, Indian hockey. And they put me in some quite advanced team.

And I was just ridiculously bad and it was kind of humiliating and then because I was in rugby school I had to learn to play rugby football in January in Warwickshire frozen fields learning how to rugby tackle you know and getting very badly beaten up in the process and then there was kind extra awful thing, which is there would be all these playing fields and some of them would be quite far away from the boarding house. By the time you got back to the boarding house, there was no hot water left in the baths. So you either had to have a cold water bath

or you had to get into somebody else's used water. Just dreadful, dreadful. I rapidly understood that sports were probably not for me. What was it like for you, this child of India, who had been raised in this culture of vibrant storytelling and sunshine, to turn up in rugby, age 13? In January. In January. Yes.

It sounds utterly grim. It was, you know, and it was my fault because my parents didn't force me to come. My mother didn't want me to come at all. And my father said, you know, there's this school that they say if you pass the exam, they'll have you and are you interested? I said yes. And looking back at that 13-year-old self, I mean, I was very happy growing up in India. My memory of my childhood is that it was a happy childhood. I had lots of friends. I liked my school and did quite well. I won prizes. Why that kid had this desire to cross the world?

It shows me that there was some strange little spirit of adventure there, that I look back at that and I think think where'd that go but yeah it was awful arriving and I quite rapidly discovered that there were three crimes you could commit at an English boarding school one was to be foreign the second one was to be clever and the third and biggest one was to be bad at games oh so I'm on and I was So, yeah, boarding school wasn't great for me. And then Cambridge was much better. That's what happened. You say that your childhood was a happy one.

You do give us a glimpse as readers into the fact that your father was an alcoholic and knife and also earlier in Joseph Anton. And your mother had a phrase, didn't she, when you spoke to her about years later about not having a memory? Yeah, she said she had a forgettery. I thought that was so brilliant. It was her way of dealing with the difficulty of her life was that she would start every day as a fresh day. And even if the previous night had been quite difficult, because my father had this relationship with Johnny Walker Red Label. this relationship with Johnny Walker Red Label. And he would drink, you know, he'd sometimes drink a bottle a night, which in the tropics is a lot.

I mean, it's a lot anywhere. But in heat, it sort of magnifies the effect. But she shielded us from it quite well when we were little children. I mean, as we grew up, obviously, we knew what was going on. And my father was a very good father of little children. He was great fun and loving and attentive, et cetera, when we were little. As we grew up and started having minds of our own, he was less successful as a parent. And the problems became more evident.

But, yeah, certainly the first, like first 10, 11 years of my life, I remember being pretty nice. And I understand that at rugby, it's the first time you experimented with fiction because the letters that you wrote at home... Yeah, were fiction. Yeah, I would pretend to be good at games. Who were you protecting?

My parents. They'd sent me across the world and they were sad about it and it was costing a lot of money. And I couldn't write back and say, you know, I'm miserable and having an awful time and I'm bad at cricket. So I would write back and say, you know, all these things are good and I got top marks in the Latin test and I scored 27 not out and took three slip catches.

All nonsense. And then a long, long time later, my mother showed me that she'd preserved the letters. And I looked at that, but there wasn't a word of truth in any of them. And then when I left school, I told them that I'd had really quite a difficult time. And they were really upset, but they were also a little bit angry. They said, why didn't you tell us? You know, if you'd told us, we would have taken you out. You know, you didn't have to be there. But it never occurred to me that that was a possibility.

So you go to Cambridge, you read history, and it's much, much better. You even meet E.M. Forster, which I'm extremely excited about. This was kind of such a complete piece of luck. He was in residence at King's and I was at King's. One year, kind of, we had rooms on the same staircase. I mean, let's say a staircase at King's, the kind of piano nobile, you know, was very grand rooms. And then when you went higher up, it was more kind of student rooms. But you went up the same flight of stairs. I ran into him, on the ground floor of a staircase was the students' common room, a little bar place. And he would sometimes come and sit there with a half of shandy

and was very approachable. But people were scared because, you know, E.M. Forster. But because I was of Indian origin and India was so important to him, we had a few chats, you know. I once was in his rooms and they were full of Indian memorabilia. There was a day when I played croquet with E enforcer in King's Fellows Garden, which is unforgettable. Had you read A Passage to India by that stage? Yes, I had. Yeah, I had.

And I was very impressed by it. And then I was super impressed to meet him. What I hadn't read was his nonfiction book about India, The Hill of Devi, which he wrote about his time in India. I didn't know, therefore, that the two people he had been most deeply in love with were both Indian men, one of whom he met before he went to India and who actually is the dedicatee of passage to India, but was straight. So it was a friendship rather than anything more. But then he went to India and met somebody else who he had a long relationship with. And so his two deepest loves were from India. And so that as well as the fact that he'd had

such important years there and that he'd written this great book. He was very engaged with India even after all those years, you know, and very generous towards me when I very shyly confessed that maybe I would try and write something. He said, yes, you must. He was very nice about it. Thank you for telling me that. He's one of my favourites. I know he's not quite up there as one of your favourites.

No, no, I mean, I think Passage to India is a great book. I'm not in love with some of the others. Yes, that's fine. But you do love, as you described them, those great Indian novelists, Charles Dickens and Jane Austen. Yeah, yeah. I mean, well, Charles Dickens, you know, that Dickensian city, London as described by Dickens, it's quite like Bombay kind of now. And Jane Austen's women, these kind of brilliant women circumscribed by the social convention of their time and forced into husband hunting.

There's lots of those. Yes. Lots of those in India. And so I thought, yeah, these are great Indian writers. They've helped me understand the world I was from. I have to say, you write female characters so well. And it's not something that you can always say about your male contemporaries you know I'm thinking of shame or the the ground beneath her feet and do you think that comes from

having three sisters yes partly from having three sisters and partly from the fact that in the extended family there were a lot more aunts than uncles there were a lot more female cousins than male cousins. And so I grew up, I thought, in quite a female world. I think it did help me write about women much later on because I didn't see them as weird, strange creatures that you were incomprehensible and to be worshipped or hated. I didn't think about it, but I thought about them as people. Yeah, and you don't sexualize them first. No.

You think of their character first. Yeah. You know, one of the things that I was taught by this great historian, Arthur Hibbert, who was one of my tutors, he said about writing history, he said, you should never write history until you can hear the people speak. He said, because if you can't hear them speak, you don't know them well enough and you can't tell their story. Goodness. Well, that's so informed your work. Yeah, yeah. I thought that's great advice for novelists.

Before I think about sex or anything, I think about how do they talk? Do they have a big vocabulary or do they have a limited vocabulary? Do they use bad language? Are they voluble or are they taciturn? You know, all these questions you ask about how people speak, what's their accent? You know, by the time you've answered all those questions, you know the person pretty well.

And it all arises out of that one question, how do they speak? What an extraordinary piece of advice. Your second failure is before you became a novelist, you dreamt of being an actor. Yeah, yeah, that was the real dream. When I was at Cambridge, I spent almost all my time involved with student theatre. I mean, so much so that I had a, you know, a minor scholarship, what they call an exhibition at Cambridge. And after two years, I was called in, I was summoned up to the powers that be, and told that unless I focused more on my studies,

they were going to cancel my scholarship. And I thought, okay, cancel the scholarship. I mean, it was like 40 pounds a year. It was just a token thing. And after I left Cambridge, in that moment, the late 60s, early 70s, there was this very, very highly creative and active fringe theater scene in London, in places like the Oval House in Kennington, where a lot of, first of all, a lot of writers who became the great writers of the generation were kind of

cutting their teeth. So you had people like David Hare and Howard Brenton and Trevor Griffiths. And so I got involved with fringe theater. I actually played at least one role in drag. A friend of mine had written a play in which there was an agony aunt. And the joke was that most agony aunts are men, you know, pretending to be women. He cast me as the agony aunt and I had to wear a long black dress and a blonde wig. And I had a moustache. Did you enjoy drag? I was so embarrassed. I wasn't very good at it.

Mercifully, no photographs survive. But anyway, one of the things that I learned, I learned that I wasn't good enough because I was around some very, very good actors. And one of the things that you can see when you're around really, really good actors is you notice your own lack of talent. And I thought, OK, maybe this is not the way to go. Then I thought, OK, do the other thing you thought about. Is that when you got into copywriting? Yeah. Yes. About the same time, yes. Because you were a phenomenally gifted copywriter.

You came up with Irresistible Bubble for Aero. I did, yeah, and Naughty But Nice. For Cream Cakes. For Cream Cakes, yeah. And I remember pitching that idea to the Cream Cakes client. And he said, no, but you're telling people that Cream Cakes make them fat. I said, well, actually, they know that. You should focus on the butt nice.

I mentioned in the introduction that you had that cameo in Bridget Jones and that you did this fantastic Curb Your Enthusiasm, which, I mean, I imagine most of it was improvised. All of it. You were so good. Thank you. It was so funny. It was very scary because, of course,

the people on the show are masters of improv. And I didn't want to be the only person who wasn't any good. But I guess I got away with it, you know. But what happened was, I mean, I didn't really know Larry David. I mean, I very casually met him, shake hands, say hello. But that was it. But then he, out of the blue, or his agents called my agents and said he'd like to talk to me. So we spoke on the phone and he said he had this idea.

And did I want to do it? And I said, well, can I see a script? And he said, well, that's difficult because there's no script. So then we just discussed it on the phone. And then I thought, you know, if we've reached the point at which we can make fun of, because this was all about Larry David wanting to, getting a fatwa against him. Yes. And wanting my advice. I said, if we can have fun with it, then actually that's a kind of victory.

And so I said, okay, I'll do it. And I was only there for two days, but it was very, very enjoyable. It's what they call guided improv. So they would say, here's the setup. You're in this scene and this is what's happening. And during the course of the scene, you've got to reach this point. But how you get there is up to you. And that was scary. And then the most frightening thing is that when you do it and they say, yeah, that was great. That was great. We've got that. I'd do it differently. Do it differently? I mean,

I just was really hard to do it at all. What they do is they overshoot a lot. And I think that's because if you're no good, they can cut you out. But they didn't cut me out. You were very good. Thank you. You say that your failure as an actor taught you about the limit of your talent in that particular area. Do you think it taught you anything about storytelling? Yeah, because I think acting is inhabiting somebody who's not you. You know, a lot of actors will say that they feel like the representative of the character, like have to

act on behalf of the character. And I think writing a book is a bit like that. You have to be able to enter a way of thinking and a way of being that is not yours. And you have to make that convincing. You have to sell the character on the page as opposed to on the stage. So yeah, I think that did help. Would you describe that as empathy or is it something more muscular? It is empathy, sure. But it's not only empathy. It's actually losing yourself and finding, as we were saying, another voice, another behavior pattern, another way of thinking. Otherwise, if all you can do is write versions of yourself, not very interesting, is it? It's not very interesting for anyone to read either.

You say that imagination is one of your skills. It's in your skill set. And then you imagine a conversation with the A in Knife. I'm also imagining that you haven't gone to the extent of feeling empathy with the A. I'm not on his side. I mean, unlike what we were saying about fictional characters, that you kind of have to be on their side when you're writing them. I didn't think that. But I did think that there was a hole in his story that I wanted to try and fill, which is that I remember saying to my editor in New York, if I wrote a character like this, you would tell me it's under-motivated. Yes.

Here's a 24-year-old kid with no criminal record, not on any terrorism watch list, not kind of hanging out with weird people. Just a 24-year-old kid in his mother's basement in New Jersey who knows nothing about me, doesn't take the trouble to find out anything about me, knows nothing about me, doesn't take the trouble to find out anything about me, but decides to go from that zero position of no crime to murder, that's a very big jump. What we know about him, which is not very much so far, kind of doesn't explain it. I mean, yes, to an extent you could say, yes, he went to Lebanon and got radicalized and he watched radical priests on YouTube and doesn't quite add up to a credible character. And I thought, let me just see if I can ventriloquize him, you know, get inside his head. I also quite liked the idea of making him a character of mine.

Yes. It was a kind of way of getting my revenge. Hi, I'm Matt Lewis, historian and host of a new chapter of Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hit. Join me and world-leading experts every week as we explore the incredible real-life history that inspires the locations, the characters, and the storylines of Assassin's Creed. Listen and follow Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. It's Kathy Burke here. Can I ask you something? How do you want to die? Is that a bit forward?

Well, you clearly haven't been listening to our podcast Where There's a Will, There's a Wake. Every week I have a natter to some of our favourite people about their fantasy funeral. And my god, we've had some fabulous guests through my deathly doors, including

Danny Dyer, Dawn French, and Sir Steve McQueen from Sony Music Entertainment. Where there's a will, there's a wake. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Your final failure are your early writing failures. Which is a lot, by the way. Tell us about them. There's three unpublished novels for a start.

Do you still have them somewhere? I gave my archive to Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. They've done an amazing job of, because the papers were just, they were just in cardboard boxes any old way and it took them like two and a half years to sort them out. But they're now very neatly catalogued and et cetera

and they're in Atlanta, Georgia and that's where those manuscripts are. And they're in Atlanta, Georgia. And that's where those manuscripts are. But they were really awful. Well, there are two reasons why they're awful. One was that they were derivative. There was one manuscript, just kind of like 300 page novel called The Antagonist,

which in retrospect was so over-influenced by Thomas Pynchon that it was kind of embarrassing. That was one thing, being derivative. And the other thing was, I think, not really knowing myself well enough. After having spent, you know, four and a half years at rugby and three years at Cambridge and so on, almost eight years away from home, and then deciding that I wanted to try and stay in England and be a writer, is that there was a moment when I was kind of lost. I think I didn't know where I fitted in or how I was going to go forward in life, etc.

And I think the books read like that. How interesting. They read like they're written by somebody who doesn't know who he is. You do publish your first novel, Grimace. Yeah, and that's also, I think that has the problem too. I mean, what happened there was the publishing company, Victor Golang's, together with, I can't even remember which newspaper,

one of the, like the Times, or I think it might've been the Times, had a competition for a new science fiction novel. And that's why I wrote that for. And I entered it in the competition and the editor at Golang's, Liz Calder, read it. And she thought, well, it's not exactly the kind of thing we're looking for in the competition, but she wanted to publish it anyway. So that's how I got published, by not winning the competition. other unsuccessful books that never even made it that far. It was very, very deflating to have a book come out and be so dismissed. And it stopped me. It stopped me in my tracks. I thought, what am I supposed to do now? And then, in a way, I learned everything from that failure.

Because what I learned from that was, find out who you are. And what I understood was that I was somehow losing touch with my origins. And so I thought, well, I better do something about that. You know, the advance I got for Grimus was, I can't remember, like 800 pounds. In 1974, you could put a zero on that maybe, you know. So I took this small amount of money and I went to India with no plan except to stay as long as I could, travel as widely as I could, as cheaply as I could, and reconnect. And I went all over the place. I went to places that I knew and loved, like Bombay. And I went to some places that I didn't know, but I wanted to find out about, like Benares. And I came back with the germ of Midnight Children. Then I got myself another job in advertising. But in in those days you could do, I think you can't do it anymore,

but you could get part-time jobs, you know, where you worked like two or three days a week. And so I would have sometimes four, sometimes five days a week to be at home to write. And that's how I wrote it. And that feeling of reconnecting is what made me a writer, I think. Wow. Thank you for explaining that so beautifully. You sent the manuscript for Midnight's Children to Liz Calder.

Yes, who had moved. She was no longer at Golanx, she was at Jonathan Cape. And she commissioned a reader's report. Yeah. What happened? Well, I only found out about this after Midnight's Children won the Booker. Like the day after the Booker Prize, there was a little piece in the newspaper saying how the book had had this terrible reader's report. And I thought, this is just newspaper nonsense. So I called, Liz called her and I said, what is this garbage in the newspaper? And she went, well, actually, not completely garbage.

And it turned out that there had been this very short report which said something like, the novel is a fat ramble through the author's mind and the author shows signs of talent but should concentrate on short stories till he has mastered the novel form. That's it for this huge novel. I thought, who wrote that? And Liz was very, very discreet. She wouldn't tell me who wrote it. She wouldn't tell me if it was a man or a woman. She wouldn't tell me if it was somebody I knew. What happened in the end is that the author incriminated herself. It was somebody I knew. Anyway, she wrote to me and said, my fault,

I'm an idiot. I just didn't, I couldn't see it. And I'm very sorry. And I said, well, as it happens, no harm done. Because what happened is that Liz commissioned a second reader's report from Susanna Clapp, who's now, you know, eminent in her own way. And Susanna really liked it. And then what happened is that Tom Mashler, who was running the boss at Cape at the time, asked Liz what she was, what was on her desk. And she said, well, there's this novel and one person doesn't like it and one negative reader's report and one positive one.

And Tom said, give me a piece of it. And so she gave him, I can't, I don't know, 100, 150 pages of it. And he took them away overnight. He came back the next morning and he put them on her desk and he said, if you haven't bought that in one hour, you're fired. And you were off. And that's after 13 years of struggle.

You know, I remember talking to the great German novelist, Günter Grass, who was talking about writing about World War II from the perspective of the losing side. And he said, you know, it's always been my view that you learn more from failure than from success. It's almost as if I've primed you to say exactly the right thing. That's exactly it. And you had to learn who you were.

I know that we're coming to the end of our time and I'm so sad about it because there's so much I want to talk to you about. I suppose it would be remiss of me not to ask about the satic verses. I'm sure that you feel rather intolerant of multiple questions about it because your work is not defined exclusively by what happened after that book. No, but the book itself, I think it pretty much stands the test of time.

Two things happen when people read the book now. One is that people say to me, kind of, where's the problematic bit? Because I can't find it. And I say, well, it's because it's kind of not there. And the other thing they say is, who knew that it was funny? And I say, well, people who read it knew that it was funny. And I think somehow because the thing that happened to it was not funny, people assumed that the book itself must be like the thing that attacked it.

Yes. And couldn't possibly be enjoyable or amusing. And, you know, it used to be the case before the attack on the satanic verses that whenever people wrote about my work, they talked about the humor in it, always. After the fatwa, nobody ever talked about me as having any sense of humor, but I was still the same person. And that was in a way the most frustrating thing, that in the public mind, I got turned into a kind of writer that's not the kind of writer that I am. First of all, I'm not actually that interested in writing about religion all the time. And actually, the Satanic Verses isn't about religion mostly. It's mostly a novel about London. And I thought of it as my London

novel. I mean, I'd just written Midnight's Children, which is primarily about India, and Shame, which is primarily about Pakistan. And I thought, let me write a novel about where I came to rather than where I came from. And I thought of it as the third in that set of books, the two books about my places of origin and the third book about the place that I landed up. And nobody thinks about it as a London novel, but that's what it is. I'm sure you don't regret the book itself and how you wrote it. Do you regret anything around it? Yeah, I'd rather have had a different life. There have been plenty of things about the last, I mean, 1988 is a long time ago. And a lot of that time was made much more difficult by the

consequences of the attack on the satanic purses. And then I managed to get my life back, mostly in America, but more than two decades, I was leading a perfectly okay life. And then this attack, in a funny way, sort of dragged me back into the past. So, you know, here I am with security again. Three years ago, if I'd been interviewed by you, there would have not been security here. So I don't know how long that's going to go on. And I hope that it doesn't take people's attention entirely away from all these other books that I've written. So my recommendation would be, yes, please read and buy this book. But then maybe read a novel.

Yes. Because some of them are okay. Read Midnight's Children. It's so funny. Again, I've never heard you express that before, the fact that all of this stole the sense of your humour. I wanted to end on a quote from someone else, V.S. Pritchett, who when he reviewed Midnight's Children wrote, The book is really about the mystery of being born and the puzzle of who one is. Salman, have you solved the puzzle of who you are? I think by now, yeah, I think I'm pretty clear. I think one of the things that happens to a writer

during the course of what is now quite a long writing life, I mean, since I sold my first novel, it's 50 years, so half a century. But I think more or less when I wrote Midnight's Children and the books, one or two books that came after that, you begin to have a fairly clear idea of the sort of road you're on. You think, I'm going this way. And then you try and go that way. And one of the things I had to work hardest at after the attack on the satanic verses was to stay on that road, not to be deflected into something else,

which would have been, again, not really me, and would have been a way of falling off that direction that I'd discovered for myself. I think I've managed to stay on the road. And who am I? I'm the author of my books. There's a moment in Midnight's Children when Salim asks himself the question of who he is. And he says, I can't quote verbatim, but he says that he is the sum total of everything that he's done and everything that has happened to him. He is the product of what came before him, you know, his mother, parents and grandparents. And he is also the things that would happen after him, which would not have happened had he not been there. So the things that would happen after him, which would not have happened had he not been there. And that's what we are. You know, we're people in a river and we take things from behind us and we give things forward. And we're the thing in between.

I think, you know, as I say, you do this for long enough and you get a pretty clear sense of what that thing in between is. Long may that river flow. I will see you at your 100th birthday party Absolutely It has been an astounding privilege to meet you Thank you so so much Sir Salman Rushdie Thank you Even better, you've played an agony art in drag but now you're going to get to play one in real life

on Failing With Friends I learned that the level of bullshit in the film industry is higher than anywhere else in the world that I've experienced. Remember to follow us to get new episodes as they land, wherever you get your podcasts, or on Spotify, Amazon Music, or Apple Podcasts. And please do share a link with everyone you know. This is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment original podcast.

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