Books
Bono’s passenger, Paula’s guest
by Paula Morris
Salman Rushdie stands in the middle of my living room, sloshing back red wine and gossiping about Hugh Grant with a gaggle of over-excited students. He has just given the annual Distinguished Lecture at the University of Iowa (topic: freedom of speech, the function of the novel and the clash of the public and private spheres; fee: $US27,000), but now he seems happy reaching for the chips and signing scuffed copies of Mid-night’s Children. The Great Author is slight and pale in a rumpled black suit. When I slink over with a plate of chocolate brownies, he pounces. A Nigella Lawson recipe, I tell him. “I know her,” he says.
This is part of Rushdie’s charm – or his preoccupation with life’s superficialities, depending on your point of view: the author of one of the Great Books is also a name-dropping lounge lizard who walks the red carpet at movie premieres and hangs out at Yankees’ games with Don DeLillo. At a Q&A session the morning after the lecture, he’s equally at ease with pronouncing on the war in Iraq and describing the leopard-skin seat covers in Bono’s car. And unlike other luminaries who drop in to be Distinguished, Rushdie seems happy to talk for his money – public lectures, private talks, pre-dinner speeches for the rich people universities need to impress in order to get bigger donations. (Bill Clinton was whisked away by security after last year’s lecture; Kurt Vonnegut restricted his engagement with the masses to a brief lecture on Hamlet.)
Rushdie is in a good mood these days. Fifteen years after Iran put a price on his head and five years since it murmured something about letting the matter drop, he feels free to roam again. And to get married again, too – to Padma Lakshmi, a 31-year-old model, at a star-swamped wedding in New York City on April 17. (Guests included Steve Martin, Ismail Merchant, Jay McInerney and Lou Reed; Nigella Lawson attended his all-star bachelorette party in London.)
And with the war in Iraq raising issues of free speech, political protest and the ascent of radicalism, Rushdie is much in demand as a speaker. The 56-year-old president of American PEN isn’t just a famous writer: he’s an important one – a symbolic one, even, introduced at the Iowa lecture as “emblematic of the power of the word”.
Rushdie is a droll and self-deprecating speaker, accustomed to playing everything for laughs. Heard the one about the fatwa? “On that little difficulty between me and the Ayatollah Khomeini,” he says, after skipping onto the stage, waving and smiling. “I’d just like to mention that one of us is dead.”
Comedy, he says, “gets up people’s noses”, and whether Rushdie is joking, arguing or posing for the paparazzi, he effortlessly enrages. Some of his targets are easy – journalists, French literary critics, Monica Lewinsky, our “culture of profes-sional offendedness”. He never tries to be politically correct on any subject, small or large. Karachi is “a hell-hole … you stay at home and wish you were dead”. Modern Bombay (he’d hoped its new name, Mumbai, “wouldn’t catch on”) is “more or less hideous”. He wishes that more critics within the Muslim world were “willing to attack their own community”, that Hindu nationalists would stop claiming ownership of “authentic Indian experience”, and that Arundhati Roy “would stop pretending she’s never read Midnight’s Children”.
On the war on terror: “The removal of the Taliban is a net gain for humanity,” he says, arguing that al-Qaeda had hijacked a nation state. “However, it’s very hard to defend what’s happening in Iraq. The dislodging of Saddam Hussein is a good thing, but it’s being done dishonestly, and the aftermath is messy. There’s a colossal mess. I am against American unilateralism, but I’m also against the regime of Saddam Hussein.” Europeans opposing the former, Rushdie believes, played down the horror of the latter. “The bad guys actually exist … [al-Qaeda] wants to destroy the modern world and restore an imaginary state of grace that happened in Arabia in the sev-enth century, in the time of the Prophet. It’s the Talibanisation of the planet.”
The writer’s role in surreal times like these, Rushdie believes, is “giving voice” and in defending freedom of speech. The test of our commitment to this “begins when you’re confronted with something you don’t like”. For him, it was a Pakistani film in which evil “Salman Rushdie” wears tacky safari suits, glugs bottles of whisky, waves a cutlass and, eventually, gets fried to death by God. The British Film Board denied the movie certification, but Rushdie lobbied in its favour, “so I wouldn’t have to rely on censorship to pro-tect my own freedom of speech”. Humans “are story-telling animals”, he says, and attempts to censor or ban books – in Iran or the US – are battles over “who has power over the story”.
His answer is not governments, not mullahs, and certainly not literary critics. “There is no crisis in writing now,” he says. “But there are some very peculiar ways of reading.” Rumours of the death of the novel, he reassures us, are just plain wrong. “The author is not dead,” he says, smiling. “The author is very much alive.”
