← Intelligence Squared
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- [00:00]
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- [01:45]
Mia Sorrenti
To Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. On today's episode, author Salman Rushdie reflects on legacy, mortality and his return to fiction after the attempt on his life in 2022. Salman Rushdie is one of the world's most acclaimed award winning contemporary authors. Now drawing on his new short story collection, the Eleventh Hour, Rushdie sits down with broadcaster and journalist Kavita Puri to discuss the people and places that have shaped him and explores what it means to approach the 11th hour of life. Let's join our host Kavita Puri now with more.
- [02:24]
Kavita Puri
Welcome to Intelligence Squared. I'm Kavita Puri. Our guest today is Salman Rushdie. Salman is one of the world's most acclaimed award winning contemporary authors. He's written 22 books and has been translated into over 40 languages. His works of fiction include Midnight's Children, for which he won the Booker Prize in 1981, the Booker of bookers on the 25th anniversary of the prize, and Best of the Booker on the 40th anniversary. He's also written Shame, the Satanic Verses and Victory City. His latest book of nonfiction meditations, after an Attempted Murder, was a number one Sunday Times bestseller and Today I'm delighted to speak to Salman about his latest book, the Eleventh Hour, a dazzling collection of short stories that reckon with death and mortality. Welcome to Intelligence Squared, Salman.
- [03:19]
Salman Rushdie
Thank you. Nice to be here.
- [03:21]
Kavita Puri
So this is your first work since Knife. So you're back to the day job of fiction writing. How does that feel?
- [03:27]
Salman Rushdie
No, it feels great. You know, I got stuck in non fiction for a few years, but I've always thought of myself as primarily somebody who makes things up. And so it's very good to be able to start writing imaginative work again. I mean, some of these stories I'd kind of had in my head for a while and some of them just showed up.
- [03:51]
Kavita Puri
And why did you choose to write a collection of stories rather than a novel?
- [03:56]
Salman Rushdie
It's just what happened. I didn't choose. It chose me. The first one that I started to write was the ghost story that's in the middle of the book. And I didn't know if it was going to be a ghost story. I started writing it and kind of in the first sentence, the main character died. I thought, took me by surprise. I thought, what's happening here? Then I thought, oh, I see, it's gonna be that kind of story. And then I began to enjoy that.
- [04:23]
Kavita Puri
And did you know when you wrote that piece, which is called Late, did you know that that would be a short story or did you think it could be potentially a novel?
- [04:34]
Salman Rushdie
I didn't know. I just thought I'd see where this goes. And it got to about 70 odd pages and that seemed to be the end of it. So I thought, oh well. And I kind of didn't know what to do with it. I thought, it's too long to be a short story, it's too short to be a novel. What do I do with this? And I put it to one side and then some months later these other two novella length stories showed up in my head. And so then I thought, okay, maybe there's a book here.
- [05:02]
Kavita Puri
And is that how you write? Is that how you've always written, that you just sit at your desk and.
- [05:07]
Salman Rushdie
It'S become more what I do. I mean, that's to say writing has become more a process of discovering what I'm writing by doing. It didn't used to be like that. I mean, when I started out, I was a planner. I used to have to have architecture before I could start to put, you know, build something around on the architecture. But now, I mean, of course I have some idea, you know, I have a kind of general sense of what the Story is and where it's going and things that have to happen in it. But a lot of it is day to day discovery, trying to see what shows up on the page. And then if I like it, I don't like it.
- [05:49]
Kavita Puri
And so you wrote late and then you put it to one side. When did you know that you wanted to write a kind of a series of fiction that was tied together with. With. Of the 11th hour?
- [06:03]
Salman Rushdie
Well, I guess it just occurred to me that I was thinking a lot about the subject of mortality for pretty obvious reasons. And the next story I wrote was. Was the Indian one, the musician of Kahani. And. And it came from two places. I mean, one was that in my family we have a wonderful concert pianist, my niece, you know, who is genius. And so I was thinking about that and I was thinking about stories in which music has supernatural powers. You know, the Pied Piper of Hamelin, et cetera. And so I thought maybe her music could have. I didn't know what the supernatural powers would be. I just thought maybe there would be some. And then there were all these extraordinary Indian weddings that got in the paper. And I thought, oh, well, maybe I can join those two ideas into one idea. And so that developed like that. And also it became for me, there's a sort of unnamed narrator figure which is kind of me revisiting old haunts, little bits of Bombay where I've written about before and where I used to live. And kind of a way of saying goodbye, you know. Cause I think. I don't think I'll be walking up that hill again. So it was a way of saying, here's one last walk up the hill. The last story to tell about that place.
- [07:36]
Kavita Puri
When I read that story and actually this particular bit, I felt this very strong sense of nostalgia. And I felt like you were talking to me. If I. I'm just going to read this bit. I'm walking slowly. There are children playing around me. And I know they aren't really here. They are ghost children of my childhood. Beverly, the Australian girl on her bicycle. Michael and David, the blonde English boys. And then you name some of your friends, including Salim Big Nose, who we have definitely met before.
- [08:09]
Salman Rushdie
Yeah, who doesn't exist.
- [08:10]
Kavita Puri
Children. Who doesn't exist. And you say that. And then you say, and at the end of the lane, while the children play, I look up at the end of my story. And just before you say that, you say, I will not come this way again. And I felt that I was in that alleyway with you and all your childhood friends. And Salim, your make believe friend, I just wonder why you think you won't go that way again. Do you mean in fiction or do you mean tread the earth there?
- [08:39]
Salman Rushdie
I meant in fiction. I mean, I meant. I don't think I've got any more reason to go up that hill. I've got no more stories up there. I mean, I revisited it before. There's a passage in Quaychat where one of the characters backstory, her childhood and younger days were spent in that same neighborhood. So it's very strange how a tiny little patch of the city, a gigantic city, you know, but a tiny little alley in that city could give you, you know, a lifetime of work. But I, but I really did think this time I think I'm done, you know, and. Which is a mixed feeling.
- [09:23]
Kavita Puri
Yeah. How do you feel about that?
- [09:24]
Salman Rushdie
Sad on the whole, sadder than happy. But I thought it worked out quite well in the story, so I'm pleased about that.
- [09:31]
Kavita Puri
You talk about that time in Bombay with a, with a great love for the, the nostalgia for the cosmopolitan nature of the place. Look at all the places, the names of the people of your. Of. Of your childhood, your childhood friends, they came from all around the world. And, and that cosmopolitanism is just a place in your nostalgia now because that doesn't really exist anymore, does it, in India?
- [09:54]
Salman Rushdie
Yeah, it's a. You know, when people say you can't go home again, you know, it's. It's not because you can't go home again because it's still there, but. But it's because it's not the same anymore. And the city that I grew up in, the city that I loved, still love bits of it, fragments of it are around mostly embodied in people, old friends, so on. But the actual life of the city is very different now and less likable, more adversarial, you know, more tension between communities, more authoritarian, you know, and. Which is not a problem only of Bombay. No, it's everywhere now.
- [10:40]
Kavita Puri
It is. Do you think that as one grows older and you look back on your life, you, you think more about home? Especially when you are a person who has, has left out a choice or you have, you've become. It is because of exile. Do you think that one goes back to that place of childhood?
- [11:05]
Salman Rushdie
Well, every time I have walked up that little lane, which I've done a number of times since we stopped living there, it always feels intensely powerful and like I'm going somewhere. That's very, very important to me. And that's. Even though, you know, my Family stopped living there in something like 1963, so more than 60 years ago. But I still have. I think that the place where you've been a child, where you've been born and raised, has a certain kind of power over you, which nowhere else has. I mean, I was thinking about, you know, Faulkner. I visited Oxford, Mississippi, once, in the heart of his fictional Yokna, Patofa county. And it's a very small town, and yet he was able to make a lifetime of work out of it. Out of those few streets, I had a professor from the Yokel University showing me around, and he would point and he would say, up there on that balcony is the lawyer's office that was in Intruder in the Dust. And over there is the fence where the idiot child used to come and stand. And literally this one town square and a few streets off it was enough for a lifetime of work. And, I mean, that little corner of Bombay has something of that feeling for me.
- [12:33]
Kavita Puri
I wonder if you feel that in a more pronounced way, though, because you left.
- [12:37]
Salman Rushdie
Yeah, maybe, maybe. I mean, Faulkner never left, you know, But I think one of the interesting things that happens when your life goes away from where it began is that. Well, in a sense, it helps you because you get more angles on the past and more. More ways of seeing, you know, and all of that is good for a writer. But I've always kind of envied writers who were deeply rooted in one place, you know, and who could. Who could make literally make a lifetime of work out of it. That's not been my destiny, but you make the best of what you have, you know.
- [13:18]
Kavita Puri
But then I think being an outsider, whether, you know, in. In. In London or New York, and, you know, question that, are you an outsider maybe does give you a different perspective.
- [13:30]
Mia Sorrenti
You.
- [13:30]
Kavita Puri
You get something different, you see things differently, you feel things differently than if you have roots in a place.
- [13:36]
Salman Rushdie
Yeah, I think that's true. I mean, for example, in New York, there's a kind of New York story that I can't tell. Writers like, say, Don DeLillo, born in the Bronx, raised in the city in the shadow of Yankee Stadium. His whole life is New York. And that's a New York I don't have access to. But New York is also a city which is created by people arriving. But most of the people who live in New York were not born in New York. They come from elsewhere in America. Elsewhere. From elsewhere. I mean, the famous song is all about coming to New York. If you can make it there, you could make it anywhere. So that Idea of arrival as a way of making the city is intrinsic to that particular place. So it means you can write novels of arrival, which I've done once or twice.
- [14:32]
Kavita Puri
And the book has scenes actually from places, the geography of your life. So it is Bombay, Mumbai, it's Cambridge, it's New York. And so it is reflecting the kind of journeys, the arrivals that you've made.
- [14:48]
Salman Rushdie
Yeah, I think in a way, it's a kind of miniature potted history of my work, you know, because there's just, to put it crudely, there's one story in India, one story in England, and there's one story mainly in New York, although with little guest appearances by Kafka, Goya.
- [15:06]
Kavita Puri
Yeah. I just want to go back on something you talked about earlier, which is about rising authoritarianism and nationalism. And we talked about the nostalgia that was the cosmopolitan of the Bombay of your childhood. But then if you go to America or Britain now, the rise of the right, there are very few places left now, aren't there, that are truly cosmopolitan?
- [15:34]
Salman Rushdie
Well, so far, Canada, that's a possibility, except it's very cold in winter. But, yes, as I was saying, it's not really just about any one place. I mean, it's a large phenomenon. And one of the things that I discovered, like last year when I was traveling a bit in Europe, when Knife came out in various translations, one of the things I was told in France, in Germany, was that young people are moving to the right. You know, the vote for parties like the AFNA in Germany and for, you know, the Le Pen gang in France is from young people, not just from old soaks, you know, and that's alarming if young people are losing faith in the values of democracy.
- [16:28]
Kavita Puri
I think the five pieces that you've written about in the 11th hour, they are timeless, but they're personal. But they also very much speak to the issues that we are trying to grapple with today. When you decided to put these five books together, was it a kind of. Was it this idea of looking back on one's life, of a sense of mortality or feeling mortality or having things to say?
- [16:57]
Salman Rushdie
It did feel. I mean, I'm glad you think that it still has contemporary dimension, because I wanted it to have that, not just to be, you know, old man looking back at happier days? That's boring. But I just felt these stories fitted together. You know, the two shorts, there's three novellas, two short stories, and the two short stories were written sometime earlier. The novellas were written all at the same time, basically. But I just felt that as a set, they added up to something. I'm not even quite sure how to define what they added up to, but it felt like a shape. And, yes, it tries to take on subjects which are relevant now. For example, the little Goya passage in the Oklahoma story. I discovered that the king of Spain in those days was actually nicknamed El Rey Felon, the thieving King, the Criminal King. And I thought, oh, I know somebody else that.
- [18:05]
Kavita Puri
Well, Yes. I mean, I wanted to talk about Fernando vii, who is in Oklahoma. I mean, who were you thinking of? A despot who jails journalists and writers.
- [18:15]
Salman Rushdie
And just made him up.
- [18:17]
Kavita Puri
Yeah, no inspiration.
- [18:20]
Salman Rushdie
But also, he really was like that.
- [18:22]
Kavita Puri
He really was like that.
- [18:23]
Salman Rushdie
He really was like that.
- [18:24]
Kavita Puri
But you chose him as a character.
- [18:25]
Salman Rushdie
And he was thought to be like that. And you know the reason why? Well, that passage is born out of my. I was able to visit the Prado about a year and a half ago, and just about my favorite room in any museum in the world is the room with the dark Goyas, you know, and those, of course, were originally painted on the walls of this villa that he acquired outside the city. And the reason he moved outside the city, having spent most of his life living at the court and painting at the court, was he wanted to get away from El Rey Felon. He wanted to put some distance because Goya's politics were quite liberal, you know, and liberal politics were not in favor, just like other people we know.
- [19:11]
Kavita Puri
I want to talk about one of the short stories, Old man in the Piazza, which I think you wrote in 2020 and appeared in the. In the New Yorker. And that really feels like you could have written that yesterday. At the end, you say, it is unclear what we must do now, what will become of us. We are at a loss to know how things will proceed. Our words fail us. And I thought that was so interesting for someone who has spent a lifetime writing words, that your words fail you now.
- [19:42]
Salman Rushdie
Well, you know, I was. A couple of years ago, PEN America had an event at the United nations, actually a sort of collection of writers to discuss how writers could respond to a crisis in the world. I mean, at that point, it was the Ukraine war that was being discussed. And I just thought there are moments when you have to not over claim for what writing can do, you know, and there are things that actually can't do, and ending a war is one of them. And it's. It's very sad to learn that the art form to which you've dedicated your life has things it can't do. You know, you, you think of literature as being a place of infinite possibility. You know, you could make, you could make a book, anything you want it to be as long as you're good at it. But then you, when you, when literature encounters the world, there are things it can't do.
- [20:43]
Kavita Puri
And I mean, you wrote that in 2020. Do you feel that more now?
- [20:47]
Salman Rushdie
Yeah, yeah, I just feel that we've had a moment when people, no longer, people seem to be losing the ability to listen to each other. You know, so many people are so angry, whichever side of the spectrum you want to look at, you know, anger, vindictiveness, revenge, this is in people's minds. And one of the things that those emotions do is they close the mind. It becomes very difficult to have an open minded conversation. And literature depends on an open mind. You know, if you approach a book with a closed mind, you can't read it.
- [21:28]
Kavita Puri
Does it worry you that the statistics show that people are just reading less?
- [21:33]
Salman Rushdie
Yeah, I wonder about those statistics because I think literature was never a mass market medium. I mean even a huge, quite a.
- [21:43]
Kavita Puri
Lot of people have bought your books.
- [21:44]
Salman Rushdie
Yeah. And I mean, then there's Harry Potter. I once, I used to know very nice gentleman who was the American publisher of, of the Harry Potter books. Nice man called Dick Robinson who's passed away now and he invited me to the launch moment of the final volume, Volume seven of Harry. And I said, what, what's your print run? And he looked a bit sheepish and I, I said okay. And he said, he said no, we printed 28 million and we sold them in a week.
- [22:17]
Kavita Puri
Gosh.
- [22:18]
Salman Rushdie
So I thought somebody's reading, you know, I remember seeing a young girl being interviewed on TV when one of the Harry books came out and the reporter said, that's a very long book. And she said, yes it is. And he said, why do you think she wrote such a long book? And the little girl without batting an eyelid said, well, it's because she knew we wanted a really long story. So I feel maybe there are girls like that and 28 million of them.
- [22:50]
Kavita Puri
But you say words fail you. But don't words connect us?
- [22:55]
Salman Rushdie
They should.
- [22:56]
Kavita Puri
And can they not be a balm? Especially now?
- [22:59]
Salman Rushdie
Yeah, well, I mean, I hope so. You know, I just think, as I say, I obviously feel somebody reading this book would find in it the things you want to find in books. Like first of all, beauty, you know, secondly, pleasure. And thirdly, you know, some kind of fellow feeling you want to feel like, you know, these people, you feel like them you know, one of the great things that literature can do is to show us that other people are like us. And I mean, I want. Of course I want that. That's what writers want. I just have this feeling at the moment, turning on the news every day, that people are not listening to each other, you know, and that that's dangerous.
- [23:43]
Kavita Puri
That is dangerous.
- [23:44]
Mia Sorrenti
And I.
- [23:45]
Kavita Puri
And I think that's why that final piece is. It's about public discourse. It's about. And really, interestingly, you make language a character in this. Why did you choose to do that?
- [23:57]
Salman Rushdie
She just showed up. She showed up and sat in a corner, and I was very. I was. I was very pleased. I hadn't known that she would arrive. But sometimes the story tells itself, you know, I mean, I guess the writer I was thinking of most when I wrote that story was the American short story writer Donald Bartleby, whose stories are full of just amazing improbabilities, but just work beautifully. There's a story of his that I really like, which is called the Flight of Pigeons from the Palace. And it's about an unnamed body which is putting on shows. They put on all kinds of things. They put on fire eaters, they put on international wars, and they show the flight of pigeons from the palace. It's an entirely surreal and improbable and impossible show, but it's completely beautiful. And I thought I was thinking about him when I wrote that story.
- [25:01]
Kavita Puri
I can see that. But the piazza, which is, I suppose, a place which is, you know, a place for democracy to talk, to, discuss. For five years, the word no is not spoken. And it is a piece of work about speech, free speech. And you have suffered hugely for the right to speak freely. You've been in hiding for. How many years were you.
- [25:30]
Salman Rushdie
Oh, I don't know. The thing about. I always worry about that term in hiding, because one of the things that is obvious about security is that it's unbelievably visible. But that period lasted about nine years.
- [25:43]
Kavita Puri
Nine years. It's a long time. You've been physically attacked and now you still have to have huge amounts of security. You said free speech is life itself. Do you fear now for free speech in Britain, in America, with everything that's.
- [26:01]
Salman Rushdie
Yes, I think it's a very bad time for free speech. And again, the traditional attack on free expression comes from the right. It comes from authoritarian forces. And that's very much there. I mean, I read an article just before I left New York which said that more than 23,000 books are now on various banned lists in America, 23,000. And these aren't just any old books, you know, these are Toni Morrison and Huckleberry Finn, some of the, you know, To Kill a Mockingbird, the Catcher in the Rye. Some of the best things ever written, you know, are now considered by some person or other to be improper. So 23,000 book bans in the land of the free, you know, in the country of the First Amendment, which enshrines free expression. And it's the First Amendment, you know, the Second Amendment is about guns. Everybody likes that one. But the First Amendment is about free speech and people seem to be turning away from it. So I. But what's happening now is that there's a kind of worrisome sliding away from free speech coming from the left as well. You know, a willingness to think that certain kinds of speech that you happen not to like should be whatever the fashionable word is now, deplatformed, you know, deprived of airtime. Whereas the kind of classic argument which I still believe is the answer to speech is more speech, the answer to bad speech is better speech. And yes, the town square, the piazza, has always been for me a kind of metaphor of democracy where many people speak in many voices and argue with each other and yell at each other and have a drink with each other. And that marketplace is to me, a kind of metaphor of freedom. And if that then becomes a place where certain kinds of speech are repressed, it's really very bad for everyone. And my old man sitting there becomes the witness to all of that. And I tell you where he came from. He came from a very improbable place.
- [28:19]
Mia Sorrenti
Go on.
- [28:21]
Salman Rushdie
I notice you ever saw the original movie called the Big Bad Thing.
- [28:25]
Kavita Puri
I did.
- [28:25]
Salman Rushdie
Well, there's a scene at the climax of that where there's an old man sitting outside a cafe while cars zoom in every direction possible as it's a fantastic climactic chase sequence. Then they all crash together in a big heap in the middle of the square and the old man just sits there and watches without just completely poker faced. And I thought, I know that old man and I want him. So I put him in my piazza.
- [28:53]
Kavita Puri
It's good to know your inspiration comes from all sources.
- [28:55]
Salman Rushdie
Yes, it comes from the pink pants.
- [29:05]
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- [29:43]
Kavita Puri
Do you think the publishing world, I mean, you're talking about the chilling effect on freedom. Do you think the publishing world is being more careful about the kinds of books that it is putting out there now?
- [29:56]
Salman Rushdie
Well, I guess so. I mean, I think there are things now which didn't used to exist. There's so sensitivity, readers, things like that. Nobody's ever dared to offer my work to a sensitive.
- [30:06]
Kavita Puri
So you've never had that.
- [30:07]
Salman Rushdie
I would not put up with it for very long because I think that's the death of art. You know, if. If anybody who might be might find a problem with a particular phrase has the right to have that particular phrase removed. And nobody could say anything because lots of things upset lots of people. Bookshops are full of books that if I was to open them, I would not like what they were saying. But that's the reason why there are lots of books in bookshops.
- [30:40]
Kavita Puri
I mean, how worrying is the situation now? Do you think in your lifetime it's worrying?
- [30:45]
Salman Rushdie
It is. I mean, I don't want to. Again, I don't want to overstate it because, you know, lots of books get published and lots of books in lots of voices and you know, that's still happening. But I think one of the problems, I think is for young writers starting out, I think there's a real worry amongst younger writers about what they're allowed to say.
- [31:11]
Kavita Puri
So you think the self censorship is going on before even the sensitives you might see.
- [31:15]
Salman Rushdie
I mean, there's all kinds of issues like, you know, appropriation, for example. All art has always been appropriation. We wouldn't have Picasso without African art. All the heads of Picasso are taken from African masks. The king of appropriation. But he's also Picasso. If you can't write about lives and experiences which are not your own, then your spectrum is unbelievably small. You know, one of the things about great writing is its ability to enter many worlds. And one of the things I really admire about Charles Dickens, for example, is how the world of Dickens has such a wide range of experience. You know, he can write about pickpockets and archbishops, you know, and that's what you want, you know, in my idea of what a book is, is it's the creation of a world and a world in which the reader is happy to be while they're reading the book. You know, and the point about a world is that it's incredibly varied. And if, you know, white writers can't write about black characters and straight people can't write about gay people, that's crippling. I mean, when I wrote the Golden House, there's a character in that who is in the process of what we now call transitioning and is quite agonized about it. And I thought, it did occur to me to think, am I stepping on another landmine?
- [32:53]
Kavita Puri
Would you write that now?
- [32:55]
Salman Rushdie
Yeah, I did write it now. I mean, everything that's happening now was happening then. It's not so long ago. And, and I didn't. I mean, the landmine didn't go off. I thought there's only two, there's two explanations for this. One is nobody read the book. And the other is I somehow didn't. I somehow got it right, you know, because, I mean, I do think the rule is that there should be no, nothing should be off limits. Everybody can write about everything. But it is also true that they have to do it well. If they don't do it well, they should expect somebody to point that out. I mean, that's. It seems almost. It's strange that this sounds old fashioned, although it's the basic rule of not just a freedom, but of art. You know, you can't have art in which people are told. There's all kinds of places you can't. There's rooms you can't go into, there's voices you can't hear.
- [33:54]
Kavita Puri
You've talked a lot about freedom and in late, freedom and goodness are two themes that come up a lot. Do you think that freedom and goodness are compatible?
- [34:09]
Salman Rushdie
Well, there's a character in that story who believes they're incompatible, that goodness requires a kind of assent from other people. You know, it's a kind of social thing. Freedom is very individual. So this is a version of the ancient battle, philosophical battle of society and the individual. Who do you give more weight to? And there are societies like for example, the United States, which has always valued the individual over the group. And there are other societies, like Eastern societies, many, much of India, where the group is considered to be the entity to which loyalty is owed and the individual is secondary to the group. And so this is an ancient struggle, but we have our version of it nowadays.
- [35:07]
Kavita Puri
You talk about in late and it's a theme that comes back in a lot of your work, the freedom of India. Freedom of India was without goodness because of the violence and migration that happened. And you that up in Old Man Piazza, the narrator, talks of. In our recent history, the drawing of borderline through our territory by ignoramuses from elsewhere has caused much heartache and loss of life. Lines and borders Disruption comes up a lot in your work, and it is especially pertinent now, isn't it?
- [35:42]
Salman Rushdie
Yeah, Well, I think one of the things that happened in the period which is now called decolonization is that Western people drew maps across the frontiers, across the world, straight line frontiers across Africa and the Middle east and so on. And then people were told that that's a country. In many cases, that created difficulties afterwards. So it is true that the drawing of lines on maps has been a real problem. I've always thought there's a beautiful. We're talking about weird things that affect me. In T.H. white's book, the Sword in the Stone, there's a moment in which the wizard Merlin, the instructor of the boy Arthur, turns both of them into birds and they're flying over the landscape. And he points. He indicates to Arthur that the thing that you can't see from the air when you look down at the earth is you can't see frontiers. There are no borders. There's just the earth. And I always thought that was a very beautiful image.
- [36:47]
Kavita Puri
Yeah. In the south, your first short story. It is a contemplation of friendship and how we spend the end of our days. You have some very good friends who have passed recently. What is that like? I mean, they were writers, people like Paul Auster, Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens. Christopher Hitchens. People who you probably discussed your work with, debated with, people you would want to talk about. All the issues that we've been talking about today. What does that feel like?
- [37:16]
Salman Rushdie
Well, you know, one thing it feels like is the loss of laughter, you know, because Christopher, Martin, these were some of the funniest people I've ever met. And. And evenings spent in their company were hilarious, you know, and not to have that anymore, except in memory, you know, Christopher and Martin would invent these crazy word games, titles that don't quite make it. Mr. Zhivago, the story of the foresights, two days in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. So on. It would go on for ages, you know, For Whom the Bell Rings. So it was just hilariously enjoyable. And so it leaves holes in the world, you know, when your friends go. It's also noticeable to me that all the people. Well, Paul Auster was a couple of months older than me. Martin Amos and Christopher Hitchens were younger than me. But, you know, it just feels like there's a generation in the process of checking out, you know, and it was quite a generation. You know, one of the interesting things is when we were all young, people used to refer to us as this generation of bright young things, you know, and Martin Amos, Ian McEwen, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, you know, Timothy Moe, Ben Okry, me, et cetera. A lot of us, and at the time, we all kind of resisted it. We're not a generation, you know, some of us don't know each other, some of us don't like each other. We're not a gang, you know, And I think in that sense, we were not a gang. But now looking back at it, I think that was a pretty good time for the literature of this country. And I think some of it has to do with the mood of readers, not just of writers, that there was a moment there where readers were kind of bored with conventional form and narrative and were looking for kind of zanier stuff, you know, and many of us provided it. And I think we benefited from that mood amongst book readers, you know, said, let's not just have kitchen sink realism, let's have fairy tales, let's have, you know, gothic stuff. Let's have anything except kitchen sink realism. And we provided it.
- [39:55]
Kavita Puri
How autobiographical is the Eleventh Hour?
- [39:59]
Salman Rushdie
You know, I think that one way of say, answering that is to say that it's not autobiographical at all. And the other way is to say that everything one writes is completely autobiographical. I mean, it comes out of my take on the world, you know, And I think what you want from a writer is the writer saying, here's how I see it. What do you think.
- [40:21]
Kavita Puri
When you look back on your life, your working life, Are there things that you wish you had written more of, said more of, held back?
- [40:30]
Salman Rushdie
No, not really. I mean, I do think, you know, this is the first book of shorter fiction that I've published since East west, which was 31 years ago. And I've often in that time felt I should write more short stories. And I felt the lack of them. So I'm quite pleased that they showed up. Even though three of them are very long stories. I mean, it's like three novellas and two stories, really. But I am pleased to have got back to the. I'd really like. I have to say I've discovered that I really like that 70 page novella form. And again, some of the most beautiful things ever written are at that length. You know, Death in Venice, Metamorphosis, many, many things that are absolutely perfect. You wouldn't want them to be 200 pages long. You know, you wouldn't want them to be a page longer than they are.
- [41:23]
Kavita Puri
So you end the book by saying, words fail us. But I'm hoping that you're gonna go back to your desk, as you do every morning, and carry on writing those words.
- [41:32]
Salman Rushdie
Yeah. No, I mean, I haven't got anything else to do. I might as well do that.
- [41:37]
Kavita Puri
Salman. Thank you.
- [41:38]
Salman Rushdie
Thank you.
- [41:39]
Kavita Puri
That was Salman Rushdie, author of the Eleventh Hour, which will be available now online and in stores. I'm Kavita Puri, and you've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us.
- [41:51]
Mia Sorrenti
Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by me, Mia Sorrenti, and it was edited by Mark Roberts.