Salman Rushdie and the Sea of Stories

The world-famous fabulist speculates about the innate theatricality of his richly imaginative novels.

BAn interview by Davia Nelson

Some artists are blessed with outrageous humor. Some artists are blessed with wonderful imagination. Some have extraordinary intelligence. Some have raw emotional power. And some seek in their work a kind of spiritual understanding of how the world works. It is extremely rare that those qualities are combined in one person.” So spoke Berkeley Repertory Theatre artistic director Tony Taccone as he introduced the novelist Salman Rushdie to the audience of a special Berkeley Rep event in November.

While Rushdie is indeed a consummate literary man of our time, his own much-publicized tribulations seem even more theatrical than the sprawling, lexicon-bending novels he’s written (The Satanic Verses, Fury and The Ground Beneath Her Feet). It would seem farfetched, for instance, to attempt a staging of his Booker Prize—stamped Midnight’s Children.

Nevertheless, the Royal Shakespeare Company recently premiered a new stage version of Midnight’s Children at the Barbican Theatre in London. Adapted by British director Tim Supple and former RSC dramaturg Simon Reade, the production, featuring an ensemble of 20 British-Asian actors, crosses the Atlantic this month for visits in Ann Arbor, Mich., and at Harlem’s Apollo Theatre in New York City. And Berkeley recently presented the first professional American production of Haroun and the Sea of Stories, directed by Dominique Serrand of Minneapolis’s Theatre de Jeune Lune. Serrand’s spectacular production substantially altered the National Theatre of London’s original version, adapted by Supple and David Tushingham, which was produced at Children’s Theatre of Western Springs in Illinois in 2000 and Georgia’s University Theatre in 2001.

Both Haroun (published as a novel in 1990) and Midnight’s Children (1981) unfold as coming-of-age fables that put the adventures of young people center stage. Haroun is the son of a storyteller—“the Ocean of Notions, the famous Shah of Blah”—who’s lost the gift of gab, and the young boy gets involved in an epic battle to save the Sea of Stories, the source of every story ever told, from the dark forces of Khattam-Shud, the master of silence. More historically grounded than Haroun, Midnight’s Children plays out as a complexly layered allegory of modern India, full of showbiz fireworks and surrealist moments, that intertwines the stories of the children born in Bombay on the stroke of midnight on Aug. 15, 1947 (the date of India’s independence from Britian).

So if texts as dense as these should make any would-be adapter blanch, the thematic chord Rushdie strikes—in Haroun, in Midnight’s Children and in the following interview—is the backbone of the theatre: Stories are our lifeblood; imagination matters.

DAVIA NELSON: Where do the stories come from? Where did Haroun come from?

SALMAN RUSHDIE: Well, Haroun came in the first place from fragments of stories that I used to tell my son— Zafar, who was at that time 10 or 11—in the bath. It was a device. You could scoop a mug of water out of the bath and pretend there was a story in it—you know, make up something. Haroun is my son’s middle name. Another germ was a short story I wrote years before but never published, in which I imagined a traveler in the Middle Ages, a Marco Polo type, who finds himself in this strange war between the world of language and the world of silence. One side was incredibly chatty and the other side was incredibly silent, and one side was light and the other was dark. The whole cause of the war was that a princess had been kidnapped from the chatty land to the un-chatty land, and they were going to ritually sacrifice her by sewing up her mouth. Anyway, I wrote this story and it just didn’t work. So I just put it in a drawer and left it alone for several years. Then, when I was coming up with Haroun’s adventure—by that time, I guess had become involved myself in a sort of war between language and silence—I suddenly understood the meaning of the story that I hadn’t previously understood. So I brought it out of the drawer and it just fit right in.

Were there other inspirations underneath Haroun?

It was a book written for one person, which is something that I don’t usually do. I’m usually seeking a slightly larger readership than that. The way I imagined it is that it was written for my son at two moments in his life. It was important that he read as a child and be able to have childish pleasure for it. But I also thought of it like a message in a bottle: One day he would grow up—and now he’s 23—and he could read it again, and he would see another book there. And I’m happy to say that’s worked out.

He’s read it as an adult?

He’s read it—he’s loved it at every age, I must say, all the way through. And he doesn’t read that many of my books.

Berkeley Rep’s not the only place to have taken Haroun and done a stage work with it.

Well, it’s amazing. Haroun seems to have made a lot of people want to do things with it. The original dramatization was done at the National Theatre in London just about four years ago. There’s been a production of it in France, in French. There was one in Swedish. There was, in Germany, a puppet version of it. There’s a project from the New York City Opera to make an opera of it with a brilliant libretto by the poet James Fenton. There has been for five years a very skillful project of not making a movie of it.

There are juicy stories in your recent collected nonfiction, Step Across This Line, of other possible collaborations.

Yeah, there have been all sorts of people interested in Haroun. Bono from U2 wanted to make a musical. And then we, by mistake, made a song together—which was completely unplanned by either of us. I wrote this novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, in which there’s a character who writes songs, and I thought, you kind of have to bite the bullet: If you’re going to have a character who’s a songwriter, at some point you’re going to have to suggest one of the songs that he writes. So the book is sort of littered with lyrics. And one of those lyrics is what Bono called the title track—an odd idea, a novel with a title track. There’s a song called “The Ground Beneath Her Feet” in the novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet. I sent him the novel in manuscript and he called me up and said that he’d read this novel and that he’d woken up with this tune in his head that he thought was quite good. So I went over to Dublin and he played it for me. And it was quite good. So we found ourselves without ever having talked about writing a song together, having done so.

Supposedly there’s a plan to make an animated feature film of Haroun, I’m told, in the kind of style of animation of Shrek and those films. That plan has been around so long that we could all die before it comes true. Every year I scream at the person who owns the rights about how he hasn’t done anything for years and he says, “This year, we’re definitely moving ahead.” I hope so. It’d be great to have it as an animation feature. So of all my books, Haroun’s the one that people seem to get the itch about.

How involved are you with those adaptations?

With Haroun in London, I wasn’t actually involved with the adaptation because the director and his collaborator—Tim Supple and David Tushingham—created the adaptation. But they were so ridiculously faithful to the novel that I don’t think there was a single sentence in there that I didn’t write. So I sort of did write it. Except that I didn’t. It felt like getting a play for free—without actually doing the work. And it was wonderful. Here in Berkeley, the literary manager/dramaturg Luan Schooler and the director Dominique Serrand have taken that adaptation and fiddled with it some more—putting things in and taking things out and making it their own. I’ve consulted in both cases. I would be sent drafts and asked what I thought, and I would say what I thought, but really it’s their work with my heckling from the sidelines. They’ve brought in more material from the novel to emphasize, what should one say, the darkness under the lightness. I rather like the direction they’ve taken it

What are some of your heckles?

Well, sometimes I say, you know, “You left out a funny bit.” Sometimes I say, “That’s not how the joke goes; it goes like this.”

You’re no stranger to the stage.

Well, I wanted to be an actor. In fact, when I was in college that’s what I mostly did. I did much more acting than writing. Mine wasn’t a very distinguished career. I remember being cast in a production of a play by Ionesco in which I played that important character, Old Man. And as part of playing Old Man, I took it upon myself to build myself a kind of enormous sort of Punch nose—forgetting that there was a point at which I had to bend over and kiss somebody’s hand. So when I did, the nose went glump. I then had to spend the rest of the play with a nose that went glump. Which, in a funny way, was very Ionesco-ish. Everybody thought it was on purpose. It wasn’t.

Are you tempted to go back to acting?

I’m open to offers. I thought after Bridget Jones’s Diary, in which I made a cameo appearance as myself, that the phone was going to ring a lot, but it remained mysteriously and enigmatically silent.

What about your writing process? 
How do you do it?

I just do it like a job. I wake up in the morning, do a day’s work, and then stop. I’ve always done it like that. You see, a novel is a very long—Randall Jarrell’s famous line is: “The novel is a very long piece of writing that’s got something wrong with it.” The only way to get a piece of writing like that done is to chip away at it. You’ve got to just do a bit every day or else it never gets done. It’s not like writing a play. A lot of playwrights talk about writing plays in very short, intense bursts of writing. Noël Coward used to write plays in two or three days. A lot of playwrights say this—that somehow the work gathers itself up and then you sit down and just write it in a very fast spurt.

Novels are not like that. A novel is a marathon. You can’t afford temperament. Poets have temperament, but that’s because they don’t write much. You know, their lines don’t go all the way across the page. They don’t go all the way down the page. And then they publish something 50 pages long and they call it a book. Or a slim volume. A slim volume is something, in my view, that is not a book. I have the novelist’s contempt for the poet. If you’re writing the stuff where you actually have to fill the page—and quite a lot of pages—you have to just get up in the morning and work.

Maybe someday I’ll write directly for the theatre. Theatre is more collaborative than novel writing. My whole career has been myself in the room: You wake up in the morning and you have a little morsel of creative juice, which is like your day’s allotment. Use it on the writing first. Don’t answer letters, don’t read the newspaper, don’t make a phone call, don’t clean your teeth. Very often I just put on the dressing gown, go straight to the desk and am there for some hours. And then I think, “Okay, now I can have a day.” Have a shower and a cup of coffee and so on. But I’ve got to do that thing first. And by first I mean first. Not second or third. Sometimes cleaning your teeth does get in the way. Cleanliness is overrated—when in the service of literature. Literature is often enriched by a little dirt.

What is it for you that makes stories so critical?

The way I’ve always said this is that we are an animal that tells stories. We are, as far as we know, the only animal that tells stories. Unclear whether dolphins have fiction. But there’s probably not, I would suspect, the dolphin Hemingway. What does it mean, that we like to tell stories? It struck me that, if you’re in a family, one of the definitions of that family is the stories of that family. You know, mad Uncle Ernest and crazy Aunt Gerta. And the day the house burned down. When somebody joins the family—either a child is born or somebody marries into the family—one of the ways in which they become members of the family is that they are told the stories of the family. When they know the family stories, then they’re in. So we start off telling the stories of other people, and in the end we become part of a story that somebody tells. It seems such an important part of how we describe ourselves in the world—and it’s not just because it’s my job. In a way it’s part of all our jobs. Everybody thinks they can tell a story. Unfortunately.

What’s drawing you to living in the United States?

I don’t live in the United States; I live in New York. There’s this T-shirt going around New York which says, “NYC out of USA.” The back of it says, “USA out of NYC.” That’s kind of—as they say—the New York state of mind. I love the city. I always did, long before I lived there. I always had a kind of itch to live there. And, in fact, had it not been for a little local difficulty I experienced in the ’90s, I probably would have been living there a lot longer. When I finished The Satanic Verses, it was the first time I got—what shall I call it?—a big check for a novel. Zeroes. And I thought, “What will I do with these zeroes?” And I thought, “I know, I’ll buy a small apartment in Manhattan and spend more time there.” Then that became impossible for a while, and then it became possible again. It’s not for profound reasons. I think it’s a great city and I love great cities. It’s a city whose culture is constructed by immigrants and, you know, I’m an immigrant. It lets you be part of that process of continual construction. What’s not to like? One of the things I like is that it’s gone back to being rude. There was this terrible moment when, after 9/11, everyone was going, “After you,” “No, after you.” Now it’s, “No, move over, I’m walking here.”

FROM THE AUDIENCE:Did Sept. 11 make you question the importance of the novel?

No. Does that answer your question? No—I mean, why? Sept. 11 wasn’t about that. What I do think it did is shake everybody whose job it is to try and imagine the world. It made us think about how to do that in the light of what happened. I don’t know the answers to that, really, but I know that a lot of the writers were vexed by that question—the kind of “now what?” question. In the aftermath of those events, I remember being asked by the fiction editor of the New Yorker if I had a short story (which at the time I didn’t have) that was ready to be published. He said, “No one’s sending us short stories suddenly.” And this is the New Yorker, which gets the best of the best, usually. And, for a moment the flow of fiction went down to a trickle—it seems as if it was an oddly nonfictional moment, which I think is what your question implies. But that did not last very long; everybody got back to writing stories. I’m not expecting myself or anyone else to write a novel about the attack on the World Trade Center any time soon. But what I do think will begin to permeate fiction and all kinds of writing is the kind of atmosphere—the kind of post-9/11 atmosphere, the feelings that we’re all living amongst now: trepidation and concern and uncertainty and a shaken feeling that began that day that I don’t think has gone away. Some of that may get into books, but the great thing about books is that they take a long time to make and they last a long time. Sometimes the response to a historical event comes much, much later. The example I like to use about this is War and Peace, which you might legitimately call the greatest novel ever written about the Napoleonic Wars—and it was written, what, 65 years after? Literature is slow; that’s its advantage.

AUDIENCE:When the blood money was off your head, was it a problem for you to come back in the public eye?

No, it wasn’t a problem to come back. Ordinary life is easy to resume. It’s what we all want and are used to, so it’s easy to go back to. I think there’s a public perception that there was this long period of invisibility and then pop, here I am again. That’s really not what happened—it was a much more gradual process than that. One of the reasons that this book is called Step Across This Line is that I had this sense that there were all these lines people were telling me not to cross. “Can’t step across that one, it’s dangerous.” And the only way to do it was to step across it and say, “See?” “Oh, well, don’t step across the next one.” I had to do that for a long time and eventually got back here. In a way, a lot of it had to do with something that wasn’t quite real. It was not to do with an actual, identifiable danger, but with people’s fear—with other people’s fear. A lot of the time I felt very circumscribed by other people’s fear. That, in a way, took longer to beat out than any real, identifiable threats. One of the problems with fear is that there is no way you can reason it away. You can say to people, “Here are 19 reasons not to be afraid.” And they say, “Yeah, but I’m still scared.” So that was the problem, and it took a long time just to know that. Happily I’m here, and I’m speaking to all these people. Close. One of the things I always thought about the days in which the money was being offered—by the way, I don’t think they ever really had the money, and P.S., I think it would have been quite difficult to collect—I remember thinking in those days, “You know, lots of writers are broke.” So it was very nice of them to be so restrained.

AUDIENCE:What have been your most important lessons in life?

I’m going to pass. I’ve learned nothing. I think learning is overrated, too. Living: difficult. Learning: relatively easy. One of the great things about literature is that you really don’t learn anything. Each book has its own problems, which the problems solved in the previous book do not help you solve. So you feel ignorant each time. I have this image of books having two ends. There’s the beginning of the book, which is the stupid end, and there’s the end of the book, which is the possibly slightly more intelligent end. You have to discover how to somehow stop being stupid about that particular idea and become more intelligent about it. Then the next idea comes along and you’re stupid again. So you don’t learn much.

I think the only thing you learn from experience as a writer is that, if you keep hammering away at it, the problem will get solved. That’s a kind of confidence that often young writers don’t have. There’s a panic that comes when you get stuck. In my view, now, if I don’t get stuck it means there’s something wrong. A book is a complicated piece of creation and the idea that you could just work it all out in advance and then just do it is naïve. You always find problems. If you don’t find them, you’re not looking hard enough. There’s a lesson in life: Keep hammering away at it and you solve the problem. That sounds too much like a fortune cookie, though.

AUDIENCE: You talked about your son and how you hoped he would read Haroun both as a child and as an adult. What do you think he’d gain or read in your story as an adult?

As an adult? Well, I think I was very aware of the fact that those terrible years in my life were also terrible years in his life. At the time of the fatwa [religious order, which was issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989 and lifted by the Iranian foreign minister Kamal Kharraz in 1998], my son, Zafar, was nine and a half. And he had to grow up through that stuff. We got ripped apart, you know. I couldn’t live with him. I couldn’t live with anybody. I could see him, but only under conditions of ridiculous secrecy. So for me the father-son relationship is the heart of Haroun. As it was for him. The audience has to feel that, if it’s going to feel anything at all. It has to be a story about real people, not just about magical beings.

And yet Haroun is a fable. The key line in the novel, the line to which the entire novel is an answer, is “What’s the use of stories that aren’t even true?” That’s the question, it seems to me, that I wanted him to know the answer to. What is the point of the imagination? It’s a story about that. That’s what I felt was the threat, in my case. That was what was being attacked. Its defense was more important than my personal safety. I wanted to—in this, I hope, very non-didactic, nonpreachy way—offer a defense. I hoped when he grew up he might appreciate that. And, I’m happy to say, he does.
 

Davia Nelson is a screenwriter, producer, director and founder of “Lost & Found Sound,” which she co-hosts on National Public Radio.
 

In Search of India's Origins
by Shazia Ahmad

“I was born in the city of Bombay…on the stroke of Midnight…Clock hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came.” With these words, sitting cross-legged on stage, notebooks scattered around him, the sniffling narrator Saleem Sinai opens the stage version of Salman Rushdie’s prize-winning novel Midnight’s Children. Born at the stroke of midnight on Aug. 15, 1947—the precise moment of India’s independence from British rule—Saleem, according to Rushdie’s conceit, is one of India’s 1,001 “midnight’s children,” destined to reimagine the country’s history: to seek meaning in its creation and in his own mysterious past.

For anyone who’s read Rushdie’s sprawling epic, the transposition of this mythic tale to the stage might seem an impossible task. But the prospect didn’t intimidate the Royal Shakespeare Company, which this month brings Midnight’s Children to the U.S. (in association with the University of Michigan and Columbia University), after opening with a London run in January. 

Midnight’s Children—as a play—traces its own birth back to 1998, when the RSC asked director Tim Supple, who had created an acclaimed adaptation of Haroun and the Sea of Stories for London’s National Theatre, to dramatize the book. Along with the RSC’s former literary manager Simon Reade, Supple began chipping away at the text. Back in 1993, Rushdie had already written a five-part screenplay of Midnight’s Children for the BBC, but the project had been aborted because of the notorious fatwa that followed the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses. With Rushdie’s go-ahead, Supple and Reade used both the novel and the screenplay as the basis for their play. Reade, who received regular input from Rushdie via detailed e-mail memos, describes the adaptation as “faithful infidelity” to the text, and observes that the novelist himself has been just as “discourteous” an adapter as his co-authors. 

After this half-decade in the making, Midnight’s Children opened to an expectant London audience made up of RSC season-holders and young South Asians eager to see something of themselves on stage. In the production, a cast of 20 actors, in true ensemble style, play two or three roles apiece, changing accents and costumes effortlessly from one scene to another. The female characters’ ornate saris in bright reds and yellows brighten a simple, prop-based set (spitoon, table, bed) designed by Melly Still.

In the pivotal role of Saleem Sinai, Zubin Varla has the burden of sustaining the narrative for the full length of the play (a January preview ran a marathon three-and-a-half hours). Despite a caricature of an Indian accent, Varla depicts an amusing, angst-ridden Saleem—a storyteller who blows hither and thither on the changing winds of circumstance. He shares the stage with another principal character: history itself. Evoked in the novel through symbolism, metaphor and the chronicling of real events, history belongs nowhere and everywhere in Midnight’s Children. But how does one portray such a concept on stage?

Enter the inimitable screen. Projected at the back of the stage, archival footage of Nehru, Indira Gandhi and British newsreels supplies a validating timeline to the more absurd antics of the characters (like the hapless hero’s flight on his hands and knees, disguised as a sniffer dog, during the 1970 Indo-Pakistan war). Though the historical footage provides an authentic picture of Indian history (“I never knew the difference between India and Pakistan until now,” a London audience member was heard to intone), the rather gimmicky device does occasionally distract from the actors’ narrative. On the whole, then, the RSC’s production of Midnight’s Children is a playful reworking of a deeply layered text—but, not surprisingly, it fails to capture the muddy depths of Rushdie’s novel.

Shazia Ahmad is a reporter for the New York Observer.

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