SALMAN RUSHDIE

SALMAN RUSHDIE

John Stapleton.

The interview with Salman Rushdie took place in the same room where he had written Midnight’s Children. Despite having won the Booker Prize, these were the days before Satanic Verses scandalized the Islamic world and a fatwah was issued against him – a time when Rushdie’s fame was more or less contained within literary circles.

Serious breaches were breaking through the fabric of things.

I was using my newfound status as a freelance journalist to pursue literary idols.

Any Australian literary or features editor would practically slather down the phone If I asked them if they would like an interview with Joseph Heller, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Anthony Burgess, Dirk Bogarde or Salman Rushdie. And London was the place to do it all, to meet the gods.

I had walked on Hampstead Heath with Al Alvarez, who I had gone out of my way to befriend after interviewing him. He was the author of one of the bibles of my youth, a meditation on suicide and Sylvia Plath called The Savage God.

The story about his then just published book on Las Vegas and the lure of gambling, The Biggest Game In Town, got a good run in The Australian Financial Review. And I was off and running, the world full of hope, opportunity, fond affections.

Of course parts of Hampstead Heath were notorious as a gay beat, with God knows how many hundreds of men lurking in its bushes and hideaways. These weren’t the parts of the Heath on which we walked.

Back in the 1970s in the crowd with which I used to run, Sylvia Plath was one of our demi-gods, the author of The Savage God a legend.

To us, Plath’s early death at the hands of an oven in W.B. Yeats former London apartment simply made her all-the-more appealing.

We could quote lines from Plath's Daddy by rote; and we weren't even at school:

You do not do, you do not do

Any more, black shoe

In which I have lived like a foot

For thirty years, poor and white,

Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.

You died before I had time--

Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,

Ghastly statue with one gray toe…”

“You do not do, you do not do, black shoe...you bastard I'm through” was one of our favorite lines.

“Sylvia Platitude” was scrawled across the lounge room wall of John Bygate’s terrace in Sydney's inner-city suburb of Paddington, the man who I wrote a short story about, and co-won a competition back in 1972. The then princely sum of $75. The discovery that you could make money out of something I liked doing, writing, was a revelation.

The British treated Australians, colonials as we were, with something between amusement and contempt.

But with the boldness of youth, it was still relatively easy to inveigle my way into all sorts of situations.

Salman was a special case.

In those days, before time and age and numerous life pressures crowded out the days and I would, like so many working journalists, be forced to interview people without having read a word of their work, heard their music or seen their paintings, back before the Executive Summary was all one would have time to read of some major report or other, back then, I always read as many of their books as possible before interviewing an author.

I particularly loved Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, as had millions of other readers. I read it in Bombay, or Mumbai as it became known, where the book was set. I even visited some of the locations in the book, including the site of the Jaan temple, in that sprawling, jumbled area of Mumbai with its feel of fading wealth which he describes so beautifully.

Midnight’s Children resonated with the chaos and multiple story lines of India. The London house where Rushdie lived at the time was a large hushed home which even then would have cost a substantial amount of money. Rushdie came from a wealthy family. Struggling to survive was not part of his experience, but was certainly part of mine.

I was living in squats at the time, and the casualness of the money struck me. My own life had been riddled with bohemian friends, and I was impressed by the substantiality of this world of casual influence and success.

A maid had opened the door. It soon became apparent that all four floors of the house were occupied by the Rushdie family; an astonishing thing in the London I mostly knew. His wife appeared briefly before disappearing into the bowels of the house. I was taken up to Rushdie's study.

In those days, before my short hand and personal hieroglyphics became good enough to keep up with most conversations, I used a tape recorder, which I duly set up.

Rushdie told me about his first published book, a science fiction novel called Grimus. And then the author pointed out a framed black and white photograph of a house featured in Midnight’s Children, the rambling Indian house where he had grown up.

Outside, before I knocked on the door, I had been frantically reading the last pages of Shame, the book I was ostensibly interviewing him about, a sprawling, black work set in Pakistan. Few of the characters were admirable, the plot confusing and the politics dark. Rushdie seemed impressed that I had actually read it.

The interview went well. He spoke disarmingly of the fame that had been thrust upon him with the phenomenal success of Midnight’s Children. He showed me the desk where he had written it; and asked: “If you had written a book like that, just sitting here, not really talking to anybody, without any orthodox plot, with multiple voices inside it, the voices of India, could you have possible imagined it would be a success?”

“No,” I replied.

And, of course, nor could he.

Afterwards, Rushdie saw me graciously to the door.

I walked back down the road into my own contrasting life in that overwhelming city.

After that intimate hour with one of the world's greatest writers, I always followed Rushdie’s career with interest, the wall of secrecy and security that surrounded him after the death threats stemming from Satanic Verses, the changed wives, his progress into the literary stratosphere.

The public relations person from Jonathan Cape said Rushdie had rang after our encounter and told her it was the best interview he had ever done. I couldn’t have been more chuffed.