Selling Salman Rushdie: ‘I suspect there will be trouble’

Summer reading: In 1988, 25-year-old John Mitchinson, then a bookseller in London, was the first person to interview Salman Rushdie about his new book, The Satanic Verses.

First published on September 11, 2022.

Uwhile writing The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie had this note posted on his wall: “To write a book is to make a Faustian contract in reverse. To gain immortality, or at least progeny, you lose or at the very least ruin your actual daily life. The sheer extent of the devastation that was to follow could scarcely have been foreseen, and as the waves of revulsion and indignation reverberated to their final manifestation, the grotesque attack on the Chautauqua Institute on August 12 “I remember turning up on his doorstep in Islington in July 1988.

I was a 25-year-old bookseller who found myself working in the publishing department of Waterstone’s, the new and rapidly growing bookshop chain in the UK. We had decided to add author interviews as an enhancement to our seasonal catalogue, and the first of seven I was co-opted to write was with Salman Rushdie on The Satanic Verses, scheduled for publication in September. I arrived with my cassette player and a proof copy of the novel. I was, he said, the first person to formally speak to him about the new book, and he proved a warm and enthusiastic interviewee. He was strangely impressed that I had not only read it, but had also read Midnight’s Children and Shame. I pointed out that this was my first interview – I like to think my rookie enthusiasm put him at ease.

Re-reading the interview some 34 years later, I am struck by how much we covered and how far he went to present the novel as an attempt to understand rather than condemn religious belief. “Rejecting it would be a very condescending thing to do to an entire culture, in fact it denies their worldview equal status with your own.”

Now we know that this very worldview will be condemned and vilified, costing him a death sentence, followed by a decade in exile and isolation, and a threat that will apparently never fully recede. “I suspect there will be problems,” he told me that sunny morning when I asked him about his expectations about the book’s reception in India. Trouble arrived earlier and closer to home than he or anyone else expected.

Booksellers mostly fell on the right side of the line in the ensuing “how best to answer” dilemma. We at Waterstone’s did not experience the terrifying immediacy of death threats with which publishers and translators were attacked, but Collet’s and Dillons in London and Abbey’s in Sydney were firebombed. WH Smith refused to stock the book after the book burning protest in Bradford in January 1989. Waterstone’s managers were allowed to choose. Most sold it openly; some hid it from view, but gladly sold it if they wished. By the time my interview was reprinted in The Bookseller in April 1989, the book was firmly at the top of the UK bestseller lists.

In 1990 we got Salman into Waterstones in Hampstead with his son Zafar to sign copies of Haroun and the Sea of ​​Stories. Other live events followed. In 1992 he appeared (unannounced) at the Hay Festival and in 1995 the Hampstead branch hosted a live reading of The Moor’s Last Sigh which sold out, although tickets were only advertised on the morning of the reading. Gradually, the situation improved and Salman began appearing regularly at literary parties, festivals and conferences. Until last month, he appeared to be fully rehabilitated in the world of books, rather than the world of politics, protests and police protection. I was touched when, along with many other booksellers, I was invited and publicly thanked for the launch of his memoir Joseph Anton in 2012.

LLooking back on those early years, what strikes me most is how easy it seemed then to defend a writer’s right to self-expression. There were no Twitter pile-ups to negotiate, less scope for public shaming and recrimination, and much less anxiety about causing offense. When Salman won Author of the Year at the British Book Awards in 1995, I remember the whole room cheering.

He mentions this in Joseph Anton: “I must not forget that there is England on my side.” There was, and still is. But discussions of free speech have been cheapened by endless social media outrage and inane attempts to align a writer’s basic human right not to be murdered or assaulted with so-called “cancellation culture.” The Satanic Verses was a novel, not an ill-advised tweet.

I reread the book recently, and I was amazed at how much I had forgotten: what a fine and sophisticated novel this is, how funny and generous. In the interview, Salman talks about the book trying to establish an “ethics of impurity”. He added: “Most of our problems begin when people try to define the world in terms of stark opposition between good and evil or in terms of racial and national purity.” I suspect that this has really fueled the fear of the fundamentalists. Novels change us from the inside, blur boundaries, allow ideas to enrich and new ones to grow and flourish.

But the subversive magic of fiction demands of you Read it it. Hadi Matar, the man accused of the Chautauqua attack, admitted that he was only able to write a few pages of The Satanic Verses. Many other people over the years have complained about how difficult or even unreadable Rushdie’s fiction is. (Reader, it really isn’t.) That’s why we booksellers can take a certain pride. We stood firm and made The Satanic Verses something that people still can and can read.

But the final word is Salman’s: “The way art changes society is never large-scale – you write a book and governments fall – that never happens. What matters is how a book affects the people who actually read it and connect with it. That’s when it can make an irreversible change in the way you see things – you’re not the same person you were before. There is some small change in your perception of the world that remains and never shifts back. That’s why I write fiction.”

Salman Rushdie was attacked on August 12, 2022, as he was about to deliver a public lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, New York. The satanic verses are available from Unity Books Auckland and Wellington.