Salman Rushdie talks Shakespeare while teaching a class for exceptional high-school writing students
Clik here to view.
ENLARGE
As we celebrate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, it might seem that all the questions regarding the Bard and his work have been asked, if not answered.
But here’s one I hadn’t heard before: “Do you think Shakespeare knew he was Shakespeare? Did he know he was that good?”
The question arose during a master class that Salman Rushdie was teaching four exceptional high-school writing students. The two juniors and the two seniors met with the author of “Midnight’s Children” and “The Satanic Verses” through YoungArts New York, a regional program organized by the National YoungArts Foundation that every year brings together talented students to learn and collaborate with luminaries from the performing and visual arts and literature.
‘There is no requirement in literature to be nice. Everybody wants to be liked. It’s not always the best way to get where you want to go.’
“My view,” Mr. Rushdie said, “is that it’s impossible to write that good and not know it’s that good. If you don’t know it’s that good, you’re not good enough to write it.”
The hour that the author spent fielding questions from the students wasn’t really about how to write. But about what it takes to be a writer. The room, at Pearl Studios on Broadway, was bare bones. Nothing more than a few chairs around a folding table under bright florescent lights.
But the experience was moving nonetheless, as Mr. Rushdie offered a sense of the price of admission to a career as a writer, whether of fiction or nonfiction.
“There is no requirement in literature to be nice,” he said. “Everybody wants to be liked. It’s not always the best way to get where you want to go.”
That might qualify as understatement coming from a writer who lived under police protection after a fatwa was issued against him in 1989 by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the supreme leader of Iran.
But neither that episode nor any other aspects of Mr. Rushdie’s celebrity came up during the meeting a couple of weeks ago.
“Whatever form,” the author continued, “the subject is truth. That’s what it’s about: trying to find a way getting as much truth on the page as you can.”
Mr. Rushdie also gave the teenagers an impromptu literature course—from Ovid and Franz Kafka to Ernest Hemingway, Truman Capote and Joseph Heller. “Most writers I know are also very big readers,” he explained. “There’s a part of writing that comes out of how you see the world. But also whatever writers inspire you.”
At the same time, Mr. Rushdie warned against the perils of “overinfluence.” “There are writers that are very infectious,” he said, citing Hemingway.
And how easy it looks, yet how hard it actually is, to create Hemingway’s distilled prose. “Towards the end of his life, neither could he,” Mr. Rushdie joked.
Writing about “the things you know best” goes only so far, he observed. Sometimes you’re required to go find a story, as Truman Capote did in his nonfiction novel “In Cold Blood.”
Or Joseph Conrad, he said, who “didn’t start writing until he was over 40. He took the precaution of having an interesting life first.”
And while it’s useful to look at lots of different kinds of writing when you’re starting out, “there comes a moment when you’re more sure of yourself.”
For some writers—he mentioned Zadie Smith and Martin Amis—that moment comes earlier than others.
Mr. Rushdie recalled receiving 100 pages of what would become “White Teeth” from Ms. Smith a year after he met her when she was a college student. “I called a friend of mine and said, ‘I suggest you read this tonight and sign this girl up tomorrow morning.’ A week later, there was a six-figure contract. The talent was so huge and so obvious.”
But it took Mr. Rushdie a lot longer to hit his own stride. Indeed, he recalled the moment it happened. He shared his depression at having written three books “two not published.” “Midnight’s Children,” the novel that would catapult him to fame, seemed to heading in the same direction, when he decided to let his main character tell his story in his own voice. The book involves a child born with special powers at the stroke of midnight on Aug. 15, 1947, as India gains its independence.
“This thing came out of me,” he marveled. “It was obviously the best paragraph I’d written in my life because it was not my voice. It was his voice. I’ve always thought of that day as the day I learned how to be a writer. I was doing something I hadn’t understood I could do.”
—ralph.gardner@wsj.com