Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives

by John Sutherland

  Biog

  National Book Award with Lydia Davis, 2007, www.nationalbook.org/nba2007_f_davis_interv.html (interviewer, B. A. Johnston)

  FN

  Siri Hustvedt (later Auster)

  MRT

  The Sorrows of an American

  Biog

  http://sirihustvedt.net/

  POSTSCRIPT

  286. Paul Auster 1947–; and Siri Hustvedt 1955–

  Hustvedt claims that her, and her husband’s work, have ‘drawn into’ each other. One could, tentatively, draw that conclusion from Auster’s 2010 novel, Sunset Park, a work which is – set against the background of his earlier fiction – strikingly un-Austerian and as strikingly Hustvedtian. The novel’s title throws back the ironic echo of the more famous ‘Sunset Boulevard’ – the Los Angeles address which (as in Billy Wilder’s sardonic movie Sunset Boulevard) incarnates the Hollywood Dream, which, Auster’s novel suggests, with dense reference to movies, has become the American Dream.

  Sunset Park, an actual place, is a run-down area of Brooklyn alongside a huge cemetery. Here it is that dreams die and American idols are buried alongside the nobodies who never made it. The story centres on a lost son/stepson. It is 2008. Miles Heller, who may or may not have murdered his stepbrother (even he is not sure), has drifted away from his publisher father, a character who has resemblances to Auster. His parents have broken up. His mother is a film and stage actress currently playing Winnie in Beckett’s Happy Days (Beckett, one recalls, is the author whom Lydia Davis cites as her principal influence). Miles’s stepmother is an academic, specialising (as did Hustvedt) on mid-Victorian fiction.

  As the novel opens, Miles Heller is employed as part of a four-man ‘trashing out’ team in Florida. Their job is to gut foreclosed-on properties, so they can be sold at auction. The wave of foreclosures, following the 2008 Wall Street crisis has done to whole swathes of suburban America what the tornado did to Dorothy’s farm shack in The Wizard of Oz. ‘Each house is a story of failure – of bankruptcy and default, of debt and foreclosure.’ Miles, to the irritation of his workmates, photographs the sites which the ‘Dunbar Realty Corporation’ strips of all human identity:

  he has taken it upon himself to document the last, lingering traces of those scattered lives in order to prove that the vanished families were once here, that the ghosts of people he will never see and never know are still present in the discarded things strewn about their empty houses.

  One thinks of the ‘dust heaps’ (i.e. mountains of human rubbish) in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, the text on which Hustvedt wrote her doctoral dissertation.

  After complications with his underage Cuban-American girlfriend, Pilar, Miles drifts back to New York where he joins a squat, until the heat cools, in a foreclosedon, but as yet untrashed, property, with three fellow drifters. Over the years of wandering he has become a connoisseur of the random vanities of human existence. The novel contains long musings on star baseball players, and movie stars, whose careers were cut short by freak accidents. There is an extended central meditation on the 1946 William Wyler-directed, Oscar-winning movie, The Best Years of Our Lives (Miles’s fellow squatter, Alice Bergstrom, a body-obsessed Scandinavian-American is writing a Columbia dissertation on the subject). Wyler’s film, in the glow of victory in the Second World War, expresses jubilant optimisms about America and its post-war future. Where, Sunset Park enquires, did all that hope go? Trashed, is the answer, like all those Florida family houses.

  Revolving ironically around happiness (whose ‘pursuit’, the Declaration of Independence promises, every American is entitled to), Sunset Park recalls the Beckett play in which Miles’s mother is starring. There are no happy days in America any more (‘happy days are here again’ was, of course, the campaign song of FDR, who dragged his country out of depression). Gloom everywhere. What strikes the reader of Auster’s other work is how different Sunset Park is from, say, The New York Trilogy. There remains the author’s irrepressible mischievousness (a character named Hertzberg, for example, walks across from What I Loved). The novel is different – looser, simpler, more story-driven – from anything the novelist has previously offered his readers.

  A similar loosening is evident in Hustvedt’s The Summer Without Men, published in 2011, a month or two after Sunset Park. The narrative bursts on to the page:

  Sometime after he said the word pause, I went mad and landed in the hospital. He did not say I don’t ever want to see you again or It’s over, but after thirty years of marriage pause was enough to turn me into a lunatic whose thoughts burst, ricocheted, and careened into one another like popcorn kernels in a microwave bag.

  It is 2008 – around thirty years after Hustvedt married Auster, one may pruriently calculate. Mia Fredricksen is a poet-professor of creative writing at Columbia, of Minnesota-Scandinavian origins. Her husband is a world-famous scientist. Unusually, the narrative of The Summer Without Men is interspersed with cartoons of Mia. As the novel’s jacket photo confirms, they are witty representations of the author herself. There are, as usual, coy allusions to Auster’s fiction embedded in the story. And, of course, there is the author’s love of nominal anagram – as in Iris/Siri. Mia anagrammatises as Mia/I am [Fredricksen] or, more fancifully ‘am I Fredricksen?’

  Mia resolves, during the marital pause, to return to her home town. Here she involves herself in two practical exercises in literary appreciation. She takes over a reading group for the ancient ladies of the town, among whom is her widowed mother. And she runs a creative writing class for a class of pubescent schoolgirls. Literature, she discovers, can do more for her than any prescription drug. She recovers her sanity – and, it is intimated, her husband. The story is told with an economy and spareness which is something new in her work. It will be interesting to see how it further evolves.

  Fancifully one can perceive a kind of marital duet. Or, if one stands a little further back – to take in the first Mrs Auster – a trio, all playing ensemble. It is a unique concatenation of novelists’ lives.

  287. Salman Rushdie 1947–

  He could start a brawl in a Trappist monastery.

  The date of birth is significant. If not, like his most famous character, Saleem Sinai, born on the stroke of midnight, 14 August 1947, Salman came into the world in the period when India again became India: simultaneously a very old and a very new country. Rushdie was born Muslim in Bombay (when Bombay was Bombay – he still prefers that name over Mumbai), a city in which ‘the West was totally mixed up with the East’. He was brought up in a home where English and ‘Hindustani’ – a ‘colloquial mixture of Hindi and Urdu’ – were spoken indiscriminately. Hindustani, he helpfully adds, is ‘the language of Bollywood movies’, that sublimely jumbled film genre. His grandfather had a reputation as an Urdu poet and imbued his grandson with a lifelong love of P. G. Wodehouse, a writer, as Rushdie mischievously claims, peculiarly congenial to the Indian mind.

  His father was a briefcase-carrying, Cambridge University-educated (Literature), businessman. Theirs was a vexed relationship. Rushdie Sr took offence at the satirical depiction of himself in Midnight’s Children (1981). Salman ‘pissed him off’ further by observing he had tactfully left most of the paternal satire out. Their reconciliation is recorded in the touching last sections of The Satanic Verses (1988), a novel which Anis Ahmed Rushdie did not live to read. Salman, the only son, was, as he records, pampered by the women in the family. He recalls as a primal literary experience seeing the film of The Wizard of Oz. ‘After I saw the film, I went home and wrote a short story called “Over the Rainbow.” I was probably nine or ten.’

  When asked what his great theme is, Rushdie answers ‘worlds in collision’. His upbringing is a bewildering series of post-colonial frictions. He, a child of the mosque, had his first formal education at Bombay’s Cathedral School. At thirteen-and-a-half he was sent halfway around the world to finish his school education at Rugby, Tom Brown’s school. Hughes’s novel starts with an extended tribute to Engl
and’s ‘Browns’, who have been instrumental in covering the globe imperial red. It was not an entirely congenial institution for someone literally brown. Dr Arnold’s school still had its Flashmans, one gathers. Rushdie says he knew ‘everything about racism’ by the time he left Rugby; he found escapist relief in The Lord of the Rings.

  Meanwhile, back in the subcontinent, his family was the victim of ethnic cleansing, forcing them to relocate to Karachi. Salman Rushdie was now a Pakistani. But if he felt he had roots anywhere it was two generations back in Kashmir. This is the region which supplies the beautifully composed prelude to Midnight’s Children. A continuously contested region, Rushdie ‘took it on’ at full-length in Shalimar the Clown (2005). Kashmir, he believes, is where the Third World War will start, kicked off by confrontation between the planet’s two most volatile nuclear powers. Those who question the prophetic powers of Salman Rushdie should be wary. His New York novel Fury (2001), with a dustjacket, chosen by the author, depicting the Empire State Building struck by lightning, came out five days before 9/11. Shalimar is a novel which the Western reader should ponder.

  Rushdie went on to King’s College, Cambridge, where he was, he recalled, happy. It was E. M. Forster’s college. His views on Passage to India have never, as far as I know, been recorded. He read history – against his father’s wishes, who demanded something more practical – economics, for example. Rushdie Sr was appalled at the thought that his son and heir should be a writer: ‘A cry burst out of him: What will I tell my friends? What he really meant was that all his friends’ less intelligent sons were pulling down big bucks in serious jobs and what – I was going to be a penniless novelist?’ Whatever else, the author of Midnight’s Children was not destined to be penniless.

  The subcontinent was currently wracked by war in which Rushdie was, by background, on both sides. He could have stayed on at the university – his third background – but, as the hero decides in Fury, the narrowness, infighting and ‘ultimate provincialism’ of Cambridge was intolerable. He went to London where he ‘futzed around’: it was an exciting decade, commemorated in the middle sections of The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999). Everyone of his age cohort was futzing. His first idea was to go on the stage – something, one fancies, which would have elicited an even louder wail from his father. His talent, he realised after a few performances, was inadequate (though the thrill is still there: he is always willing to do cameos for any film director who asks). He was broke, alienated from his father, living in a garret when – through one of his theatrical pals – he landed a job in advertising: the novelist’s equivalent to street-walking. All through the 1970s he would keep body and soul together coming up with tags and jingles for the commercial world. Meanwhile, he was writing fiction in his spare time – ‘flailing about’, as he later put it.

  His first published novel was Grimus (1975). The title of the novel, we are told (few occidental readers would have guessed) ‘is an anagram of the name “Simurg”, the immense, all-wise, fabled bird of pre-Islamic Persian mythology’. Rushdie’s later verdict on the novel is an uncompromising ‘garbage’ and there was nothing in the reviews to correct that opinion. ‘After the critical beating Grimus took,’ he records, ‘I completely rethought everything. I thought, OK, I have to write about something that I care about much more.’ He was also ‘scared’ at this period in the late 1970s; he felt he was losing the race. Amis and Ian McEwan and many other young stars were ‘zooming’ past him.

  The problem was, he recognised, ‘to find himself’, not to find a subject. He did so with Saleem Sinai and Midnight’s Children. Once created, it was Saleem, he felt, who was battering away at his typewriter keys. It was Saleem who mastered the trick of ‘dragging in everything’. The narrator-hero of the novel is conceived as one of the 1,000 children born at the precise chime of the moment of Indian Independence. They are blessed, or cursed, with ‘powers’ (Saleem’s is located in his majestic conk) and are inter-clairvoyant. Science fiction readers will recognise them as a version of the aliens in John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos – there is usually a broad strand of science fiction in Rushdie’s fictional tapestry. Saleem’s lifelong foe, and twin, will be Shiva, named after the Hindu god of destruction. Mythology – Hindu, Greek, Iranian and Roman – is another broad strand. Saleem and Shiva’s interwoven narratives comprise a history of the new, but primevally old, country. There are no English characters, although a strain of colonial blood, we learn, may course through Saleem’s veins thanks to some hanky-panky by the family’s now departed occidental landlord and some mischief in the hospital where he was born.

  The novel won the 1981 Booker Prize – and then kept on winning (as the Booker of Bookers). It was Salman Rushdie who was now zooming. He followed up with Shame (1983), which dumped – as controversially as its predecessor – on Pakistan and its ruling Bhutto dynasty. His novels were gaining him fame and making him dangerous enemies in equal measure. The Gandhi dynasty were mightily displeased by elements in Midnight’s Children and reached for their lawyers, but Rushdie had realised that the novel was one of the few free-fire zones left in modern life and rejoiced in the fact. Nothing was to be sacred. Sacrilege is a risky profession. The momentous date in his CV is (he loves the irony) St Valentine’s Day 1989 when he received, from the paramount leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, a ‘love letter’ in the form of a fatwa. The word was not one familiar in the West although, thanks to Salman Rushdie, it now forever will be. The offence was, of course, The Satanic Verses, published a few months earlier. The novel opens with a powerfully symbolic episode. An Air India jumbo jet explodes. Two Indians fall 30,000 feet on to Hastings – that symbolic beach, where William the Conqueror ate his symbolic mouthful of sand. Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha are, like William, illegal immigrants. Or angel and devil. Or Hindu and Muslim anti-types.

  Mid-air explosions which slaughter hundreds of infidels were not something to distress the Ayatollah Khomeini. What drew down his theocratic wrath was (1) an impudent depiction of his fundamentalist self in The Satanic Verses; (2) an even more satirical depiction of the Prophet, under the insulting Western name ‘Mahound’; and (3) the allegation that the Qur’an had been strategically altered (‘Satanically’) and rephrased by a Persian scribe called ‘Salman’. Rushdie’s aim was less heresy than to suggest the same kind of imagination at work in the Muslim holy text that German New Criticism had found, a hundred years earlier, in the Bible. Put another way, the holy book was not Revelation but the almighty’s novel. The fatwa laid on every devout Muslim the obligation to kill the apostate. Rushdie was bundled into protective custody by Britain’s Special Branch, under instructions from Mrs Thatcher – ‘Mrs Torture’ in the novel. It was wormwood for the ruling Tory party. Geoffrey Howe, Foreign Secretary in 1989, observed that ‘The British government, the British people, do not have any affection for the book … It compares Britain with Hitler’s Germany.’

  Diplomatic relations with Iran broke down and Rushdie would spend years in the ground beneath the world’s feet. As his friend Martin Amis wittily put it: ‘He vanished into the front page.’ His own view was that it was like ‘a bad Salman Rushdie novel’. Whatever else, it disrupted his personal life and, as doubtless biographies will one day reveal, may at least partly explain a series of broken marriages and short-term relationships with beautiful women (something else that kept him on the front pages). He produced in this jail-time children’s books and major works, notably The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), depicting an India where he was no longer able to go, on peril of his life, but which he still cared about. The most ambitious work of this period is The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999), a novel which, among much else, examines the new supranational culture of pop music. Rushdie later ventured on concert appearances with U2, for whose congenial leader, Bono, he wrote lyrics. Hard to imagine Kingsley Amis doing anything of that kind.

  By the turn of the century Rushdie, with necessary precautions, was free to emerge from underground. He moved to Ameri
ca, citing as one reason the bitchiness of literary London. He has no explanation for the personal animosity he evokes. ‘It was a strange feeling’, he says, ‘to be characterised by some in the British press as an unlikable person. I’m not quite sure what I did to deserve it.’ He was also recoiling from the breakdown of his latest marriage. The fictional outcome was Fury (2001). In it Malik Solanka, a former Cambridge professor, similarly recovering from a broken marriage and broken career, sets out to find a new life in New York City. It can be seen as what alcoholics call a ‘geographical cure’. But simply because history deposited him in Manhattan didn’t mean Rushdie liked his new home any more than he liked ‘Mrs Torture’s’ Britain, Bhutto’s Pakistan or the Gandhi’s India. As he pictures New York, it’s a circle of hell, metropolitan fury, wide-bore, full-volume: ‘Garbage trucks like giant cockroaches moved through the city, roaring. He was never out of earshot of a siren, an alarm, a large vehicle’s reverse-gear bleeps, the beat of some unbearable music.’

  Disowned as it might be, England still felt it had a stake in him and in 2007 Salman Rushdie was knighted. Predictably it provoked riots across the Islamic world and threats of retaliatory suicide bombing. The Enchantress of Florence (2008) was written in the throes of yet another divorce and doubly centred on Renaissance Italy and the Mughal Empire. In a hostile review Nirpal Dhaliwal made the case that the novel is Hinduphobic. The art of making friends constantly eludes Rushdie. He continues to write and stir up hornets. His depictions of what that writing amounts to are self-deprecating and ironic. One depiction, in Midnight’s Children, is the dying man’s pickle factory – a place where dead fruit preserves a misleadingly tangy artificial afterlife. Another ironic portrayal is that in Fury, where the hero Malik goes from academia into show-business, doing ‘philosophical dolls’ for TV: half Wittgenstein, half Thunderbirds.