Written by John Turner   

I watched most of Salman Rushdie’s three hour interview on PBS’s Book TV yesterday. It was a delight. Rushdie is such an articulate and intelligent man, his musings offer a very strong contrast to what one usually gets on TV.

One of the fortunate things about opening the phones to viewers for three hours is that there’s time to get a great variety of questions, some of them not much related to what an author is there to talk about. It’s interesting to discover the opinions of literary figures on nonliterary topics. Sometimes what they think is vapid, but that wasn’t the case with Rushdie. He managed to find something sensible to say about every question put to him.

One caller asked him why he has now chosen to live in the United States. He answered that he hasn’t; he has chosen rather to live in New York. He went on to comment that his allegiances run more strongly to cities than they do to countries, and that Bombay, London and New York are the cities he has found most enticing.

It’s not a flippant point. Cities have more sharply defined characteristics than countries do, and it’s possible to like a city located in a country you don’t particularly like at all, or, at least, are indifferent to. I, for example, have a much clearer and warmer relationship with my little town of Montpelier than I do with Vermont, and certainly much warmer than I do with the whole of the United States. I don’t mind at all being described as a citizen of Montpelier whereas there have times over the past decade when I haven’t been sure about my American citizenship. If we all strengthened our ties to our towns, cities, or locales, at the expense of fervid nationalism, we would probably have a healthier society overall.

Rushdie was asked several times about the values he has tried to propagate in his novels. He was careful to say he has no interest in telling people what to think. That, he says, is the job of politicians and priests. Novelists, by contrast, raise questions which they never answer completely. The question led to a discussion of the relationship of writers to governments, and Rushdie agreed it is generally the role of writers to oppose governments, politicians, generals, and officials of all sorts.

My guess is that most people don’t understand the worth of that sentiment, and think that writers can partake of the same kind of boosterism and patriotism as senators and military officials do. And maybe they can, if they’re hack writers. But people who are serious about literature -- whether readers or writers -- are forced to recognize that the propaganda of political entities is always sprinkled liberally with lies. If you are required by your profession to mouth them nonetheless, you can’t be genuinely loyal to the integrity of words, which is the primary virtue of a literary person. You might say that politicians use words whereas literary people serve them. If you were to mention to the average general that words are more important than nations, you would likely be met with a blank stare.

A weakness of our educational system is that it gives virtually no attention to the influence of vocation on character. I never heard a teacher say -- except, perhaps, myself -- that if you’re going to be a ... doctor, lawyer, Indian chief, then you’re going to be expected to say, and believe, this or that. And if you don’t want to believe this or that then you had better give careful thought to how you can resist the pressures without being destroyed, or, else, look for another line of work.

Several callers wanted to know what Rushdie thought about Christopher Hitchens’s attacks on organized religion. He acknowledged, with no hemming or hawing, that he was more in Hitchens’s camp than out of it. I am not, he admitted, a person of religious faith. He then, though, continued to make what I thought was an important point, laying out the difference between private and public religion. If someone finds personal sustenance in religious belief, Rushdie said, then no one else has any right to criticize him for it. But when the stances one takes on public matters arise from religious faith, then he opens himself to disagreement just as fully as if his positions came from personal taste or group loyalty. Drawing a line between the two is, of course, not easy. But I think it can be confidently said that religious positions in the public arena deserve no more, nor no less, respect than judgments arising from any other motive. If we would stop pretending to be pious about issues we feel no piety towards, we could discuss our differences much more easily and sensibly.

Writers usually relish question about the process and effects of writing, and Rushdie was not an exception. The most interesting thing he said about the writing life had to do with its influence on self-knowledge. If you sit down and try to tell a story -- a story of any kind, fiction or nonfiction -- you’ll learn about yourself far in excess of what you can get from weekly psychotherapeutic sessions. So far, I haven’t had the joy of a psychotherapeutic session, so I can’t testify as an expert, but I suspect strongly that Rushdie is right. It’s a bracing thing to be searching always for the right word and to be asking yourself why you think it’s right.

It would be a grand thing, on most days, to hear a man like Rushdie talk. I suspect for most of us though it’s a rare experience. I grew up thinking that when I was grown up I would have great conversations -- and I have had some, but not nearly as many as I want or expected. Listening to someone on TV is not as good as talking with him. But still, when it’s Rushdie, I’m glad for the opportunity.