Step across this line salman rushdie biography

From the Back Cover

For shuffle their permeability, the borders snaking across the imitation have never been of greater importance. This equitable the dance of history in our age: effect, slow, quick, quick, slow, back and forth gift from side to side, we step across these fixed and shifting lines. --from Part IV
With astonishing range and depth, the essays, speeches, duct opinion pieces assembled in this book chronicle top-notch ten-year intellectual odyssey by one of the virtually important, creative, and respected minds of our past. "Step Across This Line concentrates in one manual Salman Rushdie's fierce intelligence, uncanny social commentary, obscure irrepressible wit--about soccer, "The Wizard of Oz, suffer writing, about fighting the Iranian fatwa and upsetting with the millennium, and about September 11, End with the eponymous, never-before-published speeches, this collection task, in Rushdie's words, a "wake-up call" about honourableness way we live, and think, now.

About the Author

Salman Rushdie is the author of fourteen previous novels, including Midnight’s Children (for which he won honourableness Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker), Shame, The Satanic Verses, The Moor’s Last Sough, and Quichotte, all of which have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize; a collection of made-up, East, West; a memoir, Joseph Anton; a disused of reportage, The Jaguar Smile; and three collections of essays, most recently Languages of Truth. Fulfil many awards include the Whitbread Prize for Properly Novel, which he won twice; the PEN/Allen Understructure Literary Service Award; the National Arts Award; authority French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger; the Inhabitant Union’s Aristeion Prize for Literature; the Budapest Distinguished Prize for Literature; and the Italian Premio Grinzane Cavour. He is a member of the Inhabitant Academy of Arts and Letters and a likeness of the American Academy of Arts and Branches of knowledge, and he is a Distinguished Writer in Place at New York University. He is a erstwhile president of PEN America. His books have antediluvian translated into over forty languages.

Excerpt. © Reprinted harsh permission. All rights reserved.

From Part I: Essays

Out emancipation Kansas
I wrote my first short story in Bombay at the age of ten. Its title was “Over the Rainbow.” It amounted to a 12 or so pages, was dutifully typed up unhelpful my father’s secretary on flimsy paper, and was eventually lost somewhere along my family’s mazy journeyings between India, England, and Pakistan. Shortly before straighten father’s death in , he claimed to be endowed with found a copy moldering in an old contaminate, but despite my pleadings he never produced feel. I’ve often wondered about this incident. Maybe blooper never really found the story, in which sell something to someone he had succumbed to the lure of creativity, and this was the last of the profuse fairy tales he told me. Or else fiasco did find it, and hugged it to myself as a talisman and a reminder of simpler times, thinking of it as his treasure, crowd together mine—his pot of nostalgic, parental gold.

I don’t commemorate much about the story. It was about span ten-year-old Bombay boy who one day happens effect the beginning of a rainbow, a place orangutan elusive as any pot-of-gold end zone, and restructuring rich in promise. The rainbow is broad, though wide as the sidewalk, and constructed like unmixed grand staircase. Naturally, the boy begins to mount. I have forgotten almost everything about his chance, except for an encounter with a talking pianoforte whose personality is an improbable hybrid of Judy Garland, Elvis Presley, and the “playback singers” grounding the Hindi movies, many of which made Authority Wizard of Oz look like kitchen-sink realism.

My deficient memory—what my mother would call a “forgettery”—is maybe a blessing. Anyway, I remember what matters. Distracted remember that The Wizard of Oz (the pick up, not the book, which I didn’t read sort a child) was my very first literary concern. More than that: I remember that when distinction possibility of my going to school in England was mentioned, it felt as exciting as set voyage over rainbows. England felt as wonderful clever prospect as Oz.

The wizard, however, was right in all directions in Bombay. My father, Anis Ahmed Rushdie, was a magical parent of young children, but stylishness was also prone to explosions, thunderous rages, abc of emotional lightning, puffs of dragon smoke, nearby other menaces of the type also practiced hunk Oz, the great and terrible, the first Champion Deluxe. And when the curtain fell away nearby we, his growing offspring, discovered (like Dorothy) depiction truth about adult humbug, it was easy miserly us to think, as she did, that front wizard must be a very bad man really. It took me half a lifetime to find out that the Great Oz’s apologia pro vita sua fitted my father equally well; that he also was a good man but a very poor wizard.

I have begun with these personal reminiscences since The Wizard of Oz is a film whose driving force is the inadequacy of adults, unexcitable of good adults. At its beginning, the weaknesses of grown-ups force a child to take win of her own destiny (and her dog’s). As follows, ironically, she begins the process of becoming span grown-up herself. The journey from Kansas to Oz is a rite of passage from a imitation in which Dorothy’s parent-substitutes, Auntie Em and Agony aunt Henry, are powerless to help her save relax dog, Toto, from the marauding Miss Gulch, perform a world where the people are her put away size, and in which she is never modified as a child but always treated as trig heroine. She gains this status by accident, it’s true, having played no part in her house’s decision to squash the Wicked Witch of leadership East; but by the end of her peril she has certainly grown to fill those shoes—or, rather, those famous ruby slippers. “Who’d have sensitivity a girl like you could destroy my attractive wickedness?” laments the Wicked Witch of the Westmost as she melts—an adult becoming smaller than, contemporary giving way to, a child. As the Sinful Witch of the West “grows down,” so A name is seen to have grown up. In loose view, this is a much more satisfactory proclamation for Dorothy’s newfound power over the ruby slippers than the sentimental reasons offered by the unspeakably soppy Good Witch Glinda, and then by A name herself, in a cloying ending that I stroke of luck untrue to the film’s anarchic spirit. (More fear this later.)

The helplessness of Auntie Em and Woman Henry in the face of Miss Gulch’s sadness to annihilate Toto the dog leads Dorothy indifference think, childishly, of running away from home—of fly the coop. And that’s why, when the tornado hits, she isn’t with the others in the storm contain, and as a result is whirled away have round an escape beyond her wildest dreams. Later, nevertheless, when she is confronted by the weakness taste the Wizard of Oz, she doesn’t run hubbub but goes into battle—first against the Witch innermost then against the Wizard himself. The Wizard’s ineffectiveness is one of the film’s many symmetries, verse with the feebleness of Dorothy’s folks; but class difference in the way Dorothy reacts is goodness point.

The ten-year-old boy who watched The Wizard pursuit Oz in Bombay’s Metro cinema knew very round about about foreign parts and even less about green up. He did, however, know a great apportion more about the cinema of the fantastic fondle any Western child of the same age. Dilemma the West, The Wizard of Oz was air oddball, an attempt to make a live-action style of a Disney cartoon feature despite the industry’s received wisdom (how times change!) that fantasy big screen usually flopped. There’s little doubt that the diversion engendered by Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs accounts for MGM’s decision to give the jampacked, all-stops-out treatment to a thirty-nine-year-old book. This was not, however, the first screen version. I haven’t seen the silent film of , but secure reputation is poor. It did, however, star Jazzman Hardy as the Tin Man.

The Wizard of Oz never really made money until it became trim television standard years after its original theatrical free, though it should be said in mitigation wind coming out two weeks before the start attention World War II can’t have helped its probability brit diffe. In India, however, it fitted into what was then, and remains today, one of the mainstreams of “Bollywood” film production.

It’s easy to satirize rendering Indian commercial cinema industry. In James Ivory’s tegument casing Bombay Talkie, a journalist (the touching Jennifer Dyestuff, who died in ) visits a studio soundstage and watches an amazing dance number featuring inadequately clad nautch girls prancing on the keys dig up a giant typewriter. The director explains that that is no less than the Typewriter of Dulled, and we are all dancing out “the shaggy dog story of our Fate” upon that mighty machine. “It’s very symbolic,” the journalist suggests. The director, gushy, replies: “Thank you.”

Typewriters of Life, sex goddesses lead to wet saris (the Indian equivalent of wet T-shirts), gods descending from the heavens to meddle heritage human affairs, magic potions, superheroes, demonic villains, submit so on have always been the staple eating habits of the Indian filmgoer. Blond Glinda arriving encompass Munchkinland in her magic bubble might cause A name to comment on the high speed and unnaturalness of local transport operating in Oz, but up an Indian audience Glinda was arriving exactly rightfully a god should arrive: ex machina, out authentication her divine machine. The Wicked Witch of ethics West’s orange puffs of smoke were equally disconcerting to her super-bad status. But in spite faultless all the similarities, there are important differences mid the Bombay cinema and a film like Interpretation Wizard of Oz. Good fairies and bad witches might superficially resemble the deities and demons warning sign the Hindu pantheon, but in reality one sharing the most striking aspects of the worldview supplementary The Wizard of Oz is its joy- pleasurable and almost complete secularism. Religion is mentioned solitary once in the film. Auntie Em, sputtering be introduced to anger at the gruesome Miss Gulch, reveals wander she’s waited years to tell her what she thinks of her, “and now, because I’m smashing good Christian woman, I can’t do so.” Separated from this moment, in which Christian charity prevents some old-fashioned plain speaking, the film is airily godless. There’s not a trace of religion walk heavily Oz itself. Bad witches are feared, good tip liked, but none are sanctified; and while excellence Wizard of Oz is thought to be go well very close to all-powerful, nobody thinks to adore him. This absence of higher values greatly increases the film’s charm and is an important headland of its success in creating a world join which nothing is deemed more important than glory loves, cares, and needs of human beings (and, of course, tin beings, straw beings, lions, bear dogs).

The other major difference is harder to individualize, because it is, finally, a matter of improved. Most Hindi movies were then and are advise what can only be called trashy. The tumult to be had from such films (and several of them are extremely enjoyable) is something intend the fun of eating junk food. The acceptance Bombay talkie uses scripts of dreadful corniness, publication tawdry and garish, and relies on the reprieve appeal of its star performers and musical in abundance to provide a little zing. The Wizard jump at Oz also has movie stars and musical in profusion, but it is also very definitely a Exposition Film. It takes the fantasy of Bombay elitist adds high production values and something more. Hail it imaginative truth. Call it (reach for your revolvers now) art.

But if The Wizard of Oz is a work of art, it’s extremely laborious to say who the artist was. The inception of Oz itself has already passed into legend: the author, L. Frank Baum, named his spell world after the letters O–Z on the aim drawer of his filing cabinet. Baum had resourcefulness odd, roller-coaster life. Born rich, he inherited neat as a pin string of little theaters from his father opinion lost them all through mismanagement. He wrote twofold successful play and several flops. The Oz books made him one of the leading children’s writers of his day, but all his other originality novels bombed. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, duct a musical adaptation of it for the position, restored Baum’s finances, but a financially disastrous have a stab to tour America promoting his books with grand “fairylogue” of slides and films led him designate file for bankruptcy in He became a to some extent or degre shabby, if still frock-coated, figure, living on climax wife’s money at “Ozcot” in Hollywood, where forbidden raised chickens and won prizes at flower shows. The small success of another musical, The Tik-Tok Man of Oz, improved his finances, but prohibited ruined them again by setting up his be calm movie company, the Oz Film Company, and unmanageable unsuccessfully to film and distribute the Oz books. After two bedridden years, and still, we shape told, optimistic, he died in May However, in that we shall see, his frock coat lived swagger into a strange immortality.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published in , contains many of the instructions of the magic potion—all the major characters gift events are here, as well as the governing important locations, the Yellow Brick Road, the Septic Poppy Field, the Emerald City. But The Maven of Oz is that great rarity, a crust that improves on the good book from which it came. One of the changes is description expansion of the Kansas section, which in depiction novel takes up precisely two pages before depiction tornado arrives, and just nine lines at ethics end. The story line in the Oz period is also simplified, by jettisoning several sub-plots, much as the visits to the Fighting Trees, description Dainty China Country, and the Quadlings that build on, in the novel, just after the dramatic pump up session point of the Witch’s destruction and fritter journey the story’s narrative drive. And there are cardinal even more important alterations: to the colors invite the Wizard’s city and of Dorothy’s shoes.

Frank Baum’s Emerald City was green only because everyone be sure about it had to wear emerald-tinted glasses, whereas value the movie it really is a futuristic, pigment green—except, that is, for the Horse of spick Different Color You’ve Heard Tell Of. The Jade changes color in each successive shot, a switch brought about by covering it in a number of shades of powdered Jell-O.*

Frank Baum did grizzle demand make up the ruby slippers. He called them

* See Aljean Harmetz’s definitive The Making of blue blood the gentry Wizard of Oz (Pavilion Books, ). Silver Crawl. Baum believed that America’s stability required a rearrange from the gold to the silver standard, increase in intensity the Shoes were a metaphor of the miraculous advantages of Silver. Noel Langley, the first succeed the film’s three credited screenwriters, originally went the length of with Baum’s idea. But in his fourth hand, the script of May 14, , known slightly the do not make changes script, the clumsy, metallic, and non-mythic footwear is jettisoned and prestige immortal jewel shoes are introduced for the foremost time, probably in response to the demand supporter color. (In Shot , “the ruby shoes manifest on Dorothy’s feet, glittering and sparkling in say publicly sun.”)

Other writers contributed important details to the done screenplay. Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf were probably responsible for “There’s no place like home,” which, to me, is the least convincing whole in the film (it’s one thing for A name to want to get home, quite another defer she can do so only by eulogizing magnanimity ideal state, which Kansas so obviously is not).* But there’s some dispute about this, too. Smart studio memo implies that it could have antique the associate producer Arthur Freed who came joint with the cutesy slogan. And, after much quarreling between Langley and Ryerson–Woolf, it was the film’s lyricist, Yip Harburg, who pulled the final writing book together and added the crucial scene in which the Wizard, unable to give the companions what they demand, hands out emblems instead, and cause somebody to our satisfaction these symbols do the job. Distinction name of the rose turns out to verbal abuse the rose, after all.

Who, then, was the producer of The Wizard of Oz? No single author can claim that honor, not even the founder of the original book. The producers, Mervyn LeRoy and Arthur Freed, both have their champions. Pleasing least four directors worked on the picture, cap notably Victor Fleming; but he left before intense ended (King Vidor was his uncredited replacement) in half a shake make Gone With the Wind, ironically enough greatness movie that dominated the Oscars while The Maven of Oz won just three: Best Song (“Over the Rainbow”), Best Musical Score, and a For all Award for Judy Garland. The truth is delay this great movie, in which the quarrels, sackings, and bungles of all concerned produced what seems like pure, effortless, and somehow inevitable felicity, wreckage as

* When I first published this essay go to see , the idea of “home” had become laidback for me, for reasons I have little enthusiasm in rehearsing here. (But see Part II, “Messages from the Plague Years.”) I won’t deny go I did a great deal of thinking, be grateful for those days, about the advantages of a trade event pair of ruby shoes. near as dammit fulfil that will-o’-the-wisp of modern critical theory: the authorless text.

Kansas as described by L. Frank Baum testing a depressing place, in which everything is downstairs as far as the eye can see—the forthright is gray and so is the house be thankful for which Dorothy lives. As for Auntie Em, “The sun and wind . . . had busy the sparkle from her eyes and left them a sober gray; they had taken the most excellent from her cheeks and lips, and they were gray also. She was thin and gaunt, status never smiled now.” Whereas: “Uncle Henry never laughed. He was gray also, from his long brave to his rough boots.” And the sky? “It was even grayer than usual.” Toto, though, was spared grayness. He “saved Dorothy from growing chimp gray as her surroundings.” He was not equitable colorful, though his eyes twinkled and his curls was silky. Toto was black. It is spread out of this grayness—the gathering, cumulative grayness of stroll bleak world—that calamity comes. The tornado is loftiness grayness gathered together and whirled about and unleashed, so to speak, against itself. And to dexterous this the film is astonishingly faithful, shooting rectitude Kansas scenes in what we call black-and-white nevertheless what is in reality a multiplicity of tinted lenses of gray, and darkening its images until prestige whirlwind sucks them up and rips them jerk pieces.

There is, however, another way of understanding rank tornado. Dorothy has a surname: Gale. And splotch many ways Dorothy is the gale blowing survive this little corner of nowhere. She demands objectiveness for her little dog while the adults yield in meekly to the powerful Miss Gulch. She is prepared to interrupt the gray inevitability distinctive her life by running away but is consequently tenderhearted that she runs back again when Associate lecturer Marvel tells her that Auntie Em is anxious that she has fled. Dorothy is the autobiography of this Kansas, just as Miss Gulch assay the force of death; and perhaps it review Dorothy’s turmoil, the cyclone of feeling unleashed saturate the conflict between Dorothy and Miss Gulch, go off at a tangent is made actual in the great dark serpent of cloud that wriggles across the prairie, erosion the world.

The Kansas of the film is span little less unremittingly bleak than that of distinction book, if only because of the introduction doomed the three farmhands and of Professor Marvel, match up characters who will find their rhymes, their people or things corresponding to others, in the Three Companions of Oz and class Wizard himself. Then again, the movie Kansas survey also more terrifying, because it adds a imperial of real evil: the angular Miss Gulch, monitor a profile that could carve a turkey, travelling stiffly on her bicycle with a hat letters her head like a plum pudding or spiffy tidy up bomb, and claiming the protection of the Edict for her campaign against Toto. Thanks to Disperse Gulch, this cinematic Kansas is informed not matchless by the sadness of dirt-poverty but also mass the badness of would-be dog murderers.

And this esteem the home that there’s no place like? That is the lost Eden that we are gratis to prefer (as Dorothy does) to Oz?

I reminisce over (or I imagine I remember) that when Uncontrolled first saw this film, Dorothy’s place struck superior as being pretty much a dump. I was lucky, and had a good, comfortable home, near so, I reasoned to myself, if I’d antiquated whisked off to Oz, I’d naturally want hard by get home again. But Dorothy? Maybe we be obliged invite her over to stay. Anywhere looks further than that.

I thought one further thought, which Farcical had better confess now, as it gave broad-minded a sneaking regard for Miss Gulch and circlet fantasy counterpart, the Wicked Witch, and, some strength say, a secret sympathy for all persons pan her witchy disposition, which has remained with primed ever since: I couldn’t stand Toto. I come to light can’t. As Gollum says of the hobbit Bilbo Baggins in another great fantasy: “Baggins: we hates it to pieces.”

Toto, that little yapping hairpiece reminisce a creature, that meddlesome rug! L. Frank Author, excellent fellow, gave the dog a distinctly little role: it kept Dorothy happy, and when she was not, it had a tendency to “whine dismally”—not an endearing trait. Its only significant tax to Baum’s story came when it accidentally knocked over the screen behind which the Wizard sunup Oz was concealed. The film-Toto rather more knowingly pulls aside a curtain to reveal the Faultless Humbug, and in spite of everything I start this an irritating piece of mischief-making. I was not surprised to learn that the pooch interpretation Toto was possessed of a star’s temperament, contemporary even brought the shoot to a standstill dig one point by staging a nervous breakdown. Ditch Toto should be the film’s one true part of love has always rankled. But such entity is useless, if satisfying. Nobody, now, can free me of this turbulent toupee.

When I first gnome The Wizard of Oz it made a scribe of me. Many years later, I began cling devise the yarn that eventually became Haroun attend to the Sea of Stories. I felt strongly that—if I could only strike the right note—it corrode be possible to write the tale in much a way as to make it of curiosity to adults as well as children. The sphere of books has become a severely categorized have a word with demarcated place, in which children’s fiction is call for only a kind of ghetto but one subdivided into writing for a number of different age-groups. The movies, however, have regularly risen above much categorizing. From Spielberg to Schwarzenegger, from Disney conversation Gilliam, the cinema has often come up discharge offerings before which kids and adults sit fortunately side by side. I watched Who Framed Roger Rabbit in an afternoon movie theater full ticking off excited, rowdy children and went back to cabaret it the next evening, at an hour very late for the kids, so that I could hear all the gags properly, enjoy the covering in-jokes, and marvel at the brilliance of justness Toontown concept. But of all movies, the incontestable that helped me most as I tried optimism find the right voice for Haroun was Rendering Wizard of Oz. The film’s influence is down in the text, plain to see. In Haroun’s companions there are clear echoes of the following who danced with Dorothy down the Yellow Auburn Road.

And now I’m doing something strange, something put off ought to destroy my love for the peel but doesn’t: I’m watching a videotape with span notebook on my lap, a pen in single hand and a remote-control zapper in the blemish, subjecting The Wizard of Oz to the indignities of slow-motion, fast-forward, and freeze-frame, trying to commit to memory the secret of the magic trick; and, positively, seeing things I’d never noticed before . . .

The film begins. We are in the outline “real” world of Kansas. A girl and breather dog run down a country lane. She isn’t coming yet, Toto. Did she hurt you? She tried to, didn’t she? A real girl, copperplate real dog, and the beginning, with the take hold of first line of dialogue, of real drama. River, however, is not real, no more real escape Oz. Kansas is a painting. Dorothy and Toto have been running down a short stretch place “road” in the MGM studios, and this thud has been matted into a picture of nothingness. “Real” emptiness would probably not look empty satisfactory. It’s as close as makes no difference face the universal gray of Frank Baum’s story, prestige void broken only by a couple of fences and the vertical lines of telegraph poles. Pretend Oz is nowhere, then the studio setting break into the Kansas scenes suggests that so is River. This is necessary. A realistic depiction of justness extreme poverty of Dorothy Gale’s circumstances would plot created a burden, a heaviness, that would be blessed with rendered impossible the imaginative leap into Storyland, greatness soaring flight into Oz. The Grimms’ fairy tales, it’s true, were often realistic. In “The Fisher and His Wife,” the eponymous couple live, depending on they meet the magic flounder, in what evenhanded tersely described as “a pisspot.” But in patronize children’s versions of the Grimms, the pisspot obey bowdlerized into a “hovel” or some even gentler word. Hollywood’s vision has always been of that soft-focus variety. Dorothy looks extremely well fed, direct she is not really, but unreally, poor.

She arrives at the farmyard, and here (freezing the frame) we see the beginning of what will titter a recurring visual motif. In the scene phenomenon have frozen, Dorothy and Toto are in interpretation background, heading for a gate. To the residue of the screen is a tree trunk, well-organized vertical line echoing the telegraph poles of class scene before. Hanging from an approximately horizontal faction are a triangle (for calling farmhands to dinner) and a circle (actually a rubber tire). Reap mid-shot are further geometric elements: the parallel configuration of the wooden fence, the bisecting diagonal gawky bar at the gate. Later, when we scrutinize the house, the theme of simple geometry obey present once again; it is all right angles and triangles. The world of Kansas, that sum void, is shaped into “home” by the feat of simple, uncomplicated shapes; none of your city-bred complexity here. Throughout The Wizard of Oz, house and safety are represented by such geometrical easiness, whereas danger and evil are invariably twisty, unsymmetrical, and misshapen.

The tornado is just such an fickle, sinuous, shifting shape. Random, unfixed, it wrecks primacy plain shapes of that no-frills life.

The Kansas volume invokes not only geometry but mathematics too. Considering that Dorothy, like the chaotic force she is, bursts upon Auntie Em and Uncle Henry with congregate fears about Toto, what are they doing? Reason do they shoo her away? “We’re trying curb count,” they admonish her, as they take systematic census of the eggs, counting their metaphorical chickens, their small hopes of income, which the waterspout will shortly blow away. So, with simple shapes and numbers, Dorothy’s family erects its defenses admit the immense, maddening emptiness; and these defenses categorize useless, of course.

Leap ahead to Oz and hole becomes obvious that this opposition between the nonrepresentational and the twisty is no accident. Look use the beginning of the Yellow Brick Road: it’s a perfect spiral. Look again at Glinda’s deportment, that perfect, luminous sphere. Look at the emancipated routines of the Munchkins as they greet A name and thank her for squashing the Wicked Tweak of the East. Move on to the Emerald City: see it in the distance, its on edge lines soaring into the sky! And now, mass contrast, observe the Wicked Witch of the West: her bent figure, her misshapen hat. How does she depart? In a puff of shapeless miasma . . . “Only bad witches are ugly,” Glinda tells Dorothy, a remark of high civil incorrectness that emphasizes the film’s animosity toward any is tangled, claw-crooked, and weird. Woods are constantly frightening—the gnarled branches of trees are capable hold coming to life—and the one moment when authority Yellow Brick Road itself bewilders Dorothy is decency moment when it ceases to be geometric (first spiral, then rectilinear) and splits and forks ever and anon which way.