Rushdie archive offers literary treasures

Internationally acclaimed author Salman Rushdie (left), shown here with President Jim Wagner at a press conference on the Emory campus, has given his archive to the Robert W. Woodruff Library. Included in that archive are 98 boxes of papers and several computers filled with thoughts and writings.

Among the 98 boxes of papers that make up the Salman Rushdie archive in the Robert W. Woodruff Library, library staff recently found a notebook in which Rushdie recorded the progress of his writing and some of his most personal and private thoughts.

In one entry, dating from the late 1980s, months when he was writing The Satanic Verses, Rushdie recognizes the degree to which that novel has become a personal exploration of the self and anticipates the creative liberation he hoped the work would unleash.

“When, if, I ever finish The Satanic Verses, I will, I feel, have completed my ‘first business,' that of naming the parts of myself,” he wrote. “Then there will be nothing left to write about; except, of course, the whole human life.”

News this past fall of Emory's acquisition of the Salman Rushdie archive, and of Rushdie's five-year appointment as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emory, set off a wave of worldwide media coverage, including a front-page story in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, coverage in The New York Times and other newspapers stretching from Europe to India.

With the arrival of the Rushdie archive, library staff have begun the time-consuming work of arranging and describing the disordered collection of manuscripts, letters, notebooks, and photographs and the personal detritus that makes up Rushdie's literary archive.

Once cataloging is complete, students and scholars will have unprecedented access to this major contemporary novelist's life and work. The Salman Rushdie archive promises to reshape our understanding of Rushdie's creative development and the sources of his art.

Among the many remarkable items to come to light in the early days of processing the papers are scripts for a number of early plays that were never produced or published. Also present are complete manuscripts for two unpublished novels—The Antagonist and Madame Rom—which Rushdie wrote in the mid-1970s after he completed his studies at Cambridge and while he was working as an advertising copywriter in London. The manuscript of his debut fantasy novel, Grimus, is in the archive as well as drafts—including cut scenes and significantly altered passages—of his critically acclaimed novels Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses.

In a recent interview, Rushdie recalled the moment while writing Midnight's Children when he suddenly discovered the voice that he would employ to relate the story of his protagonist, Saleem Sinai.

“I've always remembered it as the day I became a writer,” he said. The progress of his writing and such moments of creative discovery are fully documented in the journals that Rushdie has kept for the past 30 years.

Turning the pages of these journals, one often comes upon sketches that Rushdie has doodled in the margins while gathering his thoughts. In one he draws the published book he is then writing and even sketches his own dust jacket author photo, long before he has finished writing the novel itself.

In recent years, Rushdie has composed at the computer; therefore, arriving with the traditional, paper-based archive were four computers from which library preservation and systems staff are now working to recover the texts of Rushdie's writings journal entries, and his most recent email communications. By taking steps now to stabilize and preserve these fugitive and imperiled writings, the library will be able to ensure that students and scholars have access to an equally full record of Rushdie's writing life in recent years.

Even as the Rushdie archive allows us to turn our gaze inward on the author's own life and work, it also points outward to a wide literary circle. Of great interest to future biographers and to students of world literature will be the many hundreds of letters from a worldwide community of leading contemporary writers.

Among the many authors represented in the Rushdie archive Anita Desai, Nadine Gordimer, Günter Grass, Vaclav Havel and this past year's Nobel laureate for literature, the Turkish novelist Orham Pamuk.

As Deepika Bahri, director of Emory's Asian studies program, notes: “The Salman Rushdie archive will be a durable and generative resource for generations of scholars.”— Steve Enniss