Toni Morrison is America’s most famous black writer. Her latest novel, Paradise, is being hailed as her best yet. Katharine Viner spoke to her
There are 3 000 people in the Midland Theatre, Kansas City, and the place is packed to the gods. They are here for Toni Morrison, black America’s most famous novelist, and the air is heavy with expectation.
When she finally walks on stage she gets a standing ovation just for that. ”Ms Morrison, you’re wonderful!” yells a woman. ”Ain’t that so,” mutters the young man in the next row, clutching a gleaming hardback copy of her new novel, Paradise.
Morrison begins to read from the book, her silky voice punctuated by laughter and shouts of ”all right!” from the crowd. She takes questions from smilers who ask what she meant by the date on page 43 of her 1973 novel, Sula, and does she write longhand, and welcome to Kansas City, Ms Morrison! They can’t quite believe they’ve got her to come out here, to this not-famous-for-much town right in the middle of the United States.
After an hour on stage she scoots off, and the audience – more black than white, more female than male, but with plenty of whites and men – cheers, claps and buzzes with wasn’t-she-wonderful long after she’s gone.
Morrison’s novels do not deal with the fripperies of life. Her writing, a sensuous and magnetic mix of the literary and the straightforward, looks at sex, love, pain, death, race, gender, magic and God; her novels deal with human messiness, tragedy, joy and oppression.
Morrison is a writer about race and gender who transcends both, a great black woman writer who is more often referred to as simply a great writer. And her voice is America’s; The New York Times described her as ”the nearest thing America has to a national novelist”.
And yet, unlike most high-brow writers of sometimes difficult books, Morrison has a mass readership. Her latest novel is Oprah Winfrey’s book of the month. She’s the writer who aims her work at black readers who opposed a school board which tried to ban Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn because it contained the word ”nigger”; the woman accused of being ”politically correct” who has written a defence of OJ Simpson; the feminist who supports President Bill Clinton rather than his female accusers.
And while you might expect an interview with Morrison to be full of seriousness and frowning, what you find is that she has a very ready laugh, that she smokes Kool Milds with few gaps in between and that we end up talking about Hedy Lamarr, Tom Cruise and the days when Marlon Brando used to call her up. Morrison is not who you think she is.
We meet for tea in the snow-bound American prairie. At 67 Morrison is a good-looking woman. Her hair is a magnificent concoction of white candy floss at the roots and grey braids plaited into a messy crown.
She has just received the most hilarious letter, she says, about her novel Paradise. ”I was sent this notice from the Texas criminal division that it has been banned and cannot be ordered by any inmate in this particular jail system,” she says, with incredulity. ”They have a list of books that they do not permit: books on explosives, books on how to make guns. My book, it says, on pages 64, 94, whatever, is deliberately designed to cause strikes, riots and the breakdown of the prison system.”
Her tone is coolly ironic, but she can’t help giggling as she tells the tale. ”I’m getting the original letter framed. All the best books are banned.” It may be banned in the jails of Texas but that can’t stop its nationwide success: Paradise has sold more than a million copies in the US already, its mass popularity partly owing to the sanction of Winfrey’s book club.
”Oprah has made it all right to turn off the television and read a book in the middle of the day as though it were an important event,” Morrison says. ”Spreading the readership of my own book is one thing, but spreading the idea of not being unwilling to pick up a fairly challenging book via somebody on television is quite extraordinary.”
Winfrey gave readers two months to read Paradise rather than the usual one. ”She has this impression that it’s a difficult book,” Morrison says.
Well, she’s right, isn’t she? The first chapter, in particular, is something of a challenge. ”Paradise may certainly invite second readings, as books do, but I am very concerned about writing books that are interesting to careful readers, but at the same time at another level are fascinating for people who are less careful.”
Paradise – which The New York Times Book Review said is ”possibly Morrison’s best work of fiction to date” – is set in the all-black town of Ruby, Oklahoma, founded by former slaves who have been turned away from other freedmen-towns because their skin is too dark. They are ”blue-black people, tall and graceful, whose clear, wide eyes gave no sign of what they really felt about those who weren’t like them”.
The novel opens with a gruesome mass killing by the men of Ruby at a place known as the Convent, which houses a group of women who have escaped from traumatic circumstances – dead babies, bad men, unwanted pregnancy. It is now the 1960s.
Ruby, once a blessed town where nobody ever died, has been subject to horrific and mysterious happenings. ”A woman was knocked down the stairs by her cold-eyed daughter. Four damaged infants were born in one family. Daughters refused to get out of bed. Brides disappeared on their honeymoons. Two brothers shot each other on New Year’s Day.” The men decide the women of the Convent are to blame, and they must pay.
The novel opens with the words: ”They shoot the white girl first.”
”I wanted to signal race from the very beginning,” Morrison says of that extraordinary first line, ”and then erase it, so that I made it possible to ask the question: who is the white girl? And then hope that I could write well enough so that either it wouldn’t matter, you knew all you need to know about those girls; or it mattered so much you might ask yourself why you’re worrying.
”And then the other community – the people of Ruby – is highly raced. Their identity is totally related to their race and their colour in their race. It seems to me that’s a lot of what the Sixties and Seventies were about – identity politics.”
The identity of Morrison herself is layered and complex, rather like her books. When she won the Nobel Prize she wrote: ”I felt representative. I felt American. I felt Ohioan. I felt blacker than ever. I felt more woman than ever.”
These components inform her voice; she once said: ”I think the range of emotions and perceptions I have had access to as a black person and a female person are greater than those who are neither.”
Paradise, then, is not just a book about race: it is also about gender. Some critics have said that it is Morrison’s most overtly feminist work. The women of the Convent have chosen to live without men, which is threatening to the men of Ruby; the women represent the impending breakdown of traditional, patriarchal values.
”It was important that the men of the town were thinking how much they loved women as they went to assault the women in the convent,” Morrison says. ”Their mothers, their sisters … how wonderful and safe women were. Because they really believed that their role was the protection of women and children. So they couldn’t possibly be misogynists.
”But what does frighten them is the idea of women who don’t need men and who are not under the direction of men. The women themselves are not threatening, but their values are so different. Of course what’s really going on is that the town can’t handle some of the contemporary problems that are going on – Vietnam veterans returning, women being restless.”
Can women live without men? ”You know, when I was doing research for Paradise I came across a book about towns which got started and failed,” Morrison says. ”One was an all-women’s town. Founded in 1909 or 1912 or something. It lasted eight months.” She flings herself back in her chair, laughing. ”They fell out! Eight months, notice, not nine. That’s my answer.”
Violence inflicted by men on women recurs throughout her work, and yet she supported OJ Simpson over the murder of his wife Nicole, who was white. Last year she wrote an essay suggesting that the media had an interest in representing OJ as guilty – there is no good copy in the story of an innocent man – and that the assumption of his guilt only works if you assume that as a black man he has an irrational propensity to violence.
Louis Menand, writing in The New Yorker, could not understand how she could hold this view, when she ”has been writing versions of the Simpson story for 10 years”.
”What’s he talking about?” Morrison asks. ”I never had a black male beat up a white female in my book. Louis Menand was just spanking me publicly for my views on OJ in order to talk about Paradise. It’s a very peculiar way to write about an author, to compare their fiction to their non-fiction, and to try to prove a point about one’s non-fiction by their fiction is not acceptable.”
Paradise is the first of her novels to be set in the recent past – Beloved is set in 1873; Song Of Solomon is set in the 1930s. The 1960s fascinate her.
”The generation who came to adulthood during the Sixties and Seventies, they’re the only people I know who are embarrassed by their past in this country. But the Sixties was absolutely the finest decade this country has ever known. It was when there was really some interest in being a citizen rather than a consumer, when people were questioning racial oppression in their own relationships. The only time that is comparable in America is the Civil War.”
What has happened to that spirit of change? ”Oh, the backlash, the distortions,” Morrison says. ”All political. We didn’t know how powerful and threatening the decade was until years later. I mean, there were a lot of assassinations but we didn’t know what it meant. And of course, Clinton being the only moderately activist president – they’re not going to put a bullet in his head, but this assassination of him now is long and sustained.”
She is talking about the fabled ”vast right-wing conspiracy” against the president; doesn’t she think that women like Paula Jones and Kathleen Willey are telling the truth?
”I doubt it. They just want to soil him and get him out of office. This is what I know. In 1991, people in the George Bush campaign called Hillary and Bill Clinton to say the following: if you run, we will destroy you personally. And the happy handmaiden, of course, is the press. But I think that Clinton’s popularity ratings, which are still very high, are partly a reaction to the press.
”The papers say that the reason he’s still so popular is that the economy is really booming and when people are comfortable they’re happy. But that’s only true for some people. Most people don’t make that kind of money, and Clinton’s initiatives, which the Republicans deride as small, make an enormous difference.
”If you say that there are 30-million children with no health care but we will see to them – that kind of thing doesn’t matter to those who control things, but it really matters to the other people. They know that Clinton is working very hard for those things, for them. And I think they think their president is being taken from them.”
Does she know the president personally? ”I’ve met him a couple of times,” she says. ”He’s smart. Very, very smart. And very personable. Very touchy-feely, you know, like this …” She takes my hand and strokes it. She should be careful, I say, she could be up before the grand jury.
”No, it’s nice,” she says, and appears hurt. ”It was not erotic. He’s a nice Southern guy.”
Morrison herself spent the Sixties bringing up her two sons, Harold and Slade, now in their 30s, and working as a book editor at Random House in New York. She also did some teaching at Howard University.
Her 1958 marriage to Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect, lasted six years. She says it broke up because of a clash between their two cultures.
It was only after her husband left that Morrison started to write. She would write from 5am every day, work at Random House all day and look after her children in the evening. It sounds hard, but she won’t say so. ”My parents’ parents had done things that were life-threatening – they had done the impossible – so why should I sit around whining?”
Morrison is the granddaughter of an Alabama slave. Christened Chloe Anthony Wofford – she adopted the Toni nickname at college, and it stuck – she was the second child of four born in Lorain, Ohio – ”neither plantation nor ghetto”. Her father, a shipyard welder, had grown up in Georgia at a time when lynchings were common and the Ku Klux Klan rife – and as a result had developed a ferocious loathing of white people.
Her father ”distrusted every word and every gesture of every white man on earth”, she says; he told his daughter that ”there could never be harmony between the races” because whites were ”genetically corrupt”. As a result of his influence, says Morrison, she grew up with ”more than a child’s contempt for white people”.
Her mother was less angry and a believer in education. Chloe, as she was then known, was a model student, and she won a place at Howard, the great black college in Washington DC, to study English and classics.
The stories her family told her as she was growing up were a great influence, and many of her finest literary creations are based on myth and magic. In this she reminds the reader of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, or Angela Carter; in the complexity of her structures, the non-linear nature of her narrative, she has frequently been compared to William Faulkner.
But Morrison is different, because she writes with a specific audience in mind. In 1978, she said that she was alienated by black writers like James Baldwin and Richard Wright, because she felt they wrote for a white audience. The fact that Morrison writes for black readers, and the rarity of this, particularly when she started out, is crucial to an understanding of her work. ”I have always wanted to develop a way of writing that was irrevocably black,” she once said.
She hasn’t always won the support of black writers. When she won the 1993 Nobel Prize, the judges were accused of ”political correctness” by author Charles Johnson; and an African-American English professor called Steven Moore wrote in The Guardian that: ”Morrison provides us with images of black people who seem to court self-destruction as a means of escaping horrible conditions.”
Morrison says that she has never heard of ”some guy called Steven Moore” – she pronounces his name as if it were curdled – but she is familiar with that criticism. ”There is pain,” she says plainly. ”If you can’t say those things about [Franz] Kafka or [James] Joyce or [Leo] Tolstoy, then it is not applicable. It is not literary criticism. This man would rather see another kind of book, in which black people had some difficulties and then triumphed. That’s caricature to me. That’s a cartoon.
”Black people in this country have a very complicated history. If I said that I wanted to write a book about the relationship between a mother and her child, I could set up a number of scenarios, but if I said put that in the context of slavery, that’s a whole different thing.
”I don’t believe that writing is about putting your best foot forward. Because, you see, Mr Moore’s quote is not directed at other black people, it’s directed at white people. He’s trying to say don’t write books in which our vulnerabilities are exposed, write books in which we are heroic and wonderful, so that they – white people – will feel more respect for us.
”I knew that from the beginning there were many black people who would feel exposed, hurt, disappointed, maybe even outraged at the suggestion of incest [in 1970’s The Bluest Eye, her first novel, in which a young girl is raped and made pregnant by her father].
”Black women would say to me things like: ‘I didn’t want them to know. I wanted to know, but I didn’t want them to know.’ And I said, I couldn’t let them know without making it public. I was much more concerned with the actual effects of racism on real human beings.” Racism itself is rarely depicted in Morrison’s novels; it is assumed. Her work looks instead at the effects that racism has within the black community.
The central character in The Bluest Eye is an 11-year-old girl who longs to have blue eyes like white girls. This commentary on black self-image in a white culture, and indeed of girls’ self-image generally in a culture which renders them acceptable only if they look a certain way, is more relevant today than ever.
‘These days it’s all ‘buy more make-up, get thinner, be this little breakable person who can be snapped’,” Morrison says. ”It’s so confusing for young women: on the one hand they’re stepping into a world of incredible choices, and on the other they’re being asked to torture themselves, have plastic surgery, beat themselves up about not being perfect. The amount of plastic surgery here is astonishing. You know, no one smiles.
”My friend told me of a very famous movie star who can’t close her eyes. I said to him, how does she sleep? And he said, with her eyes open!” She flings herself back in her chair, with that laugh. ”Of course, Hedy Lamarr you would not believe. Apparently she had surgery before they got really good at it!”
The conflict between surrendering yourself to love and maintaining your own independent identity is a recurring theme in her work; and, again, it is especially pertinent today.
”Negotiating that space is very hard,” she says. ”You want to belong completely, and at the same time you want to be this absolutely unique individual, not like anybody else. But that’s the human condition. When you are your own person and get totally self-sufficient, you still look around.”
But why? ”Because it’s delightful. It is delightful. To find the other who is you. The other person who knows what you like to eat and is worried about whether or not you have it. It’s an extension of the best that you are, more of you at your best, the one who loves you unconditionally.”
How many times has she had that? ”You only need one. The sad thing is, when you find that one, sometimes you think there’s another one just like that. But there isn’t. It’s the same with friendships – people can be careless, especially when they’re young. But sometimes they may never happen again, and it’s a big loss.”
Today, despite the occasional Time magazine 75th birthday party where she hangs out with Tom Cruise, Morrison says her personal life is ”most unexciting, and I like it like that”.
She has three homes in New York and rents a flat near Princeton, where she teaches, she doesn’t watch television, and her views on writer’s block are unequivocal: ”If you’re blocked, you probably ought to be.”
She’s looking forward, she says, to a screening this week of a Jonathan Demme film of her novel Beloved; Winfrey (yes, her again) bought the rights and the movie will be out in the US this year. Does it matter that it’s a white male who’s filming her book? ”I don’t care,” she says.
I tell her about a rumour years ago that Roland Joff, director of The Mission and The Killing Fields, was going to make a film of Tar Baby, one of her earlier novels, and Marlon Brando was set to star. ”Marlon Brando?” she says. ”Where do you get this stuff? Marlon Brando was going to be in Tar Baby?” She laughs. ”Well, I’ve never heard that. And I used to talk to him on the phone a lot.”
Er, pardon? ”Sure,” she says, coolly. ”He used to call me all the time. He would read my books to me over the phone. He’s a big fan. He used to ring me up and say, hey, listen to this – and then read some over to me. And do you know, he thought they were hilarious. Nobody gets the real humour in my books, but him. Everyone thinks they’re very serious, very dour, but Brando … Well, he would scream with laughter.”
She is proud and cool and magnificent, as well she might be; a Nobel, a Pulitzer, an extraordinary voice, a legion of adoring fans throughout America and the Wild One ringing up to discuss her writing. ”Oh, perhaps sometimes he just couldn’t sleep, I guess,” she says, and chuckles.
— Paradise is published by Chatto & Windus. Toni Morrison will appear on The Oprah Winfrey Show onSABC3 at 5pm, April 3