Toni Morrison is a Nobel prizewinner, a Pulitzer prizewinner, a Princeton
professor emerita and, by growing assent, the voice of America’s conscience
- so I didn’t come here hoping for a girlie chat. Even so, the circumstances
of our interview seem a little unnerving. We are in Morrison’s suite at
Claridge’s, where she and I are confronting each other on black sofas,
across an oceanic coffee table. And we have an audience: Morrison’s son
Ford, who is here to record the interview for the “Morrison archives”; and a
representative from the author’s publisher, who is watching us from a window
seat, looking desperately solemn.
“Are we ready?” Morrison asks. Her son nods. The audio equipment is placed
between us, and the cassette starts to purr. Morrison, looking formidably
big and grand in a black trouser suit, shuffles a little deeper into her
sofa, places her hands squarely on her knees and fixes me with a rather
terrifying smile. A few years ago, The New York Times described her as “the
nearest thing America has to a national novelist”, and she certainly does
not invite one to forget it. There is something so formidable about her
that, for a moment, I can’t find my tongue. A strangulated silence descends,
like the still before a battle.
She is in London to publicise her latest novel, A Mercy, a copy of which is
lying on the table between us. If her other books are anything to go by, it
will sell several million copies. Morrison eyes me beadily and cuts straight
to the chase: “Have you read it?” Mercifully, yes. She does not ask what I
thought of it - but then, she hardly needs reassurance. She described her
previous novel, Love, as “perfect”. How would she rate this one? “Flawless,”
she replies. (She says it with a smile - but not a moment’s hesitation.)
When I met Morrison in this same hotel five years ago, I found her slumped in
an armchair, looking rather deflated. But this morning, at the grand age of
77, she seems on rollicking form. She is on a whirlwind tour of
book-signings and radio interviews, and is clearly relishing it. Though she
is hardly renowned for her humour, she even cracks the odd joke. “What do
you do when you’re not working?” I ask. (This to a woman who for the past 40
years has woken at 4am to steal a few extra hours at her desk.) “Oh, I don’t
know,” she replies gamely. “I guess I just sleep around.”
If Morrison is feeling ebullient, she has good cause. In her novels, she has
compelled Americans, again and again, to confront a part of their history
they would sooner forget: slavery, and the exclusion of the black
population. Would the election of its first black president mean America has
finally atoned for its past? “Atonement is not what’s necessary,” she
replies serenely, sipping from a cup of tea. “What’s necessary is justice
and equal opportunity. And it’s been a long time in coming - almost 400
years.” In January, Morrison wrote to Barack Obama, publicly endorsing him
for president: “In addition to keen intelligence, integrity and a rare
authenticity, you exhibit something that has nothing to do with age,
experience, race or gender and something I don’t see in other candidates,”
Morrison enthused. “That something is a creative imagination which, coupled
with brilliance, equals wisdom.” So, this had nothing to do with his being
black? “Absolutely not,” she replies. “For the same reason that I wouldn’t
support Hillary Clinton because she was a woman. You need some intelligence,
some vision - and you need wisdom.” Did Hillary (a longtime admirer of
Morrison) not have wisdom? “Less,” she replies firmly. “I thought about it
long and hard.”
We must assume that Obama, whom Morrison has never met, considers her to be
pretty influential. For Morrison tells me that her endorsement of him was
not quite the spontaneous gesture it was assumed to be. In fact, Obama
himself approached her, actively soliciting her support. “He called me to
ask if I was willing to say nice things about him, and I said I would think
about it,” she says. “I was interested. I had read his book, and I was
impressed by him as a writer.” Just as well, because the Obama camp wasn’t
going to take “no” for an answer. “Later on, some of his very rabid
supporters contacted me and asked me to write something to support him,” she
says. “So, I did.” Did Obama thank her personally? “Yes, he called me up and
said how much he appreciated it.”
As well he might - for, to many Americans, Morrison is much more than a
novelist. She has become a spokeswoman for the American soul. In 1993, when
she was awarded the Nobel prize, the Swedish Academy said her novels had
given the African-American people their history back. And she is treated
with giddying reverence. When she gives readings, she generally receives a
standing ovation as soon as she walks onto the stage. Has she ever doubted
her work is worth it? “No. Never,” she replies. Doris Lessing, who won the
Nobel prize last year, recently complained that it had been a “bloody
disaster”, as the increased media interest meant that writing a novel had
become well nigh impossible. Did Morrison have any such qualms?
“It was probably the one time I felt representative of the United States, and
for a time I found myself under the impression that someone was lurking over
my shoulder,” she says. “I’d never had that feeling before, and I had to
exorcise it to get my privacy back. Until then, I’d always discounted what
the critics thought.” Now, she says, she reads all her reviews, and believes
the critics are wising up: “In the beginning, my books were treated as
sociology. They never talked about the quality of the work, or the art in
the work. That is what is happening now.”
Certainly, her success was not presaged by her first two novels - The Bluest
Eye and Sula - which had only modest sales. But her third, Song of Solomon
(1977), won the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, and Morrison has never
looked back. Her subsequent books were all bestsellers.
Beloved (1987), the story of a fugitive slave who has killed her daughter, won
the Pulitzer prize, and The New York Times recently voted it the best work
of American fiction of the past 25 years. Despite her ferociously highbrow
image, she has become a mass-market author. Her books are routinely chosen
by Oprah Winfrey for her book club, guaranteeing blockbuster sales. Some
novelists - notably, Jonathan Franzen - have been snooty about Oprah’s
endorsement, but Morrison is cock-a-hoop: “What I like is having readers,
hundreds of thousands of readers,” she says. “And think of it - Oprah has
never endorsed a book which didn’t sell 1m copies.”
Yet Morrison does have her detractors. Some critics find her work wilfully
obscure, and one described Beloved - which Morrison dedicated to the 60m
people who died because of slavery, a figure she says she arrived at by
talking to historians - as a “blackface holocaust novel”, written to enter a
“martyr ratings contest”. What would she say to that? “Who said that?” she
asks, eyes glinting. It was the African-American jazz critic Stanley Crouch.
“Oh, him,” she beams. “It’s his profession to say unkind things about my
work.”
She is black America’s most famous author, but instead of being compared with
other African-Americanwriters, she is usually grouped with fellow Nobel
laureates, such as Saul Bellow. Does she believe her novels have transcended
race and gender? “Yes, that’s probably true.” A Mercy, her ninth novel, is
set in 1680s America, when the slave trade was still in its infancy. At the
heart of the novel is the story of a mother and a daughter - a mother who
has cast off her daughter in order to save her, and a daughter struggling to
exorcise her abandonment. The theme was similar in Beloved. Is Morrison
drawing on personal experience?
She looks at me as if I am mad. “What sort of a question is that?” In the
past, she has referred to her style as “indisputably black”. Her books are
all rooted in her own culture, and references to white people tend to be
dismissive. Do whites bore her? “No. I probably have as many white
characters in my books as a white writer would have black characters. I
don’t find it any harder to get inside their minds.”
She says that her father, a shipyard welder, “did not trust white people”, but
she insists that as a child growing up in the town of Lorain, Ohio, she was
not aware of racial segregation. “Your race didn’t matter. What we had in
common then was poverty. You cannot imagine how levelling poverty is. We
needed work, protection - this is the Depression we’re talking about.”
Morrison, the second of four children, worked in kitchens from the age of
12. “I was very happy. I got $2 a week, and I gave half of it to my family.”
Does she feel that her wealth has estranged her from the community in which
she grew up? (The Nobel was worth £563,000, and one can only imagine what
her advances must be.) She looks puzzled. “Wealth? I don’t have that. I’m
looking forward to it.”
After leaving school, she went to Howard, a historically black university in
Washington, DC, where she majored in English, assumed the nickname “Toni”
and - a formidable thought - played “a wonderful” Queen Elizabeth in a
student production of Richard III. It was at Howard that she encountered
racial segregation (“This was Washington in 1949 - there were places you
couldn’t shop, you couldn’t go to the washroom”) and met Harold Morrison, a
Jamaican architect whom she married in 1958. They divorced six years later,
when she was pregnant with their second son. She has talked of a “culture
clash”, a subject on which she declines to be drawn. Did she ever come close
to remarrying? “If I could find a guy with a big gun to shoot some people,
then I might,” she says, smiling.
She started writing in her thirties, while bringing up her sons in New York.
It was an attempt, she has said, “to forestall melancholy”. Did it work?
“Yes, it did. It was an exciting life. The life of the mind struck me as the
most exciting life to have.” It was when her children were young that she
got into the habit of rising at 4am to write, while still holding down a job
as an editor at Random House. Was she a good mother? “Sometimes. But now,
when I look back, I remember the gaps; I remember all the things I didn’t
do. But I’m a wonderful grandmother.” These days, she divides her time
between New York and Princeton, where she still teaches humanities. Her
family, including three granddaughters, live nearby. When I ask Morrison if
she is available for baby-sitting, she looks a little bemused. But she gives
an impression of fulfilment. Is she suited to living alone? “I don’t know.
I’ve only lived alone for a small part of my life; otherwise, I’ve always
been with other people. I’ve never felt solitary. I’m not dependent on
anything except my own efforts.” She is already plotting her next novel: “I
will always write,” she says. “Writing is the one thing that keeps me sane.”
In some of her dust-jacket photographs, she has looked noticeably aloof. But
the photograph for her latest novel seems more cosy. “My publishers didn’t
want to use that picture,” she says dismissively. “They said it was too
welcoming. Welcoming? I mean, would they have said that to a man?” Is she
getting softer? “Oh, I don’t know,” she says. “In some areas, I’m really
sweet, but then there’s part of me that’s always in a rage.”
As I stand up to leave (I am being shooed out so Morrison can have her
photograph taken), she suddenly beams. “That is a pretty dress,” she says
approvingly. I nearly die with pleasure.
If we had had more time together, then perhaps we could have had our girlie
chat after all. But when I get home, a message comes through from Chatto &
Windus. Miss Morrison would like it to be known that she thought some of my
questions were impertinent. Apparently, she didn’t like being asked what
time she got out of bed.
