Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives
Page 98
His career took a definite direction with his move to New York (‘our Paris’, as he called it), where he became a regular contributor of short fiction to the New Yorker under its editor, William Shawn, one of the great (if largely unrecognised) literary patrons of the time. Barthelme’s first story in Shawn’s pages, ‘L’Lapse’, a typically riddling title, was published in 1963. It nestled between pieces by John Cheever and Hannah Arendt. New York, with its lively modern jazz scene, avant-garde art and ‘filth on the streets’, was more of a home town to Barthelme than Houston ever was. Over the next few years he recruited a discriminating readership as the master of the bizarre scenario. What was grey ‘theory’ in other hands was as zany and comic as Mad magazine in his. In one of the more famous of his pieces, ‘Mr. Edward LEAR, Nonsense Writer and Landscape Painter Requests the honor of Your Presence On the Occasion of his DEMISE. San Remo 2:20 a.m. The 29th of May’ (the invitation is accompanied by an RSVP). In another, King Kong is appointed ‘adjunct professor of art history at Rutgers’. In yet another, ‘The King of Jazz’, ‘Hokie Mokie’, with the death of ‘Spicy MacLammermoor’, a (trom)’bone man, finds himself ‘king of jazz’ – a verdict confirmed by white critics, who find in his ‘few but perfectly selected notes the real epiphanic glow’. Along comes a Japanese trombonist who does to black music what the Lexus does to Chrysler, or the Fuji apple to the humble Granny Smith (Barthelme, while on R&R in the army, had been impressed how frighteningly good jazz was in Tokyo).
Best known among Barthelme’s novels (or ‘anti-novels’) is Snow White (1967), a literary fantasy on Disney’s cartoon fantasia of the original German fairy story. Barthelme’s Snow White (the story begins with a corporeal inventory of her ‘beauty spots’ – including that on her buttock) misconducts herself disgracefully with her dwarfs in the shower. Like all his fiction, disconnectedness – a kind of asyntax – requires the reader to leap acrobatically from one sentence to another, often slipping. Always he wrote ‘against expectation’, as he put it: dismantling the conventional. Barthelme, a modest writer, never saw himself as more than snot on the sleeve of high literature – appreciative admirers see him as a welcome antidote to pervasive high seriousness and the portentousness of critical ‘theory’. He was both ‘pomo’ and ‘accessible’. On the whole, Barthelme had little time for critics (most of whom he believed ‘want me to stop what I’m doing’). He was of the firm belief that the only valid criticism of a work of art was another work of art. He was, above all else, a generous writer: Thomas Pynchon wrote Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) while living rent-free in Barthelme’s New York basement.
Barthelme’s short-story collections include: Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968), City Life (1970), Sadness (1972) and Great Days (1979). ‘Sadness’ could well be the title for all of them, permeated as they are with a kind of exhausted, but none the less jaunty, world-weariness. New York was eventually too much, and his income too little – he needed a salary. Incredibly, as his biographer informs us, he never earned more than $1,000 a year from his books and depended almost entirely on his New Yorker stipend, a debt he never cleared. Barthelme returned to Houston to teach creative writing, quirkily, for the last years of his life. You could, despite what Thomas Wolfe said, go home again. Whether you would be happy there was something else. He had many lovers (some of them, like Grace Paley, fellow postmodernists), married four times (the last successfully) and died prematurely of throat cancer. Years of abusive drinking contributed to his death and, arguably, to the fractured syntax of his narratives. He had, one friend observed, ‘an alcoholic’s attention span’. And, alas, an alcoholic’s abbreviated life-span. Did he know where he was, Barthelme was asked as he lay dying in hospital. Yes, he replied, ‘in the antechamber to heaven’.
FN
Donald Barthelme
MRT
Snow White
Biog
T. Daugherty, Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme (2009)
253. Toni Morrison 1931–
In 1992, there were four books by black women on the best-seller lists – at the same time. Terry McMillan’s, Alice Walker’s and two of mine. Now that’s exhilarating!
Until the post-mortem exploiters get down to their work, Toni Morrison’s life will be principally known from her own many accounts in interviews. She was born Chloe Anthony Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, on the banks of Lake Erie. The state had been on the frontline of the abolition of slavery seventy years earlier, but where the Woffords lived was integrated. Chloe’s mother, she recalled, was careful never to observe the informal segregation of cinema audiences, looking left and right of the aisle before she sat down. Chloe’s father was a ship-welder and her grandparents had been sharecroppers. Her family, in terms of the restricted social scale accessible to blacks, was moving up but aspired to a yet higher place.
Chloe was encouraged to read widely in childhood (Jane Austen and Tolstoy are cited) while surrounded, conversationally, by oral narratives and blues lyrics brought from the South. Her mother belonged to a book club, parting with ‘hard earned money’ to do so. Chloe recalled being the only black child in her first grade class and the best reader. She was not, however, to forget her place in American life. In her early teens, she served as a housemaid for local white families: ‘I started around 13. That was the work that was available: to go to a woman’s house after school and clean for three or four hours. The normal teen-age jobs were not available. Housework always was. It wasn’t uninteresting. You got to work these gadgets that I never had at home: vacuum cleaners. Some of the people were nice. Some were terrible. Years later, I used some of what I observed in my fiction.’
In 1949 she gained entrance to Howard University, an elite institution for black students. She took a BA in English and went on to Cornell University to pursue research on William Faulkner. He seemed to her ‘the only writer who took black people seriously. Which is not to say he was, or was not, a bigot.’ It was at university that she renamed herself ‘Toni’. Her motive for doing so has been analysed in various ways – it being a name beloved by home permanent-wave merchandisers, targeted at young white women. On graduation, she was appointed an English instructor at Texas Southern University before returning as a junior professor at Howard – an academic career was in prospect.
That prospect was disrupted when, in 1958, she married a colleague, Harold Morrison, an architect. The marriage lasted six years and produced two children. It was, reportedly, difficult and is something which, otherwise forthcoming, she declines to be forthcoming about. Harold returned to his birthplace, Jamaica, leaving his former wife with sole responsibility for their children. After divorce, Morrison’s career pattern altered. Her youngest son at the time of the separation was not a year old, so a doctorate was not an option. But it was not altogether a bad time: it was the mid-1960s and new opportunities were opening up for women and other ‘minorities’. Morrison (she has kept her married surname – somewhat uneasily, one gathers) moved to New York where she worked for the publisher Random House. As she recalls from that period: ‘whenever things got difficult I thought about my mother’s mother, a sharecropper, who, with her husband, owed money to their landlord. In 1906, she escaped with her seven children to meet her husband in Birmingham, where he was working as a musician. It was a dangerous trip, but she wanted a better life. Whenever things seemed difficult for me in New York, I thought that what I was doing wasn’t anything as hard as what she did.’As an editor she was instrumental in publishing African American writers such as Angela Davis and Gayl Jones. Black writing (as the favoured term then was) had begun to get traction in American culture and Morrison herself had been writing fiction as early as her time on the faculty at Howard.
One story in her mind from those years concerned a black girl who longed for blue eyes. This would be the basis of her first published novel The Bluest Eye (1970). It has never been regarded as her finest work (that accolade would probably go to Beloved) but The Bluest Eye has particular interest as
Morrison’s most autobiographical novel. The action is set in Lorain in 1940–41, the year in which America went to battle for the free world – rather ignoring the freedom of its black citizens who would have to wait a quarter of a century for their Civil Rights Act. The narrator of The Bluest Eye, Claudia MacTeer, is the same age as Chloe Wofford in that year. Hers is a solidly respectable family. They take in the child of an unrespectable family, Pecola Breedlove, who has been sexually abused and impregnated by her father. ‘How do you get somebody to love you?’ Pecola forlornly asks. She is fixated on Shirley Temple and convinced that blue eyes are the secret. They are not, she discovers. More abuse and premature death awaits. Claudia – the Morrison figure we apprehend – is made of stronger stuff. She dismembers her ‘blue eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned’ dolls to see what they are made of:
But the dismembering of dolls was not the true horror. The truly horrifying thing was the transference of the same impulses to little white girls. The indifference with which I could have axed them was shaken only by my desire to do so.
The Bluest Eye did not make much impression at this stage of Morrison’s career, although over the years – particularly after being selected by Oprah Winfrey for her Book Club – it has sold strongly. It was followed by Sula (1973) and Song of Solomon (1977) – which, unusually, has a black protagonist, Macon ‘Milkman’ Dead, searching out his roots in the old South.
By the end of the 1970s Morrison’s fiction was gaining recognition – particularly among African American readers and opinion-formers. Her importance as an American writer, without qualifying epithet, was certified by Beloved in 1987. The story is based on the historical figure, Margaret Garner, a slave, who, when her escape was foiled, killed her children rather than have them taken back into captivity. She was prosecuted less for absconding than the destruction of property. By this stage of her career, Morrison’s narrative technique had evolved into something akin to the fluidities of black musicians like Charlie Parker or Lester Young – an analogy confirmed by the title of her 1992 novel, Jazz.
Beloved triggered one of the most controversial events in her career when the novel failed to win an NBA award. A caucus of influential African American writers and critics bought advertising space to protest at what was seen by them as rank injustice. Justified as it was, one cannot imagine anything similar being done for Britain’s ‘Booker Bridesmaid’, Beryl Bainbridge. Amends were made when Beloved won a Pulitzer Prize. Oprah Winfrey, whose book club had been consistently helpful in promoting Morrison’s career, bought the rights and financed a later movie. The NBA protest, well intentioned as it was, had the perverse effect of suggesting that Morrison’s success was the result of special interest lobbying and white cultural guilt. The allegation (typically voiced behind the scenes) would haunt her later career.
Beloved also provoked controversy for its cryptic epigraph: ‘Sixty Million and more’. It is a tendentious statistic – and almost certainly inaccurate. The number of Africans estimated to have perished on the ‘middle passage’ to the New World, or in slavery there, has ranged as high as 120 million and as low (if that is the right word) as a tenth of that figure. No one – shamefully – will ever know precisely, because no one at the time bothered to count. Morrison quite clearly chose sixty million as a multiple of six million – that, notoriously, is the rounded estimate of the Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust. But as Morrison has elsewhere complained, ‘There is no suitable memorial or plaque or wreath or wall or park or skyscraper lobby honoring the memory of the human beings forced into slavery and brought to the United States.’ Not even, she noted, ‘a small bench by the road’.
Morrison was angry in the 1980s, the Reagan years. The destiny of blacks in America, she believed, was to be forever degraded – it was the cement which held the country together: ‘If there were no black people here in this country, it would have been Balkanized. The immigrants would have torn each other’s throats out, as they have done everywhere else. But in becoming an American, from Europe, what one has in common with that other immigrant is contempt for me – it’s nothing else but color. Wherever they were from, they would stand together. They could all say, “I am not that.” … When they got off the boat, the second word they learned was “nigger.” Ask them – I grew up with them.’ This phase of her career produced her most disaffected novel, Tar Baby (1981), in which a character concludes: ‘White folks and black folks should not sit down and eat together or do any of those personal things in life.’ At the same period, at a conference, she roundly declared: ‘At no moment in my life have I ever felt as though I was an American. At no moment. The sole reason that I am invited here, and the whole reason that I am sitting here, is because some black children got their brains shot out in the streets all over the country. And had the good fortune to be televised … I am a read, as opposed to unread, writer because of those children.’
The next decade, crowned as it was by her Nobel Prize in 1993, found her mellower. The award gave her, she said, ‘licence to strut’. Honours and doctorates followed in such profusion they must surely have impeded her creativity. She was now carrying the heavy load of spokeswoman – expected to negotiate ‘major themes’. Controversially, she hailed Bill Clinton as America’s ‘first black president’. He displayed, she said, ‘almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas’. Throughout her career, however, she has kept a wary distance from mainline feminism, offering such explanations as ‘I don’t subscribe to patriarchy, and I don’t think it should be substituted with matriarchy’ and ‘I can’t take positions that are closed’. Positions she was able to take were in America’s Ivy League universities, culminating in an endowed chair in Creative Writing at Princeton.
Her later fiction has often encountered a stiffer reception. Paradise (1998), the story of a massacre of whites by blacks in 1970s Oklahoma, elicited a particularly sharp review from the influential New York Times critic, Michiko Kakutani: ‘Unfortunately, Paradise is everything that Beloved was not: it’s a heavy-handed, schematic piece of writing, thoroughly lacking in the novelistic magic Ms. Morrison has wielded so effortlessly in the past. It’s a contrived, formulaic book that mechanically pits men against women, old against young, the past against the present.’ By this stage in her career Morrison was sufficiently well grounded to withstand the occasional knock although, as Kakutani intimates, her major achievements in fiction, as opposed to life, will probably be located by posterity in the 1970s and 1980s.
FN
Toni Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford. The middle name ‘Anthony’ is also used by her instead of ‘Ardelia’)
MRT
The Bluest Eye
Biog
C. C. Denard, Toni Morrison: Conversations (2008)
254. Alice Munro 1931–
I think I knew that at heart I was an aging spinster.
There is keen contention as to who is the greatest Canadian writer of short fiction in the last half century. Top place would, quite likely, go to either Alistair MacLeod or Alice Munro (née Laidlaw), both of proudly Scottish extraction: one highland, the other lowland – very different extracts. Munro, the lowlander, can trace her ancestry back to the Ettrick shepherd (author of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner), James Hogg. Less regional than MacLeod (her Huron county Ontario does not have the rich Gaelic culture of St Edward’s Island), she weaves an equally sensitive history of her country in her stories. Typically they pivot on enigmatic moments which resonate beyond the domestic background in which they occur.
‘The Progress of Love’, the title piece in her 1986 collection (first published in the New Yorker), illustrates the distinct Munro form, style and tone. There is, as usual, enough raw narrative matter for a whole novel, boiled down into a few pages. The story opens with the sentence, ‘I got the call at work, and it was my father.’ Her mother is dead (‘gone,’ as her father puts it)
. The story goes on to reconstruct a portrait of the dead mother, Marietta. Neurotically devout, she prays on her knees several times a day – forever ‘saved’, as she had been, at a camp meeting, aged fourteen. The narrator’s father, less religious, is a farmer in a small way. The couple married late. Marietta would not consent to the wedding until she had paid back her own father every cent it had cost him to raise her. The story revolves around two discoveries made by the heroine, aged twelve in 1947, through her louche Californian aunt Beryl, who has come to visit and raise a little hell. Her mother, the narrator discovers, was traumatised as a little girl by seeing her mother in a barn with a rope around her neck, on a chair, evidently threatening to hang herself. Young Marietta runs off to town for help – without managing to get any – and is suffused with guilt. But it was Aunt Beryl who noticed that the rope was not fastened to the beam: the wife was merely intending to ‘get a rise’ out of her husband, with whom she was, for unspecified reasons, unhappy.
For Marietta, however, the event is lifelong traumatic – ‘Her heart was broken.’ She recoils into God. Later, after her father has died and the farm sold, Marietta inherits $3,000. She takes the money from the bank and – dirt-poor that she and her farmer husband are – burns the bills in a stove: ‘She put in just a few bills at a time, so it wouldn’t make too big a blaze. My father stood and watched her.’ He did not protest. Or was he actually there? The narrative is uncertain on the point. Why did Marietta do it? Why did she, as few children do, repay her father? Why did she not just refuse the money he left, or give it to charity rather than ritually destroy it? Why – most hurtfully – does she deny her children (the narrator, notably) the decent education that money would have bought? Was Marietta abused by her father? The story gives no answer other than, vaguely, that her daughter thinks the money-burn was ‘right’. In fast-forward, the farm is taken over by a hippy commune, then becomes a small component in the agro-industry which is transforming the land. All is swallowed up, forgotten. Only the unanswered ‘why?’ remains.