Toni Morrison

by The Last Interview-

  BOLLEN: You’ve been called “the national novelist.” You’ve also been called “the conscience of America.” In fact, it’s hard to think of another writer, except for Walt Whitman, who has been asked to stand for so much of the national voice. Do you ever feel that distracts you from your own writing? That such extreme success is, in a way, a pigeonhole?

  MORRISON: I had a little moment of difficulty after I won the Nobel Prize, but I was already writing Paradise [1997], thank god. I didn’t have to invent something worthy of the prize. Now I just take the good stuff. I remember a grudge, but I take the good stuff. [Laughs]

  BOLLEN: There’s the romantic vision of the Nobel committee waking American recipients from their early morning sleep with a phone call. Did that happen to you?

  MORRISON: No, they changed it. They’re much more civilized about it. They announce it when they have figured it out, which is in the middle of the night. So it gets out. But they have decided not to make people crazy and call them up at night, and just do it at a normal time for whatever country they’re in. What happened was a friend of mine, Ruth Simmons, who is now president of Brown, she was still at Princeton then, called me up at about seven o’clock in the morning and said, “You won the Nobel Prize.” And I thought, What? I thought she was seeing things.

  BOLLEN: Did you even know you were in the running?

  MORRISON: I really never thought about it. So I hung up on her! I said, “What is she talking about?” Because I thought, How would she know something that I wouldn’t know? She called me right back and said, “What’s the matter with you?” I said, “Where’d you hear that?” And she said, “I heard it from Bryant Gumbel on the Today show.” So then I had to think, Well…Maybe? But there had been so many moments—as I later learned, more than I thought—when people believed they were going to get it, and journalists were beginning to circle, and they didn’t get it.

  BOLLEN: I think that happened to poor Norman Mailer. Friends even told him that he got it and he might have given an interview. But he never received it.

  MORRISON: I know. It happened to Joyce Carol Oates once! The journalists were out waiting for her. But I didn’t know what to do! I just went to class, right? And then that afternoon, around 12:30, I got a telephone call from the Swedish Academy saying that I had won—at a reasonable time of day. I still wasn’t quite certain. I said, “Would you fax that?”

  BOLLEN: You wanted it in writing! [Laughs]

  MORRISON: That’s right! But the event itself was just heaven. It’s the best party.

  BOLLEN: I saw the recent Fran Lebowitz documentary, Public Speaking, by Martin Scorsese, where she talks about going with you and being forced to sit at the kids’ table.

  MORRISON: [Laughs] I know! She was serious. But it was really lovely. It was palatial and grand…and a little inconvenient.

  BOLLEN: Is it?

  MORRISON: I mean, the risers on the stairs—they were so short—I could barely walk down them. But anyway, I thought it was the best time. It was so much fun. Fran said the right thing to me, she said, “This is the first time I’ve seen pomp with circumstance.”

  BOLLEN: When you finally quit your editing job to concentrate on writing in 1983, was that a moment where you thought, Okay, no going back?

  MORRISON: That was different, because I sat out there on that porch when I quit [Morrison points out the window to her porch over the Hudson River]. It wasn’t as lovely as it is now because the storm knocked it down and I had to have it redone. But I was sitting out there, and I felt afraid, or something jittery. I didn’t have a job. Still with kids. It was a strange sort of feeling. And then I thought, No, what I’m feeling is not anxiety—this is happiness!

  BOLLEN: Relief.

  MORRISON: More than relief. I was really happy. Which is to say I guess I hadn’t been. I hadn’t felt that—it must have been a combination of happiness and something else. And it was then that I wrote Beloved. It was all like a flood when I wrote that book.

  BOLLEN: How did you find that article about Margaret Garner [the escaped slave who killed her daughter in Cincinnati to avoid her daughter’s reenslavement upon capture], which became the basis for the story of Beloved?

  MORRISON: I was doing The Black Book [1974 nonfiction book by Middleton A. Harris and Morrison], and these guys were bringing me all this stuff because I was going to make a whole-earth catalog about black history—the good and the bad. I got old newspapers from a guy who collected them, and I found an article about Margaret Garner. What was interesting to me was that the reporter was really quite shocked that Margaret Garner was not crazy. He kept saying, “She’s so calm…and she says she’d do it again.” So I decided to look into this. It was not uncommon for slave women to do that, but I thought, Suppose she was rational and there was a reason. This was also at a time when feminists were very serious and aggressive about not being told that they had to have children. Part of liberation was not being forced into motherhood. Freedom was not having children, and I thought that, for this woman, it was just the opposite. Freedom for her was having children and being able to control them in some way—that they weren’t cubs that somebody could just buy. So, again, it was just the opposite of what was the contemporary theme at the moment. Those differences were not just about slavery or black and white—although there was some of that—but in the early days, I used to complain bitterly because white feminists were always having very important meetings, but they were leaving their maids behind! [laughs]

  BOLLEN: Did you feel a real split between white and black feminists?

  MORRISON: Womanists is what black feminists used to call themselves. Very much so. They were not the same thing. And also the relationship with men. Historically, black women have always sheltered their men because they were out there, and they were the ones that were most likely to be killed. As a matter of fact, this was an interesting thing for me. When I went into the publishing industry, many women talked about the difficulty they had in persuading their families to let them go to college. They educated the boys, and the girls had to struggle. It was just the opposite in the African American communities, where you educated the girls and not the boys, because the girls could always go into nurturing professions—teachers, nurses…But if you educated your men, they would go into jobs where they would have to be confronted or held down. They could never flourish so easily. Now that has changed in any number of ways, but it was like an organism protecting itself.

  BOLLEN: In Home, there’s the zoot-suited man that haunts the narrative and appears before the main character a few times. How did he enter the novel?

  MORRISON: Well, a lot of the book confronts the question of how to be a man, which is really how to be a human, but let’s say “man.” And he’s struggling with that, and there’s certain pro forma ways in which you can prove you’re a man. War is one. But the zoot-suit guys, postwar, in the late ’40s, early ’50s, they were outrageous—they were asserting a kind of maleness, and it agitated people. The police used to shoot them. You talk about dress, not to speak of hoodies—they were always arresting those guys. I wanted this figure of a fashionstatement male to just hover there.

  BOLLEN: You bring up hoodies. Is there a link between what happened then to what is happening today with the Trayvon Martin case? There was the Million Hoodie March. Do you think situations like Trayvon Martin’s shooting still happen all of the time and they just aren’t reported? Or have we curtailed the systematic murder of black men in America?

  MORRISON: The hoodie is just a distraction. I thought they should have had a Million Doctors March or something like that! For me, it’s highly theatricalized now, very theatricalized in the media. The killing of young black men has never changed all that much, with or without hoodies. I don’t know of any young black men who haven’t been stopped by cops. Ever. My sons…I was listening to Jesse Jackson talk about his sons—one was in law school and one was in business school. But they were al
l stopped. I remember Cornel West telling me he was teaching somewhere and he had to commute. He was stopped every time. It doesn’t matter if the car is new or beat up—Cornel’s was beat up, they still stopped him. [Laughs] So the pervasive notion of black men as “up to no good” may be spoken about more right now in the media, but it’s no less pervasive than it’s always been. It’s like my character Frank Money in Home. I just took it for granted that the police would search him on the street. But I’m interested in what the consequences of this situation will be for any number of reasons. There are two things I want to know, and I may spend some time doing research. One is, has any white man in the history of the world ever been convicted of raping a black woman? Ever?

  BOLLEN: I can’t think of one offhand.

  MORRISON: I just want one. The other thing is, has any cop shot a white kid in the back? Ever? I don’t know of any. Those are two things I’m looking for. And then I will believe all this stuff. Once I find a cop who shoots a young white kid for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  BOLLEN: That never seems to happen, does it? Back in 2008, when Barack Obama was running for office, he asked you for an endorsement, which you eventually gave. You said having him in the office would be a restitution. You called it a necessary evolution and not a revolution.

  MORRISON: Did I say that? It sounds good! [Laughs]

  BOLLEN: You did. Now, on the eve of his reelection, do you think Obama fulfilled those expectations?

  MORRISON: More. More. He’s better than I thought he would be.

  BOLLEN: I feel that way overall. There are moments where I’ve had some doubts, but it’s natural to lose confidence with a president at certain points in a presidency.

  MORRISON: Of course, but what I didn’t expect was the amount of hostility. I knew there would be some—maybe even lots—but this is really deranged. For the people who hate Obama, it doesn’t matter what he does. Nothing matters. And the things they say are so retro. I decided that once they have something called the n-word that no one can say, it did the opposite of the word like. Taking the n-word—N-I-G-G-E-R—out of language left a hole. So now there is this flood of other words—Kenyan and no-births—that they have produced in order to fill that hole. The n-word used to say it all. Now there’s this other loaded vocabulary that’s become totally insane. It’s the opposite of like. As in, “I’m, like, ‘Wow…’ ” Or, “It was, like…” Or, “I’m thinking, like…” Like has taken 90 words out of the vocabulary. They don’t say felt any more. And I get really upset about that. So there’s a word that erases language, and then there’s the erasure of a word that produces a deranged kind of language. That’s startling to me. And the response from the people who dislike Obama is a really visceral dislike. I read a sentence in a newspaper article that said, “The real problem is that here’s a black man in charge of the world.” It’s not a judge or a doctor or the head of a neighborhood—it’s the world. Some people aren’t able to deal with that.

  THE LAST INTERVIEW

  ALAINELKANNINTERVIEWS.COM

  INTERVIEW WITH ALAIN ELKANN

  OCTOBER 14, 2018

  Toni Morrison lives in a sun-filled house by the Hudson River. On a Saturday afternoon Victoire Bourgois and I took a ride 45 minutes up the Hudson River with a driver who had lived his whole life in New York and pointed to us all the different areas of New Jersey, Upstate, Yonkers, Connecticut. When we arrived she greeted us warmly, and when talking about her writing process she said: ‘My desk does not face the river, otherwise I would not do a thing all day but watch the river. Here there is a mixture of salt water and tidal movements and fresh water, because it is so close to New York City.

  ALAIN ELKANN: Have you lived in your home on the Hudson River for many years?

  TONI MORRISON: In the county for about 35 years, in this place maybe 15 or 20 years. This house burned down one year, and we all moved to New York City until I rebuilt it.

  ELKANN: You worked as a Random House, um—

  MORRISON: Editor, yeah.

  ELKANN: —editor, in New York City, right? For how many years?

  MORRISON: I don’t know. I have to tell you something—it’s a big secret, but I want you to know. I’m 87. [Laughing] So I don’t remember anything! [Still laughing] But that was good. I liked working at Random House.

  But you know I was the only—I think, Doctorow*1 occupied that place, at one point, the position of being a writer and an editor. And then he decided he didn’t want to be an editor anymore, so he quit, and just wrote books. I, on the other hand, didn’t have that luxury, since I was raising two sons. So I kept the job. But I was an author and my editor was at Knopf—Bob Gottlieb, whom I just spoke to, he’s harassing me about another book. Then of course I was editing other people’s work. So to be an author and an editor—I don’t know, there was only Doctorow, I think, who did that for about a year. I didn’t have any difficulty—

  ELKANN: But you left. You left to become a writer. But then you were also a professor at Princeton. You left to become a professor, or you left to become a writer?

  MORRISON: No, the writer thing was always with me. I mean, when was The Bluest Eye? That was in 1972 or something. So I was always writing, whether I was an editor or not. And then, when I left Random House—or, yeah, Knopf, actually—well I had to have a job. It was necessary for me to have an income. Always.

  ELKANN: Your books were not selling enough?

  MORRISON: They sold well, but, you know, you can’t make any money with a novel. No one makes money with a nice novel, or an elegant one. It’s usually crime novels and, you know, sex novels, or whatever, for money. The good thing was, whatever they paid me in advance, the sales earned back, so I didn’t owe the company money after the book was published—which isn’t always the case, you know, with a writer. And sometimes they made money.

  ELKANN: But you didn’t trust—you wanted another job.

  MORRISON: I wanted to write! I had another job. I was teaching at Yale, Cornell—at the time that I was an editor at Random House, one day a week I went to teach in a college. And it was interesting because after I started taking Fridays off to go teach, other people in the building, other editors, began to do the same thing. They said well if she can do it, I can do it!

  ELKANN: This was around the time when you met Umberto Eco*2?

  MORRISON: Eco?

  ELKANN: This was in the seventies?

  MORRISON: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I met him twice. Once in Italy. Why was I in Italy? I don’t know. And then he came to wherever I was teaching, maybe Princeton, just for a couple days.

  ELKANN: Your university was Princeton?

  MORRISON: Before that it was SUNY, State University of New York, and then I got a call from a woman at Princeton to see if I want to leave the state university and move to Princeton. And my kids were of an age by that time—I had two sons—that I thought needed me.

  ELKANN: You’ve said that you were writing very early in the morning, no?

  MORRISON: Yeah.

  ELKANN: Because you had the sons.

  MORRISON: Because I had to beat my sons. You know, they woke up at, I don’t know—As soon as the sun came, whatever season it was, I would wake up in the dark, just before sunrise, because I remember sitting at my desk, looking out for it, and it was always like 15 to 20 minutes before sunrise. But I’m very, very smart in the morning! As the day goes on it just goes away! [Laughs]

  ELKANN: How many hours did you write? One hour, two hours?

  MORRISON: I would write till lunch. But I would get up at 5:30, six o’clock, and I would be finished by the middle of the day.

  ELKANN: You’ve said you were working early in the morning, right?

  MORRISON: Yeah, that’s what it was.

  ELKANN: How long?

  MORRISON: I’d start writing early in the morning, when I got up, which was before the sun, because I would always beat the sun. And
that would last until lunch. Noon or so. Now that’s like six hours, but those six hours were pretty fruitful but, you know, not always. Sometimes you have to just go back over what you already wrote and correct it, or erase, cross it out…

  ELKANN: Because you were the editor of yourself?

  MORRISON: Exactly right. [Chuckles]

  ELKANN: How is it to be the editor of yourself? Are you more tough with yourself than you are with other writers? You’ve said that you were writing because you wanted to read what you wrote, right?

  MORRISON: Yeah.

  ELKANN: So when you read what you wrote, were you as impartial as if it were another person?

  MORRISON: Yeah. Another person very like me. [Laughs] You know, but I did have to make some boundaries so that I wasn’t pleased, perpetually pleased, with everything I wrote. That never happened.

  ELKANN: You were not?

  MORRISON: No. And sometimes, you know, it’s just a mystical thing. I remember a sentence floating around my head for like, a whole summer, and I didn’t know what it meant, or why was it staying in my head. And then I sat down and wrote it out on a piece of paper, and after I did that, another sentence came. [Laughing] And then another one. You don’t know how it’s gonna happen.

  My desk downstairs faces the—it doesn’t face the river, it faces the yard on the edge of the river, because I don’t want to look at the river all day or I won’t write anything. So I was looking on the side, this way, and a woman came out of the water, and she walked up the edge of the water along my yard, and then she sat down on a rock. And she was fully dressed, she had on a hat and a nice dress, and so on. So anyway, she’s in the book, fully dressed, I fit the sentences in there…