Toni Morrison
Page 12
ELKANN: Do you think that Black literature is very much alive today?
MORRISON: Well, let me think. I think it’s moved—you know, there was a time when the music of Black people was the most important thing. And then it became, sometimes, you know, with some of the writers, with their novels, that Black writing became important. Like, um, James Baldwin. So now, it’s nothing to single out. It’s sort of here…But it moved from music, finally, to literature—Black literature, or literature about Black people. Although people like Baldwin, they didn’t even live here. He lived in Turkey or someplace.
ELKANN: And you think literature is alive today, you read new books and—
MORRISON: I do! [Laughs] I’m not sure if in a large group, or not…
ELKANN: Are there any interesting, any new, interesting writers?
MORRISON: Some young women. You know, they’re like a new breed of writer because they have some different things they’re interested in.
ELKANN: Women have made big progress.
MORRISON: I think so, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely.
ELKANN: What do you worry about?
MORRISON: I’m really worried about the man who runs this country.*7 He’s so ignorant, so craven, and shallow, egocentric, vengeful…He’s an old man. He’s 72. He should stop it. I don’t know, there’s a really great book over here about him that Woodward*8 wrote, called Fear. I read that and said Oh, God. [Laughs] It’s worse than I thought! And I thought bad things.
ELKANN: There are reasons to be happy for you?
MORRISON: Yeah. I’ve lived a long life. It’s good.
ELKANN: And you keep on writing?
MORRISON: Oh, yeah.
*1 E. L. Doctorow (1931–2015), the esteemed American novelist who was, for many years, an editor at the New American Library and the Dial Press, where he worked with writers as varied as Ian Fleming and Ayn Rand to James Baldwin and Norman Mailer.
*2 Umberto Eco (1932-2016) was an Italian novelist and semiotician who authored numerous books, including The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum.
*3 Satchmo was a nickname of trumpeter Louis Armstrong, who was born in New Orleans.
*4 James Baldwin (1924–1987) American novelist, essayist, and short story writer, who authored numerous books including Notes of a Native Son, The Fire Next Time, Giovanni’s Room, and Go Tell It on the Mountain.
*5 The Nobel Prize, which Morrison won in 1988.
*6 Erskine Caldwell (1903–1987) was an American novelist and short story writer, best known for his novel Tobacco Road.
*7 At the time of this interview, Donald Trump was president.
*8 Bob Woodward, a journalist for the Washington Post, who has authored many books profiling presidential administrations, most famously All the President’s Men, co-authored with Carl Bernstein, about the Nixon administration.
TONI MORRISON was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford (her nickname Toni would come from her baptismal name, Anthony) in Lorain, Ohio. After graduating from Howard University, and getting a master’s at Cornell University, she became an English professor, first at Texas Southern University, then back at Howard. When her marriage to Harold Morrison broke up in 1964, leaving her with their two sons, she decided to change careers. Morrison got a job at Random House as the company’s first African American fiction editor. She would go on to work with many notable authors, including Angela Davis, Muhammad Ali, and Toni Cade Bambara. Simultaneously, she began working on her own writing, and in 1970 would publish her first novel, The Bluest Eye. The book was extremely well received, as was her second novel, Sula, and her third novel, Song of Solomon, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. She would go on to write several more novels—perhaps most notably, Beloved—as well as plays and poetry, and in 1993 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
LILA FREILICHER is a long-time publishing industry executive whom, at the time of this interview, was an associate editor at Publishers Weekly.
DONALD M. SUGGS JR. (1961–2012) was a senior editor at The Village Voice, associate director at the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, and a program director at Harlem United Community AIDS Center.
CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT has been a beat reporter for The New York Times, a columnist for The New Yorker, a correspondent for PBS, and a bureau chief for NPR. Her work has won numerous awards, including a Peabody Award two Emmys, and the 1986 Journalist of the Year Award from the National Association of Black Journalists.
BILL MOYERS became a journalist after being press secretary to President Lyndon Johnson, starting as publisher of Newsday, then, in 1971, beginning a long association with PBS, hosting news and cultural affairs programs. He also spent ten years as a commentator for CBS News. Moyers has won over 30 Emmy awards, three George Polk Awards, a lifetime Peabody Award, and the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism.
ZIA JAFFREY is the author of The Invisibles: A Tale of the Eunuchs of India, published in 1996. She lives in New York City.
CAMILLE O. COSBY is a theatrical and television producer, perhaps best known for co-producing the play and subsequent film of the hit Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years. She is also the longtime manager of her husband, comedian Bill Cosby.
CHRISTOPHER BOLLEN is the former editor-in-chief of Interview Magazine, and has been an arts journalist for numerous publications, including Artforum and The New York Times. He is the author of four novels: Lightning People, Orient, The Destroyers, and A Beautiful Crime.
ALAIN ELKANN is an Italian journalist who writes a weekly column for the Turin newspaper, La Stampa. The host of several cultural programs on Italian TV, he is also the author of several novels, including Anita and Money Must Stay in the Family.
THE LAST INTERVIEW SERIES
KURT VONNEGUT: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.”
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JACQUES DERRIDA: THE LAST INTERVIEW LEARNING TO LIVE FINALLY
“I am at war with myself, it’s true, you couldn’t possibly know to what extent…I say contradictory things that are, we might say, in real tension; they are what construct me, make me live, and will make me die.”
translated by PASCAL-ANNE BRAULT and MICHAEL NAAS
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978-1-61219-094-5
ebook: 978-1-61219-032-7
ROBERTO BOLAÑO: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“Posthumous: It sounds like the name of a Roman gladiator, an unconquered gladiator. At least that’s what poor Posthumous would like to believe. It gives him courage.”
translated by SYBIL PEREZ and others
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978-1-61219-095-2
ebook: 978-1-61219-033-4
JORGE LUIS BORGES: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“Believe me: the benefits of blindness have been greatly exaggerated. If I could see, I would never leave the house, I’d stay indoors reading the many books that surround me.”
translated by KIT MAUDE
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978-1-61219-204-8
ebook: 978-1-61219-205-5
HANNAH ARENDT: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“There are no dangerous thoughts for the simple reason that thinking itself is such a dangerous enterprise.”
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978-1-61219-311-3
ebook: 978-1-61219-312-0
RAY BRADBURY: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“You don’t have to destroy books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
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978-1-61219-421-9
ebook: 978-1-61219-422-6
JAMES BALDWIN: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“You don’t realize that you’re intelligent until it gets you into trouble.”
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978-1-61219-400-4
ebook: 978-1-61219-401-1
GABRIEL GÁRCIA MÁRQUEZ: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“The only thing the Nobel Prize is good for is not having to wait in line.”
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978-1-61219-480-6
ebook: 978-1-61219-481-3
LOU REED: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“Hubert Selby. William Burroughs. Allen Ginsberg. Delmore Schwartz…I thought if you could do what those writers did and put it to drums and guitar, you’d have the greatest thing on earth.”
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978-1-61219-478-3
ebook: 978-1-61219-479-0
ERNEST HEMINGWAY: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof shit detector.”
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978-1-61219-522-3
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PHILIP K. DICK: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“The basic thing is, how frightened are you of chaos? And how happy are you with order?”
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978-1-61219-526-1
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NORA EPHRON: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“You better make them care about what you think. It had better be quirky or perverse or thoughtful enough so that you hit some chord in them. Otherwise, it doesn’t work.”
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978-1-61219-524-7
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JANE JACOBS: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“I would like it to be understood that all our human economic achievements have been done by ordinary people, not by exceptionally educated people, or by elites, or by supernatural forces.”
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978-1-61219-534-6
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DAVID BOWIE: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“I have no time for glamour. It seems a ridiculous thing to strive for…A clean pair of shoes should serve quite well.”
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MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
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978-1-61219-616-9
ebook: 978-1-61219-617-6
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“If someone says I’m doing this out of faith, I say, Why don’t you do it out of conviction?”
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978-1-61219-672-5
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HUNTER S. THOMPSON: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“I feel in the mood to write a long weird story–a tale so strange and terrible that it will change the brain of the normal reader forever.”
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978-1-61219-693-0
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DAVID FOSTER WALLACE: THE LAST INTERVIEW AND OTHER CONVERSATIONS
“I’m a typical American. Half of me is dying to give myself away, and the other half is continually rebelling.”
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978-1-61219-741-8
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KATHY ACKER: THE LAST INTERVIEW AND OTHER CONVERSATIONS
“To my mind I was in a little cage in the zoo that instead of ‘monkey’ said ‘female American radical.’ ”
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978-1-61219-731-9
ebook: 978-1-61219-732-6
PRINCE: THE LAST INTERVIEW AND OTHER CONVERSATIONS
“That’s what you want. Transcendence. When that happens–oh, boy.”
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978-1-61219-745-6
ebook: 978-1-61219-746-3
JULIA CHILD: THE LAST INTERVIEW AND OTHER CONVERSATIONS
“I’m not a chef, I’m a teacher and a cook.”
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978-1-61219-733-3
ebook: 978-1-61219-734-0
URSULA K. LE GUIN: THE LAST INTERVIEW AND OTHER CONVERSATIONS
“Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”
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978-1-61219-779-1
ebook: 978-1-61219-780-7