CHLOE WOFFORD talks about TONI MORRISON |
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Date: September 11, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final Byline: By Claudia Dreifus; THE WOMAN BREEZING INTO A Princeton, N.J., restaurant in a brilliant silk caftan and with salt-and-pepper dreadlocks is Toni Morrison, 63, the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University and the 1993 Nobel Prize winner for literature. Heads turn as she moves to a table. Princetonians in khaki stare. Since her Grand View-on-Hudson, N.Y., home burned to the ground last Christmas, Morrison has been living in this very Anglo-Saxon American town. "Princeton's fine for me right now," she explains as we sit down to lunch. "I have wonderful students and good friends here. Besides, I'm in the middle of a new novel and I don't want to think about where I'm living." Text: The new novel is tentatively called "Paradise." In writing it, Morrison says she has been trying to imagine language to describe a place where "race exists but doesn't matter." Race has always mattered a lot in Morrison's fiction. In six previous novels, including "Beloved," "Song of Solomon" and "Jazz," she has focused on the particular joys and sorrows of black American women's lives. As both a writer and editor -- Morrison was at Random House for 18 years -- she has made it her mission to get African-American voices into American literature. As a luncheon companion, she is great fun -- a woman of subversive jokes, gossip and surprising bits of self-revelation (the laureate unwinds to Court TV and soap operas). The stories Morrison likes to tell have this deadpan/astonished quality to them. Like fellow Nobel winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez, she can recount the most atrocious tale and give horror a charming veneer. One suspects that Morrison long ago figured out how to battle the cruelties of race with her wit. She grew up Chloe Anthony Wofford, in the rust-belt town of Lorain, Ohio. Her father, George, was a ship welder; her mother, Ramah, a homemaker. At Howard University, where she did undergraduate work in English, Chloe Anthony became known as Toni. After earning a master's in English literature at Cornell, she married Harold Morrison, a Washington architecture student, in 1959. But the union -- from all reports -- was difficult. (As open as Morrison is about most subjects, she refuses to discuss her former husband.) When the marriage ended in 1964, Morrison moved to Syracuse and then to New York with her two sons, Harold Ford, 3, and Slade, 3 months old. She supported the family as a book editor. Evenings, after putting her children to bed, she worked on a novel about a sad black adolescent who dreams of changing the color of her eyes. "The Bluest Eye" was published in 1970, inspiring a whole generation of African-American women to tell their own stories -- women like Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor and Toni Cade Bambara. "I'm not pleased with all the events and accidents of my life," she says over coffee and a cigarette. "You know, life is pretty terrible and some of it has hurt me a lot. I'd say I'm proud of a third of my life, comfortable with another third and would like to redo, reconfigure, the last third." Q: When you went to Stockholm in December to collect the Nobel Prize, did you feel a sense of triumph? A: I felt a lot of "we" excitement. It was as if the whole category of "female writer" and "black writer" had been redeemed. I felt I represented a whole world of women who either were silenced or who had never received the imprimatur of the established literary world. I felt the way I used to feel at commencements where I'd get an honorary degree: that it was very important for young black people to see a black person do that, that there were probably young people in South-Central Los Angeles or Selma who weren't quite sure that they could do it. But seeing me up there might encourage them to write one of those books I'm desperate to read. And that made me happy. It gave me license to strut. Q: You've said that even after publishing three novels, you didn't dare call yourself "a writer." How was that possible? A: I think, at bottom, I simply was not prepared to do the adult thing, which in those days would be associated with the male thing, which was to say, "I'm a writer." I said, "I am a mother who writes" or "I am an editor who writes." The word "writer" was hard for me to say because that's what you put on your income-tax form. I do now say, "I'm a writer." But it's the difference between identifying one's work and being the person who does the work. I've always been the latter. I've always thought best when I wrote. Writing is what centered me. In the act of writing, I felt most alive, most coherent, most stable and most vulnerable. Interestingly, I've always felt deserving. Growing up in Lorain, my parents made all of us feel as though there were these rather extraordinary deserving people within us. I felt like an aristocrat -- or what I think an aristocrat is. I always knew we were very poor. But that was never degrading. I remember a very important lesson that my father gave me when I was 12 or 13. He said, "You know, today I welded a perfect seam and I signed my name to it." And I said, "But, Daddy, no one's going to see it!" And he said, "Yeah, but I know it's there." So when I was working in kitchens, I did good work. Q: When did you do that kind of work? A: 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 "The Bluest Eye," Pauline lived in this dump and hated everything in it. And then she worked for the Fishers, who had this beautiful house, and she loved it. She got a lot of respect as their maid that she didn't get anywhere else. If she went to the grocery store as a black woman from that little house and said, "I don't want this meat," she would not be heard. But if she went in as a representative of these white people and said, "This is not good enough," they'd pay attention. Q: What role did books play in your childhood? A: Major. A driving thing. The security I felt, the pleasure, when new books arrived was immense. My mother belonged to a book club, one of those early ones. And that was hard-earned money, you know. Q: As a young reader, when you encountered racial stereotypes in the classics of American literature -- in Ernest Hemingway or Willa Cather or William Faulkner -- how did you deal with them? A: I skipped that part. Read over it. Because I loved those books. I loved them. So when they said these things that were profoundly racist, I forgave them. As for Faulkner, I read him with enormous pleasure. He seemed to me the only writer who took black people seriously. Which is not to say he was, or was not, a bigot. Q: It must have been fulfilling, in 1970, to see your name on the cover of "The Bluest Eye." A: I was upset. They had the wrong name: Toni Morrison. My name is Chloe Wofford. Toni's a nickname. Q: Didn't you know that your publisher, Holt, was going to use the name? A: Well, I sort of knew it was going to happen. I was in a daze. I sent it in that way because the editor knew me as Toni Morrison. Q: So you achieved fame misnamed? A: Tell me about it! I write all the time about being misnamed. How you got your name is very special. My mother, my sister, all my family call me Chloe. It was Chloe, by the way, who went to Stockholm last year to get the Nobel Prize. Q: In your acceptance speech you spoke against "unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis" -- language that "suppresses human potential." Some of your critics thought you were using the Nobel ceremony to advocate politically correct literature. A: You know, the term "political correctness" has become a shorthand for discrediting ideas. I believe that powerful, sharp, incisive, critical, bloody, dramatic, theatrical language is not dependent on injurious language, on curses. Or hierarchy. You're not stripping language by requiring people to be sensitive to other people's pain. I can't just go around saying, "Kill whitey." What does that mean? It may satisfy something, but there's no information there. I can't think through that. And I have to use language that's better than that. What I think the political correctness debate is really about is the power to be able to define. The definers want the power to name. And the defined are now taking that power away from them. Q: Which authors influenced you when you began writing? A: James Baldwin. He could say something in a phrase that clarified all sorts of conflicting feelings. Before Baldwin, I got titillated by fiction through reading the African novelists, men and women -- Chinua Achebe, Camara Laye. Also Bessie Head and the Negritude Movement, including Leopold Sedar Senghor and Aime Cesaire. They did not explain their black world. Or clarify it. Or justify it. White writers had always taken white centrality for granted. They inhabited their world in a central position and everything nonwhite was "other." These African writers took their blackness as central and the whites were the "other." After I published "The Bluest Eye," I frequently got the question, "Do you write for white readers?" The question stunned me. I remember asking a white woman at Knopf, "What do white people mean when they say, 'I know you did not write that book for me, but I like it'? I never say, 'Oh, Eudora Welty, I know your book was not written for me, but I enjoy it.' " This woman explained that white readers were not accustomed to reading books about black people in which the central issue is not white people. In my work, the white world is marginalized. This kind of ground shifting seems much more common to black women writers. Not so much black men writers. Black men writers are often interested in their relations with white men. White men, by and large, are not powerful figures in black women's literature. Q: When you began writing, the best-known black literary voices were male -- Ralph Ellison, Baldwin, Richard Wright. Did you make a conscious effort to change that? A: When I began writing I didn't write against existing voices. There had been some women writing -- Paule Marshall, Zora Neale Hurston, though I hadn't read Hurston yet. When I began, there was just one thing that I wanted to write about, which was the true devastation of racism on the most vulnerable, the most helpless unit in the society -- a black female and a child. I wanted to write about what it was like to be the subject of racism. It had a specificity that was damaging. And if there was no support system in the community and in the family, it could cause spiritual death, self-loathing, terrible things. Once I did that, I wanted to write another book. By the time I wrote the third one, I began to think in terms of what had gone on before -- whether my territory was different. I felt what I was doing was so unique that I didn't think a man could possibly understand what the little girl in "The Bluest Eye" was feeling. I did not think a white person could describe it. So I thought I was telling a tale untold. Q: There's a boom now in black women's literature. Terry McMillan makes best-seller lists. Bebe Moore Campbell's "Brothers and Sisters" is a Book-of-the-Month Club main selection. Is the book world changing? A: Yes. This means there is now such a thing as popular black women's literature. Popular! 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! When I was a book editor, I had to worry about all the books I was publishing by black authors being lumped together in reviews. Black authors who didn't write anything at all like each other would be reviewed together. Their works were understood first of all to be black, and not, you know, history books or novels. Q: Back to your Nobel. What did you do with the $817,771 that came with it? [ Sighs. ] It's probably just as well. Because if I hadn't done that, I would have taken the money and rebuilt my house and it would have been like most of the money I've ever had: as soon as you get it, there's this big hole waiting for it. Q: Did the fire seem like some kind of mystical leveling for flying too high? A: No. In the two years around the Nobel, I had a lot of bad luck, a lot of very serious devastations. My mother died, other things. The only thing that happened that was unexpected and truly wonderful was the Nobel Prize. So I regard the fact that my house burned down after I won the Nobel Prize to be better than having my house burn down without having won the Nobel Prize. Most people's houses just burn down. Period. When I think about the fire, I think I may not ever, ever, ever get over it. And it isn't even about the things. It's about photographs, plants I nurtured for 20 years, about the view of the Hudson River, my children's report cards, my manuscripts. There were some months when I wouldn't talk to anybody who had not had a house burn down. Q: That must have been a limited circle. A: Oh, I don't know. You'd be surprised how many people had their house burn down. The writer Maxine Hong Kingston and I traded information. She had her whole house burn down. Right now, I don't want to think about where I live because I'm working hard on a new book. And I am getting deeper and deeper into the book. And I can feel myself getting vaguer and vaguer and vaguer. Pretty soon I will be like someone looking through water -- everybody will look to me as if I'm in a tank somewhere. Q: I read that your two sons didn't particularly like growing up with a writer for a mother. A: Who does? I wouldn't. Writers are not there. They're likely to get vague when you need them. And while the vagueness may be good for the writer, if children need your complete attention, then it's bad for them. Q: You wrote your early novels while holding a full-time job and raising your sons alone. How did you keep the responsibilities from silencing you as a writer? A: It wasn't easy. But when I left Washington, I really wanted to see if I could do it alone. In New York, 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. I remember one day when I was confused about what I had to do next -- write a review, pick up groceries, what? I took out a yellow pad and made a list of all the things I had to do. It included large things, like "be a good daughter and a good mother," and small things, like "call the phone company." I made another list of the things I wanted to do. There were only two things without which I couldn't live: mother my children and write books. Then I cut out everything that didn't have to do with those two things. There was an urgency -- that's all I remember. Not having the leisure to whine. Not paying close attention to what others thought my life should be like. Not organizing my exterior and interior self for the approval of men -- which I had done a lot of before. It's not a bad thing to please a husband or a lover, but I couldn't do that. It took up time and thought. Q: There's a lot of sexual violation in your fiction. Why? A: Because when I began to write, it was an unmentionable. It is so dangerous, it is so awful, so wicked, that I think in connection with vulnerable black women it was never talked about. I wanted to write books that ran the whole gamut of women's sexual experiences. I didn't like the imposition that had been placed on black women's sexuality in literature. They were either mothers, mammies or whores. And they were not vulnerable people. They were not people who were supposed to enjoy sex, either. That was forbidden in literature -- to enjoy your body, be in your body, defend your body. But at the same time I wanted to say, "You still can be prey." Right now, I've been writing a page or two in my new book, trying to evoke out-of-door safety for women. How it feels. How it is perceived when you feel perfectly safe a long way from home. This new book, "Paradise," has taken over my imagination completely and I'm having the best time ever. I wrote 13 pages in three days. I've never done that in my life. Q: When you relax, what do you read? A: Well, I don't read much fiction when I'm writing, as I am right now. If I read fiction, I want to be in the author's head, and I have to be in mine. I did have some time off recently and I read Marguerite Duras and Leslie Marmon Silko and Jean Genet's biography. When I'm on tour or traveling, I generally read mystery stories -- Ruth Rendell, John le Carre, P. D. James and this man called Carl Hiaasen. He has a wonderful ear for dialogue. Q: Have you been following the O. J. Simpson case? A: Yes, and I find it very sinister. It's a carnival. Sometimes you think it's about men beating women, sometimes about athletes and their being curried and made into things. Sometimes you think it's about white/black, Hollywood, but it's not. This is just one big national spectacle, and they get to kill him. We get to watch. We get to focus on the detritus, not the victim. Q: "Beloved" is the story of an escaped slave, Sethe, who kills her daughter rather than see the child live in slavery. Were you frightened while writing it? A: I had never been so frightened. I could imagine slavery in an intellectual way, but to feel it viscerally was terrifying. I had to go inside. Like an actor does. I had to feel what it might feel like for my own children to be enslaved. At the time, I was no longer working at an office, and that permitted me to go deep. With "Beloved," I wanted to say, "Let's get rid of these words like 'the slave woman' and 'the slave child,' and talk about people with names, like you and like me, who were there." Now, what does slavery feel like? What can you do? How can you be? Clearly, it is a situation in which you have practically no power. And if you decide you are not going to be a victim, then it's a major risk. And you end up doing some terrible things. And some not-so-terrible things. But the risk of being your own person, or trying to have something to do with your destiny, is one of the major battles in life. Q: Do you ever get writer's block? A: I disavow that term. There are times when you don't know what you're doing or when you don't have access to the language or the event. So if you're sensitive, you can't do it. When I wrote "Beloved," I thought about it for three years. I started writing the manuscript after thinking about it, and getting to know the people and getting over the fear of entering that arena, and it took me three more years to write it. But those other three years I was still at work, though I hadn't put a word down. Q: Several of your friends told me you were surprised when you won the Nobel Prize. Why? A: Because I never thought I had that many supporters. I never thought that the Swedish Academy either knew about my work or took it seriously. The reason it didn't occur to me is not because I didn't think my work eminently worthy. But I was aware of the cautions and the caveats and the misunderstandings that seemed to lie around the criticisms of my work. My books are frequently read as representative of what the black condition is. Actually, the books are about very specific circumstances, and in them are people who do very specific things. But, more importantly, the plot, characters are part of my effort to create a language in which I can posit philosophical questions. I want the reader to ponder those questions not because I put them in an essay, but because they are part of a narrative. Let me put it another way. I think of jazz music as very complicated, very sophisticated and very difficult. It is also very popular. And it has the characteristic of being sensual and illegal. And its sensuality and its illegality may prevent people from seeing how sophisticated it is. Now, that to me says something about the culture in which I live and about my work. I would like my work to do two things: be as demanding and sophisticated as I want it to be, and at the same time be accessible in a sort of emotional way to lots of people, just like jazz. That's a hard task. But that's what I want to do. [Image] Home | The New York Times Book Review | Search | Forums | Help The New York Times on the Web Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company |
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