Toni Morrison's Lorain

Description

The Cleveland-based newspaper, Plain Dealer, published "Toni Morrison: Lorain Writer No Slave to Success" on April 14, 1981. Its report, Brian E. Alberecht, highlights the author's writing process and inspiration. 

In the world of contemporary literature, where success often is a byproduct of epic disaster, true confessions, supernatural shockers, yet another candid look at sex or the latest way to shed a few pounds, a writer like Toni Morrison might seem predestined for the anonymous meaningful but commercially doomed status of so many other authors.

However, the critical attention and national publicity greeting her most recent work, “Tar Baby,” contradict what has been assumed to be the gospel of publishing success nowadays.

It is not the kind of book requiring the use of lurid cover graphics, a screaming read-me title or the telltale notation, “Soon to be a major motion picture,” splashed across the jacket to be accepted, commercially and professionally.

It is the kind of book requiring patience, participation and some serious thinking on the part of the reader.

“Tar Baby” is a complex study of human relationships — black and white, male and female — set in the lush surroundings of a Caribbean island where superstition and myth interact with the unfolding of a 20th-century drama.

Through the character of Jadine, the niece of a black servant couple attending to a retired candy millionaire and his wife who reside on the island, Morrison explores the conflict of integration vs. black pride and cultural heritage.

It is Morrison’s fourth book since 1967. Her third, “Song of Solomon,” won the 1978 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.

The release of “Tar Baby” last month prompted a wave of national publicity about Morrison, including an interview with Dick Cavett and a cover story in Newsweek magazine.

The sudden attention comes as an unexpected but not entirely unwelcome surprise to Morrison, who still feels somewhat ill at ease when asked for her autograph.

“It (success) has eased things a little bit, financially, but it hasn’t changed me,” the author said yesterday while here as part of an 11-city tour to promote her book. “I suppose it might have been different if success had come early for me, but it took the third book for that to happen.”

As an established author, Morrison resists what would seem to be inherent pressure to stay on top of the literary heap.

“I’ll only write a book if I think it needs to be written and feels compelling,” she explained. “The first book I wrote (‘The Bluest Eye’) was because I felt very strongly about it and I was doing it for myself. I felt it was important for me to do it, and that’s still the case.”

Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford in Lorain, 50 years ago. The city was the setting for her first book. Several members of her family, including her mother, still live there.

She remembers it as a town frozen in the era of her childhood during the 1930s; a typical Midwest setting complete with horse-drawn ice wagons and milk trucks.

“Toni” was a nickname she acquired during her school days. “I thought it was kind of cute then,” she commented. “I don’t think so now, but I guess I’m stuck with it.”

Her youth was filled with a passion for books, including such authors as Updike, Poe, Hawthorne and Melville. After earning a degree in English at Howard University, she taught the subject there and at Texas Southern University, then married a Jamaican architect and worked as an editor in New York.

She now lives with her two sons in a renovated boathouse on the Hudson River in New York. In addition to writing, she is a senior editor at Random House, a teacher at Bard College and an active member of the National Council on the Arts.

The possibility of being categorized as another black author, evoking much the same message popularized during the Black Power movement of the 1960s, does not seem to disturb Morrison.

“A Russian writer will write about Russian things. I write about black things,” she said. “I write about what I know, and as a writer you have to accept all the things that go along with the gig. It’s part of the risk you take in being a writer.”

Morrison said the key to her writing is to involve the reader, “like the people in a black church shouting and talking back to the minister.”

She said, “I don’t want it to sound ‘booky.’ I want to write it so it has a sound to it that can almost be heard; so the reader can come in and work with me, seeing things and feeling things and hearing things.”

In fleshing out her characters, no detail seems too minute to be overlooked by Morrison. In her latest book, even the surrounding trees and insects take on the form of an ancient Greek chorus, responding to the human drama that invades their domain.

To Morrison, it’s all part of making the characters more important than her, a reason she did not include any biographical data in her first book.

“These are the kind of characters who never had center stage in anybody else’s book,” she said. “Now they’re there in all their glory.”

Gaining this degree of intimacy with her fictional characters produces an outcome that affects both author and reader.

“The story is so uppermost in my mind that other things can look distant to me. I have some difficulty concentrating on real life when I’m writing, so much so that I have to mentally drag myself away from a story to do the everyday things,” Morrison said.

“The hardest part is the first draft. After that, it’s reasonably agonizing.”

As a book editor, Morrison is well aware of the pressures of commercialism in today’s publishing industry. She can see it in the degree to which publishers have moved away from accepting unsolicited manuscripts — the way she broke into the field — relying on established authors instead.

She finds it important to resist the publish-or-perish pressures that can be brought to bear against any successful writer.

“I may have written my last book. I don’t really know. I’m just going to have to let the next one find me. I can’t force it, even though I start to feel very melancholy after a while if I’m not writing,” she said. “If it’s not there, it’s not there. If it takes five years, fine.”

The idea of her books achieving some degree of immortality long after she is gone seems to surprise Morrison, who paused, then offered a doubtful, “You really think so?”