The Week UK 17.08.2019

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17 August 2019 THE WEEK

Obituaries

Toni Morrison, who
has died aged 88,
wrote fiction that
focused overwhelm-
ingly on black American lives–“in
particular, the often crushing experience
of black women”–using “luminous,
incantatory prose resembling that of no
other writer in English”, said The New
York Times. She was the first African-
American woman to win the Nobel
Prize for Literature–and remains the
only one. But she was also that rare
thing in American letters,awriter
“whose books were both critical
and commercial successes”. The great
achievement of her fiction was to show
how past injustices–above all the legacy
of slavery–live on ina“harrowing
present”. At the same time, the elements
of magic and superstition in her novels
gave themamythical, timeless feel.

Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia
Wofford on 18 February 1931, in the
steel-making town of Lorain, Ohio. Both her parents had fled the
south, to escape segregation: her father, George, wasashipyard
welder; her mother, Ramah, wasahomemaker. When Morrison
was two, the family’s landlord set their house on fire when they
failed to meet their rent payments–anact George ascribed to
the fact, as he saw it, that white people were “genetically
evil”. Nonetheless, the household she grew up in wasahappy
one, full of music and stories,
and at her integrated high
school she developed a
passion for Dostoevsky,
Flaubert and Austen. She
went on to read humanities at
the historically black Howard
University in Washington DC. Finding that people had trouble
pronouncing Chloe, she began calling herself Toni, based on her
baptismal name of Anthony, which she had taken when
converting to Catholicism, aged 12.

After graduating, Morrison moved to Cornell University to write
amaster’s thesis about suicide in the work of Virginia Woolf and
William Faulkner. Returning to Howard asalecturer, she met
Harold Morrison,aJamaican architect. They were married in
1958 and had two sons, Harold and Slade. The marriage,
however, was unhappy, and Morrison took up writing as an
escape. “I wrote like someone withadirty habit,” she recalled.
“Secretly, slyly, compulsively.” After she and Harold divorced
in 1964, Morrison moved with her sons to Syracuse, New York,
where she gotajob with Random House–first editing textbooks,
and later moving to the fiction department. In 1970, aged 39, she
published her first novel,The Bluest Eye,the story of an 11-year-
old girl who believes that her life would be vastly improved if only
she had blue eyes like Shirley Temple.

For nearly two decades, Morrison combined her day job with
writing fiction–getting up at 4am–while raising her sons by
herself, said The Times. She found the strength to do this, she
said,“because of the history of black women.Ihad seen people
who had got through with much more courage thanIever
mustered.” As an editor, she helped bringanew generation of
black writers to prominence, including Angela Davis and Gayl
Jones. Meanwhile, her novels brought her increasing acclaim,
especiallySong of Solomon(1977), her first to featureamale
protagonist–the son ofarich black property owner who
travels south onajourney of self-discovery. (Awarding Morrison

the Presidential Medal of Freedom in

2012, Barack Obama said it was the

book that enabled him to “figure out

how to write”.)

In 1983, Morrison left her day job to

focus on writing full-time, and four years

later publishedBeloved,widely regarded

as her masterpiece. Set in Ohio after the

Civil War, and based onatrue story

Morrison had come across while editing

abook about black history, it centres on

an escaped slave who kills her daughter

to prevent her being captured by slave

hunters. Reviewing it, Margaret Atwood

said it established Morrison’s status as a

“preeminent American novelist”. Others

were equally impressed: whenBeloved

was overlooked for the National Book

Award, more than 40 writers and critics

publishedaletter of protest in The New

York Times. Two months later, it was

awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

In 1989, Morrison returned to academia,

becoming professor of humanities at Princeton University. She

continued lecturing and teaching for much of the rest of her life;

she said it helped her “stay current”. She also branched out into

other forms of literature, writingaplay,Dreaming Emmett

(about the lynching of Emmett Till), various opera librettos and

song lyrics, and five children’s books with her younger son, Slade,

who died of pancreatic cancer in 2010. In 1993, she won the

Nobel Prize. All the while, she

continued writing novels, 11 in

all (her last,God Help the Child,

appeared in 2015).

Morrison helped shift the very

parameters of literature, said

The Washington Post. Although by no means the first successful

African-American novelist, she was arguably the first who wrote

unshackled by what she called the “white gaze”–the need to

explain black experience to white readers. She admitted that her

novels were primarily written “about black Americans, for black

Americans”; the point, she said, was “not having the white critic

sit on your shoulder”. In her work, only white characters are

routinely identified by their skin colour, and she mostly eschewed

the traditional settings of black fiction–plantations and ghettos –

in favour of small-town America. “She paved the way for so

many of us,” said the novelist Candice Carty-Williams, “inspiring

us to do what we need to do without any force or showiness.”

In later years, Morrison “cut an imperious figure, with her silver-

dreaded crown” and “lightning intellect”, said The Times. She

remained an acerbic commentator on race relations, sometimes

provoking anger: during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, she

lamented Bill Clinton’s mistreatment and described him

approvingly as “our first black president”; afteraneighbourhood

watch coordinator shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin dead in

2012, she said she’d like to see “a white kid shot in the back by

acop”. She never remarried, and remained highly private, turning

away all potential biographers. Dividing her time betweenalarge

apartment in Tribeca, Manhattan andaconverted boathouse in

upstate New York, Morrison liked to garden when she wasn’t

writing, and baked the “best carrot cakes in the world”,

according toafriend. To the end, Morrison remained

convinced of the “power of language”, said The Guardian,

and aquotation from her Nobel acceptance speech makes an

“appropriate epitaph”: “We die. That may be the meaning of life.

But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”

Toni

Morrison

1931-2019

Great novelist of black American experience

Morrison:a“lightning intellect”

“The marriage was unhappy and Morrison

took up writing to escape. ‘I wrote like

someone withadirty habit,’ she recalled”