The Daily Telegraph Wednesday 7 August 2019 *** 27
returned to Howard as an instructor
in the same subject in 1957. While
at Howard she met the Jamaican
architect Harold Morrison; the couple
married in 1958, and had two sons.
But the marriage was not a happy one
and Toni turned to writing as a means
of escape.
“It was as though I had nothing left
but my imagination,” she recalled, “no
will, no judgment, no perspective,
no power, no authority, no self – I
wrote like someone with a dirty habit,
Secretly. Compulsively. Slyly.”
Joining a small, informal group of
poets and writers, and one day finding
herself short of any material to take
to the meeting, she dashed off a story
about a little black girl named Pecola
Breedlove who wanted blue eyes – the
genesis of The Bluest Eye.
She resigned from Howard in 1964,
the year of her divorce, and took a
job as a textbook editor for Random
House. She soon found herself forced
to juggle the various demands of full-
time employment with raising two
sons, and she would rise at 5am to fit
writing into this crowded schedule.
The Bluest Eye was finished in 1969;
the novel, praised for its emotional
range and poetic lyricism, explored
the destructive consequences of
what Toni Morrison saw as the most
superficial aspect of human identity,
aesthetic beauty.
However, Pecola’s tragic
misfortunes – she is raped by her
father – were, the author felt, largely
misunderstood as being somehow
representative of African-American
life: “No one reads Lolita as if it were
typical of white girls. My book was
about incest; it wasn’t a children’s
book. Yet it was taught to children
as offering a good look into the black
family. I was horrified.”
The relationship between women
was a theme Toni Morrison continued
to explore in Sula. Set in the 1930s,
and narrating the 40-year friendship
between two sharply contrasting
personalities, Nel and Sula, the text
was widely admired for the depth of
its characterisation, The New York
Times comparing the “heroic, almost
mythological quality” of her writing tothat of one of her principal influences,
Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Toni Morrison turned to a new
challenge for her third novel, Song
of Solomon, which concerned
the personal odyssey of Malcolm
“Milkman” Dead Jr, her
first male protagonist,
to find his roots and
identity, symbolised
by a mythic treasure
hidden somewhere in
the Deep South. The
book was a triumphant
success, carrying off
both the National Book
Critics Circle Award and
the American Academy
and Institute of Arts and
Letters Award in 1978.
In recognition of her
achievements, President Jimmy
Carter appointed Toni Morrison to the
National Council on the Arts in 1980.
The following year she published her
fourth novel, Tar Baby,
which addressed the issue
of racial interaction set in
a Caribbean location, and
contained one of her most
famous, and controversial,
lines: “White folks and
black folks should not sit
down and eat together or
do any of those personal
things in life.”
When asked in
interview whether she
felt the racial divide, as
depicted in the book, was
an unbridgeable abyss, Toni Morrison
pointed to blackness as a fundamental
constituent of American identity. “If
there were no black people here in
this country, it would
have been Balkanised.
The immigrants would
have torn each other’s
throats out, as they have
done everywhere else.
But in becoming an
American, from Europe,
what one has in common
with that other immigrant
is contempt for me – it’s
nothing else but colour.”
Toni Morrison left
Random House in 1983 to
concentrate on writing
and teaching, and in 1984 she took
up the Albert Schweitzer Chair in the
Humanities at the State University of
New York at Albany, a position she
held for five years until accepting the
Robert F Goheen Professorship in the
Council of Humanities at Princeton
in 1989, where she remained until her
retirement in 2006 – the first black
woman writer to hold a named chair at
an Ivy League University.
The story of Margaret Garner, an
escaped slave who in 1851 tried to kill
her children rather than “have them
suffer as she had done”, formed the
basis of Beloved, commonly considered
Toni Morrison’s masterpiece. The
book was dedicated to the 60 million
who died as a result of the slave trade,
and powerfully explored the brutality
of, in James Baldwin’s words, “this
past, the Negro’s past, of rope, torture,
castration, infanticide, rape”.
With her determination to uncover
passages of history that America, a
country she perceived as obsessed
with the myth of innocence, had
tried to forget, even Toni Morrison
herself was surprised at the acclaim
she won for the book: “I had thought
this has got to be the least read of all
the books I’d written because it is
about something that the charactersdon’t want to remember, I don’t want
to remember, black people don’t
want to remember, white people
don’t want to remember. I mean,
it’s national amnesia.”
Not only did Beloved become
a bestseller, it was
subsequently turned
into a film through the
efforts of Oprah Winfrey,
who bought the screen
rights and took the role
of Sethe, and the Oscar-
winning director Jonathan
Demme. She also wrote
the libretto for an opera
by Richard Danielpour,
Margaret Garner, first
performed in 2005 at the
Detroit Opera House.
Jazz (1992), set in
1920s Harlem and echoing to the
improvisational strains of black jazz
music, was the second instalment
of the trilogy begun by Beloved and
completed by Paradise
in 1998. The opening line
of Paradise, “They shoot
the white girl first”, was
vintage Morrison – quiet
understatement bristling
with a raw, uncontrolled
undercurrent of energy.
The novel had a
mixed reception,
some commentators
complaining of convoluted
plotting, sensationalist
characterisations and
a gothic melodramatic
style in the manner of Solzhenitsyn.
But Toni Morrison brushed off
such criticisms: “I’m a child of the
Depression, I’m scared of doing
nothing,” she said in 1998.
“My father taught me that
unemployment was a bad
thing. Give me a stipend, a
little office and a little bit
of health insurance – I’ll be
fine. Writing is my work
but not my job.”
Toni Morrison would
write four more novels.
Love (2003) told of the
lives of several women
and their relationships to a
charismatic but dead hotel
owner; A Mercy (2008)
examined the roots of racism going
back to slavery’s earliest days and made
it to the New York Times Book Review
list of he “10 Best Books of 2008”.
Home (2012) was the story of a Korean
War veteran in the segregated United
States of the 1950s who tries to save his
sister from medical experiments at the
hands of a white doctor.
Her final novel, God Help the Child
(2015), concerned an executive in
the fashion industry dogged by the
childhood trauma of being tormented
as dark-skinned by her lighter-skinned
parents. It won mixed reviews, Razia
Iqbal in The Independent complaining
that the characters were “too didactic
on the page: prototypes for an idea
rather than real people.”
In addition to her novels she
published two plays, Dreaming
Emmett (1986) and Desdemona (2011)
and an influential critical work on
race relations in literature, Playing in
the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary
Imagination (1992).
In 2012 President Obama awarded
Toni Morrison the Medal of Freedom.
She is survived by a son. Her second
son predeceased her.Toni Morrison, born February 18
1931, died August 5 2019Nobel Prize-winning African-American novelist whose bestseller Beloved was hailed as a masterpiece
Toni Morrison
S
IR MICHAEL
MARSHALL, who has
died aged 87, was
chairman and chief
executive of Marshall of
Cambridge, the automotive
and aerospace business
founded by his grandfather;
he was also a prominent
figure in Cambridgeshire
public life and a veteran
aviator.
The Marshall group
comprises one of the UK’s
largest motor dealership
chains combined with
divisions which service
aircraft and supply mobile
military equipment and
medical systems. The group
has some 6,000 employees
and £2.5 billion of sales.
Michael Marshall took
over the leadership of the
group from his father in- Astute, hard-working
and interested both in
people and technology, he
presided over an expansion
which saw the car sales side
expand from four outlets in
the 1950s to 30 at its peak.
On the aerospace side, he
directed the company’s vital
support for the RAF’s
Hercules and TriStar fleets
during the Falklands and
Gulf wars and the conflict in
Bosnia, and maintained
close personal relationships
with US manufacturers such
as Lockheed Martin.
Michael John Marshall
was born in Cambridge on
January 27 1932. He was the
son of Sir Arthur Marshall
and Rosemary, née
Dimsdale, granddaughter of
the 6th Baron Dimsdale – a
Russian imperial title
conferred by Catherine the
Great on an English doctor
who had inoculated her
against smallpox.
Arthur was the son of
David Marshall, who in 1909
had started a chauffeur-
driven car business that
became Marshall’s Garages.
Arthur was a keen flier who
developed an aerodrome
(now Cambridge
International Airport), a
flying school and an aircraft
maintenance business
alongside an expanding
garage chain.
During the Second World
War, Arthur Marshall had a
hand in the training of
thousands of RAF aircrew,
and in the post-war era his
company was involved in
many military and civilian
aircraft projects, including
the design of the droop nose
and visor of Concorde.
Michael Marshall was
educated at Eton and was
commissioned as an RAF
pilot for National Service
before going to Jesus
College, Cambridge, where
he read History and stroked
the 1954 Boat Race crew
which lost to Oxford by four
and a half lengths; he went
on to row for Britain in the
1955 European
Championships.
He joined the family firm
in that year, becoming
managing director in 1963
and deputy chairman in
1965; he was chief executive
until 2010, chairman until
2016, and president
thereafter. The car
dealership side was floated
on the Stock Exchange in
2015, with Marshall of
Cambridge remaining its
majority shareholder.
Michael Marshall was
High Sheriff of
Cambridgeshire in 1988 and
Vice Lord-Lieutenant from
1992 to 2006. He chaired
fundraising appeals for Ely
Cathedral, Addenbrooke’s
Hospital and the Prince’s
Trust, and for the county’s
contribution to the 1984
Olympic Appeal. He was a
benefactor of Jesus College,
the family having donated
the original Marshall garage
for postgraduate
accommodation.
He was also involved in
numerous industry bodies
for the motor trade and
manufacturing, and was
active in all aspects of air
training. Both in business
and in public life, he was
passionately concerned
with helping young people
to realise their potential. He
was appointed CBE in 1999
and knighted in 2010.
A member of the Royal
Air Squadron, Marshall held
a private pilot’s licence for
70 years and (with his
75-year-old co-pilot) had
planned to fly his single-
engined Morane-Saulnier
Rallye Minerva to Morocco
next month.
He married first, in 1960,
Bridget Pollock; the
marriage was dissolved in
1977 and he married
secondly, in 1979, Sibyl
Walkinshaw (née Hutton),
who survives him with two
sons and two daughters of
the first marriage, and two
stepsons.Sir Michael Marshall, born
January 27 1932, died July
27 2019Sir Michael Marshall
Aviator who became a giant of
the car and aerospace industries
Held pilot’s licence for 70 yearsT
ONI MORRISON, the
novelist and essayist,
who has died aged 88,
was in 1993 the first
African-American woman
to win the Nobel Prize
for Literature, and one of the most
original and challenging literary
voices of the 20th century.
Though she took up writing
relatively late in her career – to
“postpone the melancholy” of a failed
marriage – her work came to enjoy
great critical and commercial success,
prompting The New York Times to
describe her as “the nearest America
has to a national novelist”.
Drawing heavily on her own
experiences growing up poor, female
and black, Toni Morrison sought to
convey the experiences of African-
Americans through a prose style
of lyrical simplicity that could also
be unsettling in its intensity. She
was forthright when describing her
writing, and its intended audience:
“I want to participate in developing
a canon of black work,” she once
declared, “writing about black
Americans, for black Americans.”
Despite favourable reviews, her
first two novels, The Bluest Eye (1970)
and Sula (1973), did not sell well, and it
was not until the publication of Song
of Solomon in 1977 and, particularly,
the Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved
a decade later that her reputation
was guaranteed.
A later work, Paradise, was
published in 1998 to a mixed reception
- yet the book sold over a million
copies, thanks in no small part to
being endorsed by Oprah Winfrey,
and confirmed Toni Morrison’s status
as one of the foremost talents of
her generation.
Unsurprisingly, she was no stranger
to controversy. Though the Nobel
panel praised a “literary artist of
the first rank”, some critics felt that
Toni Morrison was the fortunate
beneficiary of the new climate of
“political correctness”. Beloved was
panned by Stanley Crouch in New
Republic as being “written in order
to enter American slavery into the
big-time martyr ratings contest”.
Toni Morrison fiercely rejected
such accusations, and saw her writing
as based on intensely personal
experience. Not as political as
Alice Walker, she also resisted the
temptation to sensationalise her own
history in a manner akin to her other
great black American contemporary,
Maya Angelou.
Her admirers (who included not
only Oprah Winfrey, but also President
Clinton and even Marlon Brando:
“he found my novels funny – no one
finds my novels funny”) felt that
she transcended the politics of race
and gender. Salman Rushdie wrote
that her books, though “created
out of black experience”, exerted a
far wider influence and “enrich the
whole of literature”.
However, Toni Morrison herself
never forgot her roots. Of winning
the Nobel, she declared: “I felt
representative. I felt American. I
felt Ohioan. I felt blacker than ever.
I felt more woman than ever.”
The second of four children of
George and Ramah Wofford, Toni
Morrison was born Chloe Anthony
Wofford on February 18 1931 in the
gritty steel town of Lorain, Ohio
(“neither plantation nor ghetto”, she
would later write). She changed her
name at college because Chloe was
difficult to pronounce – a decision
she would later regret as pandering
to convention.
The family had moved to Ohio from
the southern states to escape racial
tensions. However, George Wofford,
an intensely proud man and a ship-
welder by trade, was forced during
the worst of the Depression to work
as a car washer and road construction
worker to support his family.
Toni Morrison would later recall
the jubilation when he returned home
one evening with his first steel job:
“$50 a week, and I remember my
mother dancing in the middle of the
room; she kicked off her shoes one
at a time, and he was beaming! $50 a
week! It was heavenly! Rich!”
But she also recalled the Wofford
household as “basically racist”. George
Wofford believed that whites were
“genetically evil”, and distrusted
“every word and every gesture of
every white man on earth”.
Her mother Ramah, though, was
fired by the belief that the power
of the community could overcome
man’s inhumanity to man. A brave
and determined woman, she would
tear off the eviction notices put on
the Wofford house, and write to
President Roosevelt if there were
maggots in her flour – an attitude
which would prove influential to her
daughter’s narratives.
Toni Morrison attended the
multiracial Lorain High School, then
moved to Washington DC to enrol at
the all-black Howard University, but
her hopes of finding a stimulating
intellectual environment “full
of brilliant black students” were
disappointed: “We were treated like
defective kids on the one hand ... and
ladies of the night on the other.”
Having graduated with a BA in
English in 1953, she went on to a
Master’s degree at Cornell University
mainly because, in her words, she had
“nowhere to go”, submitting what she
later admitted was a “shaky” thesis
on the theme of suicide in William
Faulkner and Virginia Woolf.
After two years of teaching English
at Texas southern University she
Toni Morrison’s
novels sought to
convey the
experiences of
black Americans,
but for her many
admirers she
transcended race
and gender and
enriched the whole
of literature. Below,
President Obama
gave her the Medal
of Freedom in 2012JACK MITCHELL/GETTY / CAROLYN KASTER /AP PHOTOObituaries
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