THENEWYORKER,JULY27, 2020 39
to you, dear Toni: alive, beloved and per-
severing, magical.... For all America,
for all of American letters, you have ad-
vanced the moral and artistic standards
by which we must measure the daring
and the love of our national imagination
and our collective intelligence as a peo-
ple.” They contested the fact that Mor-
rison had yet to be considered for a Pu-
litzer Prize. Later that year, “Beloved”
did win a Pulitzer. Ralph Ellison, for one,
disapproved of the special pleading. “Toni
doesn’t need that kind of support, even
though it was well intentioned,” he said.
“Beloved”’s profile only got higher
as time went by. The contrarian critic
Stanley Crouch called it “protest pulp
fiction” and complained that it ideal-
ized black behavior “to placate senti-
mental feminist ideology, and to make
sure that the vision of black woman as
the most scorned and rebuked of the
victims doesn’t weaken.” He objected
to its commerciality. “Were ‘Beloved’
adapted for television (which would suit
the crass obviousness that wins out over
Morrison’s literary gift at every signifi-
cant turn) the trailer might go like this:
‘Meet Sethe, an ex-slave woman who
harbors a deep and terrible secret that
has brought terror into her home.’” (As
it happened, it was adapted for film,
with Oprah in the role of Sethe.)
Best-selling books, film adaptations,
television talk-show appearances all in-
creased Morrison’s celebrity and drew
other famous people into her life. The
actor Marlon Brando would phone to
read her passages from her novels that
he found particularly humorous. Oprah
had her to dinner—on TV. By the time
the film of “Beloved” was released, Mor-
rison’s fame was inescapable. I recall
walking along the West Side piers in
Manhattan and hearing a Puerto Rican
queen, defending one of her “children,”
say to an opponent, “You want me to
go ‘Beloved’ on your ass?”
Morrison’s critics reached their loud-
est pitch when she was awarded the
Nobel Prize, in 1993, a year that Thomas
Pynchon and Joyce Carol Oates had
been favored to win. “I hope this prize
inspires her to write better books,”
Crouch said. Charles Johnson, a black
novelist, called her writing “often offen-
sive, harsh. Whites are portrayed badly.
Men are. Black men are.” He said that
she had been “the beneficiary of good
will” and that her award was “a triumph
of political correctness.” A piece in the
Washington Post asked well-known
American writers whom they would
like to see receive the award. Erica Jong
(whose choice, Doris Lessing, Jong de-
scribed as “the wrong kind of African:
white”) wrote, “I wish that Toni Mor-
rison, a bedazzling writer and a great
human being, had won her prize only
for her excellence at stringing words to-
gether. But I am nevertheless delighted
at her choice.... I suspect, however, that
her prize was not motivated solely by
artistic considerations. Why can’t art in
itself be enough? Must we also use the
artist as a token of progressivism?” The
Nobel Committee said that Morrison
“delves into the language itself, a lan-
guage she wants to liberate from the
fetters of race.” To this, one critic re-
torted that she has “erected an insistent
awareness of race (and gender and what-
ever else may be the ‘identity’-defining
trait du jour) as the defining feature of
the self.”
“I have never competed with other
people,” Morrison told me. “It just never
occurred to me. I have to sort of work
it up to understand what people are
talking about when they complain about
what this person did or that person
shouldn’t do. There were several con-
tenders from the U.S. that year, and my
wish was that they would’ve all gotten
it, so that I could be left alone. I onlycompete with myself, with my stan-
dards. How to do better the next time,
how to work well.”N
ear the end of one of our inter-
views last summer, Morrison took
me on a tour of the house. Descending
the staircase off the sitting room, we
had a look at her office, with its two big
desks stacked with paper and correspon-
dence. Behind one desk was her assis-
tant, John Hoppenthaler, a poet. Win-
dows surrounded the room. “I don’t
really write that much in here,” Morri-
son said. “Don’t look at it—it’s a mess.”
She decided that she would pick some
tomatoes for lunch. She is what she calls
a “pot” gardener—she enjoys gardening
on a small scale. The room below the
office is where Morrison does her writ-
ing. It has a slate floor, a big wooden ta-
ble—“It’s from Norway, not that I got
it in Norway, and I’m sure the man who
imported it overcharged for it, but I love
all the grooves and cracks in it”—and
a fully equipped kitchen. Sometimes
she cooks Thanksgiving dinner for her
family there (both sons are married, with
children), but it’s a room meant for work.
French doors lead out to a stretch of
grass and the river beyond. Morrison
got to work picking tomatoes off a small
vine trained against a stone wall. Two
tomatoes that did not meet her stan-
dards she chucked into the river. Then
she led me inside to get back to work. “Comparison is the thief of joy, Mittens.”