I am convinced that among the reasons Bearden must be widely viewed in galleries, should occupy the burgeoning attention of scholars to African American art, is only partly canon formation; is only minimally the quenching of nationalistic desire; is supplementally a tribute to his genius. The more significant reason in the exploration of the resonances, alignments, the connections, the intergenre sources of African American art is the resounding aesthetic dialogue among artists. Separating art forms, compartmentalizing them, is convenient for study, instruction, and institutions. But it is hardly representative of how artists actually work. The dialogue between Bearden and jazz music and musicians is an obvious beginning. The influence writers acknowledge is a further step. The borders established for the convenience of study are, I believe, not just porous, they are liquid. Locating instances of this liquidity is vital if African American art is to be understood for the complex work that it is and for the deep meaning it contains.
Romare Bearden sat in an airplane seat once and told me he would send me something. He did. An extraordinary, completely stunning portrait of a character in one of my books. Not his Pilate of 1979, but the Pilate in Song of Solomon—part of a series, I gather. Imagine my surprise at what he saw. Things I had not seen or known when I invented her. What he made of her earring, her hat, and her bag of bones—far beyond my word-bound description, heavy with the life that both energized and muted her; solitary, daring anyone to deprive her of her symbols, her history, her purpose. I had seen her determination, her wisdom, and her seductive eccentricity, but not the ferocity he saw and rendered.
Later on I acquired a watercolor of his, a row of Preservation Hall–type musicians standing before a riverboat, all in white with their traditional sashes of color. For the first time in a representation of black jazz musicians I saw stillness. Not the active, frenetic, unencumbered physical movement normally seen in renderings of musicians—but the quiet at the center. It was, in a word, sacred, contemplative. A glance into an otherwise obscured aspect of their art.
That kind of insight is rare indeed. Displaying it, underscoring it, analyzing it is far more compelling than merely enjoying it. The legacy enjoins us all to think deeply about what Romare Bearden has given us, and what African American art is imploring us to discover.
Faulkner and Women
I’M AMBIVALENT about what I’m about to do. On the one hand, I want to do what every writer wants to do, which is to explain everything to the reader first so that, when you read it, there will be no problems. My other inclination is to run out here and read it, then run off so that there would be no necessity to frame it. I have read from this manuscript three or four times before, and each time I learned something in the process of reading it, which was never true with any other book that I wrote. And so when I was invited to come to Oxford and speak to this conference about some aspect of “Faulkner and Women,” I declined, saying that I really couldn’t concentrate enough to collect remarks on “Faulkner and Women” because I was deeply involved in writing a book myself and I didn’t want any distractions whatsoever. And then very nicely the conference directors invited me to read from this manuscript that had me so obsessed, so that I could both attend the conference and associate myself in some real way with the Center for the Study of Southern Culture and also visit Mississippi and “spend the night,” as they say. So, on the one hand, I apologize for reading something that is not finished but is in process, but this was a way to satisfy my eagerness to visit the campus of the University of Mississippi, and I hope there will be some satisfaction rippling through the audience once I have finished. My other hesitation is simply because some of what I read may not appear in print, as a developing manuscript is constantly changing. Before reading to a group gathered to discuss “Faulkner and Women,” I would also like to add that in 1956 I spent a great deal of time thinking about Mr. Faulkner because he was the subject of a thesis that I wrote at Cornell. Such an exhaustive treatment of an author makes it impossible for a writer to go back to that author for some time afterward until the energy has dissipated itself in some other form. But I have to say, even before I begin to read, that there was for me not only an academic interest in Faulkner, but in a very, very personal way, in a very personal way as a reader, William Faulkner had an enormous effect on me, an enormous effect.
The title of the book is Beloved, and this is the way it begins:
[The author read from her work-in-progress and then answered questions from the audience.]
MORRISON: I am interested in answering questions from those of you who may have them. And if you’ll stand up and let me identify you before you ask a question, I’ll do the best I can.
QUESTION: Ms. Morrison, you mentioned that you wrote a thesis on Faulkner. What effect did Faulkner have on your literary career?
MORRISON: Well, I’m not sure that he had any effect on my work. I am typical, I think, of all writers who are convinced that they are wholly original and that if they recognized an influence they would abandon it as quickly as possible. But as a reader in the fifties and later, of course (I said 1956 because that’s when I was working on a thesis that had to do with him), I was concentrating on Faulkner. I don’t think that my response was any different from any other student at that time, inasmuch as there was in Faulkner this power and courage—the courage of a writer, a special kind of courage. My reasons, I think, for being interested and deeply moved by all his subjects had something to do with my desire to find out something about this country and that artistic articulation of its past that was not available in history, which is what art and fiction can do but sometimes history refuses to do. I suppose history can humanize the past also, but it frequently refuses to do so for perfectly logically good reasons. But there was an articulate investigation of an era that one or two authors provided and Faulkner was certainly at the apex of that investigation. And there was something else about Faulkner that I can only call “gaze.” He had a gaze that was different. It appeared, at that time, to be similar to a look, even a sort of staring, a refusal-to-look-away approach in his writing that I found admirable. At that time, in the fifties or the sixties, it never crossed my mind to write books. But then I did it, and I was very surprised myself that I was doing it, and I knew that I was doing it for some reasons that are not writerly ones. I don’t really find strong connections between my work and Faulkner’s. In an extraordinary kind of memorable way there are literary watersheds in one’s life. In mine, there are four or five, and I hope they are all ones that meet everybody’s criteria of who should be read, but some of them don’t. Some books are just awful in terms of technique but nevertheless they are terrific: they are too good to be correct. With Faulkner there was always something to surface. Besides, he could infuriate you in such wonderful ways. It wasn’t just complete delight—there was also that other quality that is just as important as devotion: outrage. The point is that with Faulkner one was never indifferent.
QUESTION: Ms. Morrison, would you talk a little bit about the creation of your character Sula?
MORRISON: She came as many characters do—all of them don’t—rather full-fleshed and complete almost immediately, including her name. I felt this enormous intimacy. I mean, I knew exactly who she was, but I had trouble trying to make her. I mean, I felt troubled trying to make her into the kind of person that would upset everybody, the kind of person that sets your teeth on edge, and yet not to make her so repulsive that you could not find her attractive at the same time—a nature that was seductive but off-putting. And playing back and forth with that was difficult for me because I wanted to describe the qualities of certain personalities that can be exploited by conventional people. The outlaw and the adventuress, not in the sense of somebody going out to find a fortune, but in the way a woman is an adventuress, which has to do with her imagination. And people such as those are always memorable and generally attractive. But she’s troublesome. And, by the time I finished the
book, Sula, I missed her. I know the feeling of missing characters who are in fact, by that time, much more real than real people.
QUESTION: Ms. Morrison, you said earlier that reading a work in progress is helpful to you as a writer. Could you explain how reading helps you?
MORRISON: This whole business of reading my own manuscript for information is quite new for me. As I write I don’t imagine a reader or listener, ever. I am the reader and the listener myself, and I think I am an excellent reader. I read very well. I mean I really know what’s going on. The problem in the beginning was to be as good a writer as I was a reader. But I have to assume that I not only write books, I read them. And I don’t mean I look to see what I have written; I mean I can maintain the distance between myself the writer and what is on the page. Some people have it, and some people have to learn it. And some people don’t have it; you can tell because if they had read their work, they never would have written it that way. The process is revision. It’s a long sort of reading process, and I have to assume that I am also this very critical, very fastidious, and not-easily-taken-in reader who is smart enough to participate in the text a lot. I don’t like to read books when all the work is done and there’s no place for me there. So the effort is to write so that there is something that’s going on between myself and myself—myself as writer and myself as reader. Now, in some instances, I feel content in doing certain kinds of books without reading them to an audience. But there are others where I have felt—this one in particular because it’s different—that what I, as a reader, am feeling is not enough, and I needed a wider slice, so to speak, because the possibilities are infinite. I’m not interested in anybody’s help in writing technique—not that. I’m just talking about shades of meaning, not the score but the emphasis here and there. It’s that kind of thing that I want to discover, whether or not my ear on this book is as reliable as I have always believed it to be with the others. Therefore, I agree quickly to reading portions of this manuscript. Every other book I wrote I didn’t even negotiate a contract until it was almost finished because I didn’t want the feeling that it belonged to somebody else. For this book I negotiated a contract at a very early stage. So, I think, probably some of the business of reading is a sort of repossession from the publisher. It has to be mine, and I have to be willing to not do it or burn it, or do it, as the case might be. But I do assume that I am the reader, and, in the past, when I was in doubt, if I had some problems, the people I would call on to help me to verify some phrase or some word or something would be the people in the book. I mean I would just conjure them up and ask them, you know, about one thing or another. And they are usually very cooperative if they are fully realized and if you know their name. And if you don’t know their names, they don’t talk much.
QUESTION: Ms. Morrison, could you discuss the use of myth and folklore in your fiction?
MORRISON: This is not going to sound right, but I have to say it anyway. There is infinitely more past than there is future. Maybe not in chronological time, but in terms of data there certainly is. So in each step back there is another world, and another world. The past is infinite. I don’t know if the future is, but I know the past is. The legends—so many of them—are not just about the past. They also indicate how to function in contemporary times and they hint about the future. So that for me they were not ever simple, never simple. I try to incorporate those mythic characteristics that for me are very strong characteristics of black art everywhere, whether it was in music or stories or paintings or what have you. It just seemed to me that those characteristics ought to be incorporated into black literature if it was to remain that. It wasn’t enough just to write about black people, because anybody can do that. But it was important to me as a writer to try to make the work irrevocably black. It required me to use the folklore as points of departure—as, for example in this book, Beloved, which started with a story about a slave, Margaret Garner, who had been caught with her children shortly after she escaped from a farm. And rather than subject them to what was an unlivable and unbearable life, she killed them or tried to. She didn’t succeed, and abolitionists made a great deal out of her case. That story, with some other things, had been nagging me for a long, long time. Can you imagine a slave woman who does not own her children? Who cares enough to kill them? Can you imagine the daring and also the recriminations and the self-punishment and the sabotage, self-sabotage, in which one loves so much that you cannot bear to have the thing you love sullied? It is better for it to die than to be sullied. Because that is you. That’s the best part of you, and that was the best part of her. So it was such a serious matter that she would rather they not exist. And she was the one to make that reclamation. That’s a very small part of what this is about, but that’s what was in my brainpan—as they say—when I got started. So that in this instance, I began with historical fact and incorporated it into myth instead of the other way around.
QUESTION: Ms. Morrison, earlier you said you had no intention of becoming a writer when you started to write. Could you explain what you meant by this?
MORRISON: I was in a place where I didn’t belong, and I wasn’t going to be there very long so I didn’t want to make it any nicer than it was. And I didn’t want to meet anybody, and I didn’t like anybody and they didn’t like me either; and that was fine with me; and I was lonely. I was miserable. My children were small, and so I wrote this story. I had written a little story before, in the time I could spare to work it up in the evening. (You know children go to bed, if you train them, at seven. Wake up at four but go to bed at seven.) And so after I put them to bed, I would write, and I liked it. I liked thinking about it. I liked making that kind of order out of something that was disorderly in my mind. And also I sensed that there was an enormous indifference to these people, to me, to you, to black girls. It was as if these people had no life, no existence in anybody’s mind at all except peripherally. And when I got into it, it just seemed like writing was absolutely the most important thing in the world. I took forever to write that first book: almost five years for just a little book. Because I liked doing it so much, I would just do a little bit, you know, and think about that. I was a textbook editor at that time. I was not even trying to be a writer, and I didn’t let anybody know that I was writing this book because I thought they would fire me, which they would have. Maybe not right away, but they didn’t want me to do that. They felt betrayed anyway. If you’re an editor, what you’re supposed to do is acquire books, not produce them. There is a light adversarial relationship between publishers and authors that I think probably works effectively. But that’s why I was very quiet about writing. I don’t know what made me write it. I think I just wanted to finish the story so that I could have a good time reading it. But the process was what made me think that I should do it again, and I knew that that was the way I wanted to live. I felt very coherent when I was writing that book. But I still didn’t call myself a writer. And it was only with my third book, Song of Solomon, that I finally said—not at my own initiative I’m embarrassed to tell you but at somebody else’s initiative—“This is what I do.” I had written three books. It was only after I finished Song of Solomon that I thought, “Maybe this is what I do only.” Because before that I always said that I was an editor who also wrote books or a teacher who also wrote. I never said I was a writer. Never. And it’s not only because of all the things you might think. It’s also because most writers really and truly have to give themselves permission to win. That’s very difficult, particularly for women. You have to give yourself permission, even when you’re doing it. Writing every day, sending books off, you still have to give yourself permission. I know writers whose mothers are writers, who still had to go through a long process with somebody else—a man or editor or friend or something—to finally reach a point where they could say, “It’s all right. It’s okay.” The community says it’s okay. Your husband says it’s okay. Your children say it’s okay. Your mother says it
’s okay. Eventually everybody says it’s okay, and then you have all the okays. It happened to me: even I found a moment after I’d written the third book when I could actually say it. So you go through passport and customs and somebody asks, “What do you do?” And you print it out: WRITE.
The Source of Self-Regard
I WANT TO TALK about two books in a way in which I understand a kind of progression to have taken place in my work, to talk a little bit about Beloved and a little bit about a new novel, and to suggest to you some of the obstacles that I created for myself in developing these books, and perhaps to talk, and illustrate by very short examples in the books, ways in which I approached the work.
I was told by somebody at a very, very large state university, “You know that you,” meaning me, “are taught in twenty-three separate classes on this campus.” Not twenty-three separate groups of students, but twenty-three different subject-matter classes. And I was very flattered by that, and very interested in that, but a little bit overwhelmed, because I thought, well, outside of, say, African American literature or women’s studies, or who knows, maybe even English departments and places like that, how could there be twenty-three? Well, some of them were legal studies, and some of them were courses in history, and some of them courses in politics, some of them were in psychiatry, in all sorts of things. And aside from some obvious things that I could claim about Beloved, it did seem to me that it had become a kind of an all-purpose, highly serviceable source for some discourse in various disciplines and various genres and various fields.
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