Toni Morrison

by The Last Interview-

  ELKANN: You wrote longhand, right?

  MORRISON: Yes. On yellow tablet paper. Yeah, that’s old school. [Laughs] That’s the way we were taught.

  ELKANN: But why with pencil?

  MORRISON: Because…if you wrote with ink it sounded a little arrogant. Pencil sounded like you knew what you were doing but you were willing to erase.

  ELKANN: You wrote many books, right?

  MORRISON: Um-hmm. About eight, I think. Some I would like to do over. One I would like to do over.

  ELKANN: Which one?

  MORRISON: The Bluest Eye. The first book. I know more now. I’m smarter.

  ELKANN: The Bluest Eye—the little girl wants to have blue eyes, right?

  MORRISON: Yeah. I liked her a lot, as I was writing about her because she was a real little girl. When I was seven or eight years old I had a friend, a neighboring friend, a girl, who was my age, and we were walking down the street, and she said that every night she prayed—we were having a sort of verbal quarrel about whether or not God existed—

  ELKANN: At age seven?

  MORRISON: Yeah, because she said there was no God. And I said, There is a God, and—whatever. So that’s what we were quarreling about. The presence of absence.

  ELKANN: And she had no God because she didn’t have blue eyes?

  MORRISON: Well that’s why she knew there was no God. Because every night—or every day or morning, every something—she prayed, she spoke to God, and asked for blue eyes, and He never ever delivered. So if He didn’t give her blue eyes, the way she asked, obviously, he didn’t exist! [Laughs]

  ELKANN: In your experience, African American people, they don’t want to be African Americans, they want to be Norwegians?

  MORRISON: No no no, she was beautiful, actually, although I didn’t realize it at the time. But she was incredible—she was pitch black, with this incredible beauty—the shape of her head, her lips, her nose, these big eyes—

  ELKANN: She was very beautiful?

  MORRISON: Gorgeous! But she only was concerned about the color of her skin. And I turned to look, to see, and I thought, What? I didn’t know beauty at that age. And I was sort of struck. That’s the first time I looked at a friend, girlfriend, and realized—and thought she was beautiful. That word wasn’t in my vocabulary. You know, there was cute, pretty, but beautiful? That was something like the sky, or something. Anyway.

  ELKANN: But in your books, you describe the condition of African-American people as difficult, right? But at the same time you have a little nostalgia for the ’50s.

  MORRISON: Yeah, the difficulty was—

  ELKANN: Is it because you were young, or is it because—

  MORRISON: No, it was because—no, the difficulty that you reminded me of—of being Black—we were not people, we were Black people. Therefore there was this separation. And I don’t remember being unhappy, or my friends and family being unhappy about that, but there were certain things we were not able to do, and certain places we were not able to go. You know, restaurants, neighborhoods, and so on. But we made our own neighborhood. For instance, we lived on the shore of Lake Erie and there was a Lake Erie park that the city supported, and no Black people were allowed in there. So what they did—what we did—was go further down the shore, about a mile down, and make entrance into Lake Erie there, as opposed to here. We just made our own park.

  ELKANN: This was a time where many minorities, even the Jews, were not accepted in society.

  MORRISON: No no, they were very isolated. The only difference was, at least for people in my area, whether it was race, or Jews, or Italians—boy, they were mean to Italians!—the group that was acceptable were the sort of middle-class, upper-class whites who lived on the shore. They were doctors and dentists, so they thought they were kings and queens, and everybody else was below them. But uh, I guess it affected grown-ups more than it did the kids because we all went to school together. In my fourth grade, there were two Italian kids who could not speak English, they were fresh off a boat, and my teacher made me sit with them so they could learn to speak English, which I did.

  ELKANN: You liked to teach, right?

  MORRISON: I liked teaching those little punks. [Laughs] I feel smart because he was the mayor of our little town at one point, when he grew up.

  ELKANN: You have been a professor for many years.

  MORRISON: I love teaching because you learn so much. It’s not just me telling them, it’s what you get back, which I really like. It’s not just me talking, it’s the conversation, in a sense. I taught at Princeton for something like seven years. I just left not so long ago. My secretary is still there—Ruth.

  ELKANN: Do you prefer teaching to editing?

  MORRISON: You know I don’t know. I think probably now I would prefer editing. I think. That’s because I’m 87 years old and I don’t wanna go nowhere. But normally, the two of them are almost the same thing for me.

  ELKANN: Do you still write?

  MORRISON: “Oh yes,” she said. [Laughs]

  ELKANN: You still write at five in the morning?

  MORRISON: No. [Laughs]

  ELKANN: When do you write?

  MORRISON: Right now, you know, now I can’t do it. I wake up that same time, but the physical stuff is so different now, you know.

  ELKANN: When do you write now?

  MORRISON: Hm, night, right now.

  ELKANN: In the afternoons?

  MORRISON: Later than that, I’d say. Sort of like evenings, six o’clock, seven o’clock. Like that. Yeah. Sometimes it’s three pages, you know. Like that yellow paper over there, those tablets. Sometimes I can do three of those. Sometimes I do half of one, you know, depends on—it’s not so much the amount as it’s what’s clear in my mind, what I want to develop.

  ELKANN: How does it work, the process of a novel? You are obsessed with one story?

  MORRISON: Oh, I don’t know, some of it’s—it’s different—

  ELKANN: If you have one book, a new one, you stick with that?

  MORRISON: Yeah, just one book.

  ELKANN: How long does it take to write a book?

  MORRISON: Three years is the shortest time I’ve spent writing a book. Most of them take six or seven.

  ELKANN: Your most famous book is Beloved?

  MORRISON: I don’t know, is it?

  ELKANN: [very unclear, 15:05]

  MORRISON: I don’t know if that’s why. I thought it was my other one.

  ELKANN: You think it’s your best novel?

  MORRISON: No.

  ELKANN: No?

  MORRISON: My best novel is Jazz. But nobody cares about it but me. Because I never used the word jazz, but I framed, I designed it the way jazz music is—not produced, but created. It has that quality. You never know—you know, it’s inventive, it changes…

  ELKANN: What is the story about?

  MORRISON: I’m not telling you. You won’t get that from me. I want you to read it. [Laughs]

  ELKANN: I will read it then.

  MORRISON: It’s about that period, you know, the 1920s, in a big city like New York.

  ELKANN: You do research for that?

  MORRISON: I did some on New York, at that time. What the buildings looked like—it was very hip, the ’20s in New York City. And the music was great. There wasn’t even much segregation. There was a lot of mixture, you know? Because of the music, I think. If you walked down Harlem, Fifth Avenue, you could just—it was lovely. The way other people talk about it, too, makes it sound like the most exciting place, and the only one that was close to it was New Orleans. But both of those places, it’s occurred to me, are music places. Jazz in New Orleans, musicians living there, playing there. Satchmo*3 and all those guys. And then New York was a different kind of music—

  ELKANN: You love music.

  MORRISON: Love it.

  ELKANN: Because there is music in your books
.

  MORRISON: Well that’s the only way I could do it, because I can’t play it.

  ELKANN: And there is always music in your books, no?

  MORRISON: Yeah, that makes sense. My mother was one of those people who sang all the time, and with a beautiful voice. She never took any lessons, she was just a natural singer. She sang better than anybody I ever heard. Bessie Smith, all those women. Anyway. So she made us take piano lessons, which we thought was like telling us we had to go learn how to walk! [Laughs] We had to go to school to learn to do what she did naturally and all the time?

  ELKANN: Phillip Roth did not want to be considered a Jewish writer, but a writer.

  MORRISON: I remember that. I knew him.

  ELKANN: Are you a Black writer, or are you a writer?

  MORRISON: I’m a Black writer. No hiding.

  ELKANN: Why are you a Black writer?

  MORRISON: Because people like you ask the question. [Chuckles quietly] It’s different.

  ELKANN: What’s the difference?

  MORRISON: The quality, the music, the sound, the texture…And what is it about? You know, Black people writing—what was the other one’s name? Oh, I can’t remember. He came before Baldwin,*4 and he wrote about Black life but it was sort of distant, as though he looked at it as though it were separate from him. Baldwin wasn’t interested in Black anything, he was interested in the craft, and in the world. You know, he lived in Europe, most of the time anyway. But both of those were extremes in their relationship because, you know, if you were a writer and also Black, you didn’t get reviewed in the New York Times. You didn’t get positions at the universities.

  ELKANN: Since then, the world has a lot changed in your lifetime.

  MORRISON: A lot changed. Yes it has. Although I have to say, when I won the Prize,*5 there was some negativity in the press. [Laughs]

  ELKANN: How was it for you, you know, the Black story in America went through a lot since —

  MORRISON: Yeah, yeah, it was a lot of suffering and then people used it in their music, like Nina Simone, you know what I mean? They pulled from it, which is natural. But the writers —

  ELKANN: You, too. You used it in Beloved.

  MORRISON: Yeah. It’s there. But it’s not confined to Black people. You know, white writers do the same thing. They go into the places that are most hurtful, in their youth or in their neighborhood or in their families, and they pull from that a kind of elegance in terms of their writing. There are very few writers that just write happy stuff. They all think they’re Edgar Allen Poe.

  ELKANN: So tell me about you and this changing. Because you lived through a very interesting period—right?—of changing for a Black person, vis-à-vis your parents, your grandparents —

  MORRISON: Yeah, yeah, big changes…

  ELKANN: I mean, when Obama became president, what did you feel?

  MORRISON: I love Obama. [Laughs] That’s my feeling. And he loves me! Well, I don’t know about that—well yes I do, he invited me to a party. Me, my son Ford and I went.

  ELKANN: Do you think this was just one episode?

  MORRISON: I wonder.

  ELKANN: Do we live in a different America now—again?

  MORRISON: Well that’s done. There was Martin Luther King, and then there was Obama. He won twice. We often elect somebody and then never let them become elected again, you know, they have one term. But he had two terms. His daughter came here once—the older one, I think. She was interested in writing, and uh, I don’t think it was him, I think it was his wife who asked me would I talk to her daughter who was interested in becoming a writer. And I said of course. So she came here, in a limousine, and we talked. She was lovely, a lovely girl.

  ELKANN: Do you think there is more freedom and less prejudice now?

  Morrison: I do. Well, my life has changed because I’m well known. But the real test is that my grandchildren, teenagers, will never think about the things that I thought about at their age. And their mother who, you know, attended Woodrow Wilson College and Princeton, so they’re not even in the same category, you know.

  ELKANN: Your grandchildren don’t feel different?

  MORRISON: No, they feel superior. My grandchildren—one is in Jordan at the moment, studying Arabic. Not as a Black girl, but as a person who wants to study Arabic in Jordan, which is like—[Laughs] Oh, really? That would never have occurred to me at that age. I was a very proud Black person, like being a very proud, I don’t know, gay person. Or, you know—there’s always a little category you could put yourself into. Whether it meant anything or not…

  ELKANN: What does it mean to be a very proud Black person?

  MORRISON: Mean? [Laughs] My mother was always “better than.” She was the best singer, she sang in the church, and her voice was so beautiful that white people came from other parts of the state just to hear her sing. So I had an entirely different perception of what being, oh God, I guess on the edge of society versus on top, meant. But that was in Ohio, that’s a different state. That probably wouldn’t have happened in Georgia.

  ELKANN: Nowadays, the world is going back. Nationalism, fascism is coming back in Europe.

  MORRISON: Oh, God!

  ELKANN: Do you think America is in danger?

  MORRISON: Yes. It’s just a kind of a corruption—corruption without embarrassment. I mean, normally when you get a sort of bad leader, whole bunches of people are embarrassed. Now, some people are embarrassed, regardless of race, about Trump. But not enough. I mean, can you imagine—I mean, he lies every minute, everything he says. [Laughs]

  ELKANN: And he’s bad with the Black population, no?

  MORRISON: He’s okay, the same. He doesn’t care. It doesn’t matter to him, race.

  ELKANN: He is not a racist?

  MORRISON: I don’t know. But he wouldn’t fall into that category—racist—because that’s not important to him. Money is important to him. I suppose he likes rich Black people.

  ELKANN: To be a writer today, in America, is it different? Do people read less?

  MORRISON: Well, the response to writing is different because I think people—I don’t know, I may be wrong about this, but I taught in universities for so long, so I’m a little bit out of it, but I have a feeling people don’t read the way they used to.

  ELKANN: They don’t?

  MORRISON: I think they do not, and they don’t read as much, and when they do they don’t want to read certain kinds of things, you know? I don’t know, I may be a little bit off because I’m not teaching anymore, but when I was at Princeton all those years, I could sort of feel what the atmosphere vis-à-vis important books was. Now that I’m out of there I don’t know, I just have to rely on my secretary.

  ELKANN: Why do you write?

  MORRISON: I’m very good at it. That’s one of the reasons. I know how. I always knew how. The problem was that other people didn’t think so.

  ELKANN: What induced you to write when you were young? Why did you become a writer?

  MORRISON: I was in grade school and my mother came to visit the teacher on one of those days where parents come and talk to the teacher about their children. And my teacher told my mother to be very careful with me because I was very talented. And I think I mentioned the little Italian boys that they put next to me so they could learn the language. I remember once, because my maiden name, my last name, was Wofford, and in those days we sat alphabetically. So if your name was a W you’d be in the back, or a Z, or a V, you know, you’d be in the back of the classroom. So I was at the back of the classroom. And a girl named Shirley Vick, V-I-C-K, was sitting next to me. And the other kids were Italians. You just put ’em back there with people like me and Shirley Vick.

  ELKANN: How did you start writing? You wrote a short story?

  MORRISON: I don’t think I did any of that until I went to—I’m remembering—when I went away to college. I don’t know what I did in high scho
ol. Maybe I wrote something but I don’t remember. Because I went back to the university maybe thirty years ago and one of my colleagues was there and I went to see him, and we had coffee—he used something I wrote when I was there in his class as an example of good writing that he gave to all of his students.

  ELKANN: What is good writing?

  MORRISON: [Sighs.] I wish I knew. I can do it, but I can’t describe it. [Laughs]

  ELKANN: Did the Nobel Prize change your life?

  MORRISON: No. They gave me some money, which I spent. It made a lot of people mad. They wrote very—not insulting, but close to insulting, articles that were really hurtful. What’d they give it to her for? [Laughs]

  ELKANN: Once you have so many awards and recognitions, does it become more difficult to write?

  MORRISON: No. Look at that. You see that? That’s my new novel. I spent the morning talking to my editor about that manuscript. That’s called Justice.

  ELKANN: You like very short titles.

  MORRISON: I do, now that you mention it. I hadn’t thought about it but it’s true. It’s just that if it comes that way, it sums up for me something in the book—either a character or a person, somebody who lives there, or you know, a kind of atmosphere.

  ELKANN: Would you like it to be said that you’re poetical?

  MORRISON: Some people have said so. I like it, because I know what they mean. They mean it’s kind of an elevated language. All novels should be elevated. I don’t want, I don’t like journalistic prose for a novel.

  ELKANN: You have a writer that you really admire?

  MORRISON: Caldwell*6 was a great favorite of mine for years and years and years. For his brain, for his mind, how he understood things. He wrote very well, very well. But there are a lot of good writers. What I liked is that he seemed to—he had a close language and personal feeling for people that he was—I met him a couple of times. He was a boring old man. But his characters were extraordinary. I mean, I’m sure he wasn’t that way to his friends, but you know, I sort of like that. He wasn’t all, sort of—I’ve met writers who were very much [deepens her voice] writers. And they were always showing off. [Laughs] Nice people but, you know, they’re always putting their writing skills above everything else.