Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (131 page)

That prospect was disrupted when, in 1958, she married a colleague, Harold Morrison, an architect. The marriage lasted six years and produced two children. It was, reportedly, difficult and is something which, otherwise forthcoming, she declines to be forthcoming about. Harold returned to his birthplace, Jamaica, leaving his former wife with sole responsibility for their children. After divorce, Morrison’s career pattern altered. Her youngest son at the time of the separation was not a year old, so a doctorate was not an option. But it was not altogether a bad time: it was the mid-1960s and new opportunities were opening up for women and other ‘minorities’. Morrison (she has kept her married surname – somewhat uneasily, one gathers) moved to New York where she worked for the publisher Random House. As she recalls from that period: ‘whenever things got difficult I thought about my
mother’s mother, a sharecropper, who, with her husband, owed money to their landlord. In 1906, she escaped with her seven children to meet her husband in Birmingham, where he was working as a musician. It was a dangerous trip, but she wanted a better life. Whenever things seemed difficult for me in New York, I thought that what I was doing wasn’t anything as hard as what she did.’As an editor she was instrumental in publishing African American writers such as Angela Davis and Gayl Jones. Black writing (as the favoured term then was) had begun to get traction in American culture and Morrison herself had been writing fiction as early as her time on the faculty at Howard.

One story in her mind from those years concerned a black girl who longed for blue eyes. This would be the basis of her first published novel
The Bluest Eye
(1970). It has never been regarded as her finest work (that accolade would probably go to
Beloved
) but
The Bluest Eye
has particular interest as Morrison’s most autobiographical novel. The action is set in Lorain in 1940–41, the year in which America went to battle for the free world – rather ignoring the freedom of its black citizens who would have to wait a quarter of a century for their Civil Rights Act. The narrator of
The Bluest Eye
, Claudia MacTeer, is the same age as Chloe Wofford in that year. Hers is a solidly respectable family. They take in the child of an unrespectable family, Pecola Breedlove, who has been sexually abused and impregnated by her father. ‘How do you get somebody to love you?’ Pecola forlornly asks. She is fixated on Shirley Temple and convinced that blue eyes are the secret. They are not, she discovers. More abuse and premature death awaits. Claudia – the Morrison figure we apprehend – is made of stronger stuff. She dismembers her ‘blue eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned’ dolls to see what they are made of:

But the dismembering of dolls was not the true horror. The truly horrifying thing was the transference of the same impulses to little white girls. The indifference with which I could have axed them was shaken only by my desire to do so.

The Bluest Eye
did not make much impression at this stage of Morrison’s career, although over the years – particularly after being selected by Oprah Winfrey for her Book Club – it has sold strongly. It was followed by
Sula
(1973) and
Song of Solomon
(1977) – which, unusually, has a black protagonist, Macon ‘Milkman’ Dead, searching out his roots in the old South.

By the end of the 1970s Morrison’s fiction was gaining recognition – particularly among African American readers and opinion-formers. Her importance as an American writer, without qualifying epithet, was certified by
Beloved
in 1987. The story is based on the historical figure, Margaret Garner, a slave, who, when her escape was foiled, killed her children rather than have them taken back into
captivity. She was prosecuted less for absconding than the destruction of property. By this stage of her career, Morrison’s narrative technique had evolved into something akin to the fluidities of black musicians like Charlie Parker or Lester Young – an analogy confirmed by the title of her 1992 novel,
Jazz
.

Beloved
triggered one of the most controversial events in her career when the novel failed to win an NBA award. A caucus of influential African American writers and critics bought advertising space to protest at what was seen by them as rank injustice. Justified as it was, one cannot imagine anything similar being done for Britain’s ‘Booker Bridesmaid’, Beryl Bainbridge. Amends were made when
Beloved
won a Pulitzer Prize. Oprah Winfrey, whose book club had been consistently helpful in promoting Morrison’s career, bought the rights and financed a later movie. The NBA protest, well intentioned as it was, had the perverse effect of suggesting that Morrison’s success was the result of special interest lobbying and white cultural guilt. The allegation (typically voiced behind the scenes) would haunt her later career.

Beloved
also provoked controversy for its cryptic epigraph: ‘Sixty Million and more’. It is a tendentious statistic – and almost certainly inaccurate. The number of Africans estimated to have perished on the ‘middle passage’ to the New World, or in slavery there, has ranged as high as 120 million and as low (if that is the right word) as a tenth of that figure. No one – shamefully – will ever know precisely, because no one at the time bothered to count. Morrison quite clearly chose sixty million as a multiple of six million – that, notoriously, is the rounded estimate of the Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust. But as Morrison has elsewhere complained, ‘There is no suitable memorial or plaque or wreath or wall or park or skyscraper lobby honoring the memory of the human beings forced into slavery and brought to the United States.’ Not even, she noted, ‘a small bench by the road’.

Morrison was angry in the 1980s, the Reagan years. The destiny of blacks in America, she believed, was to be forever degraded – it was the cement which held the country together: ‘If there were no black people here in this country, it would have been Balkanized. 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 color. Wherever they were from, they would stand together. They could all say, “I am not that.” … When they got off the boat, the second word they learned was “nigger.” Ask them – I grew up with them.’ This phase of her career produced her most disaffected novel,
Tar Baby
(1981), in which a character concludes: ‘White folks and black folks should not sit down and eat together or do any of those personal things in life.’ At the same period, at a conference, she roundly declared: ‘At
no moment in my life have I ever felt as though I was an American. At no moment. The sole reason that I am invited here, and the whole reason that I am sitting here, is because some black children got their brains shot out in the streets all over the country. And had the good fortune to be televised … I am a read, as opposed to unread, writer because of those children.’

The next decade, crowned as it was by her Nobel Prize in 1993, found her mellower. The award gave her, she said, ‘licence to strut’. Honours and doctorates followed in such profusion they must surely have impeded her creativity. She was now carrying the heavy load of spokeswoman – expected to negotiate ‘major themes’. Controversially, she hailed Bill Clinton as America’s ‘first black president’. He displayed, she said, ‘almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas’. Throughout her career, however, she has kept a wary distance from mainline feminism, offering such explanations as ‘I don’t subscribe to patriarchy, and I don’t think it should be substituted with matriarchy’ and ‘I can’t take positions that are closed’. Positions she was able to take were in America’s Ivy League universities, culminating in an endowed chair in Creative Writing at Princeton.

Her later fiction has often encountered a stiffer reception.
Paradise
(1998), the story of a massacre of whites by blacks in 1970s Oklahoma, elicited a particularly sharp review from the influential
New York Times
critic, Michiko Kakutani: ‘Unfortunately,
Paradise
is everything that
Beloved
was not: it’s a heavy-handed, schematic piece of writing, thoroughly lacking in the novelistic magic Ms. Morrison has wielded so effortlessly in the past. It’s a contrived, formulaic book that mechanically pits men against women, old against young, the past against the present.’ By this stage in her career Morrison was sufficiently well grounded to withstand the occasional knock although, as Kakutani intimates, her major achievements in fiction, as opposed to life, will probably be located by posterity in the 1970s and 1980s.

I think I knew that at heart I was an aging spinster.

There is keen contention as to who is the greatest Canadian writer of short fiction in the last half century. Top place would, quite likely, go to either Alistair MacLeod or Alice Munro (née Laidlaw), both of proudly Scottish extraction: one highland, the other lowland – very different extracts. Munro, the lowlander, can trace her ancestry back to the Ettrick shepherd (author of
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
), James Hogg. Less regional than MacLeod (her Huron county Ontario does not have the rich Gaelic culture of St Edward’s Island), she weaves an equally sensitive history of her country in her stories. Typically they pivot on enigmatic moments which resonate beyond the domestic background in which they occur.

‘The Progress of Love’, the title piece in her 1986 collection (first published in the
New Yorker
), illustrates the distinct Munro form, style and tone. There is, as usual, enough raw narrative matter for a whole novel, boiled down into a few pages. The story opens with the sentence, ‘I got the call at work, and it was my father.’ Her mother is dead (‘gone,’ as her father puts it). The story goes on to reconstruct a portrait of the dead mother, Marietta. Neurotically devout, she prays on her knees several times a day – forever ‘saved’, as she had been, at a camp meeting, aged fourteen. The narrator’s father, less religious, is a farmer in a small way. The couple married late. Marietta would not consent to the wedding until she had paid back her own father every cent it had cost him to raise her. The story revolves around two discoveries made by the heroine, aged twelve in 1947, through her
louche
Californian aunt Beryl, who has come to visit and raise a little hell. Her mother, the narrator discovers, was traumatised as a little girl by seeing
her
mother in a barn with a rope around her neck, on a chair, evidently threatening to hang herself. Young Marietta runs off to town for help – without managing to get any – and is suffused with guilt. But it was Aunt Beryl who noticed that the rope was not fastened to the beam: the wife was merely intending to ‘get a rise’ out of her husband, with whom she was, for unspecified reasons, unhappy.

For Marietta, however, the event is lifelong traumatic – ‘Her heart was broken.’ She recoils into God. Later, after her father has died and the farm sold, Marietta inherits $3,000. She takes the money from the bank and – dirt-poor that she and her farmer husband are – burns the bills in a stove: ‘She put in just a few bills at a time, so it wouldn’t make too big a blaze. My father stood and watched her.’ He did not protest. Or was he actually there? The narrative is uncertain on the point. Why did Marietta do it? Why did she, as few children do, repay her father?
Why did she not just refuse the money he left, or give it to charity rather than ritually destroy it? Why – most hurtfully – does she deny her children (the narrator, notably) the decent education that money would have bought? Was Marietta abused by her father? The story gives no answer other than, vaguely, that her daughter thinks the money-burn was ‘right’. In fast-forward, the farm is taken over by a hippy commune, then becomes a small component in the agro-industry which is transforming the land. All is swallowed up, forgotten. Only the unanswered ‘why?’ remains.

Munro’s best novels all have within them plots which, like Japanese water-flowers, could expand into full-size fiction. In her strongest collection,
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
(2001), the title story centres on a plain, middle-aged servant (an orphan shipped in her childhood from Glasgow), Johanna. Two smart young teenagers maliciously send her letters leading her to believe that a man, hundreds of miles away, wants to marry her. She packs up and leaves. Indeed there is a man – he is dying and she saves his life. In gratitude, he marries her. The nasty young girls fare less well. Perhaps there is a God.

Alice Laidlaw was born in 1931, in the thin ribbon of Canada bordering the US, where 90 per cent of Canadians live – facing south, many of them, like heliotropes. Her father, Robert, was a mink and silver fox-farmer (for the manufacture of garments none of his own womenfolk would ever wear) in an unprosperous way, on the outskirts of the small town of Wingham, Ontario. He was prone to bouts of bad temper. Grumpy fathers – often seething impotently in retirement homes – recur frequently in Munro’s fiction. Alice’s mother was a former schoolteacher, credited as a principal influence on her daughter’s literary career. But a heavy cost was paid. Mrs Laidlaw developed Parkinson’s disease when Alice was nine and many of the household duties came Alice’s way as she was growing up. The domestic atmosphere of her childhood was, she recalls, ‘stifling’. She gives a close evocation of these early years in many of her stories – most closely ‘Family Furnishings’. In this story she introduces a half-sister, a by-blow of the father’s early years. Is it fiction? There is so much evident fact in ‘Family Furnishings’ that one is inclined to credit it as autobiographical.