Backlisted - Beloved by Toni Morrison

Episode Date: May 27, 2019

Award-winning novelist Preti Taneja (We That Are Young) joins John and Andy to discuss Beloved by Toni Morrison, one of the greatest American novels of the last half century. Other books featured on this episode are It's Gone Dark Over Bill's Mother's by Lisa Blower and The House on Vesper Sands by Paraic O'Donnell.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)8'17 - It's Gone Dark Over Bill's Mother's by Lisa Blower12'03 - The House on Vesper Sands by Paraic O'Donnell18'07 - Beloved by Toni Morrison* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When you're working out at Planet Fitness, it's a judgment-free zone, so you can really step up your workout. That's why we've got treadmills. And our team members are here to help, so you can be carefree with the free weights. There are also balance balls, bikes, cables, kettlebells, and TRX equipment. But, like, no pressure. Get started for $1 enrollment, and then only $15 a month. Hurry this $1 enrollment sale at Planet Fitness end July 18th. $49 annual fee applies. See

Home Club for details. Make your nights unforgettable with American Express. Unmissable show coming up? Good news. We've got access to pre-sale tickets so you don't miss it. Meeting with friends before the show? We can book your reservation.

And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance. Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. so how was guernsey it was really great we had a lovely time and they looked after us very nicely. So, John, what did we do? What was the highlight of our trip? Without doubt the highlight of our trip,

given that I was prevented from consuming the local shellfish, the orma, which you can only catch when certain spring tides are coming in, the orma-ing tides, and we'd missed it, was we went to Victor Hugo's house. Victor Hugo was in exile on Guernsey for how many years? About 15 years. And he wrote, finished Les Mis when he was there. And he also wrote a book sort of set in and around Guernsey,

The Toilers of the Sea, which I've now bought a copy of. Have you? Not in French, but I am going to read it. I got Guernseyed up when I was there. You did? I can confirm that, yeah. He looks quite Sarnian. If you were wearing a Guernsey.

Have you ever been to Channel Islands? Yeah, actually my best friend Faye lives in Guernsey. Does she? Ah, okay. So I was hoping that there would be still people speaking Patois there, but I think it's only the old people, really, because of the war, the children were all evacuated. So it's obviously occupied by the Nazis.

Ready to go? Good. Here we go. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today, you find us on the outskirts of Cincinnati in the years after the Civil War. The snow is falling heavily as we stand on Bluestone Road, staring at number 124, a house apart, a house with secrets, a house with ghosts. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers

crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. Joining us today is Preeti Taneja. Hi. Hello. Hi, Preeti. Preeti is a novelist and teacher in prisons and in universities. Her novel, We That Are Young, which we loved on Backlisted, published by the excellent Galley Beggar Press,

won the 2018 Desmond Elliott Prize for the best debut of the year. It was also shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize and the Books in My Bag Reader's Choice Awards, and longlisted for the Jallak Prize, the Folio Prize, and for Europe's most prestigious award for a work of world literature, the Prix Jean Mikalski. It has been translated into seven languages to date. Are there more in the offing? I hope so. And there's another award which I was very proud to be listed for in India called the Shakti Bhatt First Book Award, which is given in honour of a young woman who died called Shakti Bhatt. And, you know, it's amazing to be recognised

in all of these different ways by people in different parts of the world. Did you expect, because didn't this book take several years to write? Well, it took a long time to write. It took like three or four years to write, but it took about the same amount of time to find a home. Yeah, okay. So the seven years is made up of the writing struggle and then the publishing struggle.

And would I be right in thinking you weren't sitting around going, well, it'll be fine because I'm going to win all these prizes when it comes out? You would be right. Yeah. I thought that. But it's a great publishing story. I mean, you know, we love Gally Beggar and what they do,

and they published the book, I think, they published the book brilliantly in the UK. But it's also published by knopf in in the us which is like is the there is no higher rung on the publishing tree it's an extraordinary thing yeah to go from um the world of small press publishing into the world of the top flight yes it's been an extraordinary experience for me well the great sonny mesha who is still he's still at knopf but that is that is publishing you know it takes you a while to find a publisher you then as you say work with small presses and then you the book suddenly bursts onto the onto the scene and wins prizes gets amazing reviews and then the foreign deals fall into place.

Yeah, I mean, it all happened in a slightly roundabout, jigsaw puzzle way with me. I think the book sold to Knopf before the Desmond Elliott Prize. They bought it in August, September, October. It was in conversation sort of very shortly after it came out in the UK. Sonny bought it himself for Knopf, and I had the opportunity to work with him, which has been so incredible. So We That Are Young is going to soon be a TV series, right? That's true.

That's what they say, yeah. Okay. And also you're published by Knopf, which means that you didn't want me to say this, but let's state the facts. You share a publisher with Toni Morrison. It is true. And it feels like a full circle in many ways because Sonny was actually an editor at Picador back in the day in the UK when I first read Beloved at school. So I think he had a hand in bringing Toni Morrison to bear in the UK.

And that book, Beloved, was on the school curriculum when I was doing my A-levels. So that's how it came into my life. And it just soldered itself, the language just soldered itself into me, like DNA, because I was taught it very well. And years later, obviously, decades later, basically, when I met Sonny, I just wanted to thank him for that moment. And maybe something about what he likes in a book resonated through mine, I hope, because I think you are what you read in many ways. You're made up of all these different books.

We believe that. We'll come on to that in relation to the book we're going to be talking about and its relationship to other books, but we're not quite there yet. we're not quite there yet great you might have guessed that the book that uh pretty is here to talk to us today about is beloved by tony morrison first published in 1987 by knopf uh sunny mater and which went to want to win the pulitzer prize for fiction in 1988 among many other prizes and was controversially shortlisted but didn't win the National Book Award in 1997. But in 2006, the New York Times declared Beloved the best work of American fiction of the previous 10 years. Now, we just want to say to everyone listening

that our starting point for talking about both Beloved and Toni Morrison is this, that we all believe that Beloved is one of the greatest novels of the 20th century and that Toni Morrison is the greatest living American writer. And we believe it so strongly it's not even an opinion. No. It's the starting, it's going to be the starting point of this discussion.

So we're not going to be sitting here going, is she as good as Dondalillo? It doesn't matter. The book is important. She is incredibly important. I feel both honoured and intimidated about having to talk about this particular book, but I'm so pleased that we decided to do it with you, Priti, because it's just a masterpiece, this novel.

Yes, it absolutely is. And, you know, that feeling of being awed and intimidated is exactly right. But at the same time, she draws you in to a sense of bliss almost with the way she uses language and the way she constructs a sentence and the things that she can bury within that. It's like falling in love to read this book. Yeah. Well, keep listening, everyone.

But first, John, what have you been reading this week? I've been reading a really lovely collection of stories by a writer called Lisa Blower, who is from Stoke, and it's called It's Gone Dark Over Bill's Mothers, which is a, in fact, I'm going to read you a little bit, which puts it in context. It is a collection of short pieces. If you can think of a sort of Alan Bennett monologues in a lot of ways,

they're really wonderfully funny, wise. A lot of them are set in the 1980s. I think they were written over a period of 10 years. Lisa Blower is featured in the anthology of working-class writers that Unbound have just published, Common People, edited by Kit Duvall. And she was one of the writers that really stood out for me. She's published by Myriad Press.

This is another excellent bit of small press publishing. And if you're interested in you know fish paste sandwiches and and going on holiday and and the you know your your legs sticking to the back of your you know your 1970s car or those are all my interests one of the stories i love in this book there's a story called drive in 17 in 17 views where it's 17 different, um, very short pieces about driving in cars from, there was a wonderful lovers, a professor having an affair with a student, which is brilliantly done.

None of this is complicated or challenging, but she writes with a, with a, a precision and a, and a humor. The great stories are always about what isn't included as well as what's in there. And she's, she's actually, I think a master of the form. And I, what isn't included as well as what's in there. And she's actually, I think, a master of the form.

And I just really, I raced through it, really, really enjoyed it. Hugely recommend it. I'm going to read you a little bit, which is from a story called Potluck, which is about a classic sort of cafe. I'll try not to, I hope I get my kind of slightly kind of Midlands-y accent right for it because it is a monologue. It is very much in that Alan Bennett. What can I get you, duck? Sausage, egg, cup of tea. Don't worry, you're here now, so you can stop looking at the floor. I welcome all lids that don't fit and spouts that don't pour. Who told you about me? I thought you

looked familiar. Like I know you. Who's your mother? Does she live on Warrington Road? It's the eyes you see. I never forget a pair of eyes. And you've got big eyes, duck. They give you away. I hope you don't mind me saying that. My eyes like yours are sad stories.

You tell them whether you like it or not. Now come on and get warm. That's it. You need some sugar in that tea. Your skin and bone. I haven't got any. Food bank was that busy last week. You forgot what you need.

Do I not get to choose? Can I get some of that? What am I supposed to do with kidney beans? Her from number nine, chinning on about the veg again. I'd rather it frozen if you've got it, duck. Those carrots last month went black. I said to her, next time you chuck stuff out, chuck them to me. I can make meals out of onions. She says, well, give us a fiver

then I'll see what's on the turn of course some faces don't want you to see them make out like they don't know you when they sat on it beside you at school others turn up with a couple of shopping trucks next door's baby and bare face cheek it's like there's a war on rationing all over again my mother would say if there's a men in the world there'll always be wars and my father would go Hester as long as there's woman there'll be men and don't forget that it only took one woman to bring down a lifetime of men and off he'd go again there was a time when you couldn't eat a meal in any decency without the potters from Stoke proud of every dinner table we were till those slow boats from

China promised cheap cheap cheap can't grow a bloody teapot for toffee anymore four thousand kin's gone later and it's gone that dark over bill's mothers as you realize just how much daylight those kilns let in there you go it's just it's just lovely um who's published by myriad editions um and it's gone dark over bill's mothers andy what have you been Well, when we went on our Guernsey mini break, I felt like I was on holiday, although we were working, working hard, but I did feel like I was on holiday. It was really exciting to be back in Guernsey. And so I thought what I wanted to read was something that would be a contrast to the book that we were there to discuss. And also with Tony

Morrison, who I was reading in preparation for this episode. And so I chose the book that we were there to discuss and also with tony morrison who i was reading in preparation for this episode and so i chose a book that was published last year and which has just come out in paperback by porek o'donnell called the house on vesper sands now do you know anything about this novel no right it's set in the winter of 1893 and as it starts you are unclear what is going on what you know is that a seamstress has been invited into a house in mayfair that something isn't right that she has stitched something into her own skin and that before the chapter is out spoilers on the first chapter she's committed suicide crikey and this this book had got me within about six pages really you know i'm often on this podcast i'm grumping away about that things having too much plot i have a slightly queasy

relationship with how i feel about plot. This has got just the right amount of plot. You can put that on the cover. The House on Vespersand has just the right amount of plot. I thought it was absolutely wonderful. A fantastic mixture of a detective novel and a ghost story and a horror fiction. And it seemed to me very consciously that

porrego donnell is bringing in wilkie collins and dickens and conan doyle not just in sherlock holmes i'm going to read a bit in a minute with a detective but also conan doyle's interest in the paranormal in spiritualism is reflected in this book it reminded me of the woman in black by Susan Hill it reminded me of the tv series Ripper Street John I don't know if you know right so it has that really it's got that real energy and it's sort of Victorian Baroque but it's thrilling and stylish. And it's also really funny. It has some really wonderful set pieces. And then he manages to do that thing that I think lots of people

trying to write this kind of novel would like to do, but perhaps is more challenging than one might think, that he's able to shift gear from the modes of storytelling quite brilliantly, I must say, that you go from something which is making you laugh and then two pages later you're utterly horrified by what you're being presented with. And really, it's a wonderful, wonderful book.

It never goes where you think it's going to go. Is it Edwardian? Is it kind of that Victorian? Victorian. So here's a little bit. This is a discussion between inspector cutter and a servant in the house where the seamstress has committed suicide he is called karu but first we hear from inspector cutter inspector cutter says now will you be an obliging fellow and show us to the particular room in the upper part of the house where this misfortune occurred. It was a room, I take it, and not a chimney or a nest in the eaves.

Very good, Inspector, but I hope you will refrain from any further levity, for you will find us all greatly saddened at what has occurred. Levity? Inspector Cutter's face darkened, and he clamped his hand for a moment over his jaw. For an instant Gideon imagined that some predatory creature lurked within him and might burst from him at any moment like an unhooded hawk from its perch. Levity, will you tell me, Carrow, do you keep an eye to the newspapers at all? On occasion, sir, as my duties permit. Did you ever read of the case of the children of Dr St John?

The slaughter of the St Johns? Carrie's eyes widened, but he checked himself almost at once. I believe I saw some mention of it. And do you recall how many children the St Johns had, and what their ages were? Not to an exactness, Inspector. I would not have had the leisure to... Five? There were five St John children.

The eldest was Antony, a boy of thirteen, and the youngest was Matilda. Matilda was a babe of fifteen months and was still nursed at the time of her death. Do you know how it is that I come to know that? No, inspector, how could I? You could not, and I will do you the kindness of keeping it from you, for I assure you it is a thing that would never leave you. But I will do you the kindness of keeping it from you for I assure you it is a thing that would never leave you but I will tell you this much I know their names and their ages I know the colour of each one's hair and I could give you a litany of every scrap of clothing that was on them it was I who made the photographic plates that were shown to the jurors since the Frenchman we depend upon in the normal course would come no further than the head of the stairs. Did you know, Caru, that the

adult teeth of a small child are formed in her jaw long before the milk teeth are lost? I did not, Inspector. Yes, it's a remarkable thing. They are hidden away until they are called for in a tiny and perfect array. The workings of nature are a puzzle and I suppose I have been fortunate to have glimpsed them as others have not. But you may be certain of this much, Carew. If I had any great store of merriment when I went into that house, and I suspect I had not if the truth be known, then it was gone from me entirely when i came out and it has never troubled me again so i i thoroughly enjoyed that that's out in paperback many of you might be able to have a holiday this year if you do i strongly recommend the house on vespa sands now here are our sponsors telling you what to do.

Summer's here, and you can now get almost anything you need for your sunny days delivered with Uber Eats. What do we mean by almost? Well, you can't get a well-groomed lawn delivered, but you can get a chicken parmesan delivered. A cabana? That's a no. But a banana? That's a yes. A nice tan? Sorry, nope.

But a box van? Happily, yes. A day at sunshine? No. A box of fine wines? Yes. Uber Eats can definitely get you that. Get almost, almost anything delivered with Uber Eats. Order now. Alcohol in select markets. Product availability may vary by regency app for details. Now, we have to move on to the main event, which is Belo by tony morrison i thought maybe we would hear from tony morrison herself we're going to hear from her a few times but i thought maybe she could read to us this is from about 50 pages into the novel and it's where the character of beloved makes her first appearance a fully dressed woman walked out of the water. She barely gained the dry bank of the stream before she sat down and leaned against a mulberry tree. All day and all night she sat there,

her head resting on the trunk in a position abandoned enough to crack the brim in her straw hat. Everything hurt, but her lungs most of all. Sopping wet and breathing shallow, she spent those hours trying to negotiate the weight of her eyelids. The day breeze blew her dress dry. The night wind wrinkled it.

Nobody saw her emerge or came accidentally by. If they had, chances are they would have hesitated before approaching her. Not because she was wet or dozing or had what sounded like asthma, but because amid all that, she was smiling. It took her the whole of the next morning to lift herself from the ground and make her way through the woods, past a giant temple of boxwood, to the field,

and then the yard of the slate-gray house. Exhausted again, she sat down on the first handy place, a stump not far from the steps of 124. By then, keeping her eyes open was less of an effort. She could manage it for a full two minutes or more. Her neck, its circumference no wider than a parlor service saucer, kept bending, and her chin brushed the bit of lace edging her dress. Precise. I mean, we're all sitting here slightly stunned by actually hearing that read aloud. What are the qualities of Toni Morrison's prose that you can hear just in

that one paragraph? Well, when I listen to that paragraph, I'm listening for all of the things that make her work and her sentences and her language so exciting. And, you know, what she's doing there is she's compressing language and distilling language to multiple meanings in every sentence. So when you have this idea of the trunk, then you're thinking not just about the tree trunk, but you're thinking about the body, the part of the body that we call the trunk. So then you imagine that this young woman with this huge effort drags herself to this house,

this mysterious young woman. She sits down on the first thing she sees and it's a tree stump. So that part of her body, is the trunk actually becomes the next part of the tree and it's done so carefully and so easily and so beautifully that it just happens at the back of your brain as a reader you just take that in and you just realize that somehow this is a writer who can evoke how much the how much the human world and the natural world just are fused together then there's also this idea that this trunk has been, that she's sitting on a stump, a cut tree.

And that is just exactly what her own story is. I don't want to ruin it for readers who haven't read the book, but it's a ghost story. And this young woman has had a violence done to her, which she's grown out of into this ghost, which has to do with axes and cuttings. And of course, the tree is very resonant in the context of this novel. It's a slavery novel. It's a place where a tree can be both the site of a great and awful violence against black bodies, where bodies hang.

And it can also be something very sheltering and that idea of the tree and reclaiming the shelter of the tree becoming something that takes nurture um is is part of this book it's ingrained in this book so it's got a lot of layers of meaning and tony morrison never ever strays from connecting the body through its experiences what she shows us to material objects either so when she talks about this neck as the size of a saucer we're in the parlor yeah with something balancing really gently. And there's such dread in the idea of the axe and this trembling neck. And it's all there in that tiny paragraph that we just heard her read. I first read this novel in 2006. And I read it as one of the books for my book, The Year of Reading Dangerously.

for my book, The Year of Reading Dangerously. And I can remember reading that specific paragraph, which is one of the reasons why we heard it there, thinking how, in a way, Priti, you've just explained it brilliantly. That was pretty thorough. How is she doing that how is she marrying lyricism and horror which one of those things is making the hairs on the back of my neck stand up on end is it both at the same time it probably is and one of the things I think about Beloved specifically and I suppose Toni Morrison's writing in general is that she manages through

craft and genius to create a voice out of several things that shouldn't work together that she makes work together i think one of the most important things that she does is she remembers how naming cannot be subversive you know and in every way that she gives us um an idea of something. She uses that idea to find the uncanny in its own self. Yeah. So when we hear that paragraph, we hear that it's not because this young woman looks sleepy or she's dozing. It's not because she's pale or she's wet.

It's because she's smiling. Smiling, yeah. And the smile is that thing that brings the horror to that paragraph because we are trained socially to think of a smile as welcoming. It's something that we want to be part of, this joy, but it's intensely private. It's a smile that's saying, I know more than you and I'm coming to get you and make sure you know it too.

And there is no escape from that. And by you, we also mean the reader, right? Yeah, we do. You know, this idea that she puts into this about lungs as well, I think is really important. The pain in her lungs is the worst pain of all. And so I'm thinking when I'm hearing that is, oh, it's because she's been gasping for breath.

Because she's trying to tell this story that is just submerged under layers and layers of history and silencing and censorship. And, you know, this is a kind of metaphor for the whole book, really. Yeah. I mean, that passage captures it beautifully. The simplest scenes are, as you say, these multi-layered. So the book never relaxes in a way. You can't read this book. You simply cannot read this book quickly. I've read a lot of criticism of it,

which is people haven't liked the beloved character because they think it's too supernatural. And then I've read other criticism saying, oh no, it's perfectly possible that this is just a case of mistaken identity. That doesn't seem to me to be what she's doing is creating that space, that charge space, where you can't choose because she's not letting you choose

because she's making both possibilities simultaneously happen. It's both, as you say, it's both the horror but also the sense of that feeling that you have towards Beloved of wanting to love her and wanting to mother her and wanting to, it's at the same time, you know. I'm going to read the blurb. Oh, yeah. From the back of the film tie-in edition. Oh, no.

But it might be the same as you've got there. I haven't seen the film. Is the film the one with Oprah Winfrey? It is. Jonathan Demme. It's a Jonathan Demme film. It is the mid-1800s at Sweet Home in Kentucky. An era is ending as slavery comes under attack from the abolitionists. The worlds of Halley and Paul Dee are to be destroyed in a cataclysm of

torment and agony. The world of Sethe, however, is to turn from one of love to one of violence and death. The death of Sethe's baby daughter, Beloved, whose name is the single word on the tombstone, who died at her mother's hands and who will return to claim retribution. Wow. I don't know who wrote that, but I've got a few things to say. It actually says, whose name is the single word on the tombstone. Really?

So it's not even been copy edited properly. Can I say that's a three and a half to four out of ten blurb. We're not allowed to swear on this, are we? Of course we can. Did you say it was fucking awful? Oh dear. But I mean, just going back to this idea of reversals, the reversal she affects very easily through language.

Sweet Home is this slave plantation that the characters in this novel have have fled and we catch up with them you know decades later when um they've they've all had more trauma in their lives but obviously as paul d says it wasn't sweet and it certainly wasn't home so all the time in every way she's subverting these ideas of what we think. And, of course, the idea of the sweetness absolutely connects to sugar, which is the great colonial slave product, which could not have happened without slave ships, the slave ship which is the Brooks that was from, you know,

if you've seen that impressive cross-section, horrific cross-section of the slave ship, the Brooks, very famous, just sails through this text all the way, like a haunting. It's a history of place and haunting and time and haunting and bodies that have already suffered traumatic violence. It's not the abolitionists. Here's a clip of Toni Morrison talking about...

Most of these clips are taken from an amazing 1992 interview that she did with Charlie Rose for when jazz came out, her novel Jazz. And this is a clip about how it was to write about slavery and the slave trade. Well, the slavery stuff is terrible because it's one thing to sort of know historically, abstractly, conceptually, generally what it was like. But imagining that life, which is sort of entering it very fundamentally,

is very, very difficult for me. And the only thing that made it really possible to stay there was just little things, just knowing that you couldn't see your husband in the daytime, only at night, only when the sun was out, because people worked from sunup to sundown. The only thing that made it really possible for me was thinking, well, I didn't have to do it.

I just had to imagine it. So I can't be too self-regarding and precious about all that. If they could do it, I could write about it. I mean, I could get tough enough. You, Priti, you've got a book with you by Toni Morrison. She was talking about I can't be too self-regarding. And you've wrote a book called The Source tony morrison she was talking about i can't be too self-regarding and uh you've wrote a book called the source of self-regard which is the u.s title for a book

that's available in the uk as a mouthful of blood right yeah so this is the newest edition of a selected essay speeches and meditations um that tony morrison has made and um there's a few paragraphs in this which i have as a sort of writing manifesto for myself in many ways. I think it's important for me to say that why Beloved meant so much to me, not just because of the brilliance of the language, but because it reversed the gates. I grew up in a very, in a small town on the white side of a small town that had an Indian population, but it was on the other side of town. And there's a class aspect to that.

It was like a lower middle class new builder state where I grew up. And then on the other side, there was the working class Indian. But when I was at school, I was very much a minority. And to read this book was like having permission to realize there was another side to myself. Because it was the nearest access one had to thinking about how you could claim your own story. It is so powerful because part of the message of the book is that this language can allow for critique of racial difference. It must make a critique of racial difference. It must make a critique of racial difference. And so here is Toni Morrison talking about some of those things. It's from a chapter called The Trouble with Paradise.

I want to begin my meditation on the trouble with paradise with some remarks on the environment in which I work and in which many writers also work. The construction of race and its hierarchy have a powerful impact on expressive language, just as figurative interpretive language impacts powerfully on the construction of a racial society. powerfully on the construction of a racial society. The intimate exchange between the atmosphere of racism and the language that asserts, erases, manipulates or transforms, it is unavoidable among fiction writers who must manage to hold an unblinking gaze into the realm of difference. And so it's that unblinking gaze that can be done so lyrically in this book which really is just something that one aspires to as a writer i think one of the things that is interesting about tony morrison as a writer a novelist about beloved as well uh picking up on what you were saying there,

is the way that her project is attempting to reverse that gaze while engaging with the literary canon at the same time, right? Yeah, it's very exciting. I mean, for me, this is an absolutely modernist book. Yeah. And it's modernist because it uses, it's sort of experimental in that sort of. It's like reverse Faulkner. I love it.

Yeah. And, you know, it's got many voices in it. It's got sort of poetic, figurative language. It is not something that you can categorize as a post-colonial novel or a slavery novel. It belongs in a canon of modernism because modernism was a global movement and this is absolutely part of that great point really i've got the the last the ending of a.s byatt's review when this novel was published uh in the uk a.s byatt reviewed it and um she said uh she describes it as, she says, this novel gave me nightmares and yet I sat up late,

paradoxically smiling to myself with intense pleasure at the exact beauty of the singing prose. It's an American masterpiece and one which, moreover, in a curious way, reassesses all the major novels of the time in which it is set. That's true, right? Melville, Hawthorne, Poe wrote riddling allegories about the nature of evil, the haunting of unappeased spirits, the inverted opposition of blackness and whiteness.

Toni Morrison has with plainness and grace and terror and judgment solved the riddle and showed us the world which haunted bears. Brilliant. That is of a piece with Toni Morrison's lectures, which were collected as a book called Playing in the Dark, which she said, have you ever read this? It's sort of this incredible investigation of particularly Ernest Hemingway saying what defines Hemingway's work and many white writers, Willa Cather as well,

is the inability to look at the black element of the society in which they were living. I think it's a moral failing. I i think it's a moral failing i actually think it's a moral failing and an ethical failing and and and for writers it's an aesthetic failing not to do that and you know this book is about something for young women which we just don't learn enough but for young black women brown women of color, as we are now known or know ourselves as in a whiter world, that you are your own best thing. It is such a powerful sentence. It is such an exact sentence to say down a lineage of violence that's been perpetrated on the body of the women of color you are your own best thing

and there's a wholeness to that so it's actually a very hopeful book yeah i think we have tanya orson commenting on your comment finding out answers to these incredible questions that it seemed to me had never been put subtly and if they they had been, the language had not manifested it. I wanted the language to be what the question was. I wanted the language to simply hold it. I started my career

with the bluest eye of putting the entire plot on the first page. The whole story is there. So you know it. So the reader reads the first page. He knows exactly is there. So you know it. So the reader reads the first page. He knows exactly what happened. And if he turns the page, it's because he wants either to find out how it happened or

he loves the language. And you hope for both of those things. I hope for both of those things. Right. Right. I mean, we're just going to turn into sort of card play. We quote in Toni Morrison, but if you'll allow me, I'd like to read another part from The Source of Self-Regards.

And this is where she talks about the aesthetics of what she's doing so powerfully. She says, I suppose I approach the politics versus art, race versus aesthetics debate initially the way an alchemist would, looking for that combination of ingredients that turns dross into gold. But there is no such formula. So my project became to make the historically raced world inextricable from the artistic view that beholds it and in doing so encourage readings that dissect both, which is to say, I claim the right and the range of authorship, to interrupt journalistic history with a metaphorical one, to impose on a

rhetorical history and a majestic one, to read the world, misread it, write and unwrite it, to enact silence and free speech. In short, to do what all writers aspire to do, I wanted my work to be the work of disabling the art versus politics argument to perform the union of aesthetics and ethics. And that is what she does in Beloved. John, when did you, I'm going to ask you, when did you first read this book? I read it about 20 years ago.

I'd read a lot of 20th century american male writers um particularly white male writers absolutely white male writers reading tony morrison was the fault that was the one that i was most interested in because he was i think he was a modernist and he was what he did with form was so interesting and he his language was but it was that moment when you realized that here was somebody doing something as well as Fultner but just the resonance and the and the the the precision of her language well it was exactly what Antonia Blight was saying I can't go back now and read those writers without Toni Morrison without my Toni Morrison's voice and what Toni Morrison...

I mean, that's why, for me, I think she is the most important writer of the second half of the 20th century. To write a great modernist novel is, you know, not many people have done it, and she's done it at least three times. Beloved was the one that I read first, and then I read Jazz when it came out, and I've read Song of Solomon. But Beloved is still the one that I read first and then I read Jazz when it came out and I've read Song of Solomon but Beloved is still the one that I go back to

I just might read a tiny little bit if I'm allowed to what she can do and I love, as you know, I'm always interested in how people use nature and that relationship with the natural world in fiction this is as good as I think it honestly gets in fiction this is after Sethi has just given birth to the baby that we'll later know as Denver,

with Amy, the white girl, helping her. The baby whimpered and Sethi looked. 20 inches of cord hung from its belly and it trembled in the cooling evening air. Amy wrapped her skirt around it and the wet, sticky women clambered ashore to see what, indeed, God had in mind. Great sentence.

Spores of blue fern growing in the hollows along the riverbank float toward the water in silver-blue lines, hard to see unless you are in or near them, lying right at the river's edge when the sunshots are low and drained. Often they are mistook for insects, but they are seeds in which the whole generation sleeps, confident of a future. And for a moment, it is easy to believe each one has one, will become all of what is contained in the spore, will live out its days as planned. This moment of certainty lasts no longer than that, longer, perhaps, than the spore itself.

On a riverbank in the cool of a summer evening, two women struggled under a shower of silvery blue. They never expected to see each other again in this world, and at the moment couldn't care less. But there on a summer night, surrounded by blue fern, they did something together appropriately and well. A patroller passing would have sniggered to see two throwaway people, two lawless outlaws, a slave and a barefoot white woman with unpinned hair, wrapping a ten-minute-old baby in the rags they wore. But no paper roller came and no preacher. The water sucked and swallowed itself beneath them. There was nothing to disturb them at their work.

So they did it appropriately and well. One of the most extraordinary descriptions of what sisterhood should be I've ever read. It doesn't matter about race um it doesn't matter about race it doesn't matter about background who's free and who's unfree um and water spores generations who gets to write about nature yeah yes planning you know the whole that whole thing about having a plan which is central to the book i mean it's everything you want fiction to do everything you want you hope it can do every that what you're saying about the art politics thing that she was writing about that that she you can dissolve that into into into language like

this into storytelling like this i think it's worth making the point as well that when um beloved was first published it was perceived as being an important book, Toni Morrison's best book. If you look at the reviews at the time, they are mostly extremely positive, describe it as a masterpiece. As we pull away from it, though, I think you can see the effect of this novel. you can see it the effect of this novel you know for a classic to be a classic we can debate what makes classic you know but we're not going to but but what's interesting about this is you can see that it has a political and social effect the ripples beyond the literary world you know it takes on um properties and qualities that one would aspire to as a writer who has set herself that project but to watch it go out in the world

and change the history the narrative of the historical view of slavery which is unquestionably what Beloved has done, is an amazing social achievement. Yes, it's amazing. But it is also, you know, when you were talking about Faulkner, I was thinking, you know, I haven't read Faulkner, actually, to be honest, and it's not something that I'm going to seek out. Perhaps I will eventually. But I would never think she's

doing it as well as Faulkner. I would always think, is this as good as Toni Morrison? Yeah. Well, that's- That's my centre. And that's- And that's the centre she makes. But yet Morrison would put herself in that lineage as if to say, why shouldn't I do this? Yeah. Right? So this is what I mean about her work being a literary project

as much as a social project. It's that point Antonia Byatt makes about, you know, rewriting the novels of the great American novels written by white men in the 19th century. That's quite a thing to take on, to melville and win well you're talking to someone who wrote it in the indeed indeed there's lots of ways in which her um centering of her self and her the things she wanted to say and the way she sees the world in in this book inspired me not just in a sort of she is a tree in a way if you like the tree that certain writers doing certain things want to do certain things can take strength from can shelter from and the

roots that she's that she's put down have have yielded so much this is tony morrison talking about the what the starting point for Beloved was. What was the seed of Beloved? The question was, who is the Beloved? Who is the person who lives inside us that is the one you can trust, who is the best thing you are? And in that instant for that segment, because I had planned several books around that theme. It was the effort of a woman to love her children,

to raise her children, to be responsible for her children. And the fact that it was during slavery made all of those things impossible for her. And there was this interesting historical incident, you know, the Margaret Garner story, in which that actually happened. There was a great deal of infanticide in order to prevent her from living a life she believed would be intolerable. But that's her claim, you know, kind of a control that she was trying to exercise in order to be simply a mother, and that the best thing she was was this lovely child or these children. And, of course, that set her on a very complicated, self-destructive journey. But the question was still there.

And the answer, or at least the other question that's delivered, is when somebody asks her or tells her, no, no, you are your best thing. You are. Which is what you were saying, Priti. Yeah, it's amazing. But when I listen to that, I'm actually thinking about something else which I have mulled over in the last two or three years.

And it's interesting to me that this book has a quote from Margaret Atwood on the back because the things that happen to these women, these black women who have been enslaved, are true facts that women's babies were taken away from them, that they were used as ways of making families. They didn't have a say in how they were to bring up their children. It absolutely haunts Sethe, and that is why she is so determined to do what she does so no one else will raise her children. I'd like to say something, if I may, about... So when we do a backlisted, I normally try and read

or reread the book that we're talking about. But I also read at least one other book by the author because, you know, because I can. I have this opportunity. We have the opportunities to just steep ourselves for a fortnight in in a writer's work so i read the bluest eye for the first time i read song of solomon and suda as well yeah and i read the the bluest eye for the first time i almost wish we were talking about the bluest guy i'm glad we're talking about beloved because it's fantastic and we're and it's

so rich for discussion but what's incredible about watching how morrison develops as a novelist is and she doesn't publish till she's 39 40 yeah she'd worked in so she'd worked in publishing been editor is there's something really visceral about the bluest eye we talked about gail jones and her novel corregidora on backlisted last year with Sarah Churchill, Tony Morrison edited Corregidora. They're different novels, but they have a similar kind of energy about them and need to be born, actually. If The Bluest Eye was published on its own

and she'd never have done anything else, it would still be a really significant book. The difference in craft between the bluest eye which is almost like a kind of pent-up like vomiting of something that needed to be said by the time you get to beloved she's become this incredibly sophisticated narrative storyteller i'd just like to get on the record the opening paragraph of The Bluest Eye because as a bit of prose, it's hard to beat. This is how this book starts.

Nuns go by as quiet as lust. And that, I don't even need to read the rest of the paragraph right but anyway nuns go by as quiet as lust and drunken men with sober eyes sing in the lobby of the greek hotel rosemary villanucci our next door friend who lives above her father's cafe sits in a 1939 buick eating bread and butter she rolls down the window to tell my sister, Frida, and me that we can't come in. We stare at her, wanting her bread, but more than that, wanting to poke the arrogance out of her eyes and smash the pride of ownership that curls

her chewing mouth. When she comes out of the car, we will beat her up, make red marks on her white skin, and she will cry and ask us, do we want her to pull her pants down? We will say no. We don't know what we should feel or do if she does, but whenever she asks us, we know she is offering us something precious and that our own pride must be asserted by refusing to accept and that's just the opening of the book right a book incidentally that still appears every year in the top 10 lists of books or novels that schools in the united states of america are trying to ban yeah well yeah because there is something so subversive about a project of love like this. And I feel like all of her work is this project to make us heal wounds,

to make us be honest about our interconnectedness and our histories. It is such a subversive project to say this at the heart is a story about love, but at first I'm going to make you feel pain and the pain that you're responsible for in your own society and in yourself we have a clip here i think this is the last one this is clip number five now this is quite long but stick with it everyone tony morrison has just been asked you've won the nobel prize for fiction do you still encounter racism and the issues of race in your life yes i do charlie but let me tell you that's the wrong question okay Okay, what's the right question? How do you feel?

Not you, Charlie Rose, but don't you understand that the people who do this thing, who practice racism, are bereft. There is something distorted about the psyche. It's a huge waste, and it's a corruption and a distortion. It's like it's a profound neurosis that nobody examines for what it is. It feels crazy. It is crazy. And it leaves, it has just as much of a deleterious effect on white people and possibly equal as it does black people. I always knew that I had the moral high ground all my life.

I always thought those people who said I couldn't come in the drugstore and I had to sit in this funny place, I couldn't go in the park. You felt more superior to them from day one. And I thought they knew that I knew that they were inferior to me morally. I always thought that. And my parents always thought that. But if the racist white person, I don't mean the person who is examining his consciousness and so on, doesn't understand that he or she is also a race. It's also constructive. It's also made. And it also has some kind of serviceability. But when you take it away, I take your race away.

And there you are, all strung out. And all you've got is your little self. And what is that? What are you without racism? Are you any good? Are you still strong? You still smart? You still like yourself?

I mean, these are the questions. Part of it is yes the victim how terrible it has been for black people. I'm not a victim. I refuse to be one. You can only be tall because somebody's on their knees then you have a serious problem and my feeling is white people have a very, very serious problem and they should start thinking about what they can do about it. Take me out of it. Then give white people some free advice. They're all in my books.

This question of who thinks of themselves as superior and why how this these works undermine that security and showed up to be this fragile veneer that is so easily broken by a confidence of selfhood of equality of owning a space because you can and you should that is something that it's you if we could only teach our young people that if if I had had that and I got it from these books um you know it wasn't lost on me that everywhere I went the people who were brown were doing the serving and the people who were teaching were doing the white ones or the ones on television or all of those things. And what does that do to your sense of self in a world? How do we begin to understand that if you're thinking you're superior,

someone else is thinking that you're not if someone says to me oh you know you're the you're the token person here and that does happen to me i think okay that means you are too yeah it's as simple as that you simply can't have a token person without everyone else there being a token person too. Or being there because of their race and their identities. It simply doesn't affect me. It's like, because at the end of the day, I have language. Can I ask a question of both of you?

Do you think, I've got to get this right, we feel, don't we, that Toni Morrison articulates something that had needed to be articulated for a long time? needed to be articulated for a long time. How much of that is her era being channeled through her and how much is her and her personality? Do you mean era sort of when she was writing these books? I do think there's certainly when I read Song of Solomon, that felt like a novel from the 1970s. It has a certain kind of magical realist thing going on, which feels of its era in a way that Beloved doesn't, I have to say.

But I'm wondering also, she comes up through the kind of the era of the mid to late 60s civil unrest in the States. She has a great success with an amazing book called the black book in 1974 which she edited which is a collection of clippings and writings to do with the identity of black americans up to that point and i i'm wondering how much of her is um her success success is not her her importance is as a product of that era and how much is of her personality a force of personality well it takes an enormous amount of strength to be the person that people want to support yeah i mean who is who who is deciding what is success and what is

significant that is the rot that she's trying to always break yeah that is the kind of disease that she's always trying to show itself to itself because if your society is trained to believe that only this kind of writing fits in this kind of literary category of high art then you know and you have to be this incredibly strong person to say actually I'm doing my thing and you can take it or leave it the center will come to me and have that confidence in in your own voice and your own work and your own right to do what you're doing like you said she started writing you know 39 40 so it took a long time for her to to begin to put her work into the world and she was

already working in publishing she she says a brilliant thing um somewhere about how the extent to which she's channeling jazz she's channeling jazz both in the the musicality of the prose, she says, but also how jazz is an art form that carries American blackness within it, even though there's good jazz in Japan, she says. Yeah. And that's what she wants her writing and, by extension, black American writing to be. And so does it matter what a jazz critic who is from not that background or even is from that background but is thinking in different ways

thinks of the jazz? Does it really matter? No. She says it doesn't. She sort of says because it carries, it has not been compromised. Right. I came back to this book and the other books by Toni Morrison that I've read before this episode thinking it's such a pleasant change

on backlisters to have something that is so undeniably great that it hasn't been neglected right yeah you know what no i mean we we love the books that we talk about but but this is this is you know it's the force of this is couldn't be kept back right it's right that's true but i think you know what what the project of her work is trying to say is that we she like again with these reversals and underminings that are in the book she says and it chimes through the book this is not a story to pass on because she wants the story to be passed on so everything has to be taken in double double yeah yeah and she's also making a river and she's also making a tree and

she's also making a world and that should be populated by writers who are doing similar things. Not just one Toni Morrison, who is amazing Toni Morrison. She wants us to populate this world with the stories that have not been told, that have not been heard. She's saying, don't shut the door on these voices again. And that's where we must leave it. Wiser, chastened, reminded of the importance of great art, full of questions.

Schools. Full of questions. Deep and heartfelt thanks to Preeti for choosing such a great book, to the Keeper of Sounds, Nicky Birch, and to Unbound, our host and patron. You can download all 94 of our shows, plus follow links, clips, and suggestions for further reading by visiting our website, backlisted.fm,

and you can contact us on Twitter, Facebook, and Boundless. And before you do that, feel free to leave us a review on iTunes. It makes us happy, and happiness is something to cling to. I didn't write that, but I sold it. You sold it very well. Thank you for listening. We'll be back in a fortnight. Yay!

Amazingly good episode. Absolutely brilliant. You feel all right? I'm good, yeah. I'll have that one right now, please. You can choose to listen to Backlisted with or without adverts. If you prefer to listen to it without adverts, you can join us on our Patreon,

patreon.com forward slash backlisted, where you also get bonus content of two episodes of Locklisted, the podcast where we talk about the books and films and music that we've been listening to over the last couple of weeks.