Backlisted - Beloved by Toni Morrison - reurn

Episode Date: May 26, 2026

Beloved by Toni Morrison was first published in 1987 by Knopf, it went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988, among many other prizes. In 2006, the New York Times declared Beloved the best work of American fiction of the previous twenty-five years. and more recently it came second in the Guardians top 100 novels of all time. This show was recorded in 2019 and our guest is Preti Taneja a novelist, a teacher and an activist. She won the Desmond Elliot Prize for her first book, We That Are Young (2017), and her creative non-fiction work, Aftermath (2022) was based on her own experience of teaching in prison. In this episode John also enthuses about Lisa Blower’s sparkling story collection It’s Gone Dark over Bill’s Mother’s published by Myriad Editions and Andy discovers the perfect holiday read in Paraic O’Donnell’s The House on Vesper Sands. published by Weidenfeld. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, it's Nikki. And John, and we're here to introduce one of our rerun episodes of Backlisted. And this is one from seven years ago, from May 2019. And it features the novel that was, I think, voted the second best book of all time. No pressure. This is the second best book of all time. According to who? In the recent poll, organized by The Guardian. We don't know who the people were.

who voted. Maybe they're all backlisted listeners. A lot of writers I know have voted in it. But the book is Tony Morrison's beloved, and our guest was Pretty Tenager who had at that point published one novel, We That Are Young, which had won the 2018 Desmond Elliott Prize. And she was to go on after, according to this podcast, to write another really extraordinary, quite harrowing book called Aftermath. she was when we talked to her she was still

running a prison writing program and it was one of the people who had been a pupil of hers ended up being the protagonist the person who I think murdered five people on the London Bridge attacks later on in 2019 but her book about that whole process

and about being a teacher and what things are going wrong is a really really remarkable book I talked about it on the podcast when it came out. But this is all about Tony Morrison and I love this podcast because Pretty is so articulate. I think in terms of pure literary insight into a book and being able to really nail why Beloved is such an important novel and such a great novel, she really takes it, I mean, she talks so articulately and sensitively and intelligently as a novelist herself.

It's a great introduction to Tony Morrison. If you've not read Beloved, you will want to read it by the end of this podcast. Brilliant. And just a quick plug for what subscribers can get on our Patreon site. There is a Booker Prize winning show, which we call Posh Bingo on Paul Lynch's Prophet Song. And coming up next is one of our readers. That's one of our Patreon subscribers. We're calling them backlisted readers.

is bringing us Agnes Gray by Anne Bronte. So lots there to look forward to. That's patreon.com forward slash backlisted. Now, John, should we crack on with Beloved? Let's do that. Imagine it's May 2019. And you're just turning, you're just tuning into Battlisted for the first time.

Enjoy it, everybody. 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. But given that I was prevented from consuming the local shellfish, the ormer, which you can only catch on when certain spring tides are coming in, the armering 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? 15 years. And he wrote, he finished Les Mies and 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. 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 sarnie and if you were wearing a guernsey. Have you ever been to Channel Islands? Yeah, actually my best friend, Phelis 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 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 and I'm Andy Miller. Joining us today is Pretty Teenager. Hi. Hello. Hi, Priti 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 Gali Bega 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 of My Bag readers' choice awards and long-listed for the Jalak Prize, the Folio Prize, and for Europe's most prestigious award, for a work of world literature, the pre-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 Bhat first book award, which has given in honour of a young woman who died called Shakti Bhat. 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 publisher. story. I mean, you know, we love Gali Begger and what they do and they've published the book,

I think they've published the book brilliantly in the UK. But it's also published by Knoff in the US, which is like, is there is no higher rung on the publishing tree. It's an extraordinary thing, yeah, to go from the world of small press publishing into the world of the elite top flight. Yes, it's been an extraordinary experience for me. Well, the great Sonny Mehta, who is still at Knopf, but 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 the book suddenly bursts onto the scene and wins prizes, gets amazing reviews, and then the foreign deals fall into place.

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

Okay. And also you're published by Knoff, which means that you didn't want me to say this. But let's state the facts. You share a publisher with Tony Morrison. It is true. And it feels like a full circle in many ways because Sonny was actually an editor at Piccador back in the UK when I first read Beloved at school. So I think he had a hand in bringing Tony 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 solded 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 of these different books. We believe that on here. 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. Great. You might have guessed that the book that, British is here to talk to us today about is beloved by Tony Morrison, first published in 1987 by Knoff, Sonny Mehta, 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 Tony Morrison is this, that we all believe that Beloved is one of the greatest novels of the 20th century and that Tony 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 Dondolilla?

it doesn't matter. The book is important. She is incredibly important. I feel both honored 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. Yes, it's 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. But first, John, what have you been reading this way? 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 Bloa is featured in the anthology of working class writers

that I'm man have just published to common people, edited by Kit DeValle. 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 going on holiday and the, you know, your legs sticking to the back of your, you know, your 1970s car. Those are all my interest.

One of the stories I love in this book, there's a story called Drive in 17 views where 17 different very short pieces about driving in cars. There was a wonderful lover's professor having an affair with a student, which is brilliantly done. None of this is complicated or challenging, but she writes with a precision and a humor. The great stories are always about 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 Midlandsy 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 bore. Who told you about me? I thought you look 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'll 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?

am I supposed to do with kidney beans? Her from number nine, chining on about the veg again. I'd rather it frozen if you've got it, Doc. Those carrots last month went black. I said to, 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 aside you as school. Others turn up with a couple of shopping trucks next door's baby and bare-faced 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 slowboats from China promised cheap, cheap, cheap, can't grow a bloody teapot for toffee anymore. 4,000 kins gone later, and it's gone that dark over Bill's mothers as you realize just how much day.

out those kilns let in. There you go. It's just lovely. Who's it published by? By mirrored editions. And it's gone dark over Bill's mothers. Andy, what have you been reading? Well, when we went on our Guernsey mini break,

I felt like I was on holiday, although we were working. I'm 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 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, John? 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. Cricky. And 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 of the Bespersand says 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 Porake O'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... 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. hear 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, but it never goes where you think it's going to go. Edwardian, is it kind of that 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 Karoo. 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'll 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 unhuded hawk from its perch. Levity! Will you tell me, Karoo, 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. John's? Carru'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. John's 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 Anthony, a boy of 13, and the youngest was Matilda. Matilda was a babe of 15 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 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 Frenchmen we depend upon in the normal course, would come no further than the head of the stairs. Did you know, 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, Karoo. 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 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 Vespasans. Right. But. Now, we have to move on. to the main event, which is Beloved 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, passed 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 one. wider than a parlor service saucer kept bending, and her chin brushed the bit of lace, edging her dress. Precee. I mean, we're all sitting here slightly stunned by actually hearing that read aloud.

What are the qualities of Tony 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, which 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 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 sight 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 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 strayed 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 parlour 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. And I can remember reading that specific paragraph, which is one of the reasons why we heard it there, thinking how, in a way, pretty, you've just explained it brilliantly. 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 Tony Morrison's writing in general, is that she, 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 an idea of something, she uses that idea to, 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. 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 shared joy. But it's intensely private. it. 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 to. 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 that feeling that you have towards beloved of wanting to love her and wanting to mother her and wanting to, is at the same time, you know. I'm going to read the blur from the back of the film Tyne edition.

Oh, no. But it might be the same as you've got that. I haven't seen the film. Was the film the one with Oprah Winfrey now? It is Jonathan Demme. It's Jonathan Demi film. It is the mid-1800s. That's Sweet Home in Kentucky.

An era is ending as slavery comes under attack from the abolitionists. The worlds of Hallie and Paul D. to be destroyed in a cataclysm of torment and agony. The world of Sether, however, is to turn from one of love to one of violence and death, the death of Sether'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 world. 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.

I should 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 fled. And we catch up with them, you know, decades later. when 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. So which could not have happened without slave ships, the slave ship, which is the Brooks that was from, you know, that 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 abolitionist. Here's a clip of Tony 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 slave stuff was 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. It's very, very difficult for me. And the only thing that made it really possible to stay there, you know, 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 set up 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 can write about it. And I could get tough enough. You, Prieta, you've brought a book with you by Tony Morrison. She was talking about, I can't be too self-regard. You've brought 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 that Tony Morrison has made. And there's a few paragraphs in this, which I have 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 a 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 build a state where I grew up in it.

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. And so here is Tony 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 impact 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, 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. 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 is a global movement. And that's absolutely part of that. Great point, really. Hey, y'all, it's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair.

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I've got the last, the ending of A.S. Byatt's review when this novel was published in the UK, AS Byatt reviewed it. And she said, 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. Tony 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 Tony Morrison's lectures, which were collected as a book called Playing in the Dark, which he 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 Kather 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 actually think it's a moral failing and an ethical failing. 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, women, 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, Tony Morrison, commenting on your comment. Finding out answers to these incredible questions that it seemed to me had never been put subtly. And if they had been, they had never, 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 blue style 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 what happened. And if he turns the page, it's because he wants either to find out how it happened

or he loves the line. And you hope for both of those things. I hope for both of those. Right. Right. I mean, we're just going to turn into sort of cardplay. We're quoting Tony Morrison, If you'll allow me, I'd like to read enough power from the source of self-regards.

And this is where she talks about the aesthetics of what she's doing. And 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 raised 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 read a lot of 20th century American male writers, particularly white male writers. Reading Tony Morrison was the, Fulton was the one that I was most interested in because he was, I think, he was a modernist and what he did with form was so interesting and his language was

but it was that moment when you realized that here was somebody doing something as well as Faulkner but just the resonance and the the precision of her language well it was exactly what Antonio Bight was saying I can't go back now and read those writers without Tony Morrison without Tony Morrison's voice and what Tony Morris. 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 go back to. I just might read a tiny little bit if I'm allowed to. You know, 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. All 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 Bluefern, 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 paint 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. I think those extraordinary descriptions of what sisterhood should be. Yeah. I've ever read. Yeah. It doesn't matter about race. It doesn't matter about background. Who's free and who's unfree.

Water, spores, generations. Who gets to write about nature? Yes. Yes. planning, you know, 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. What you're saying about the art politics thing that she was writing about, that you can dissolve that into language like this, into storytelling like this.

I think it's worth making the point as well that when Beloved was first published, it was perceived as being an important book, Tony Morris, 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 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 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 properties and qualities that one would aspire to as a ricer who has set herself that project,

but to watch it go out in the world and change 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 Tony Morrison? Yeah. Well, that's my centre. 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? Right? So this is what I mean about her work being a literary project

as much as a social project. That point Antonio Biot makes about them, 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 wrestle Melville and win. Well, you're talking to someone who wrote. only in the indeed. Indeed. Indeed.

There's lots of ways in which her centering of her self and the things she wanted to say and the way she sees the world 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 that she's put down have have yielded so much. This is Tony Morrison talking about 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 doing 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 them. She killed her job.

In order to prevent her from living a life, she believed would be intolerable. But that's her claim, you know, kind of a kind of a couple of. 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, no. You are your best thing. You are.

Which is what you were saying, pretty much. 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.

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 Sether. 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 badlisted, 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 Arise's work. So I read The Bluest Eye for the first time. I read Song of Solomon and Sula as well. And I read The Bluest Eye for the first time. I almost wish we were talking about the bluest eye. I'm glad we're talking about Beloved because it's fantastic 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 publishing. So she'd worked in a couple. She'd been an editor. Yeah, she was in the office.

Is there's something really visceral about the bluest eye. We talked about Gail Jones and her novel Correjadoura on backlisted last year. Sarah Churchill, Tony Morrison, edited Corredegedora. 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 needs to, 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 read to it. They don't even read to it. 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 ten lists of books or novels that schools in the United States of America are trying to ban. Wow.

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, 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 thought more superior to them from anyone. 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 conscience. 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? I still strong. He's 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. If 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 these works undermine that security and show it 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, if we could only teach our young people that if I had had that and I got it from these books, 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,

were 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 token person here. And that does happen to me. I think, okay, that means you are too. It's as simple as that. You simply can't have a token person without everyone else there being a token person too. Being there because of their race and their identities simply doesn't infect me as 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 Tony Morrison articulates something that had 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'm wondering how much of her is her success. Success is not 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. I mean, 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 centre will come to me and have that confidence 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, 3940. So it took a long time for her to begin to put her work into the world and she was already working in publishing. She says a brilliant thing somewhere about how this.

extent to which she's channeling jazz. She's channeling jazz both in 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. I came back to this book and the other books by Tony Morrison that I've read before this episode thinking it's such a pleasant, change on backlist is to have something that is so undeniably great that it hasn't been neglected. Right, yeah. Do you know what I'm saying? No, I mean, we love the books that we talk about, but this is, you know, the force of this is couldn't be kept back, right?

Right, that's true. But I think, you know, what the project of her work is trying to say is that we, she, like, again, with these reversals and undermining, 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. 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 Tony Morrison, who is amazing Tony Morrison. She wants us to populate this world with the stories that have not been told,

that had 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 with the importance of great art, full of questions. Full of questions.

Deep and heartfelt thanks to Preeti for choosing such a great book. To the Keeper of Sounds, Nikki Birch, thank you for listening. We'll be back in a fortnight. Yay! Amazingly good episode. It was really brilliant. You feel all right? I'm good, yeah, I'll have that away now, please.