BOOKS

The blues and the bluest

James Buchan

THE BLUEST EYE SU LA SONG OF SOLOMON TAR BABY BELOVED JAZZ by Toni Morrison Chatto & Windus, £12.99 each, pp. 164, pp. 174, pp. 337, pp. 309, pp. 275, pp. 229 respectively In her first novel, which was published in the United States in 1970, Toni Morrison sets out her store. The book, which is very good, is called The Bluest Eye and tells the story of a young black girl who goes to a quack magician for blue eyes:

Of all the wishes people had brought him money, love, revenge — this seemed to him the most poignant and the one most deserv- ing of fulfillment. A little black girl who wanted to rise up out of the pit of her black- ness and see the world with blue eyes.

In this novel, which is set in Toni Morri- son's hometown of Lorain, just west of Cleveland, Ohio, the characters are never labelled as black except in their longing for whiteness; or in a sort of ugliness or defor- mity which they seem to have inherited not from God — there is no God in Ms Morri- son's fiction, only church — but from an obscure and unfortunate history.

In the six novels Ms Morrison has pub- lished since 1970, the characters are always fussing with their blackness, the exact colour of their skin, or the crinkliness or straightness of their hair: cosmetics of vari- ous sorts play a large role in her fiction. Ms Morrison, who even quotes Gobineau at one point, is the most racially conscious writer I have ever encountered.

To be black in a northern US city is for her a fallen condition, perplexing, violent, mad, desperate and bad. The origins of this condition lie some distance to the south and at some moment in the past: all her books include some form of journey to the South and into history, most memorably in Sula, where a genteel Ohio lady, returning to visit her dying grandmother in New Orleans by train in 1920, discovers the southern restroom:

At Meridian the women got out with their children. While Helene looked about the tiny stationhouse for a door that said COLORED WOMEN, the other woman stalked off to a field of high grass on the far side of the track.

These southern journeys, actual or in what Sethe in Beloved calls 'rememory', always start as back eddies in the narrative stream but eventually engulf it. At the risk of sounding high-falutin', I'd say that United States literature has an east-west orientation: either westwards to a receding frontier (Turner, Parkman, Steinbeck) or eastwards to Europe (late Hawthorne, Henry James). Toni Morrison, like the blues singers and jazz musicians she admires, works on a north-south axis. This is an innovation and was presumably the reason why the Swedish Academy awarded her the Nobel Prize for Literature this year. The politically correct have no notion of art except as consolation but we should

demand more. I read these books in their handsome new British edition to see whether Toni Morrison was not simply worthy, but good.

Already, in The Bluest Eye, you can see Ms Morrison's strengths and weaknesses: wonderful dialogue, which if it wasn't the authentic speech of blacks in lakeside Ohio in the 1940s, damn well ought to have been; a domesticity so full of conviction it never slips into genre; a feeling for Ameri- can nature both romantic and precise; and a tendency to flashiness, bombast, spici- ness and, very occasionally, incoherence.

In Sula, published in 1973, we are already running into problems. The loca- tion has lost its precision, and there are passages of that portentous whimsy known to its admirers as magic realism: plagues of robins, spells, dreams, birthmarks, identical children, and a resolution of the narrative nicked from The Pied Piper of Hamelin. It is true that Toni Morrison is only a genera- tion away from the most acute superstition, but she herself is a professor at Princeton and it shows. Also, and more seriously, she is starting to preach: that is, to propel the

'What kind of rock are you into?' novel through assertion rather than the dynamics of narrative.

By Song of Solomon (1977), this preachi- ness has become tedious. There are two passages, quite close together, which reveal what is going wrong to the reader though the author has not quite grasped it: But now he was doing it again, with his son, and every detail of the land was clear in his mind: the well, the apple orchard, President Lincoln; her foal, Mary Todd; Ulysses S. Grant, their cow; General Lee, their hog.

and:

'They say Till had a knife,' Freddie said.

'They always say that. He could of had a wad of bubble gum, they'd swear it was a hand grenade.'

'South's bad,' Porter said. 'Bad. Don't noth- ing change in the good old U.S. of A.'

The first is authentic history, as it exists in the memory of poor people. The second is a botched attempt at documentary or newspaper history; if I were interested in race, which I ain't, I'd say a white history; and in gender, which ditto, a male history. Young men play large roles in Song of Solomon and Ms Morrison has some diffi- culty handling them: one, for example, is a sort of pasteboard terrorist. The book ends with people flying, always a sign of narra- tive defeat.

Toni Morrison seems to have recognised something was wrong, and tackles the problem in different ways in her next two books. Tar Baby, which was published in 1981, opens not in a black household in the US, but the modern Caribbean retreat of a retired white Philadelphia candy manufac- turer, who has all but adopted a beautiful and intelligent black girl called Jadine, the niece of his butler and cook. Into this dis- turbed and corrupt paradise, a young black man breaks in, having jumped ship, and rapidly demolishes the fragile hierarchies of colour, wealth and sex. In language both repellent and unconvincing, he captures Jadine. The young man — ignorant, wounded, nameless, desperate — is Toni Morrison's trademark on a borrowed Con- radian tale. The lovers fly to New York, and then to the young man's hometown in

the Florida sticks, where, I am sorry to say, I left them. Tar Baby is the only Morrison

book I was unable to finish, apart from her essay on the Anita Hill affair, Race-ing Jus- tice, Engendering Power, which I was unable to start.

Beloved (1987) is Toni Morrison's .most ambitious novel, for it at last approaches the unspoken goal of all these southern journeys and the source of all those black deformities: plantation slavery. We are back, with some relief, in Ohio, this time on the outskirts of Cincinnati in the era of the Civil War. The past, in the form of the Sweet Home plantation, is just across the river in Kentucky: a place of heart-breaking beauty, amenity and horror in the memo- ries of the escaped slaves: 'It made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too.'

When the plantation's new owner crosses the river with a posse, Sethe dashes her child's brains out against a post. Later she says, 'If I hadn't killed her, she would have died.' This extraordinary sentence — the best Ms Morrison has ever written — actu- ally makes sense: though, oddly, it is Ms Morrison's acute understanding of the slave economy, rather than various lurid scenes of brutality, that gives the sentence its tremendous meaning. Her world has expanded, too, and her white characters have gained greatly in persuasiveness and humanity. One, a little girl called Amy, helps deliver Sethe's baby on the banks of the Ohio; and this is more convincing than the regular assertions that, for example, 'there is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks'. For me, Beloved is still inferior to The Bluest Eye; but it is longer, bigger, more 'important' and American: a Pulitzer and Nobel book.

Returning to The Bluest Eye, there is, towards the end, a passage where Toni Morrison seems to despair of literature and suggest that only music can make sense of a black man's biography: black music, race music, the blues and jazz and, presumably, soul and rap which have overrun the world in successive waves like Muslim armies:

Only they [jazz musicians] would know how to connect the heart of a red watermelon to the asafetida bag to the muscadine to the flashlight on his behind to the fists of money to the lemonade in a Mason jar to a man called Blue and come up with what all that meant in joy, in pain, in anger, in love, and give it its final and pervading ache of free- dom.

In her latest book, Jazz (1992), she returns to this notion and expands it into a whole novel. We are in the Harlem of the Jazz Age. and there is an exuberance and freedom about the book which is quite new; also some thrilling hymns to New York City in all its beauty. Though there is some incoherence, it arises from a striving not for flash but for a precision in descrip- tion and character; and though there is the usual hopeless violence, her characters achieve what might almost be described as happiness. One senses, for the first time, that emancipation may be possible and without imaginary blue eyes.

A good writer, then, with a project of Incomparable interest, the will to experi- ment and the intelligence to learn from mistakes. As for the Nobel, the best Ameri- can writers never won it (Hawthorne, Henry James, Nabokov) and the list of those that did is not impressive. If one excludes for a moment the expatriates (Eliot, Pearl Buck), the playwright (O'Neill), and the Poles who wrote in other languages (Milosz, Singer), we are left with Sinclair Lewis, Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck and Bellow. Her novels are way beyond Steinbeck, better than Lewis's and better than anything Hemingway did at length. And I suspect there is more and better to come from her.