Toni Morrison (1997)
In which the author pivots and attempts adulting
To continue with this project of (random) year-by-year reflections, I turn now to 1997, a year when very little happened and yet, upon reflection, it seems was a pivot point.
To recap, I finished a Masters degree in English literature at the University of Toronto in 1996. I had no desire to pursue a PhD, though I had a conversation with one of my professors about how I could continue my education (broadly, informally).
"Keep reading."
This might seem like the inverse of typical academic advice ("keep publishing"), though I did that, too. I published three book reviews, five short stories, one poem, and polished one of my MA assignments into an essay published in Paragraph, "Defying the black flies: The Romanticism of Susanna Moodie."
The book reviews:
Paragraph #20. Ken Sparling. Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall. Knopf.
Paragraph #21. Eye wuz here. Ed., Shannon Cooley. Douglas & McIntyre.
Paragraph #22. Barry Kennedy. Through the Nightfall. Doubleday.
The short stories and poem:
“Gerry’s Sister (Mercy in the Night).” Queen Street Quarterly.
“Parents.” The New Quarterly.
“13 Shades of Black and White.” Black Cat #115.
One poem and story: “12 Days of Unemployment.” Ink.
“Drew Barrymore’s Breasts.” The New Quarterly.
All of five of these short stories would later appear in Thirteen Shade of Black and White (Turnstone Press, 1999). Probably, in 1997 I was also sending out sample packages to publishers, hoping for a bite. I don't have a clear record of that. I sent a sample of stories to maybe a dozen publishers, a half-dozen at a time.
Turnstone was the only one that asked to see the full manuscript. I probably sent that in 1998, because they took many months to respond, and then they did with a phone call, and then it was at least a half-year plus many months before the book came out, late-fall 1999.
In the meantime, as I noted in my 1998 episode, after I finished by MA, my full-time job was to look for a full-time job, while I continued to live in my parents basement. In 1997, I turned 29. I did not find a full-time job. I found two part-time jobs, neither of which paid well at all.
One was with a publishing company that put together course packs for university students and involved a lot of photocopying. One was at a marketing company that used the Canadian Press wire service to stream news headlines to closed circuit screens in the offices, lobbies, public spaces of their clients: banks, bars, retail and grocery stores. My job, as weekend “editor,” was to snip the CP copy and create bite-sized news stories.
Those were the two jobs I had that year.
In 1996, my father had stopped working due to a medical issue. He remained at home on disability leave, never returning to work. My mother was the only one of the three of us working full time.
I would say it was the best of times, it was the worst of times, but it wasn't the best of times.
Why Toni Morrison (1997)? I saw her around this time, though I can't be sure it was 1997. She was touring on her book Paradise, which was published that year. Her event was at Trinity-St. Paul's United Church (427 Bloor Street West), and what I remember most about her was her hair. Okay, her presence. The venue was packed, mostly with women, and the room vibrated with awe.
Toni Morrison! Toni Morrison! Queen!
She read a passage, and I don't remember her taking questions.
As I was leaving, I overheard two (White) women exchanging thoughts.
"That's the thing," one of them said, "she makes you think that even women can be evil."
Even women are human, I thought. Thank heavens.
In 1992, I remembered this exchange differently.
"You know from a feminist point of view she's interesting."
"Why's that?"
"She doesn't just present women as victims."
Similar. Different. Odd.
I never read Paradise, but I reviewed Jazz (1992) when I when I was an undergraduate at the University of Waterloo (see below). I saw the 1998 movie of Beloved (1987) when it came out and then many years later listened to the audio version of that novel. I had forgotten almost all of the major plot points, which seemed incredible to me, after I realized (again) what they were.
The Toni Morrison book I think about first, though, isn't even a Toni Morrison book. It's a collection of interviews with her, Conversations with Toni Morrison (1994). I read a library copy in the first years after it was released. What struck me was, what a deeply commonsensical person she was, while also being deeply devoted to her craft and purpose. I also learned she did her MA thesis on William Faulkner, which surprised me at first, then it didn't.
Looking it up now, is see that its title was "Virginia Woolf's and William Faulkner's treatment of the alienated" (1955) — I didn't remember the Woolf part. What didn't surprise me was how Morrison's moral complexity (in her work) was similar to Faulkner's. I'm not saying Faulkner influenced her; I believe it to be more of a meeting of minds, a consistency in purpose. The victim/offender relationship, in most cases, is not simple, and victims in one case are well capable of being evil in another. The cycle of violence is a familiar one, and way difficult to untangle.
On the common sense front, I remember Morrison dismissing questions along the lines of "it must be difficult to balance being a mother and a writer." Hard, sure. Impossible, no. She was a single mother with two sons. She set up her typewriter in the living room with the kids underfoot and wrote — while working during the day as an editor. Queen.
I've said this wasn't the best of times. Sometimes, I've said I was stereotypical GenX, over-educated, under-employed. Around this time, the University of Toronto demographic economist David Foot released a popular book, Boom, Bust, Echo (1997). I heard him on CBC radio, promoting the book and its ideas, which were basically that demographics determined economics. He was asked what were the best and worst years to be born, economically? The best was 1937, the year my father was born, and the worst was, 1968, the year I was born.
I certainly did not want to be 29 and living in my parents' basement, but two part-time jobs weren't enough to pay rent. They weren't enough to fund a helluva lot. I used the library and stayed home a lot. I didn't reconnect with my high school friends, and my university friends were all over. I'd spent two years in Saskatoon, stretching myself, but now I was back in Toronto and knew next to no one. Everything felt on the precipice. Whatever future I'd been working towards hadn't arrived. I sent out dozens of CVs, had a dozen decent interviews, was short-listed at least twice, but I was getting nowhere.
This tension was in the short stories I was writing. I wanted to do a kind of In Our Time (1925) for that time. Not a K-Mart Realism, more a Zeller's Realism. "12 Days of Unemployment" contained a Bukowskiesque summation of the feeling of getting nowhere fast.
"Gerry's Sister" and "Parents" were intense bits of stream of consciousness, trying to capture the pressure of "the human heart in conflict with itself" (per Faulkner's 1949 Nobel Prize speech), which I took as instructional. Neither is the least autobiographical. Neither is "Drew Barrymore's Breasts," a great piece of misdirection, taking as its starting point Barrymore's flashing of David Letterman on late night television, an absurd bit of theatre, and placing it within the voice of a young man whose father, a taxi driver, had recently been murdered. It's as crisp as anything Carver ever wrote.
I felt that I had found my voice, my artistic purpose, to write sharp points of absurdist realism. Grunge was still prominent, though fading. The Nineties were, what? Full of angst, yet we're so much more anxious now that they seem like the calm before the storm. I didn't know that then, though. I thought I could write absurdist realism and also pursue a professional career, though the evidence seemed to the contrary. It would be another half decade before I had any traction on the career.
I was starting to become aware of who my contemporaries were, thanks to the small press table at Pages bookstore, opposite the CHUM-City building, Queen Street West, my old haunt from the 1980s. Insomniac Press had a nice run then. I liked Natalee Caple’s The Heart is Its Own Reason (1998), Pull Gently, Tear Here (2001) by Alexandra Leggat, and I thought was a classic of the genre Toronto Stories: The People One Knows (1994) by Daniel Jones. In Book City on Bloor, I found the lit zine, Black Cat #115, from Matthew Firth’s Black Bile Press. I went to the launch event for Firth’s collection, Fresh Meat (Rush Hour Revisions, 1997), held at a very divey bar in Kensington Market, exactly the kind of place conjured up in Firth’s fiction. I thought, These are my people.
I said above that 1997 now seems like a pivot year. What did I mean? Well, when I started to think about what to write for 1997, more and more it seemed that prior to that year I was open-ended to the future. Something will happen. I don't need to know what. But in 1997, the future started. I couldn't wait any more. Whatever foundation I had then, it had to do. From a writing point of view, prior to 1997 I was searching for what I would do, but in 1997 I knew enough to feel I had arrived. I had a POV and it was dark absurdism. You keep pushing that rock, and it keeps falling backwards. Or as my step-daughter said recently, the dishes don't do themselves. Ha!
I've never tried to articulate my artistic practice, but I've been thinking about it lately. The first association I have with the word "practice" is Allen Iverson.
The second might by Yoda: "There is no try."
If asked to describe my artistic practice, I would probably say it's "experimental." And conversational. I think stories come in almost infinite forms. I disagree with known formulas. Stories are what people do all day, every day. When I was working through a story, I would sometimes try to dream about it or think about it in the waking dreamscape, trying to discover subconscious connections, interesting twists that had narrative logic.
I hadn't, at that time, read Jesus' Son (1992) by Denis Johnson, but when I did I recognized it as the kind of space I was trying to work in. Something that didn't look complicated on the surface, but had deep currents. Was funny, sad, shocking, absurd, everything all at once.
Roddy Doyle was an active influence around this time. I saw him (with my parents) at Convocation Hall, University of Toronto. Possibly it was 1996, because The Woman Who Walked Into Doors (1996) had just come out. I had read all of Doyle's work up to that point, and I had seen the 1994 four-episode TV series "Family," which was as raw and biting as anything else I've ever seen). The Wikipedia entry for "Family" says it aired in Canada, but "citation needed." How about, citate this? I saw it, and I was in Canada. I think it was on TV Ontario (TVO)? ... Interestingly, I haven't read any Doyle titles since. Not sure why.
I remember Doyle taking questions. What was he reading? "Kerouac. It's shite." Regarding the copious drinking by the pregnant 20-year-old in The Snapper (1990), concerns? "Yes, I wouldn't do it that way if I was doing it now. I know more about fetal alcohol syndrome now."
Was I working certain themes? Oh, probably, but I wasn't thinking like that. If I had any thought, it's that I wanted to capture the whole world, just take every sensation and cram it all in. I did not believe any experience was excluded from anyone else. Being a human being is enough of a foundational grounding for everyone on the planet. This did not mean I was naively "universalist," or that I'm suggesting that everyone is identical. Clearly not.
But I did think, and still think, that everyone has access to all stories — at least as audience, at least given an effort. Life is awesome, and that awesomeness can be shared with everyone. Differences matter, distinctions matter, but not differences or distinctions override completely what we have in common, and we are capable of holding in mind both the commonness and the distinctions at the same time. No distinction cancels out humanity. Conflict is natural and inevitable, but it can be a source of engagement and learning, even celebration, if folks engage with curiosity, generosity, and set aside insecurity.
In 1997, these beliefs were put to the test, as I agreed to take part in a conflict resolution committee at the church where I had spent my youth and my parents still attended. The congregation had split into factions, and I had spent two years (1992-94) in Saskatoon at the community mediation agency, immersed in conflict resolution and active communication styles. I was optimistic and hopeful about the ability of people to solve issues, when they acted in good faith and remained open to "the Other." Surely, this little congregation could live up to that limited ambition.
In short, hell no, despite weeks, turned into months of meetings, reports, conversations, surveys, and tears. One person even accused me of being an agent of Satan. Ha, ha. No joke.
Overcoming insecurities and engaging with curiosity and generosity turned out to be much harder than I expected. I still don't think it's impossible, though. I've seen it happen. I'm much more likely to counsel "walking away," though, now. Cut your losses and run. Protect your boundaries. If people want to spin in dysfunction, wish them well and slip away quietly. Disengage.
This has been a hard lesson for me to integrate, and, yes, I think it's connected to learned codependency. When I look back on a lot of my fiction, now, I see many attempts to sort this out. Characters struggling with blurred boundaries. Characters trying to separate from crazy-making demands. Characters trying to establish independence, outside the expectations of others. Characters constantly failing, feeling trapped. Adulting, is a gerund in use now. Ha.
Incidentally, it seems to me that new, young writers, releasing work today, are much better at articulating their “practice.” Perhaps such ways of thinking are better integrated into education these days, or maybe they’re all MFA graduates, immersed in a more robust artistic pedagogy than I ever received. I took a couple of creative writing classes in university, but there weren’t no pedagogy, man.
If I were to try to imitate a contemporary artistic statement, I would probably say something like, “Michael Bryson’s stories explore the pressures of economic hardship and other strains, barriers and structures of self-expression and fulfilment. The characters press against the limitations of identities imposed from within and without, including gender roles, sexuality, and lived experience with mental illness.”
It was around this time that I had what I consider to be one of my more insightful conversations with my father. As noted above, he was on permanent medical leave at this time. He was supposed to be resting, which he was, but he was struggling with resting. He always needed to be busy.
“I just see things that need doing, so I have to go and do them.”
“No, you don’t,” I said. “That’s the point. You don’t need to do them. You need to, in fact, not do them.”
“But then they won’t get done.”
“That’s not your problem!”
He meant, like, things at the church. He had a view of the future that could only be made possible through his intervention, and yet his interventions were not leading to that future.
I used to think he was probably bi-polar. Now I wonder if it wasn’t ADHD, a perpetually restless mind. It was something like that, anyway, and it was always there, throughout my childhood and, really, until he passed away in 2017. And my fiction is written in the wake of this. And I still don’t know, exactly, how to talk about it.
Back to Toni Morrison.
Here's a link to her 1993 Nobel lecture.
Below is my review that first appeared in Imprint, University of Waterloo, June 26, 1992.
Jazz by Toni Morrison (Knopf, 1992)
Sth, I know that woman. She used to live with a flock of birds on Lenox Aveune. Know her husband, too. He fell for an eighteen-year-old girl with one of those deepdown, spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going.
There is a school of literary criticism that holds to the belief that black women writers are doubly discriminated against in their quest for intellectual recognition. They are, it is said, excluded from the discussions that determine academic excellence first because women's experiences are generally devalued in our culture, and second because white people simply don't try hard enough to understand black people.
Toni Morrison is one of the few writers, along with Alice Walker, to have broken through this cultural barrier. She won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for her novel Beloved and has just released Jazz to somewhat confused critical acclaim. Affirming the notion that institutions of power are unable to understand marginal voices, Time magazine's review of Jazz praised Morrison's literary ability while confessing not to understand her purpose.
The novel's plot is contained in its first sentences, quoted above. Simply put, the novel is about a couple who grow apart as they grow old. He takes a young lover, who leaves him. He kills his lover. Life goes on, somewhat like before. But also radically different. The novel concentrates on its characters, not its plot. It tells us in deeply drawn strokes each individual's quirks and fantasies, and after a while it is difficult to discern the victims from the offenders. Everyone is hurting, everyone is looking for redemption.
Likely this is not what you'd expect from a novel about a love triangle and a murder. But Morrison's point is that there are not easy answers, the roots of the problem run deep. The symptoms may be obvious, but the causes are certainly not. Jazz explores (as a Charlie Parker solo explores; it wanders, but always to the right place) the depth of this theme, celebrating human connections at the same time as it points out the consequences of their failings.
Love's connections may be frail, Morrison is saying, and they are often the cause of much pain and anguish, but they are also life's strongest bonds. Jazz plays with this paradox. The purpose of the novel, then, is simple. Jazz is jazz. That is all. Nothing more, nothing less. And as Louis Armstrong once said, "If you have to ask what's jazz, you'll never know."
As a cultural phenomena, the novel deserves to be discussed within the context of contemporary race and gender relations. A novel about black people in Harlem in the 1920s, Jazz speaks the voices of the marginalized people who feel they've moved up in the world. The readers, however, who know how hollow these dreams of 70 years ago are, can see the tragedy in the characters' ambitions. Just as they can see how little has changed with regards to violence against women.
But Jazz is not an overtly political novel, though in a completely subversive way the novel points out the commonalities that bind all people. These are the connections of emotion, the need to be loved, understood and wanted. And though these connections function on the level of individuals, they are also symptomatic of our culture as a whole.
Says one character: "All kinds of white people are there. Two kinds. The ones that feel sorry for you and the ones that don't. And both amount to the same thing. Nowhere in between is respect."