A birthday tribute to Toni Morrison

America’s only living Nobel laureate for literature celebrates her 82nd birthday on Monday, February 18, which prompts us to share a special tribute Morrison received at last summer’s New York State Writers Hall of Fame gala.

Toni Morrison
Ryan Brenizer Photography

As regular readers of Reader’s Almanac will recall, last June The Empire State Center for the Book, New York’s affiliate of the Library of Congress Center for the Book, held its annual gala at the Princeton Club in midtown Manhattan. The highlight of the evening was the induction of the 14-member class of 2012, which included living writers E. L. Doctorow, Pete Hamill, Joyce Carol Oates, and Toni Morrison, as well as John Cheever, Hart Crane, Edna Ferber, Washington Irving, Henry James, Mary McCarthy, Marianne Moore, Barbara W. Tuchman, Kurt Vonnegut, and Richard Wright.

Judge Anne E. Thompson
Ryan Brenizer Photography

The following tribute was prepared for the evening by former New York mayor David Dinkins, who was unable to attend in person. His remarks were read at the gala by Judge Anne E. Thompson of the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey, whose friendship with Ms. Morrison and with David and Joyce Dinkins dates to their college days at Howard University.

Over the four score and four years of my life, I have been blessed to know some of the most wonderful women who ever walked the face of this earth. There was my mother, then my sister Joyce, another Joyce—my bride of more than a half-century . . . who is here this evening, and (eventually) our little girl Donna and her daughter Kalila.

And beyond my family circle, I have had the good fortune to have as close friends a number of truly remarkable women, including one who is central to our purpose here this evening. I speak, of course, of Ms. Toni Morrison. And I am thankful for the opportunity to contribute to this occasion in tribute to her despite the thousands of miles that separate us.

Joyce and I have shared a friendship with Toni for many years and, as is true of everyone, we have been fans of her artistry since the beginning of her career . . . and have taken great pride in her accomplishments. You may know that our friendship began while undergraduates at Howard University—I was Class of 1950, and Joyce and Toni were in the Class of 1953.

Our friendship with Toni has evolved as much from how she has chosen to share her talents as it has from the pure talent itself. Her activism in the struggles for educational opportunity for young persons of color has earned her the respect and appreciation of parents everywhere . . . as she has encouraged their children’s dreams and stimulated their creativity by her example and her teachings.

After Howard, Toni went on to earn her master’s degree in English at Cornell University and she has taught her craft at her alma mater Howard and some other good schools—Yale and Princeton. Toni once said in a speech on values in higher education that: “What I think and do is already inscribed on my teaching, my work. And so should it be. We teach values by having them.”

Toni has incorporated the values learned from her parents during her early years in Lorain, Ohio into the richly-expressive depictions of the characters of her novels . . . from The Bluest Eye in 1969 through a succession of works that have included such best-sellers as Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby . . . and her Pulitzer Prize–winning classic, Beloved.

A member of the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters for over a quarter century, Toni has been awarded countless literary distinctions, including the Commander of the French Order of Arts & Letters and, the ultimate—the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. Taking these honors in stride and never losing sight of her personal values, she has remained the warm and unpretentious person she was before becoming an icon whose every word is captured in print, whether in cover articles in Time magazine or the senior theses of students of literature the world over.

“I’m just trying,” she said in an interview with Salon magazine, “to look at something without blinking, to see what it was like or it could have been like, and how that had something to do with the way we live now.” And her body of work is the best testament that she has never blinked. The Nobel Prize Committee described her “epic power, her unerring ear for dialogue, and her poetically-charged” contributions to the field of literature . . . but Toni had other thoughts at the time.

You may recall her initial reaction to learning of her selection for this, the highest recognition for writers in the world. In case you may not, let me share it with you in her own words: “I called someone at the Nobel Committee,” she remembered, “and I said, ‘Look, if you're going to keep giving prizes to women (and I hope you do), you're going to have to give us more warning. Men can rent tuxedos. I have to get shoes and I have to get a dress.’” Vintage Toni Morrison.

In receiving this award tonight, Toni Morrison joins the company of a group of recipients who qualify as our pantheon of artistic excellence—E. L. Doctorow, Pete Hamill and Joyce Carol Oates as well as those inducted posthumously. I commend the good folks at New York Library Association, the Empire State Center for the Book, and the Writers Hall of Fame for their continued efforts to support and encourage the artistry Toni Morrison exemplifies, and hope that your presence here this evening is but prelude to an ongoing commitment to their mission.

Novelist, editor, teacher, scholar, dramatist, poet, children’s author, Pulitzer Prize winner, Nobel Laureate, author of the best work of American fiction in the last quarter century . . . Toni Morrison has given us many hours of literary pleasure and thought, and has provided young writers with a blueprint for the kind of work they must strive to do.

She is dedicated to helping them to build from that blueprint and to design their own, and the tribute tonight is a promise to Toni that the people of the State of New York will continue to support work that expands and engages her artistic and intellectual legacy.

Toni, you are a jewel in the crown of American Letters. We congratulate you on your extraordinary achievements, and promise to do what we can to bring as many of your heirs as possible under the light of that jewel for generations to come.

Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, please join me in saluting our Beloved, Ms. Toni Morrison.

Previous posts from the Hall of Fame ceremony:
Ross Posnock on Henry James
Liesl Schillinger on E. L. Doctorow
Eleanor Bergstein on Joyce Carol Oates
Elizabeth Bradley on Washington Irving
Alice Quinn on Marianne Moore
Jessica Tuchman Mathews on Barbara W. Tuchman
Langdon Hammer on Hart Crane
Eve Stwertka on Mary McCarthy

New York State Writers Hall of Fame: Langdon Hammer on Hart Crane

Toni Morrison greets fellow Hall of Fame inductees
Pete Hamill and E. L. Doctorow
Ryan Brenizer Photography

On June 5, The Empire State Center for the Book, New York’s affiliate of the Library of Congress Center for the Book, held its annual gala at the Princeton Club in midtown Manhattan. The Center is committed to fostering reading and greater appreciation of the literary arts, and among its initiatives is the New York State Writers Hall of Fame, established in 2010 to recognize New York–based poets, novelists, journalists, and historians who have made an indelible mark on our culture. The centerpiece of this year’s gala was the induction of the fourteen-member class of 2012, which included E. L. Doctorow, Pete Hamill, Toni Morrison, and Joyce Carol Oates, all of whom attended. Also honored were John Cheever, Hart Crane, Edna Ferber, Washington Irving, Henry James, Mary McCarthy, Marianne Moore, Barbara W. Tuchman, Kurt Vonnegut, and Richard Wright.

Hall of Fame inductees Joyce Carol Oates and Toni Morrison
Ryan Brenizer Photography

Over the coming weeks, The Reader’s Almanac will present remarks offered at the induction ceremony, in which literary scholars, critics, and descendants of the writers honored the inductees. We begin with Langdon Hammer’s tribute to the poet Hart Crane. Hammer is professor of English at Yale University, where he teaches modern and contemporary poetry. He has written and edited several books on Crane, including volume #168 in the Library of America series, Hart Crane: Complete Poetry & Selected Letters.

Langdon Hammer offers a tribute to Hart Crane
Ryan Brenizer Photography

Like many New York writers, Hart Crane was born somewhere else—in Garretsville, Ohio, in his case. He came here to live, quite alone, in 1916. He was 17, just a little older than the century, and he felt obscurely but intensely (Crane’s feelings were usually obscure and intense) that his fate and that of the century were deeply connected with each other and with the capital of modern life, New York City.

On New Year’s Eve of that first year in the city, the new arrival wrote home from East 15th Street: “My Dear Father, I have just been out for a long ride up Fifth Ave. on an omnibus. It is very cold and clear, and the marble facades of the marvelous mansions shone like crystal in the sun. . . . The room I have now is a bit too small, so after my week is up, I shall seek out another place near here, for I like the neighborhood. The houses are so different here, that it seems most interesting, for a while at least, to live in one.”

Crane was peripatetic and lived in many houses in the city. The address that mattered most was 110 Columbia Heights, Brooklyn. It was there he began the love affair of his life with a Danish sailor named Emil Opffer, and where, “living in the shadow of the bridge,” as he put it, he conceived of his epic poem about the visionary promise of America, The Bridge. “That window,” he said about his window facing Brooklyn Bridge, “is where I would be most remembered of all: the ships, the harbor, and the skyline of Manhattan, midnight, morning or evening,—rain, snow or sun, it is everything from the mountains to the walls of Jerusalem and Nineveh, and all related and in actual contact with the changelessness of the many waters that surround it.”

The Bridge begins with an ecstatic address to Brooklyn Bridge in which its Gothic arches suggest a new religion and a new image of divinity. The bridge rises up above not simply New York but the whole of the continent, even the Midwest Crane left behind to make his life here. This stanza comes from the proem:

O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.

That’s gorgeous poetry, as stirring as any language an American has authored. But it isn’t easy poetry, and The Bridge was a puzzle and a problem when it arrived in most reviewers’ mailboxes. Crane died, a suicide, in 1932. He knew what he had achieved in his poetry. But he must have feared no one would ever recognize it, including the most important audience he wrote for, literary New York. I can just imagine, therefore, how gratified he would be by this recognition tonight. Hart Crane wrote the great poem of New York, and it is right to name him one of New York’s greats.

On Toni Morrison’s 80th birthday: Remembering her friendship with James Baldwin

Today, February 18, marks the eightieth birthday of Toni Morrison, Nobel and Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist, editor, and educator. In 1998 Morrison edited two volumes of James Baldwin’s works for The Library of America: Early Novels & Stories and Collected Essays. Although they were born just seven years apart, Morrison and Baldwin came from seemingly different generations of writers. They met in 1973 when Morrison was an editor at Random House and tried to sign Baldwin to a book deal. No contract ensued but they quickly became friends. “I dig Toni, and I trust her,” Baldwin wrote to his biographer David Adams Leeming.

Severely weakened by his battle with cancer, Baldwin spoke about Morrison to Quincy Troupe in November 1987, just three weeks before he died, in what would be his last interview:

Troupe: What do you think about Toni Morrison?
Baldwin: Toni's my ally and it's really probably too complex to get into. She's a black woman writer, which in the public domain makes it more difficult to talk about. . . . Her gift is in allegory. Tar Baby is an allegory. In fact all her novels are. But they're hard to talk about in public. That's where you get in trouble because her books and allegory are not always what it seems to be about. I was too occupied with my recent illness to deal with Beloved. But in general she's taken a myth, or she takes what seems to be a myth, and turns it into something else. I don't know how to put this—Beloved could be about the story of truth. She's taken a whole lot of things and turned them upside down. Some of them—you recognize the truth in it. I think that Toni's very painful to read.
Troupe: Painful?
Baldwin: Yes. Because it's always or most times a horrifying allegory; but you recognize that it works. But you don't really want to march through it. Sometimes people have a lot against Toni, but she's got the most believing story of everybody—this rather elegant matron, whose intentions really are serious and, according to some people, lethal.

At Baldwin’s funeral service at the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine on December 8, 1987, Morrison was one of several eulogists. Her remarks movingly described how indebted she felt to her friend:

The season was always Christmas with you there and . . . you did not neglect to bring at least three gifts. . . You gave me a language to dwell in, a gift so perfect it seems my own invention. . . . The second gift was your courage, which you let us share: the courage of one who could go as a stranger in the village and transform the distances between people into intimacy with the whole world. . . The third gift was hard to fathom and even harder to accept. It was your tenderness – a tenderness so delicate I thought it could not last, but last it did and envelop me it did.

You knew, didn’t you, how I needed your language and the mind that formed it? How I relied on your fierce courage to tame wildernesses for me? How strengthened I was by the certainty that came from knowing you would never hurt me? You knew, didn’t you, how I loved your love? You knew. This then is no calamity. No, This is jubilee. “Our crown,” you said, “has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do,” you said, “is wear it.”

And we do, Jimmy. You crowned us.

Watch a 2001 C-Span interview with Toni Morrison:


Related LOA works: James Baldwin: Early Novels & Stories; James Baldwin: Collected Essays; The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works (includes Morrison’s 1996 “Introduction to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”)