While a great deal has been written about Toni Morrison\u2019s fiction, her work as a senior editor at Random House is less well known. Dana A Williams, professor of African American Literature at Howard University, sets out to fill this gap, offering an impeccably researched account of Morrison\u2019s stint at Random House between 1971 and 1983, against the backdrop of the Civil Rights and the Black Arts movements. Reflecting ideas generated by that convergence, Morrison\u2019s novels \u2013 described by the Nobel committee, when they awarded her the prize in literature in 1993, as giving life to an essential aspect of\u00a0American reality \u2013 were driven by an unwavering belief in the possibility of African American empowerment through self-regard. Williams\u2019s interest lies in showing how Morrison\u2019s editorial career was informed by the same invigoratingly insular ethos. Whether writing or editing, her work was aimed at producing \u201cexplorations of interior Black life with minimal interest in talking to or being consumed by an imagined white reader\u201d.<\/p>\n
Morrison saw early on how that kind of insularity could be wielded as both a weapon and a shield. Addressing the Second National Conference of Afro-American Writers at Howard in 1976, she urged the audience to recognise that \u201cthe survival of Black publishing, which [\u2026] is a sort of way of saying the survival of Black writing, will depend on the same things that the survival of Black anything depends on, which is the energies of Black people \u2013 sheer energy, inventiveness and innovation, tenacity, the ability to hang on, and a contempt for those huge, monolithic institutions and agencies which do obstruct us\u201d. These\u00a0words could well have been repurposed as a\u00a0mission statement for her editorial career, which, as\u00a0Williams points out, consisted of \u201c[making] a revolution, one book at a time\u201d. Change was coming in America. Morrison\u2019s contribution would be to work\u00a0towards change in the overwhelmingly white world of publishing: \u201cI thought it was important for people to be in the streets,\u201d she said during an interview for the documentary Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, released in 2019. \u201cBut that couldn\u2019t last. You needed a record. It would be my job to publish the voices, the books, the ideas of African Americans. And that would\u00a0last.\u201d<\/p>\n
Toni at Random<\/a> traces the path that led from Morrison\u2019s Jim Crow childhood to her storied literary career, briefly documenting her early years, during which storytelling was an \u201cever-present pastime\u201d, as well as her academic life (Howard, followed by graduate studies at Cornell), before moving on to chapter-by-chapter case studies of some of the publications she oversaw during her stint at Random House. At times Williams\u2019s book reads like a catalogue of those works, from The Black Book (a compendium of black life in America) to work by June Jordan, Lucille Clifton and Toni Cade Bambara, as well as autobiographies of Angela Davis, Huey Newton and Muhammad Ali, and Gayl Jones\u2019s Corregidora<\/a> (which was reissued in 2019). Nevertheless, it is a fascinating catalogue, not least because it is full of thrilling behind-the-scenes insights into what it took to get them published.<\/p>\n Morrison chased blurbs and championed her projects with passion, tenacity and a moving sense of urgency<\/p>\n Morrison was keenly aware that success depended on proving that books such as these could sell; demand would have to be so high that, as Williams writes, \u201ceven the most recalcitrant salesperson would have no choice but to fall in line\u201d. The first job was making sure the books were excellent. Williams provides a number of examples of Morrison\u2019s exacting standards, including the fact that, while working on a collection of Huey Newton\u2019s essays, she recommended deleting the weak ones and editing the rest, \u201ceven those that had been previously published\u201d. But Morrison was also required to navigate \u201cthe irony of the need to be appealing to white people while also preserving enough distance from them to maintain Black privacy\u201d, keeping one eye on the bottom line even while the other was on black consciousness. On one memorable occasion, when the\u00a0poet Barbara Chase-Riboud stonewalled her about\u00a0doing publicity (loftily describing it as \u201ctap [dancing] for prizes and coverage\u201d), Morrison fired off a flinty letter reminding her that Random House<\/a> was \u201ca commercial house historically unenchanted with 500 slim volumes of profound poetry that languish in stock\u00a0rooms\u201d.<\/p>\n Morrison could be blunt when she had to be but, alongside this, Williams paints a picture of her as a fiercely protective editor, chasing blurbs and championing her projects with passion, tenacity and a moving sense of urgency, \u201cscared that the world would fall away before somebody put together a thing that got close to the way we really are\u201d. In addition, Williams highlights her convivial and collaborative approach, which led to the development of close friendships with a few of her authors including, famously, Angela Davis, who lived with Morrison and her sons for a time while they worked on her autobiography. It is astonishing to consider that at the same time as doing all this Morrison was also busy raising two sons and writing her own novels, frequently leveraging her literary status in service of her editorial campaigns. Williams includes references to a 1978 interview in which Morrison hinted at how exhausting this was: \u201cI want to stop writing around the edges of the day \u2026 in the automobile and places like that.\u201d<\/p>\n