The fusion of long-hidden secrets with the destructive-redemptive power of love forms the hot core of Morrison’s masterworks, “Song of Solomon” (1977) and “Beloved’ (1987). It may seem rash to be claiming such stature already for “Love,” the novel that will appear this November, but somebody’s going to, and it might as well be us. To try to summarize the book would be equally rash. So here goes: it’s about a preintegration, black-run seaside resort, the glad-handing owner’s marriage to an 11-year-old girl, what was won and lost during the civil-rights movement, the lifelong love-hate bond between two women, a poisoning (or is it?), a crucial character you may not realize is dead and another crucial character you probably won’t realize is crucial. “Love” doesn’t offer the mythic heft of “Song of Solomon” or the painful, –terrifying intensity of “Beloved.” It’s a dense, dark star of a novel, seemingly eccentric, secretly shapely, with Faulknerian passions and Nabokovian layers of lies and misdirection, the 19th-century device of a disputed will and some 20th-century social history–and with Morrison, now 72, writing at the top of her game.
Now, about that title. She wrote much of the manuscript thinking she’d call it “The Sporting Woman”–one key character is a prostitute–but the story became more complex, and she got discouraging reactions from people who didn’t know the antiquated term. “They thought it was a horseback-riding woman.” Her next thought was “L,” the not-very-puzzling initial by which another character is known. “I thought that was wonderfully clever.” Her publisher’s reaction? “Silence.” She’d had a similar problem with “Song of Solomon,” a title she hated at first. “Oh, I thought it was ter-rible. It sounded Bib-lical”–she laughs–“and pom-pous…” It was the late novelist John Gardner who talked her into that one, and even then she had misgivings. (“I thought, Why am I listening to him? Somebody who called a book ‘The Sunlight Dialogues’?”) Robert Gottlieb, her longtime editor at Knopf, came up with “Love”–which, she says, is both “the cliche of the century” and “the most powerful, probably singular, exclusive human emotion. It seemed simple enough and complicated enough for me at the same time. And there it is.” With that decided, she went through the book getting rid of every instance of the word “love,” so that when it finally appears–at a moment it would be mean to give away, and too elaborate to explain anyhow–it jumps out at the reader to maximum effect.
Morrison had worked with Gottlieb since her second novel, “Sula,” in 1973. When he left Knopf to edit The New Yorker, she was assigned a different editor for the indifferently received “Jazz” (1992) and “Paradise” (1998), but didn’t consult the new editor much “because I wanted to see what it was going to be like without Bob’s eye.” Her return to form may owe something to Gottlieb’s reappearance. He reminded her to bring back a minor character who’d dropped out of the book, had her take “a rather beautiful epic passage” out of the mouth of a major character who would never have spoken it (“Mr. Gottlieb thought it was a little much”) and argued for more clarity about when (or whether) that character becomes a ghost. “I kept saying to Bob, ‘I want the reader to suspect–or not–that she’s dead, but I don’t want her to know.’” These are normal author-editor transactions–Morrison herself, after all, was a book editor for years at Random House. All their real knock-down, drag-outs were about commas. “For me the language has such an oral, spoken quality that I just resist them,” she says. “Bob said, ‘You have to have them because the reader–’ I said, ‘I want the reader to figure out that sound.’ I left them out in ‘Jazz’ because he wasn’t there.” She laughs. OK, mischievously.
Otherwise, writing “Love” was business as usual, at least as Morrison goes about it. She started with a couple of characters; the idea of a profitable, long-gone black business, and what turned out to be a peripheral scene. She cut pictures out of magazines to keep the arrangement of an imagined wedding photo straight. She debriefed people about imaginary friends they’d had in childhood. She pondered the implications of her women’s crossing their legs, and found out exactly when models started posing open-legged in fashion spreads (1975. French Vogue). She kept “farmer’s hours”–up at 4:30. She wrote. She rewrote. “The revision, of course,” she says, not kidding, “is ecstasy.”
Morrison already has the “seed” of another book. “I’m not happy with no project at all,” she says. “Real-ly not happy.” She’s not ready to write it, though, and by no means ready to talk about it. To anyone. But after three years spent alone with “Love,” she seems glad of a chance to talk about its teeming details, like that passing reference to “Mildred Pierce.” “It’s a little indulgent,” she says. “I have to kind of restrain myself.” And she speaks of its people as old friends–or dangerous acquaintances. The cunning, half-feral, miniskirted reformatory girl Junior, whose kinky high boots hide her webbed feet. The resort owner Bill Cosey, a beneficent “race man” who becomes the serpent in his own oceanfront Eden. And Cosey’s child bride, Heed the Night Johnson (named after a passage in Corinthians), who turns into a magnificently intransigent, if not especially bright, old woman. “Some people think I have no sense of humor,” Morrison says. “I thought having somebody named Heed the Night”–she laughs and can’t finish the sentence. She recovers herself. “Anyway. It’s a little muted, I suppose.” This lack of self-importance isn’t self-deprecation, and certainly not false humility: without a bedrock confidence in her work’s importance, what serious writer could afford to be so playful? Which is about the last word you would have applied to the august Ms. Morrison, she of the chair at Princeton and a table reserved at the banquet of the immortals. But wait. Isn’t this someone who keeps farmer’s hours just to get up and play with imaginary friends? What did you expect?
