Toni at Random begins as most good stories do: in the middle. It’s April 24th, 1976. Toni Morrison is speaking on a panel at the Second National Conference of Afro-American Writers. Yet this is not Toni Morrison, the celebrated author of The Bluest Eye and Sula, just a year away from Song of Solomon and subsequent stardom. This is Toni Morrison: senior editor at Random House, shepherd to works by Black authors like Toni Cade Bambara, Gayle Jones, Angela Davis, and even Muhammad Ali. Always a fastidious esthete, Morrison the Editor manages writers with the same sharp tools she applies to her own fiction: an eager pen and a singular mind.
Dana A Williams introduces her titular Toni at Random in a crowded Howard University conference room (alma mater to both Williams and Morrison). Through Williams’ interpretation, here Morrison deploys a persona distinct from that of the writer. As an editor Morrison dispenses with “the coy warmth she worked so hard to exude as a writer.” In its place she wears “a certain solemnity” further shored up by her pantsuit and jacket, the costume of her editorial self, out of sync with the temperature in the stuffy conference room. “Even the offhanded way she chew[s] her gum, no doubt a smoker’s habit,” Williams speculates, affects an “element of performance.” Morrison, who in her youth had considered a career in dance and later in theatre (and who Robert Gottlieb, her own editor, dubiously described as having a reputation as a “diva” in his own memoir), appears in opposition to the title’s punning “at random”; instead, Williams reveals a controlled performance of public selfhood at odds with the generic expectations of biography, a market reliant upon bare-it-all exposition and unchecked intimacy.
The opening chapter is unlike any other in the book: it’s one of the few scenes of Morrison in public; it’s one of the few chapters shaped by a single event rather than the long process of pre-internet editorial work; and it’s essentially the only chapter with dialogue, since most of Toni’s voice comes from letters and inter-office memos. Williams quotes these archival documents at length, thereby disclosing a punchy and exacting editorial style, particularly in title selection. Morrison suggested that Bambara revise her story’s title from “Am I Spoiling Ya?” to “The Apprentice”; she supported Leon Forrest’s decision to change The Light of the Boy Is of the Eye (“too obtuse,” in his thinking) to Two Wings to Veil My Face; Lucille Clifton’s “And I Am Not Done Yet” came after Morrison rejected the original title “I Am a Black Woman” on the grounds that “There must be 800 of these.” And most evocative is Williams’ own ad hoc editorial experience: Morrison saw Williams’ proposed title The House that Toni Built at Random and raised her Toni at Random.
Though ostensibly about the un-splashy work of an editor, the angle of the book—Morrison’s day job from 1965 to 1983—promises some proximity to the totemic author. And the cover, a close-up photo of Morrison with pencil in hand, suggests the same. It’s almost a publicity decision that Morrison herself would make: her face, which takes up most of the cover, reflects her own view that “The purpose of the jacket is to make people pick it up, fondle it and hopefully open the book.” (This ethos derives from a dispute over artist Barbara Chase-Riboud’s resistance to her portrait being the cover of her first poetry collection. Morrison ignored Chase-Riboud’s accusation that the cover selection evinced the editor’s imprisonment within “the mentality of white publishing.” And Morrison responded, “I don’t understand you. Why did you send us 36 pictures if we weren’t supposed to use them…?” And that with jacket covers, “No author tells me what to do in that area”). The cover certainly achieves Morrison’s desired effect; it encourages the prospective reader to open the book, to go “behind the curtain” as it were, to get insight into the market decisions guiding the hand that, at that very moment, flips to a random page.
But achieving this desired intimacy is not without difficulty since Morrison remained somewhat evasive as a public figure. She wasn’t cold, nor was she private per se—interviews are full of fables from her childhood and stories of her famous carrot cake—but she maintained a public persona at once warm and removed, a celebrity without over-familiarity. Morrison was reticent to reveal the Chloe Ardelia Woffard hidden behind the outsized Toni, who afforded the former some privacy as the latter received a Pulitzer and Nobel. Morrison says of her pen name in the 2019 documentary Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am that “It’s a way of dividing your life. One of those names is the person who is out there. And the other one is the one who isn’t, who doesn’t do documentaries”—that is, Chloe from Lorain, Ohio. That Toni at Random can’t fully account for the lively author seems to result from Morrison’s ethos of a divided life: that to be successful as author, senior editor, single mother, and “head of household,” she had to silo each role to reserve something for herself, a private self to which Toni does not gain—or perhaps even desires to have—access.
Toni at Random is thorough—Williams spent a decade writing it, drawing from the author’s Princeton-held archives. And it is perceptive—among others, Williams interviewed Angela Davis and Morrison herself. But it isn’t as penetrating as other literary (quasi) biographies (Sempre Susan comes to mind). Williams upholds Morrison’s maxim that “You make a distinction between the two crafts” of writing and editing to such a degree that Morrison’s life as an author bears little impact on her life as an editor. When a novel like Sula, for instance, does come up, it is only to note how the “clout she achieved as a novelist could only accrue to her benefit as an editor,” particularly in promoting lesser-known writers. Or take the chapter structure, which divides the book based on the author with whom Morrison worked rather than chronological order. The organizational logic centres the labour of editing, thereby backgrounding the biographical. For the chapters on Toni Cade Bambara and Davis, both of whom Morrison counted as friends (Davis even lived with her while drafting An Autobiography), the focused structure furnishes an account of a decades-long editorial and personal relationship, showing Morrison to be a dedicated editor who trusted and defended the integrity of her authors.
But Williams’ strategy also produces a disjuncture when the personal intrudes into the editorial. In the chapter on Henry Dumas, she recounts Morrison’s (contested) posthumous discovery of the writer and the publication apparatus required to procure his works. Upon receiving Dumas’ manuscript for Jonoah and the Green Stone, Morrison swiftly read and edited the novel since she wanted it “to be released as quickly as possible to build on what little momentum they had” from his recently published poetry and story collections. But Williams notes that they faced several delays: “she did not correspond with Redmond about it until early fall. Her schedule for the book’s preproduction work was disrupted even more when her father became ill and died unexpectedly.” Williams subordinates the personal loss to the editorial work, thereby relegating the death to just one of many unavoidable scheduling conflicts. There is no indication of how Morrison felt; the death doesn’t even get its own paragraph. Sandwiched between a production schedule and a note on chapter sequence we find the possibility of affect, of access to the person as such, but the book elides this potential revelation. “She was out of the office for a little over a month,” writes Williams, “but continued to work on the book intently.” And that’s the extent of it.
Partly this elision results because, even though marketed as a biography, Toni at Random is, I think, a cultural history of mid-century Black publishing focalized through one central figure. Toni elucidates an entire ecosystem of writers and workers involved in the Black artistic scene, within which Morrison was only a single—if now outsized—figure. When we might expect biographical editorializing, Williams instead turns her attention to the names eclipsed by their association with a giant such as Morrison. Thus, the biographical subject works in service of a broader historical moment, a contradictory period in publishing that saw both the energy of the late-Civil Rights era and the beginning of Reaganomics.
Though we might be inclined to think that the corporatization characteristic of the 70s and 80s meant that Morrison was stymied by the demands of the marketing department, her tenure as editor tracks with shifting economic, cultural, and political forces that afforded a degree of editorial autonomy unlikely today. At the time Random House ensured a kind of independence incongruent with the modest financial success of her booklist. When pitching her authors to the higher-ups Morrison relied on the fact that they weren’t much of a financial risk because they didn’t have big advances. Meanwhile publishers were looking to capitalize on the energy of the Civil Rights and Black Arts movements and especially the emergence of Black Studies programs, which provided an institutional market for books about Black life. Extractive, perhaps, but revolutionary nonetheless since the Black reading public was, until this point, viewed by white publishing houses as an unimportant, even mythical, market. Though while others discussed creating a Black reading public, Morrison staunchly defended its pre-existence.
The much-discussed Black Book, a “scrapbook history” of Black American life— probably the most notable publication of Morrison’s editorial career and inarguably the most aesthetically radical—, reflects the unique conditions of the industry as much as the editorial interests of its editor. Morrison could push through a book about Black life and history, formally more of a collage than a narrative, to great success because the economic, political, and commercial stars aligned. But these conditions did not last. By the early ‘80s Mel Watkins reported “hard times” for Black authors as the number of Black senior editors halved. Soon after Morrison left Random House to write full-time.
As with The Black Book, I read an ethical imperative in Toni’s collectivist impulse. Whether or not a marketing department had anything to do with the book’s focus on a celebrity editor or, as Williams recounts in her acknowledgements (which are engrossing and more of a coda than anything), a dream dissertation project she first proposed in 1997 (her advisor gave an emphatic “no, not yet”), the product is the same: less a biography than an ethnography, less a portrait than a mural. The Morrison that emerges in Williams’ work runs contra to the marketable biographical self, if a self emerges at all. And as such, Toni refashions some of the individualist precepts of the genre to craft a collective narrative of the mid to late century Black publishing community. If autobiography is defacement (following de Man) then Williams posits that biography is a simultaneous re-facement (literally so, considering the cover) and effacement (rhetorically so).
Yes, at times Toni at Random does fall into the trap set for all editors’ memoirs, what Gottlieb prefaces in his own: that they basically all end up being versions of the same thing: “So I said to him, ‘Leo! Don’t just do war! Do peace too!’” But even so, given that Morrison saw her booklist as a way to concretize the history and continuity of Black life and culture, “Do peace too!”-type corrections bear an ethical weight.
By mobilizing iconicity, the book uncovers the incessant labour required to prime an unknown writer for public consumption. Morrison’s memos attest to the effort involved in producing a marketable subject, like in the self-styled The Greatest, aka Muhammad Ali. Williams describes a protracted project fraught with delays, but which Morrison’s editorship gave some credibility in terms of craft—even though she “admitted to being bored by sports and always a bit puzzled if not annoyed by the roar of the crowd.” Sports and crowds do seem anathema to Morrison’s way of being, given that she always awoke before dawn, worked before breakfast, and wasn’t a partier.And likewise, the lack of intimacy parallels Morrison’s own editorial aesthetic. She was, after all, the editor of Davis’s anti-autobiography. So it isn’t surprising that Morrison seemingly follows her own rules, since for Williams “her potential for self-fashioning was always present, patiently waiting to be unearthed.” Even when drawing from her own life, Morrison’s fiction never ran amok in the auto-fictional. As an educator Morrison told her students to make things up, to actually invest in fiction qua fiction. She recalls telling them, “I don’t want to know anything about your little life” (which is, I think, advice more contemporary fiction writers should take). But more importantly, we can take this as a facetious repudiation of the hyper-individualism underpinning the biographical subject. Morrison’s fiction found the universal in the particular—so does Toni at Random.
Adrianna Michell
Adrianna Michell is a critic and PhD candidate based in Toronto. She is a founding editor ofToronto Review.