TONI AT RANDOM: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship, by Dana A. Williams
Among the Merriam-Webster dictionary definitions for “icon” is this: “In Eastern Orthodox Christianity: a representation … used as an object of veneration or a tool for instruction.”
No writer has been churned through the iconography machine more than Toni Morrison, especially since her death in 2019. There are objects galore adorned with her image: Christmas ornaments, refrigerator magnets, T-shirts and on and on. Beyond objects, her words are culled from her lectures and rigorously crafted novels and presented as context-free inspo.
Dana A. Williams’s new biography, “Toni at Random,” does much to lift the writer above this morass. While the book has the words “iconic” and “legendary” in its subtitle, one of its primary virtues is that it treats Morrison as neither. Instead, it basks in her ordinary humanity. With great respect and meticulous research, Williams reveals Morrison as a hard worker, a devoted literary citizen and one of the most important book editors of the 20th century.
While Morrison’s career as a writer could scarcely be more heralded and closely studied, Williams’s book is the first exploration of her nearly 20 years at the publisher Random House, where Morrison worked as a trade editor across various imprints from 1965 until 1983. She started out in Syracuse at the textbook publisher L.W. Singer, which had recently been acquired by Random House. Taking the job was a risk: She was a single mother of two, living at the time in Ohio. “The idea of returning to upstate New York with two young sons and no family to help her raise them was daunting,” Williams writes. But she needed employment, and, as Williams explains, “being paid to work with books all day was undeniably appealing.”
She worked at the publisher for two years before moving to New York to join the editorial team at Random House proper in 1967. There she found not only employment but also fulfillment, and she commenced a mission, one supported by the team at Random: publish books by Black authors about Black life.
“Toni at Random” brings to light Morrison’s process in shaping many of the books that carried out that mission, among them “Angela Davis: An Autobiography” and the anthology “The Black Book.” For her research Williams relied on numerous sources, including reams of workaday communications — interoffice memos as well as Morrison’s correspondence with her writers — housed in the Random House Collection in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University. She shapes this vast trove of materials into an inspiring overview of Morrison’s perspicacity and tenacity as an editor, and also provides a granular view of the daily work of 20th-century book publishing.
Among Morrison’s many fruitful collaborations was her work with Toni Cade Bambara. Through their working relationship, the two became close friends as well as writer and editor. At one point Bambara stayed at Morrison’s home for three days straight to revise her novel “The Salt Eaters.” Morrison describes their interactions thus: Bambara “would go upstairs and work, then she’d run down the stairs and say, ‘What about this?’ Then I would sit down and go over that, then she’d run back up the stairs. … She could focus immediately. I would just have to grunt and point and she knew exactly what I was suggesting.”
The love was there between the two but, when it was needed, so was the iron fist in the velvet glove. “Time’s up,” Morrison wrote to Bambara when the final pages of the novel were overdue. “I need the last three pieces yesterday. Soon you will lose pre-publication energy, excitement and money. Bullets follow along with love.” Now that’s gonna get a manuscript across your desk!
Fans of literary gossip will find much to delight them in this book. A particular highlight is the rocky road to the publication of Barbara Chase-Riboud’s “From Memphis & Peking.” It’s easy and fun to revel in the drama but examples of Morrison’s skill, kindness and determination far outnumber the stern exchanges and contentious working relationships.
Writing exclusively about Morrison’s time as an editor of books by Black authors gives “Toni at Random” a logical and enlightening framework, but it requires eliding a remarkable facet of Morrison’s career: She was working as an editor at the same time she was working with an editor. While she was at Random House, she wrote and published “The Bluest Eye,” “Sula,” “Song of Solomon” and “Tar Baby,” garnering increasing laurels with each novel. While reading, I began to wonder about her experience of working with her editor, Robert Gottlieb. What was it like to be on both sides of the typewriter?
That question isn’t part of Williams’s brief, so it doesn’t detract from her accomplishment that she doesn’t engage with it, but I was so curious that I sought out Gottlieb’s memoir, “Avid Reader.” As he tells it, their literary partnership (which lasted more than 40 years) was ideal: “We were meant for each other. … We read the same way, so that when I make a suggestion she instantly knows why, whether it’s about a sentence or a major structural issue.”
One can imagine that Morrison’s skill as a writer and her skill as an editor worked together in her capacious mind, one feeding the other. Who can say for sure? What we can say is that she knew that every writer needs a good editor and she had the right one, just as she was the right one for so many.
Toni Morrison loved being an editor. She fought for her writers and with them when necessary. She was funny, she was smart, she was acerbic, she was kind. She cajoled, she praised, she made better, she got her hands covered with ink and buried deep in the words. She helped Black voices ring out loud and clear. She was anything but “an object of veneration.” And as Dana A. Williams makes clear in this fine book, that makes her all the more priceless.
TONI AT RANDOM: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship | By Dana A. Williams | Amistad | 355 pp. | $29.99
The post You Know the Novelist. Now Meet Toni Morrison the Editor. appeared first on New York Times.
