BACK LIST
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JUS BLED '
I The Sorcerer's Apprentice (‘harlcs Johnson Serpent's Tail £5.95) A magical collection of ‘Tales and (‘onjurations' drawing mainly on urban poverty and deprivation. plying insistently its theme of the dreams and aspirations ofblack people. Streetwise and racy. in the mean and meaty manner of (‘hesterllimes
I The Penguin Book at Modern British Short Stories Edited by Malcolm Bradbury (Penguin £4.95) (‘ould be rc-titled ‘The E'tst Anglian Book of. . ‘given thclid boy's tendency to favour survivors ofhis Creative Writing course ( lshiguro. Tremain. Mchan. himselfand fellow tutor. Angela Carter) and those with a Flatland connection (Graham Swift. David Lodge and Angus Wilson l. But nepotism does not — de facto — a bad anthology make and while the Scottish input is lower than one would like. and the Irish lower than one would expect. there's the surprise inclusion of the Poet Laureate and strong stories from Salman Rushdie. Alan Sillitoe and that prose lapidarist. Jean Rhys.
I Talking Heads Alan Bennett ( BBC £4.95) Six small screen monologues for different voices by the David Hockney of drama; stylish. wickedly witty. satirically spot-on.
I White Palace Glenn Savan (Bantam £4.95) Twenty seven year old adman widower Max meets forty two year old Dogtown waitress with a taste for sex. smokes and Smirnoff; the stuffofthe classifieds. A murky good read with a hot line in backchat.
I Foe IM. Coetzee (Penguin £3.50) A la Recherche de Robinson Crusoe told by one Daniel Foe. amanuensis to Susan Barton who claims to have been shipwrecked with Crusoe and lived on the desert island with him and his black slave. Friday. An apartheid allegory. transluscent as myth.
I Filthy Lucre Beryl Bainbridge (Flamingo £3.50) BB. curtseysto Dickens and RIS in a melodramatic. cautionary tale set in Victorian times. Wrote when its author was 13.
I The Collected ertlngs ol Ambrose Blerce (Picador £6.95) Few writers have made such a virtue of misanthrope as Bierce who in 1913 disappeared into the Mexican wilderness never to be seen again. It is salutary to think that if he was still alive he would be 145. Here are more than 800 pages of his voluminous works; stories. journalism and cynical offcuts. Only a fool would read them all. Serendips should first try his ‘Devil's Dictionary". a lexicon of bad humour and outrageous insight.
I A Postllllon Struck by Lightning Dirk Bogarde (Penguin £2.95) First ofa four part autobiography which takes the shy thespian through an idyllic English childhood to less halcyon days in Bishopbriggs where he stayed with relatives while attending Glasgow Tech. The best that can be said ofhis experiences there are that they drove him to the cinema. When last seen he isin Hollywood. signing up for King Vidor under false pretences. Let reel two roll. I She Knew She Was Right Ivy Litvinov (Virago £4.50) The title is not the only Trollopian echo in this varied collection of stories which its author published in 1971 when she was 80.
I Bullion Brink's Mat: The Story of Britaln's Biggest Gold Robbery Andrew Hogg. Jim McDougall and Robin Morgan (Penguin £3.50) Say no more.
I Another Marvellous Thing Laurie (‘olwin (Methuen £3.50) Love at first sight at a publisher's party between a husband and wife not married to one another. Smartypants prose. insidiously effective
Lind moving.
Alan Taylor meets Toni Morrison.
In the beginning was. . . Maya. Maya‘.’ Maya Angelou. hoofer. hooker. chanteuse. Black activist. all things to black women. big. bold. brassy and singin‘ and swingin' and openin‘ doors so caged birds could fly free and sing. It was Maya. says Toni Morrison. who was the first of the black writers to be really successful. at least ‘in terms of money and national attention .' Not Baldwin'." ‘Oh. well. that‘s another generation. I'm talkingabout my generation. The Seventies. Baldwin published in the Fifties.‘ But didn‘t he pave the way"? Would other black writers have broken through when they did. if he had not'." ‘I guess he would have thought be paved the way. He would have wanted it. But the publishing industry doesn't work that way. It tends to select one writer every five or six years to represent the race.‘
Toni Morrison has a voice like Gaelic coffee. creamy and strong. and a laugh that would raise high the roofbeams if there were such things in modern hotels where the mu7ak excretes like computer tape and builds what Phil Spector would not call a wall ofsound. She is one of a triumvirate of black spokeswomen » the aforementioned Ms Angelou and Alice Walker are the others ~ whos- writing has heightened consciousness of a section of society until lately as near as damnit ignored by the reading public and those who say what is and isn't good for us: publishers. Now even publishers are cottoning on and we can at last buy novels by black women like Zora Neale Hurston. Paule Marshall. Dorothy West. Ann Petry. Vivian Glover and others.
When Toni Morrison was in publishing her ‘real joy was in trying to acquire the books I wanted to do And so many of them were books by white people and some ofthem were books by black people. But I thought. that black fiction writers in particular
l
weren't going to be with agents. they weren’t going to be the books that would immediately surface as I wanted. So I would have to scent those out harder. It took longer. it took more time.‘
Eventually she found about twenty as well as editing the autobiography of Muhammed Ali (‘I liked very much the man who had written that book with him‘). Angela Davis - the black activist - and The Black Book. an influential and popular collection ofclippings. faded family photographs. slave quilts. dream books and other memorabilia.
But about three years ago Toni
' Morrison finally quit publishing ‘to
make a genuine commitment to writing and take the knocks'. Since then she has published Beloved. her
' fifth novel. confirming her status as
' one ofAmeriea‘s most important
2 and potent fictional voices. It is a
remarkable book from a writer who aims to create something ‘beautiful. and powerful. but it also should -ork. . . To make the story appear =ral. meandering. effortless. spoken — to have the reader feel the narrator without identifying that narrator. . . and to have the reader work with the author in the construction of the book -« is what's important. What is left out is as important as what is there. To describe sexual scenes in such a way that they are not clinical. not even explicit — so that the reader brings his own sexuality to the scene and thereby participates in it in a very personal way. And owns it.‘ Her aim is to achieve a jazz-like quality in her writing so that it's apparently spontaneous. ‘unthought out. unintellectual'. which when all goes well should not reveal the backbreaking work that has gone into it. This she realises is ‘a double-edged sword because ifa
. black person does something
extremely well white people say.
i ‘Well.it‘snatural.orit’s magic.‘
' Something ridiculouslikethat.
A Because black people are interested in making it look as though no
; thought went into it. And the jazz
musician's the classic person. I mean the hours and hours and hours of work so that you can be so imbued with it so you can actually stand on stage and make it up.‘
So Beloved winds back and forth telling the story ofSethe. a slave woman haunted by the ghost of her baby daughter whose throat she cut to prevent her being taken from her by slavers. Sethe lives alone with her only surviving daughter. Denver. until Paul D. arrives on her doorstep. to be joined by Beloved.
the dead daughter. whose name Sethe had carved on a tombstone by opening her knees ‘wide as the grave‘. Perhaps foranother ten E minutes‘ favour. she reflects. she might have got ‘Dearly' too. It‘s a l heart-breaking story told with few concessions. obliquely. brutally and utterly natural. in rhythmic. sensual prose redolent ofthe King James \'1 3 Version. Her style has been likened to William Faulkner. Nabokov and , Joseph Heller but she fights shy of { acknowledging influences because she wants to make ‘the process of reading brand new - I am sorry to sound so arrogant. Brand new. So that any way you read before is not goingto help you.‘
What she does is rewrite the history ofslavery though it was not something she wanted to write about. ‘I thought it was
2 unimaginable and I didn‘t want to imagine it. And I didn‘t want to think
about it. It‘s too big. 'I‘oo awful. I wrote the first book I wrote (The Bluest Eye) to see what it felt like.
That‘s why I wrote because I didn't
understand that feeling. It hurts. you know. But it‘s got to be done. It can‘t be too much for art. It can‘t remain too hard. Ifit can‘t be handled that
waythenthey've won.they've made I,
the whole thing unimaginable. But if you can‘t imagine it then it's bigger than you.‘
Beloved by Toni .v'llorrr'son is published by ('lmtto & Wlndus priced l £11.95.
IIIIIIIIIIII: I I I I I I I I I I I I - CK N o H -, I I i . I I I .E I I I I I I Q I I i I . f I I I I I I g I I I I I i I I I THIS ILLUSTRATED BOOK - Y I PRODUCED ‘ l I IN COLLABORATION WITH I GLASGOW SCHOOL OF ART. I IS THE FIRST TO GIVE . . A GENERAL VIEW OF . ; THIS SIHGUIAR MAI‘I 8r i ' HIS FUTURISTIC Vision I I I I . . £5.95 . 5
RICHARD DREW Punilsniao I. I
g._. .00.”. . . .fl. . . . .j
Th0 List Iii-~31 March Iiis‘s‘ 55