Last winter, Nobel laureate Toni Morrison
received a phone call from Sen. Barack Obama, then the underdog to
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in the race for the Democratic
presidential nomination.
Obama had contacted Morrison to ask for her support. But before
they got into politics, the author and the candidate had a little
chat about literature.
"He began to talk to me about one of the books I had written,
'Song of Solomon,' and how it had meant a lot to him," Morrison
said in a postelection interview from her office at Princeton
University, where for years she has taught creative writing.
"And I had read his first book ('Dreams From My Father'). I was
astonished by his ability to write, to think, to reflect, to learn
and turn a good phrase. I was very impressed. This was not a normal
political biography."
For Morrison and others, the election of Obama matters not
because he will be the first black president or because the vast
majority of writers usually vote for Democrats. Writers welcome Obama as a peer, a thinker, a man of words - his own words.
"When I was watching Obama's acceptance speech (Tuesday night),
I was convinced that he had written it himself, and therefore that
he was saying things that he actually believed and had considered,"
says Jane Smiley, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning "A Thousand
Acres" and other fiction.
"I find that more convincing in a politician than the usual
thing of speaking the words of a raft of hack speechwriters. If he
were to lie to us, he would really be betraying his deepest self."
"Until now, my identity as a writer has never overlapped with my
identity as an American - in the past eight years, my writing has
often felt like an antidote or correction to my Americanism," says
Jonathan Safran Foer, author of the acclaimed novel "Everything is
Illuminated."
"But finally having a writer-president - and I don't mean a
published author, but someone who knows the full value of the
carefully chosen word - I suddenly feel, for the first time, not
only like a writer who happens to be American, but an American
writer."
"Dreams From My Father" and Obama's "The Audacity of Hope"
have each sold millions of copies and have been praised as the rare
works by politicians that can actually be read for pleasure. Obama's student poetry was even lauded - and compared to the work of
Langston Hughes - by the most discerning of critics, Harold Bloom.
Morrison, whose novel "A Mercy" comes out next week, endorsed
Obama in January, even though she was a friend and admirer of
Hillary Rodham Clinton and had famously labeled Bill Clinton the
country's first black president. As if reviewing a new book,
Morrison released a statement citing Obama's "intelligence,
integrity and rare authenticity," and his "creative imagination
which coupled with brilliance equals wisdom."
Morrison finds herself wondering how some of her late friends
would have reacted, like James Baldwin ("How I miss him now," she
says), who in the 1960s had scorned as condescending Robert
Kennedy's prediction that the United States would have a black
president in 40 years. Were "Invisible Man" author Ralph Ellison
still alive, he would have renamed his classic novel "Visible
Man," Morrison joked.
Ayelet Waldman, whose novels include "Daughter's Keeper," is an
Obama fan dating back to when both attended Harvard University. Her
husband, novelist Michael Chabon, came to support him through "his
writing, the quality of his prose," Waldman says. They in turn
persuaded author and former Hillary Clinton supporter Rick Moody.
Moody, whose novels include "The Ice Storm" and "The Diviners," said he began to think of Obama as a writer with the
skill to chose the right word when he heard one of the candidate's
speeches.
"But," he added, "I think the larger issue is cultural.
There's a trickle down from the top in the way art exists inside and
outside of the culture as a whole. Here in the USA, you could feel
in the Bush years how little regard there was for it. ... There's
reason to believe that we are in for a much better period."
