The Source of Self-Regard - Toni Morrison Page 0,56

logical.

Someone saw the last sentence of Beloved as it was originally written. In fact it was the penultimate sentence if one thinks of the last word—the resurrection of the title, the character, and the epigraph—as the very last sentence. In any case the phrase “Certainly no clamor for a kiss,” which appears in the printed book, is not the one with which I had originally closed the book, and this friend was startled by the change. I told him that my editor had suggested an alteration at that point, although he in no way offered a description of what the change might be. The friend railed at my editor for the audacity of suggesting a change, and at me, too, for considering, let alone admitting one. I then went to some pains to explain to him why I made the change but became entangled in what the original phrase had meant, or, rather, what the original last word of the phrase had meant to me. How long it took to arrive at it, how I thought it was the perfect final word; that it connected everything together from the epigraph and the difficult plot to the struggles of the characters through the process of re-membering the body and its parts, re-membering the family, the neighborhood…and our national history. And that this last word reflected this re-membering, revealed its necessity, and provided the bridge I wanted from the beginning of the book to its end, as well as to the beginning of the book that was to follow. As I went on with the importance of this original last word, my friend became angrier and angrier. Nevertheless, I said, I thought there was something to be considered in the editor’s objection—which was simply that, not a command. He wondered if a better word could be found to end the book because the one I had chosen was too dramatic, too theatrical. At first I disagreed with the editor about that. It was a very simple common word, but in the context of the previous sentences he believed it stood out like a sore thumb. That may even have been his phrase.

So I resisted it for a long time. A long time considering that we were in galley. Or rather late stages of manuscript, I guess. At any rate, I went away and thought about it. Thought about it every day in terms of whether to leave it the way I had originally written it or whether to change it. I decided, finally, to let the decision rest on whether I could indeed find a better word. One that produced the same meaning.

I didn’t find any satisfactory replacement for weeks. And I was eager to find something because the point that gripped me was that even if the word I had chosen originally was the absolute right one, something was wrong if it stood out that way and did not complete the meaning of the text, but dislodged it. So it wasn’t a question of simply substituting one word for another that meant the same thing—a synonym—or of trying to decide whether my original word was apt. I might have to rewrite a good deal in order to assure myself that my original last word worked.

I decided that it didn’t. I decided that there was another word that could do the same thing with less mystification. That word was “kiss.”

Well, the discussion with my friend made me realize that I’m still unhappy about it, because “kiss” works at a level a bit too shallow. “Kiss” works at a level that searches for and locates a quality or element of the novel that was not, and is not, its primary feature. The primary feature is not love, or the fulfillment of physical desire. The feature was necessity, something that precedes love, follows love, informs love, shapes love, and to which love is subservient. In this case the necessity was for a kind of connection, an acknowledgment, a paying out of homage still due.

I was inclined to believe that there were poorly lit passages leading up to that original word if indeed it was so very misunderstood and so strongly and wrongly unsettling. I have been reading some analyses of revisions of texts out of and thinking about the ways in which books get not only reread but also rewritten not only in one’s own language with the ambivalence of the writer and the back-and-forth between editor and writer, but also