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Ralph Ellison: A Tribe of his Own (Matthew Price - Bookforum)
March 24, 2007 11:20 PM
Copyright Bookforum
In early April 1968, Ralph Ellison took part in a literary festival hosted by the University of Notre Dame, where he joined the likes of Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, and William F. Buckley Jr. on the program. When he took the stage on the evening of the sixth to deliver his remarks, the moment could not have been more charged. The nation was in crisis: Two days earlier, Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated; across the country, cities had exploded in scenes that seemed uncannily to mirror the apocalyptic final sections of Invisible Man, still one of the handful of truly indispensable American novels. But there would be no resounding statement or mournful eulogy; instead, Ellison talked about the function of the novel in American democracy.
It was a signature Ellisonian gesture, perhaps too modest for the hour, but forceful in its way. Fifteen years before, he had put his invisible man down a hole in an attempt, he said in his 1953 National Book Award speech, “to return to the mood of personal moral responsibility for democracy which typified the best of our nineteenth-century fiction.” Throughout the ’60s and ’70s, as intellectuals and writers clenched their fists and took to the barricades, Ellison appealed hopefully to America’s literary past as a way to transcend the country’s racial fractures and ferocious contests of identity.
His stubborn faith in that tradition was breathtaking. Some were baffled by what they saw as his scholarly aloofness; others were outraged. (During his life, he was accused of all kinds of things: of not writing protest fiction à la Richard Wright, of being too cozy with whites, of spurning the civil rights movement.) But to Ellison, being engaged did not mean marching in the streets. Operating in the higher frequencies of culture, Ellison, in scores of essays and talks, commemorated the synthetic genius of the American vernacular style and the moral vision of a cherished group of writers—Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Stephen Crane—who both nourished his growth as an artist and provided the seeds for democratic renewal. Whatever America’s social and political strain, the work of Ellison’s literary heroes pointed beyond the impasse. “These writers,” he said, “suggested possibilities, courses of action, stances against chaos.”
As essayist, cultural theorist, and novelist, Ellison would return again and again to these concerns. And the trajectory of his life—his Oklahoma boyhood, his passage to the Deep South as a student at the Tuskegee Institute and then northward to Harlem during the ’30s, his toil on his masterpiece, his literary celebrity and legendary failure to complete a second novel—is itself a remarkable, contradictory study in courses of action and possibilities, many realized, others unfulfilled.
Given that Ellison published only one novel in his lifetime, the amount of material confronting his would-be biographer is enormous. One could write a book on just the particulars of the years leading up to Invisible Man, when the young writer was a disciple of Richard Wright and active in Harlem’s communist literary circles, as Lawrence Jackson did in Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius (2002), an intellectually rigorous first attempt at an Ellison biography. Still, that approach has a way of letting the triumph of Invisible Man blot out other achievements. Ellison died in 1994, and he published many of his greatest essays in the decades after his literary debut, all the while trying to harness the unruly pages of his second novel. With Arnold Rampersad’s Ralph Ellison: A Biography, Ellison now has a life in full, though perhaps not the one he deserves.
Rampersad, a respected scholar of black literature and the author of a definitive, two-volume biography of Langston Hughes, casts Ellison in a tragic light, as a man, unmoored by personal instability, whose hard-won literary integration came at the expense of his aesthetic vision and whose prickly views on other black political and cultural figures cost him dearly. “That critical instinct,” writes Rampersad of Ellison’s fierce intellectual bravado, “freed him to ascend, without inhibition, the heights of the Euro-American artistic and intellectual tradition (but it may well have been a decisive factor in his eventual decline as an artist, because it took a toll on his imagination and morale.)”
Ralph Waldo Ellison could be downright arrogant, but, as he saw it, his choice of inheritance was never an either/or proposition. Hybridity was his natural inclination, his birthright. Growing up in Oklahoma City, where he was born in 1913, sharply honed his creative outlook. Though his father died when he was three and his mother toiled as a domestic worker, Ellison looked back fondly on his years in Oklahoma—”the Territory,” as he called it, in homage to Twain and to the region’s freewheeling mixture of black, Indian, and white idioms. Segregation was a reality, and Tulsa saw some of this country’s worst antiblack violence, but Jim Crow had not set hard. (For descendants of freed slaves, Oklahoma was a “territory of hope,” Ellison wrote.) A trumpeter in his high school band, Ellison came at writing through music—this would form a central connection in his aesthetic. As a young man, he bopped around Oklahoma City’s thriving blues and jazz scenes and soaked up black church music, tutoring himself in a free-for-all of conflicting styles.
Against Ellison’s almost nostalgic regard for this time, Rampersad stresses his angry vulnerability and poverty, which would prick at him when he attended Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute on a music scholarship. Ellison chafed at the school’s provincialism and battled with his teachers, but his transformation from musician to writer had begun. A librarian became a mentor. Steeped in black musical and literary traditions, Ellison pointed out again and again in his writings that Twain, Dostoyevsky, Faulkner, Malraux, Hemingway, and T. S. Eliot were no less decisive in his formation. Like the narrator of Invisible Man, Ellison was a specialist in perception; he had a gift for seeing around corners. He wanted the hidden connections between styles revealed. For Ellison, there was only a short distance between jazz and “The Waste Land.”
A search for a summer job led the chronically hard-up Ellison to Harlem in 1936—he would not return to Tuskegee—and into the hubbub of big-city life. There, Ellison met Wright (an encounter brokered by Langston Hughes), who would prove a major influence. Wright, who headed up the Daily Worker’s Harlem bureau, encouraged Ellison to review books, steered him to the ferment of left-wing politics and black cultural nationalism, and got him a gig with the New York City Federal Writing Project researching black life. Drawn into the orbit of the Communist Party, Ellison became, at least outwardly, a rather doctrinaire Stalinist and began contributing to the communist weekly the New Masses, where he published some of his first efforts in criticism and social commentary.
Later, Ellison’s feelings toward Wright would be marked by an ambivalent respect, but Wright’s impact on him was profound. In Wright, he found a kinsman. “Hating racism, both men were also haunted by what would soon be called a sense of existential chaos in life,” notes Rampersad. “Both were hungry for fame, in love with art and ideas, and adoring of Western learned culture. Both Wright and Ellison admired and yet had also grown more and more critical of black culture. They had become especially disdainful of its political and religious leaders.”
More than 1940’s Native Son, which Ellison praised, the publication of Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices in 1941 hit him with the force of dynamite. A documentary hymn to black America, it unleashed a torrent of powerful emotion in Ellison. To Wright in the year of its release, he confessed bitterness and rage in a letter of searing frankness: “I know those emotions … which tear the insides to be free and memories which must be kept underground, caged by rigid discipline lest they destroy, but which yet are precious to me because they are mine and I am proud of that which is myself.”
It’s an extraordinary statement, dipping low, rising into a Whitmanesque crescendo, bursting with many of the themes Ellison would pour into his essays and fiction. (It’s almost a prophecy of Invisible Man.) Discipline was a key concept for Ellison, referring both to the techniques imposed by the artist, who must master and shape his materials, and to the carefully modulated repertoire of attitudes Ellison saw in black life. These different psychological registers—ironic, forbearing, indifferent, mocking, contemptuous—formed a protective bulwark against political and social oppression.
From the mid-’40s onward, charged by Wright’s example, Ellison would spin out considered (if sometimes pedantic) essays on black culture and begin his turn toward Invisible Man. In “Richard Wright’s Blues,” an appraisal of Black Boy, and in other pieces, Ellison elaborated a wide-ranging theory of black life that went beyond racial cheerleading. America’s racial predicament could never be reduced to a simple equation of white oppression = black suffering. For the pragmatic Ellison, it was important to acknowledge the way black people, despite this predicament, had built a fully human culture that most whites either diminished (he jabbed at well-meaning whites who subscribed to the “‘Aren’t-Negroes-Wonderful?’ school of thinking” that reduced blacks to simple, happy primitives) or refused to see at all. “Men have made a way of life in caves and upon cliffs,” he wrote in 1944. “Why cannot Negroes have made a life upon the horns of the white man’s dilemma?” In a whole range of black cultural expression—jazz, blues, Negro spirituals—Ellison located a certain paradoxical freedom “implicit in the Negro situation.” For both him and Wright, the blues, “an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically,” were a way of getting beyond the tempting certainties of communism.
At the same time, he put American culture on the couch. Lamenting the white denial of Negro humanity, Ellison began to develop a powerful countermyth to the narrative of white supremacy. From 1776 to 1876, “there was a conception of democracy current in this country that allowed the writer to identify himself with the Negro,” he wrote, invoking a pantheon of his heroes—Whitman, Twain, Emerson, Thoreau. (For Ellison, Huck’s raft symbolized a lost racial fraternity.) Only after the tawdry betrayal of Reconstruction “was the Negro issue pushed into the underground of the American conscience and ignored.” As a result, America had become a “nation of ethical schizophrenics,” unable to deal with its racial situation, a vital segment of its humanity cut off, anesthetized by a steady drip of “hypnotic ritual and narcotic modes of thinking.” Despite all this, Ellison found—or made up—a homegrown tradition he could identify with. He wanted to find a place in the total American scheme, a project that would become his lifework.
All this feverish speculation spurred Ellison’s growth as a writer of fiction. Indeed, the publication of Invisible Man can be seen as the explosive culmination of a decade’s worth of theorizing and emotional turmoil. Whatever his ideological fervor—his zeal was, in part, a career move—Ellison never fully submitted to the rigid categories of Marxism and black nationalism. Always seeking to make connections between traditions, Ellison imbibed the tricks of modernism. Taken with the aesthetics of surrealism, he made an advance toward fulfilling his vision in “King of the Bingo Game” (1944), probably his best short story. In this harrowing study of bewilderment in the city, a black migrant from the South who chances everything in a bingo parlor sees his luck turn viciously against him. “You’ve written some kind of crazy thing there, man!” Wright told him. Still, for all his admiration of his mentor, Ellison did not want to follow the elder writer’s path in his own attempt at a novel…
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