Man of Letters
Going to the Territory.
by Ralph Ellison.
Random House. 338 pp. $19.95.
In 1965, the book-review supplement of the old New York Herald Tribune asked two hundred critics to pick the best American novels published since World War II. The resulting list of the “top twenty” was quite solid, as such lists go, and if it were to be revised today to take account of the novels published since then, it would, sad to say, require little revision. The first choice of the critics was Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, which was published in 1952, and the book still stands as probably the best American novel to be published since—well, pick your favorite Faulkner.
Among Ellison’s many accomplishments in that book was to demolish the Chinese Wall which critics like Philip Rahv had erected between the two main tendencies in American writing—between, as Rahv phrased it, the “palefaces” and the “redskins.” Ellison’s strategy was impeccably “literary”; he rejected the formulas of the social novelists of the 30’s—given the story he wanted to tell, they must have suggested themselves as models—and took what he needed instead from the likes of Henry James and T.S. Eliot. The techniques of allegory and symbolism he learned from them gave his narrative both a depth and a surface texture which was beyond anything the writers in the naturalist camp were capable of. But at the same time, Ellison gave the impression that he was writing flat-out in good “redskin” fashion; he not only injected his dialogue with the rhythms of jazz and Harlem street talk, but also seemed to draw on an enormous fund of raw, primary experience. It was as though Henry James were improvising riffs with Charlie Parker on the corner of Lenox and 125th Street.
Among the lessons which Ellison’s novel would seem to hold for younger American writers today is that it is possible to explore the subject of alienation without writing about an adolescent off in a corner doing lines of cocaine. It is a lesson that Ellison tells us he first learned from André Malraux. For implicit in his novel is the idea that the identity and fate of an individual are inextricably tied to the public life of the society in which he lives.
Ellison has also told us that as a young writer he deliberately set about making himself familiar with “the major motives of American literature” and in the process discovered books like Moby-Dick and Huckleberry Finn. (And these books were a discovery for a writer starting out in the 30’s. Joyce and Eliot did not become acquainted with Huckleberry Finn until they were past middle age.) Even more, perhaps, than the modernists, Hawthorne, Melville, and Twain helped Ellison to write a novel that, while deeply political in its implications, went far beyond any “protest” novel in its exploration of the social realities of America.
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Ellison is much taken with his own biography, and in his new collection of nonfiction pieces, Going to the Territory, we learn a great deal about how he turned himself into a novelist. Invisible Man is a work of such high order that we do not begrudge the information. But Ellison’s one novel appeared thirty-four years ago, and only a few fragments of the big (or at least very long) novel which he has been writing since then have been allowed to leave the workshop. So far as his public is concerned, then, we may say that Ellison’s main work since Invisible Man has been the crafting of himself as a man of letters.
It has been very careful and measured work, and has produced one of the more dignified, if somewhat mannered, presences on the literary landscape. I do not think Ellison would object to my implication that there is an element of calculation in his public persona, for in the strongest essay in this new book, “An Extravagance of Laughter,” he quotes Yeats on the necessity of fashioning a “second self” if one is to do any work in this world. According to Ellison, Yeats’s demand for a “mask,” for a self-elected identity, applies doubly for an American, and triply for a black American like himself, because he lives in a fluid society in which the social identity of an individual is far more problematic than it is on the other side of the Atlantic.
Like Shadow and Act, which was published in 1964, Going to the Territory brings together some of the speeches, interviews, and articles which have come forth, at wide intervals, from the public Ellison. Like most artists who take it on themselves to instruct outside the medium of their art, Ellison turns out to have a few favorite hobbyhorses which he mounts again and again. To begin with, he has a healthy obsession with the American writer’s role as a continuator, as an improviser on the themes set down not only by past American writers, but also by the men who “conceived” America in documents like the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Ellison understands American democracy much the way he understands literature—as a highly deliberate and self-conscious act. Like Emerson, he sees the writer as an energizer, teaching the possibilities of the individual in an open society. (Here, as elsewhere in these pieces, Ellison is playing the themes of Invisible Man in a different key. Early on in that novel, the nameless hero is told to read Emerson, and the epilogue contains phrases which might have been spun during a walk in the woods around Concord.)
Ellison, of course, is not the only postwar writer to have taken the American classics to heart and set up shop as a public “witness” to the democratic experience. There has been Robert Lowell, for example. When Lowell read his poem, “For the Union Dead,” to a cheering crowd of thousands in the Boston Public Garden, he went about as far as a writer can go along these lines. But Lowell’s most famous public act was his refusal to accept Lyndon Johnson’s invitation to the White House Festival of the Arts in 1965 because of his disagreement with Johnson’s policies in Vietnam. Ellison accepted the invitation, and in a subsequent interview he took Lowell to task for mixing art and politics. And here we come to another major theme which connects many of the pieces in this new book with one another and with Invisible Man. Ellison does not care for partisan politics, and he thinks that an artist contributes far more to the commonwealth by sticking to his work than by going public with an agenda.
Ellison’s distaste for political activism, which seems to date from his involvement with the Communist party as a young man, caused him to be subjected to a fair amount of abuse during the salad days of the New Left. In the same year that Lowell and Norman Mailer marched on the Pentagon, Ellison tweaked the nose of the New York literary establishment by quoting in Harper’s, with approval, a speech of Lyndon Johnson to the effect that art is not a political weapon. Like Saul Bellow (who is far more prickly on the subject), Ellison is impatient with those who would force him into the reductive certainties of a “position,” and, again like Bellow, much of what he has put into print during the last few decades would seem to be an exasperated response to the sectarian clamor around him.
It would be a mistake, however, to say that Ellison rejects the use of political pressure to achieve ends like racial equality. But for him, that goal is promoted far more effectively by powerful non-political forces which are at work in this country. America’s vernacular culture, he points out, is a potent leveler. It is the great solvent of social disparities, constantly eating away at traditional barriers of class and race. And in relation to the cultural whole, he writes, “we are all minorities,” anyway. The implication of Ellison’s argument—that Stevie Wonder and Bill Cosby are the cutting edge leading to a successful multiracial society—is not likely to sit well with those who are still intrigued by various forms of social engineering; but Ellison is supremely confident that our pluralistic culture will always manage to “outflank” politics.
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Ellison’s sheer relish of American vernacular culture expresses itself in just about every piece in this book. He is really most at home writing about jazz and folk humor. He points out that from the beginning our general culture has been strongly influenced by blacks—Ellison prefers the term “Negro American”—and that even in the South before the Civil War, blacks and whites shared in a cultural relationship which was nothing less than organic. Black artists, he says, should not subscribe to “the myth of the Negro American’s total alienation from the larger American culture—a culture he helped create in the areas of music and literature. . . .” Cold comfort, perhaps, to a black musician who finds himself on the less remunerative side of the so-called “crossover” line, where records do not go triple platinum, but Ellison is making the valid point, which again will not sit well with those who have not yet graduated from the 60’s, that a minority artist unnecessarily handicaps himself if he surrenders to “sociological notions of racial separatism.”
The pieces in this book deal with a variety of subjects, but many of them, even when they have titles like “Remembering Richard Wright” and “Homage to Duke Ellington on His Birthday,” are heavily autobiographical. The writing varies in quality. Ellison is crisp and engaging when he addresses a concrete topic—his own past, for example, or jazz—but he tends to get windy when dealing with abstractions like culture and democracy. His generalities have a way of drowning in a sea of five-dollar words. (“So perhaps the complex actuality of our cultural pluralism is perplexing because the diverse interacting elements. . .,” and so on.) But one thing Ellison never loses is his humor. It is constantly brought forth by his contemplation of the American scene. James Joyce complained that not one of the critics of Ulysees saw that the book was “damn funny,” and Ellison in effect makes the same point to critics of America. For all its problems and incongruities, the country is blessed with a vernacular culture which produces “an extravagance of laughter,” and in that laughter, Ellison tells us, much that is painful can be transcended.
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