What Winston Churchill said of the Battle of Britain—“Never . . . was so much owed by so many to so few”—might with appropriate adaptations easily be applied to the American novelist Ralph Ellison. For surely no author ever owed so much to a single book: so much acclaim, so much honor, so many awards.
The novel in question, of course, is Invisible Man, which came out in 1952 when Ellison was already thirty-eight years old. Except for a few excerpts that had appeared while the book was still a work-in-progress, he had previously published only a number of reviews and a few stories of no particular distinction. But this first novel by an obscure Negro writer (to use the term in common currency in those far-off days) was immediately hailed on all sides as a classic, an imperishable masterpiece, perhaps the greatest American novel of the century. Accordingly, Ellison was elevated overnight into the upper reaches of our culture, and for the remaining 42 years of his life—he died in 1994 at the age of eighty—was treated reverently on the strength of this one book.
Well, not entirely, and not quite by everyone. Even upon its original publication, at least one other Negro novelist, John Oliver Killens, denounced Invisible Man: “The Negro people need Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man like we need a hole in the head or a stab in the back. . . . It is a vicious distortion of Negro life.” Then for a time, especially in the 60’s, black radicals of one stripe or another either ignored or attacked him as, if not exactly an Uncle Tom, then at least an unreliable ally in the struggle they were conducting against white society. Thus, to the poet and playwright Amiri Baraka (who had changed his name from LeRoi Jones upon becoming a fierce black nationalist), Ellison’s sin was to elevate aesthetic over political considerations; to other black cultural separatists, it was his dismissal of the need for, or even the possibility of, a special “black aesthetic” and his belief in the universal “laws of literary form” to which all writers—and by extension artists working in other genres—of whatever racial or ethnic group were bound.
In its own right, as well as in its relation to him as a novelist, this aspect of Ellison’s career has enormous interest and significance. It also lies at the root of the curious—and to him, if not necessarily to the rest of us, tragic—paradox of his life. But before getting into all that, I want to concentrate for the time being on the strictly literary part of his reputation.
On that side of Ellison’s street, it was usually sunny, and hardly any rain ever fell on his parade. Much more typical than the attacks of Killens and Baraka (though echoes of them can sometimes still be heard) was the response of Ellison’s fellow novelist, Saul Bellow: “What a great thing it is when a brilliant individual victory occurs, like Ellison’s, proving that a truly heroic quality can exist among our contemporaries.” It was mainly praise of this high order, and even higher, that came his way, and the few times he was criticized—by me, among others—it was for certain ideas expressed in his essays,1 not for any faults or deficiencies that might have been unearthed in Invisible Man on a second or third reading, let alone a first.
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The literary climate has changed very radically since 1952, to the point where many people have come to suspect the operation of a double standard whenever a black author wins the National Book Award or the Pulitzer or some other literary prize. It therefore seems necessary to state bluntly that the admiration Ellison evoked with Invisible Man emitted not the slightest whiff of critical affirmative action, and would not have done so even if such a concept had existed then (which mercifully it did not).
This is not to imply that Ellison’s race went unnoticed. How could it? The word “novel” means new, and there was a time when the novelist saw it as his job either to bring the news of a world previously unexplored or to find a new way of performing that task on ground that may already have been broken and tilled and ploughed by others before him. In both of these senses—the substantive as well as the technical—Ellison was unmistakably and unabashedly, and proudly, a Negro novelist. As he himself defiantly declared: “Who wills to be a Negro? I do!”
Moreover, the “invisibility” he was making visible referred not only to the identity of his nameless hero. Even more broadly and crucially, it consisted of his effort to show that Negroes were very far from being an undifferentiated mass of suffering victims with no autonomous existence of their own—that they were not, in other words, a people wholly created and determined by forces controlled by the white world. This was how they had been, and still were (and to this day still are), most often portrayed by their own spokesmen, literary as well as political, black as well as white. But as Ellison never grew weary of saying in his essays and interviews, and as Invisible Man was written to “prove” in the way that only art can do, Negroes (even under slavery, let alone lesser forms of oppression) were fully human.
Human: that was the almost embarrassingly naked word he reverted to time and again in this connection. Being human, Negroes had always retained a degree of inner or imaginative freedom that was “limited only by their individual aspiration, insight, energy, and will.” And as such, they had also created a dense and distinctive culture.
In speaking of the culture of the American Negro, Ellison did so first in the anthropological sense:
Being a Negro American . . . has to do with a special perspective on the national ideals and the national conduct, and with a tragicomic attitude toward the universe. It has to do with special emotions evoked by the details of cities and countrysides, with forms of labor and with forms of pleasure; with sex and with love, with food and with drink, with machines and with animals, with garments and dreams and idioms of speech; with manners and customs, with religion and art, with lifestyles and hoping, and with that special sense of predicament and fate which gives direction and resonance to the Freedom Movement.
Clearly with Henry James’s famous observation that it was a “complex fate” to be an American echoing in his head, Ellison went on to apply a version of the same concept to being an American Negro:
It imposes the uneasy burden and occasional joy of a complex double vision, a fluid, ambivalent response to men and events which represents, at its finest, a profoundly civilized adjustment to the cost of being human in this modern world.
But when Ellison discussed culture, he naturally also had in mind the arts—especially the blues, jazz, and (on its own less self-conscious level) folklore—that had developed to give the deepest expression to the American Negro’s special modes of thinking and speaking and being. Such expression was what he had aspired to achieve in Invisible Man, and it remained his ambition throughout his whole life.
However, distinctive as the Negro American culture may have been, Ellison—blasting an unbridgeable gulf between himself and the black nationalists whose rhetoric his own could sometimes misleadingly resemble when the celebratory spirit was upon him—also never tired of repeating that this culture was simultaneously American to the core:
It is not skin color which makes a Negro American but cultural heritage as shaped by the American experience, the social and political predicament; a sharing of that “concord of sensibilities” which the group expresses through historical circumstances and through which it has come to constitute a subdivision of the larger American culture.
To Ellison this was a self-evident truth, although it too was “invisible” to most white people, and many blacks as well.
But most “invisible” of all was the correlatively pervasive interpenetration of the Negro culture and “the larger American culture,” as well as the degree to which they drew from the same sources and had influenced and shaped each other. This is why he loved juxtaposing Louis Armstrong with the St. Louis born-and-bred T.S. Eliot, both of them children of the Mississippi River. Going even further, he always claimed that while he found Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land” hard to understand when he first came upon it (in, as he often made a point of stressing polemically against those liberals who imagined that no such thing was possible, the library of Tuskegee, the black college he attended in the South), he could still detect in its obscure verses a resemblance to the offbeat jazzy rhythms that marked Armstrong’s music.
One of the many times Ellison gave passionate expression to this idea of interpenetration was in a piece he did in 1970 entitled “What America Would Be Like Without Blacks” (the name that had by now supplanted “Negro,” though Ellison himself never quite gave up on the older usage). Here he began by exploring the various schemes that had cropped up throughout American history for “getting shut” of the blacks. “Despite its absurdity,” this “fantasy,” he said, was “born not merely of racism but of petulance, of exasperation, of moral fatigue” on the part both of whites (including at one time even Abraham Lincoln, whom Ellison, unlike future revisionists, never ceased revering) and blacks alike.
But then, having underlined how relentlessly black culture had flowed into the American “cultural mainstream” (“Negro Americans are in fact one of its major tributaries”), he proceeded to challenge the newly influential idea (which had first been propounded most authoritatively a few years earlier by Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan) that the “melting pot” had not actually melted:
The problem here is that few Americans know who and what they really are. This is why few [white ethnic] groups . . . have been able to resist the movies, television, baseball, jazz, football, drum-majoretting, rock, comic strips, radio commercials, soap operas, book clubs, slang, or any of a thousand other expressions and carriers of our popular culture.
From here Ellison leaped headlong to a much bolder assertion:
On this level the melting pot did indeed melt, creating such deceptive metamorphoses and blending of identities, values, and lifestyles that most American whites are culturally part Negro American without even realizing it [emphasis added].
One might even say without too much exaggeration that Ellison had written Invisible Man precisely to give novelistic life and flesh to this previously most “invisible” of all the truths he was bent on bringing to light (“Who knows,” runs the book’s last sentence, “but that on the lower frequencies I speak for you?”).
But there was another side to the same coin that has to be displayed if the picture is to be complete—and all the more so at a moment when thinking on these matters, while bearing a superficial similarity to Ellison’s, is at the furthest remove from his. If most American whites were, in Ellison’s unshakable view, “part Negro American without even realizing it,” most Negroes were conversely more American than they or their white countrymen generally understood. There is a saying in Hebrew: “As his name is, so is he,” and Ralph Waldo Ellison was a very good example of this peculiar phenomenon. That he had been named after one of the quintessentially American writers and sages was something to which he and others often alluded as an amusing and even slightly embarrassing fact. But my own guess is that, deep down, he took it with great seriousness as a mark not only of his Americanness but of his literary destiny and his human fate.
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Ellison had originally set out to pursue a career in music, and though he then had and would maintain a lifelong love affair with, and the profoundest admiration for, the music of the black world—most notably the blues and jazz—his ambition was (characteristically) to become a composer of classical symphonies. Then, when already into his twenties, he met Richard Wright, who with the publication of Native Son (1940) was soon to emerge as the leading black novelist of the generation before Ellison’s and who encouraged him to try his hand at writing. That did it. The young man’s growing suspicion that he was not talented enough to realize his musical ambitions gave way to a more promising and positive intuition: that what he was truly cut out for was a literary career—though in talking about Ellison, a better term would be “vocation.”
Yet it is of the utmost importance to emphasize again that Ellison’s ambition was to become an American writer. As what used to be labeled a “pluralist,” he believed in the existence of a common culture, one which the various ethnic and racial groups making up a heterogeneous society like ours steadily enriched by their indigenous contributions. This common culture was a precious heritage that could be claimed by any American of whatever group or color, and to it every American of whatever group or color also owed a debt and an allegiance. Which is to say that Ellison had nothing in common with today’s “multiculturalists,” who regard the common culture, to the extent that they recognize its existence at all, as nothing more than the heritage of a single group (the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants) and in whose eyes it deserves no special “privilege” with respect to the cultures of other groups. If anything, many multiculturalists even regard it as inferior.
For Ellison, this balkanizing tendency was an ironic reappearance in sheep’s clothing of the racial segregation under which he himself had grown up, and even may have been worse. Neither as a Negro kid in Oklahoma nor as a college student in Alabama was he prevented from reading books that opened his eyes and his mind and his imagination to a wider world of possibility; on the contrary, he was urged on, not discouraged, by teachers and other adults to do so. Later, even as a literary novice, he never felt himself to be “limited” in any respect by his race or defined by it as a writer. Hence it was not to other black novelists—not even his first sponsor Richard Wright—that he looked for models to be emulated. Still less did he think that it was their books he should study in trying to learn the new craft—“a very stern discipline,” he called it—that he was so fiercely determined to master.
One knows all this from the snippets of autobiography that frequently turn up in Ellison’s essays and interviews, and from the resentment always aroused in him by any suggestion that he had been exclusively or even largely influenced by other black writers. For instance, he excoriated his old friend and “sparring partner,” the critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, for assuming that the use of folklore in Invisible Man was a product of Ellison’s race:
I use folklore in my work not because I am a Negro, but because writers like Eliot and Joyce made me conscious of the literary value of my folk inheritance. My cultural background, like that of most Americans, is dual (my middle name, sadly enough, is Waldo). . . . My point is that the Negro American writer is also an heir of the human experience which is literature, and this might well be more important to him than his living folk tradition.
On numerous other occasions, he also went out of his way to deny that this or that detail of Invisible Man had been inspired by Wright or some other black predecessor. A much more powerful literary influence on him when starting out as a writer, he often insisted, had been exerted by a French novelist, Andre Malraux (and—further to underscore his constant emphasis on the admixture of cultures—he would add that it had been the Negro poet Langston Hughes who had given him two of Malraux’s novels to read).
In addition, it had been through three 19th-century novels, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, and Feodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, that the artistic power of fiction had first made an impact on him as an undergraduate at Tuskegee. The American writers he most often cited in his pieces about literature were also all white: Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Henry James, and Ernest Hemingway. And then—above all, as it would turn out—there was William Faulkner, a Southerner who, though still to some extent infected by racism, had in Ellison’s judgment produced more truthful portraits of Negroes than any black or white-liberal Northern novelists had ever succeeded in doing.
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Yet even if Ellison had not told us all this himself, one would have deduced it from his conception of the dual nature of identity in America—his own and that of all others who had arrived on these shores more recently than the Mayflower. And it would also have become clear to any perceptive reader of Invisible Man.
I am not a good enough scholar of black writing in America to assert with full confidence that Invisible Man was the first work of fiction by a Negro about the life of his people to free itself from the disabilities of what another Negro writer, about ten years younger than Ellison, James Baldwin, in an essay of the late 40’s about Richard Wright that brought him a premonitory taste of fame, had dubbed the “protest novel.” But if not necessarily the first, Invisible Man must surely have been the most successful. Baldwin had criticized Wright’s most famous book, Native Son, and the tradition out of which it came, for representing its hero, Bigger Thomas, as so purely a creature of white oppression that he is not even responsible for the rape and murder he commits. Like all “protest” literature, Native Son thereby for all practical purposes dehumanized the black man, which as James Baldwin then saw it (he would later change his mind, to the great detriment of his own novels) was too high a price to pay, both in life and in literature, in order to do what this literature primarily aimed at—to make whites feel guilty.
As we can tell from his own written comments about Wright, and from many other indications, including Invisible Man itself, Ellison agreed with Baldwin’s early view of the matter. Admittedly, he sometimes claimed that he did not “recognize [any] dichotomy between art and protest,” citing Goya, Dickens, and Twain, and insisting that the problem for Negro writers lay not in the act of protest but in their “lack of craftsmanship and their provincialism.” Still, it was in order to move beyond and transcend the limitations of the protest novel as handled by Negro writers before him that he employed the techniques he had learned from careful study of the great masters of the novel. And that this was exactly what he himself hoped to do he made no bones about admitting in 1981 in an introduction to a new edition of Invisible Man. There he confessed to the difficulty he had had in “trying to avoid writing what might turn out to be nothing more than another novel of racial protest instead of the dramatic study in comparative humanity which I felt any worthwhile novel should be.”
Not that this was a matter of technique alone. For implicit in the novelistic craft itself at the highest reaches to which Ellison aspired was the ambition to represent the realities being portrayed in as full and rounded a form as possible. Which meant, as the great Victorian critic Matthew Arnold had put it in describing literary criticism at its best, striving “to see the object as in itself it really is.” And this meant, in turn, eschewing special pleading, apologetics, and any offstage or, for that matter, onstage obeisance to the extraliterary imperatives of ideological militancy. In Ellison’s formulation: “The greatest difficulty for a Negro writer was the problem of revealing what he really felt, rather than serving up what Negroes were supposed to feel, and were encouraged to feel.”
To be sure, Arnold also spoke of literature as a “criticism of life.” But (rather like the kind of protest Ellison defended) this was a criticism arrived at through the special objectivity or disinterestedness which was given only (borrowing a phrase from a poem by W.B. Yeats) to “the cold eye” of the true artist.
On my first reading of Invisible Man when it appeared in 1952, I thought that Ellison had pulled off this supremely difficult task. Here was a novel that presented us, in an intensely charged prose that managed (as Gustav Mahler had done in music, and as Saul Bellow would soon go on to do in The Adventures of Augie March) to synthesize elements of high style and low vernacular, with a wonderful—and often wonderfully comic—panorama of Negro life in all its American varieties and stretching from the Deep South to Harlem.2
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Invisible Man, written in the first person, is a kind of bildungsroman about an idealistic young Negro (Ellison never gives him a name3 ) who begins as a student at a black college in the South dutifully hoping to become what once upon a time was known as a “credit to his race.” But a naive error leads to his expulsion, and he then makes his way to Harlem. There, instead of eventually finding and forging an identity by which he can be recognized by others, he is subjected to a series of adventures (including a stint in the Communist party, disguised by Ellison for no very good reason as “the Brotherhood”) which finally leave him with the realization that he is in fact faceless—that is, invisible—to everyone around him, whether black or white. They all want to make some use of him for whatever ends they happen to be pursuing, but nobody has the slightest desire to see or know him as the individual human being he is. Nor are they any more interested in confronting the realities of the world around them, to which they are as blind as they are to him.
So disillusioned does he become through this realization that he winds up living all by himself in an abandoned cellar. But in the closing pages he decides to end his hibernation and reemerge, as invisible as ever but capable now of telling his imaginary interlocutor “what was really happening when your eyes were looking through.”
The Invisible Man’s story unfolds in the manner of a classic picaresque novel, as one vivid character after another bursts with such incandescent clarity onto the scene that the reader’s eyes are simply prevented from “looking through.” These characters are collectively meant to penetrate the stereotypes that have hidden the great diversity of Negro life in America. They thus cover a very broad range: from the apparently meek but cunningly manipulative and malevolent black college president Dr. Bledsoe, with his bewilderingly complicated sense of the only way a Negro can successfully maneuver his way around a hostile white world; to the wildly colorful and semi-comic, semi-sinister black-nationalist demagogue of West Indian origin, Ras the Exhorter; to the handsome and troubled Communist militant Tod Clifton; to the brilliant con man and hustler Rinehart; to the lovingly warm-hearted Harlem landlady Miss Mary Rambo.
Swelling this huge cast are many other figures, both major and minor, among them a number of whites like Mr. Norton, the wealthy trustee of the protagonist’s college, and the Communist leader Brother Jack, who are portrayed with the same clarity: a clarity that can be arrived at only by the nonapologetic “cold eye” of a true novelist working with all his might to achieve precisely that and nothing else (though the paradox is that he accomplishes much else along the way that escapes writers who go whoring after what, from the perspective of an artist, are always strange gods).
All this was astonishing enough. But what seemed equally amazing for a first novel—and what today, knowing as we now do how great a reader Ellison was and how diligently in learning to write fiction he schooled himself in other books, seems all the more amazing—was how underivative it was. If one looked closely enough, one could detect the influence here and there of this writer or that. But the main quality that struck so many of us on a first reading of Invisible Man was its originality: no such voice had ever been heard before in American literature. In some of his earliest stories, now collected in the posthumous Flying Home, Ellison was obviously imitating Hemingway’s prose, and doing it pretty well. But he eventually got Hemingway out of his system, having discovered that the “teasing” character of such prose, “that quality of implying much more than was stated,” was not right for expressing what he “really felt” and was not a flexible enough vehicle for evoking the varieties of experience he wished to represent.
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It was about ten years before I reread Invisible Man, and I was still sufficiently impressed to vote for it as the best American novel of the postwar period in a poll of critics conducted, if memory serves, by the Sunday book supplement of the now-defunct New York Herald-Tribune. Yet I was disappointed to find that it did not hold up as well as I had expected. Or was it that extraliterary considerations had entered, distorting my judgment?
For by this time I had met Ellison, and was seeing him fairly often around New York. To my great surprise, the humorous touch that was so central a part of his talent as a novelist rarely if ever showed itself in private conversation, or in the essays he published from time to time. But this is putting it too mildly. He actually was, at least in my encounters with him, a bit of a stuffed shirt, tending to speak like a character he himself might have lampooned in fiction. Once, while we were discussing something or other about which we disagreed, the author of Invisible Man actually delivered himself of the sentence: “As for me, I have values.” It was like that, too, when he gave a lecture or wrote a non-fiction piece. On such occasions his prose was almost invariably pompous and pretentious: just the opposite of what it sounded like in his novel.
For all I know, then, the poor impression I had formed of Ellison personally may have had something to do with the somewhat lessened esteem in which I now held his novel. And what may have influenced my slight change of judgment even more was the obvious dislike Ellison felt for me.
Since he never owned up to this dislike or discussed it openly, I never figured out exactly what it was that bothered him. Maybe I simply rubbed him the wrong way, as he did me. But other possibilities entered my mind. One of them was that, in common with many of Saul Bellow’s friends and Bellow himself, he never altogether forgave me for the negative review I had written as a fledgling critic in 1953 of The Adventures of Augie March. Another was my fairly close association in the early 60’s with James Baldwin, who had become his closest rival among contemporary black writers.
Out of some motive I could never fathom, Ellison was grudging about Baldwin even when they were on the same side (as against Richard Wright) in the debate over whether the black writer’s main responsibility was to be “ideologically militant” or to work at “writing well.” The easy explanation of this stingy attitude on Ellison’s part was that it stemmed from envy of all the attention and praise Baldwin (whose beautifully elegant prose style certainly exempted him from any criticisms based on deficiency of craft) had already been getting in the 40’s as an essayist before Ellison pulled ahead, far ahead, with Invisible Man. A year later, in 1953, Baldwin’s own first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, was published to loud hosannas and even became a best-seller, but no one—myself included—ever thought, or said, that it was in the same class as Invisible Man.
In short, Ellison had no apparent cause to envy the early Baldwin. Conceivably the problem was a lack of generosity in Ellison’s character—a supposition that is given plausibility by other evidences of that trait that could be detected in his conversation and his essays. But then again the explanation may lie in something personal that was going on between the two men to which I was not privy.
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But if I was, and remain, a little puzzled by Ellison’s lack of generosity toward the early Baldwin, there was no mystery about it once the younger writer’s conversion to a species of black nationalism took place in the early 60’s. This new strain then grew more and more virulent in the poisonous attitudes it fostered in Baldwin toward whites (and Jews), as well as in the hectoring and self-pitying tone of the books written under its spell. Such a development could only have repelled Ellison who, after all, identified himself with and spoke for an American Negro tradition “which abhors as obscene any trading on one’s own anguish for gain or sympathy.” In the spirit of this tradition, he denounced the increasingly fashionable “stance of militancy” as “an easy con-game” for “ambitious, publicity-hungry Negroes.”
Ellison did not mention Baldwin’s name in this connection, but very likely, as the 60’s wore on, it kept moving closer and closer to the top of his private enemies list.4 Therefore my own enthusiastic response to Baldwin’s first hesitant embrace of what would soon become a fanatically held point of view—that is, his highly sympathetic essay about the Black Muslims, “The Fire Next Time,” a piece I myself had actually persuaded him to write, and which caused nothing short of a sensation when it appeared in 1963—may well have made me guilty by association.
If so, I soon compounded the guilt, and now on my own hook, when in that same year, partly in response to “The Fire Next Time” and with Baldwin reciprocally egging me on, I wrote an essay entitled “My Negro Problem—and Ours.” Of this essay a critic once said that it contained something in it to offend everyone, and where Ellison was concerned, there was more than one such something.
Oddly, he did not complain to me about the passage that in retrospect, having just reread practically his entire published output, I would think would most have outraged him. This was the section in which I declared that unlike the Jews, who wished to survive as a distinct group because “they not only believed that God had given them no choice, but . . . were tied to a memory of past glory and imminent redemption,” the American Negro had no correspondingly powerful motives for the same wish. “His past is a stigma, his color is a stigma, and his vision of the future is the hope of erasing the stigma by making color irrelevant, by making it disappear as a fact of consciousness.”
Surely Ellison must have been enraged by these words, with their sweeping dismissal of his fervent belief in the great richness and precious value of the American Negro’s culture and the inestimable contribution it had made, and was still making, to “the wider American culture” (and, as he invariably added, to American democracy too, in calling it to account and demanding that it fulfill its best promise). Yet in at least two discussions I had with him about the piece—discussions he was so reluctant to enter that I had to prod him out of his loud silence by asking flatly where he stood in the heated controversy my essay had generated—he said nothing to me about the insult I had hurled at the culture of the American Negro.
Perhaps the reason he kept silent on this point was that he was assuaged by the sentences that came immediately before (the ones that, in as it were equal-opportunity fashion, most offended many Jewish readers of the piece):
In thinking about the Jews I have often wondered whether their survival as a distinct group was worth one hair on the head of a single infant. Did the Jews have to survive so that six million innocent people should one day be burned in the ovens of Auschwitz?
Or perhaps, as a devout pluralist, he did not consider it worth debating this particular issue with someone who could be so obtuse and impious not just about Negroes but about his own people as well. Or perhaps he felt he had already taken sufficient care of the matter in the angry reply he had written to an essay by the socialist critic Irving Howe, “Black Boys and Native Sons,” that was published shortly after “My Negro Problem—and Ours” and that also used the word “stigma.” Knowing I had read that reply when we talked about my own piece, Ellison may well have assumed that I understood it as applying with equal, if not greater, force to me and have decided not to waste any further breath on it.
Even so, he did let me have it about the notorious last paragraph of my essay, where—driven by the logic of my prior analysis of race relations in America—I concluded that the only solution to “the Negro problem” was the wholesale mixing of whites and blacks through intermarriage. Don’t you realize, he asked with a decidedly unfriendly grin but in a completely civil tone—I am paraphrasing from memory here—that this would be no solution to anything, since the babies who, would be produced by these intermarriages would still be considered black? All you would accomplish would be to increase the size of the black population, which would probably make things politically worse. I must confess that this criticism—which he was the only one to come up with, though a thousand different objections to the essay were raised by others—caught me completely off-guard and that I had no answer to it.
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What finally tore it between us, however, was my review about a year later (1964) of Shadow and Act, his first collection of essays and his first book of any kind since Invisible Man had come out twelve years earlier. Ellison was as thin-skinned as the next writer, and he could not have taken kindly to my statement that he had “never mastered the art of the essay enough for his best qualities to find expression in it.” Never mind that I professed myself a great admirer of his fiction and that I also praised him “as an extraordinarily principled man, a man of great seriousness, stubborn rectitude, and intellectual determination.” Given his virtually religious devotion to craft, none of this could have canceled out my attack on the stilted and awkward prose of Shadow and Act.
Nor could he have failed to be angered by the corollary I drew here from the point I had made in “My Negro Problem—and Ours” about the price of Jewish survival. By now, largely under the influence of Ellison’s own essays, I was ready—even eager—to concede that the Negro past was more than a “stigma,” and that there were “marvelous qualities” in Negro culture. But I also denied, in the teeth of Ellison’s assertions to the contrary, that these qualities could survive the disappearance of the oppression that “in some awful sense” had produced them in the first place.
As if all this were not enough to finish me off in his eyes, I (now entrenched in the radical phase of my complicated political evolution) devoted a large section of the piece to siding with Howe in his dispute with Ellison. In “Black Boys and Native Sons,” Howe had defended Richard Wright and the “protest novel” against both Ellison and Baldwin. It was more incumbent on the Negro writer, said Howe with a vigorous nod from me, to call attention, as Wright had done, to the terrible and inescapable pain suffered by his people in America than to cultivate the aesthetic virtues to which these two black critics of Wright’s work attributed a higher importance (though Baldwin, as Howe did not fail to recognize, had already been moving in the other direction—that is, toward Wright’s position).
Nevertheless, even if I now had a slightly lower opinion of Invisible Man, I still thought it was a very good novel, and better than almost anything else written in that period. No longer, however—and on this, I feel sure, I was exercising a disinterested critical judgment, without any taint of personal pique—did I regard it as a true masterpiece. All the indisputably great works of my acquaintance got better with repeated rereadings over the years: I would discover things in them as I grew older that I had been too young or inexperienced or ignorant to perceive or appreciate or even understand the first time around. With Invisible Man, by contrast, the freshness of it had faded somewhat in the ten years since I had last read it, and with that freshness went the illuminating shock of the first reading. The prose was still what it had been—vivid and charged with the energy of the superficially incongruous elements out of which Ellison had brilliantly forged it. The story too was still beautifully paced and structured. But now some of the characters had become less interesting, largely because, while still delightfully colorful on the surface, they were rarely examined in depth.
Then, too, there was the problem of the symbolism Ellison had clearly worked so hard to incorporate into the central idea of the hero as an Invisible Man living in a hole in the ground, and also in several much-praised scenes (like the one that takes place in a bizarre paint factory), which now came across as strained and even gratuitous. It was as if this symbolic dimension had sprung more out of deference to the high-literary dogmas and fashions of the 40’s and 50’s than out of the organic imperatives of the narrative. (Not for nothing did Ellison once say that both he and Baldwin had been created as much by the library as by the environments in which they had grown up; and I know from first-hand acquaintance with both men that Ellison read many more symbolically-minded critics like Kenneth Burke and Edmund Wilson, and took them more seriously, than Baldwin ever did.)
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Meanwhile, there had arisen the great question of when Ellison’s next novel would appear. The word, coming from Ellison himself and his closest friends, was that he had actually started it even before beginning Invisible Man, and that he had now returned to this aborted project and was working steadily on it. But since he was a notoriously slow writer (Invisible Man had taken him seven years to complete), and since this was to be a much longer book than its predecessor, there was no telling how many more years we would have to wait for its appearance.
Despite the eight excerpts from this work-in-progress that appeared in various literary magazines between 1960 and 1977, the suspicion spread that Ellison had been afflicted by a writer’s block that was preventing him from developing and putting them all together into a finished novel. There was nothing unusual about this: many writers had been known to experience great difficulty in following up on a first novel, especially one so successful as Invisible Man. Writing was hard enough under normal conditions, but the inevitable compulsion to satisfy the expectations aroused by an impressive debut was well-calculated to induce paralysis, sometimes temporary, sometimes permanent.
Until Ellison came along, the most famous second-novel block in American literature had been the one that silenced Henry Roth, whose Call It Sleep, published in 1934, had (like Invisible Man) been recognized as a masterpiece by certain critics but (unlike Invisible Man) had been a disastrous commercial failure. Unable to finish the second novel he then set out to write, Roth gave up in despair and disgust, becoming, among other things, a poultry farmer. Ellison had no need to seek refuge and income in a territory so distant from the literary world. While working on his second novel, he made his living by teaching at one university after another while also collecting the royalties and the prize money that kept pouring in from his first.
But would he ever finish what looked to be an endless project, assuming that he had even made a real start on it? I for one had my doubts, and then came the great disaster that increased those doubts. Here is John F. Callahan on what happened:
In his own mind Ellison was moving toward completion in . . . 1967 as he revised the novel at his summer home . . . in the Berkshires. Then, in the late afternoon of November 29, 1967, Ellison and his wife, Fanny, returned from shopping to find the house in flames. . . . Ten days after the event, he wrote . . . that “the loss was particularly severe for me, as a section of my work-in-progress was destroyed with it.”
The section, he told an interviewer shortly before his death in 1994, had amounted to 362 pages, of which he had no copy. (In another version of the story, he did have a copy of the pages themselves but not of the revisions he had made on the one that perished in the fire.) Even so, he had told another interviewer in 1980: “I guess I’ve been able to put most of it back together again.”5
Saul Bellow also recently revealed—further refuting my suspicion that the second novel had not even been seriously begun—that in 1959 or 1960 Ellison had given him “a couple of hundred pages, at least” to read. It now appears that by the time Ellison died about five years ago, the still unfinished manuscript consisted of some 2,000 pages in all. At one point, around 1970, he had considered publishing the whole thing in three volumes, but then changed his mind because he wanted each volume to “have a compelling interest in itself,” which, he feared, would not be the case. And so, for the next 24 years, he continued to write and expand and revise without ever completing the book to his own satisfaction.
This may not exactly seem like a block—a word that conjures up the inability to write at all—but it is one of the forms that a block can sometimes take. I know of a novelist who turned out several hundred thousand words without—or rather to avoid—coming to the end, and I would guess that something similar was involved in Ellison’s 2,000 pages. Invisible Man was a very tough act to follow, made tougher yet by the honors that had been heaped upon him; and he simply proved unable to follow it. He differed from Henry Roth, who was rendered mute for a very long time, in that he could produce pages. But what he could never manage to do was produce another finished work that would justify the tremendous fuss made over him as a result of a single book written ages before.
At this juncture, we witness a fascinating reversal of roles between Ellison and Henry Roth. Late in life, Roth found his tongue again (curiously through learning how to use a computer), and proceeded to pour forth what had been pent up for so many years into a very lengthy autobiographical novel (published serially in several volumes) that in my judgment was as wooden and amateurish as his youthful first novel had been alive and precociously accomplished. It was a sad, even pathetic, denouement to the story of a career that might better have been left in the poignantly and romantically legendary state in which it had previously been frozen.
By sharp contrast, Ellison, with all the makings of a book in hand, was unable to bring it to a conclusion and present it to the world. Now, however, the dedicated and indefatigable John Callahan has carved a fairly short novel out of the 2,000 manuscript pages Ellison left behind and issued it under the title Juneteenth.6
Juneteenth takes off from the attempted assassination (apparently in the 1950’s) of a race-baiting United States Senator named Sunraider who represents a New England state (one of several implausible details in the book through which Ellison must have wanted to say something—probably concerning racism in the North—that he never gets around to saying) by a young black man about whom we never learn anything else here.7 Lying in the hospital close to death, Sunraider sends for an old black minister, the Reverend Hickman, who a few days earlier had come to Washington with members of his congregation in order to warn the Senator of the danger facing him (though we never find out how they knew), but had been unable to get past his secretary.
Now, through a combination of Hickman’s soothing discourse to the partly comatose Sunraider and the fevered reminiscences that float through the Senator’s mind, we learn that this racist politician had as a child been raised in the South under the name of Bliss by “Daddy” Hickman and had worked with him as a boy preacher. One day he had run away, changed his name, and had eventually become a United States Senator. Left in suspense is whether Sunraider is a light-skinned Negro who has successfully passed for white, or a white foundling who had in effect been adopted by Hickman. But at least this question is finally resolved.8 Not so with Sunraider’s story. We long to hear it after getting to know him as a child, but the gaps in the narrative are so wide that the steps of his vast journey are never traced. All we are given is a few pages about one of these steps: at some point, Sunraider had been in the movie business. Yet how and why he got there, and how and why this had led him into politics, remain untold.
By comparison with Invisible Man, which teems with a multitude of characters, Juneteenth is sparsely populated. A number of female members of Hickman’s congregation are vividly drawn, but only Hickman himself and the boy Bliss are evoked with any real fullness. Hickman, in his youth a jazz musician and sinner before converting and becoming a “Revrend,” speaks in the marvelously pungent and seductively rhythmic idiom of the best black Southern preachers, but as a character he is too good to be true—so good that the portrait of him verges on sentimentality. So does the sketchier portrait of Sunraider as the boy Bliss.
But these weaknesses of Juneteenth, which can mainly be ascribed to its unfinished state, are the least of its problems. I have already noted that one of the most extraordinary features of Invisible Man is that, unlike most first novels, it was not derivative. Ellison might have been a creature of the library, and his earliest stories might have sounded like talented imitations of Hemingway, but in writing Invisible Man he had triumphantly banished the voices of other novelists from his head and had been rewarded with the discovery of his own style and his own voice. How could it have happened, then, that he would go on to write a novel that is as derivative as the stories of his novitiate?
In the case of Juneteenth, the ghost haunting the prose is not Hemingway, however, but Faulkner. The author of the multivolume Yoknapatawpha saga is there in Ellison’s very desire to produce a multivolume saga of his own, but his presence can be felt even more intrusively in the prose of Juneteenth. Here is a typical passage:
Oh, she said. . . . You not from Chicago?
Never been there, I said. And looking at her nibbling the sandwich, her soft eyes on my face, I thought of some of them. We had bad a rough time, coming through all of that cloudburst of rain, having to avoid the towns where I might have been recognized and the unfriendly towns where the oil rigs pounded night and day, making the trip longer and our money shorter and shorter. Getting stuck in the mud here and having engine trouble there, the tires going twice and the top being split by hailstones the size of baseballs and almost losing all of the equipment off a shaky ferry when we crossed a creek in Missouri [italics in the original].
The hands may be the hands of Ellison, but from large elements like the cadences of the italicized interior monologue—sired by James Joyce out of Ireland on another thoroughbred across the ocean and in the American South—down to smaller stylistic details like the omission of quotation marks in the dialogue and the heavy reliance on gerunds, the voice is the voice of William Faulkner.
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Reading Juneteenth under the impression that it was the product of a 40-year gestation by a perfectionist who was laboring without letup to satisfy his own demands on himself, I found this regression to literary derivativeness very puzzling. But then at the end I came to Callahan’s afterword, where he informs us that “Except for a very few, very brief passages, written in the early 1990’s, the novel is not Ellison’s most recent effort.” Actually it was mostly composed as early as 1959 and designated as the second of the three-volume saga Ellison had been aiming at.
It is a stretch, then, for its publisher to call Juneteenth a “new novel” (as Henry Roth’s final series genuinely was) or the product of a 40-year effort. What we have here instead is an unfinished section of a never-to-be completed larger novel that Ellison wrote in the years immediately after Invisible Man. It can thus more accurately be described as an early—or, if one prefers, middle-period—than a late work.
Yet it is still very hard for me to understand how, having succeeded in the immensely arduous job of finding his own voice and staying with it throughout the seven years it took him to complete his first novel, Ellison should have then lost it and become possessed in working on his second by the daimon of another writer. But that the other writer should have been Faulkner is not so mysterious when we consider the deep admiration Ellison had always felt for him even despite the atavistic traces of racism of which the great Southern novelist was never fully able to rid himself.
Other parts of the 2,000-page manuscript he left behind may prove me wrong, but for now my speculation is that Ellison—a man of great intelligence and literary erudition who had an ear second to none—knew that Faulkner had invaded and taken him over and that this was why he could never finish the book. I can imagine him struggling for 40 years to get Faulkner’s sound out of his head; I can imagine him searching desperately for the lost voice he had created in Invisible Man; I can imagine him trying to fool himself into thinking that he had finally found it again, and then realizing that he had not; and I can imagine him being reduced to despair at this literary enslavement into which some incorrigible defect in his nature had sold him—and to a Southern master, at that!
I offer this theory with sadness in my heart, and I am even unhappier at having to report that after revisiting Invisible Man yet again in recent weeks, the faults that had become apparent on my second reading loomed even larger, and its virtues were commensurately diminished. Worse yet, the book now struck me as dated. Let me try to explain why.
Insofar as the central theme of Invisible Man is the significance and implications of the black presence in America—which of course it mainly is (“the most complex, multilayered, and challenging novel about race and being and the preservation of democratic ideals in America,” in the words of one of its admirers)—its very title, and its defining symbol, has now acquired an almost quaintly archaic aura.
For if Negroes—or blacks or African Americans—were once invisible, today, in the age of affirmative action and multiculturalism, they have become perhaps the most salient group in the American consciousness. If their literary culture was previously held at naught, it is now studied and celebrated beyond what Ellison—judging from his own harsh remarks about the need for his fellow black writers to become better craftsmen—would probably have deemed its intrinsic merits. If the way of life growing out of their oppressed condition was once dismissed as nothing but a stigma and hence demanded to be brought into view with the undeniable force of conviction about its richness that lay behind the picture painted by Invisible Man, this way of life has now become a national obsession at which no one ever stops looking and about which no one ever stops talking.
On the other hand—and this dates the book even more—there is hardly a trace in Invisible Man of the one aspect of that way of life which has done more in the years since the book was published to affect race relations in this country: black violence and criminality, the fear of which has spread even among the most sympathetic white liberals. Yes, Invisible Man contains hustlers and pimps and tricksters and con artists, but (like Rinehart, who embodies them all in his own individual person) they are represented as ingenious and admirably resourceful, not as menacing or dangerous.
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But could not the same charge of datedness be leveled against almost any novel written in the past about the past? The answer is no—not, in any event, when we are dealing with those that are truly great. And because Ellison once praised Richard Wright for his eagerness to compete with the best, and because this eagerness was even more intense in Ellison himself, I think it fair to pit Invisible Man against such indisputably great novels as—to cite a few very different ones off the top of my head—James’s The Bostonians, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.
In each of these books, the social conditions of the world being portrayed, and the attitudes that underlay and supported them, are dead and gone and so obsolete that one might suppose a reader of our own day would be incapable of identifying with the characters whose plight is determined by them. In Anna Karenina, for example, the entire plot hinges on an adultery that is taken with a literally deadly seriousness hardly imaginable to a contemporary American. Yet the human tragedy Tolstoy depicts, fully anchored though it is in social circumstances and moral attitudes that could not be more radically different from our own, reaches so deeply into the never-changing human realities beneath them that the reader is gripped by it from the first word to the last. Something similar happens with all the other novels I have listed. But alas, it does not happen with Invisible Man. Good though it is in so many respects, it does not survive this acid test of greatness.
The reason it saddens me to say these things is that I would have wished at this point in my own life to celebrate Ellison, not to denigrate him. For I feel that I owe him a posthumous apology for having, during my sojourn on the Left in the 60’s, taken the side of Howe and Baldwin against him when he was so bravely standing almost alone in resisting the politicization of everything and holding out for the writer’s responsibility as a writer to his art above any other consideration.
The upshot is that though Ellison has been diminished somewhat in my eyes as a novelist, studying his essays again has had the opposite effect on my opinion of him as an intellectual and as a man. I cannot tell a lie: much of the prose of those essays has not in my reluctant opinion become any less stilted and awkward and pretentious over the years. But the general position they take has acquired a luminosity and a nobility that were, if not exactly “invisible” to me when I first read them, then much less striking.
Indeed, if Invisible Man has been rendered dated by the place to which, for better and worse, we have come in America, many passages in Ellison’s essays have acquired a greater power in that very same place than they had when he wrote them. I quoted above from one such passage in another context, but it is so perfect an embodiment of the quality I wish to capture that I am going to quote it again. It comes from the section in which Ellison chides Irving Howe for suggesting (in Ellison’s paraphrase) “that unrelieved suffering is the only ‘real’ Negro experience, and that the true Negro writer must be ferocious.” To this Ellison counters with the following little lecture:
But there is also an American Negro tradition which teaches one to deflect racial provocation and to master and contain pain. It is a tradition which abhors as obscene any trading on one’s anguish for gain or sympathy; which springs not from a desire to deny the harshness of existence but from a will to deal with it as men at their best have always done. It takes fortitude to be a man and no less to be an artist. If so, there are no exemptions.
It is in this same reply to Howe that he later speaks (in a sentence from which I also quoted above) of “what an easy con-game for ambitious, publicity-hungry Negroes this stance of ‘militancy’ has become.” If this was the situation in 1964, the name of Al Sharpton alone tells us how much worse things have become in the intervening 35 years.
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All honor, then, to Ralph Ellison. If Invisible Man is not the great novel it has been taken to be, it still ranks among the best we have had in the past half-century; and if Ellison falls far short even of that in Juneteenth, he is still a magnificent intellectual and moral and political exemplar. It is—and now I arrive at long last to the paradox I mentioned at the beginning—that aspect of his life and work, and not his fiction, which, in looking back at his entire career, now stands out as the most admirable and impressive.
Hearing this would have distressed Ellison no end, and he would almost certainly have felt offended by it, if only because it was to the novel that he committed himself as to a religious calling. It was also as a novelist that he wanted to make his contribution not only to the literature of the America he always loved (even when he was growing up under segregation in Oklahoma) but to the struggle of the Negro people he loved, and “affirmed,” with equal intensity. Refusing to be mollified by Irving Howe’s praise of Invisible Man as “miraculous,” Ellison shot back: “If there is anything ‘miraculous’ about the book, it is the result of hard work undertaken in the belief that the work of art is important in itself, that it is a social action in itself.”
I shout Amen to that, but I end with an even deeper and more reverent bow to the proud and self-respecting tradition out of which Ellison spoke and from which he could never be budged: a tradition that exposes the aggressive black nationalists and separatists and mau-mauers who have grown more numerous today than ever for the whiners and braggarts and self-haters Ellison despised them as being. If he had done nothing more than keep that tradition alive by his steady reminders of its existence, he would deserve all the prizes he won, and a few more as well.
Without a doubt Ellison’s response to such an estimate of him would have been a furious “No thanks, Jack.” Apart from the blow it would have dealt to his p
1 One collection, Shadow and Act (of which I wrote what I now regard as a wrongheaded negative review), was issued in 1964, and a second, Going to the Territory, came out in 1986. The contents of both of these volumes, plus some additional pieces, have been brought together posthumously by his literary executor, John F. Callahan, in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison (Modern Library, 1995).
2 In the introduction to a posthumous collection of Ellison’s earliest forays into fiction, Flying Home and Other Stories (Random House, 208 pp., $23.00), John F. Callahan, the book’s editor, makes a point similar to the one I am trying to get at in bringing up the name of Mahler: “The young man who had dreamed of composing a symphony by the time he was twenty-six . . . ended up writing Invisible Man, a novel with traces of symphonic form as well as the beat and breaks of jazz.” Mutatis mutandis, the same juxtaposition can be found in Ellison’s initially bizarre comparison of Louis Armstrong and T.S. Eliot to which I referred above. “Ever loyal to his musician’s bent,” writes Callahan, “while his eye read Eliot’s fragments, his ear heard Louis Armstrong’s 200 choruses on the theme of ‘Chinatown.’”
3 In 1959, James Baldwin, perhaps directly or unconsciously influenced by Ellison’s idea, would write an essay called “Nobody Knows My Name”—a title he would then use for the collection in which the piece would be reprinted in 1961.
4 In all fairness, I should note that Ellison did on various occasions make some sort of effort to suggest that he was not hostile to Baldwin. But whenever he did, one could sense that his heart was not in it. Nor can I recall a word of actual praise for Baldwin—I mean Baldwin when he was at his very best—either in private or in any of his published writings.
5 It may be instructive to compare Ellison’s experience with a similar disaster that befell Thomas Carlyle more than a hundred years earlier. In March 1834, Carlyle lent the only copy of the manuscript of the first volume of his history of the French Revolution, on which he had been laboring for three years, to John Stuart Mill, whose maid accidentally burned it. Without any notes or earlier drafts, Carlyle still managed to rewrite the entire volume in just four months, and he then went on to complete the entire work with two more volumes by the end of the same year. For Ellison, obviously, putting “most of it back together again” after the fire that destroyed his manuscript did not have the same result that Carlyle so miraculously achieved under comparable circumstances. But as has often been observed, when it came to writing, the Victorians were as different from us as they were in their moral convictions.
6 Random House, 352 pp., $25.00.
7 However, according to a piece in the New York Times Magazine by Gregory Feeley, who has read everything Callahan decided to leave out of Juneteenth, there is a great deal about the young assassin in the pages that remain in manuscript. Other pages were omitted, too, that may fill in some of the gaps I mention below. And Callahan also omitted from his edition of Juneteenth four of the eight published excerpts mentioned above, among them the much-admired “Cadillac Flambé.” Callahan promises, though, to include all this material, along with different versions of some of the sections he chose to use, in a special “scholar’s edition” that he will eventually issue.
8 That is, as I read the book. Feeley disagrees: he says that the question is left hanging. But as others read it, the answer is the opposite of the one I think Ellison gives. One of these three interpretations should be right, but it is also possible that Ellison never finally made up his mind, and that this is why so much confusion has been generated.
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