Conversations with Ralph Ellison, edited by Maryemma Graham and Amrijit Singh; Flying Home and Other Stories, by Ralph Ellison; and Heroism and the Black Intellectual: Ralph Ellison, Politics, and Afro-American Intellectual Life, by Jerry Gafio Watts
Early, Gerald
The curious, but essential, dimension of the Ralph Ellison literary myth is that he published only one novel, and that his entire authority as a writer and intellectual rests on this one...
...The narrator, Mr...
...It is that presence, self-consciously and thickly constructed, and sometimes enigmatic and even paradoxical, that Watts attempts to unpack in his book...
...What the interviews make clear is that Ellison, although sticking to the same creed of dedication to the power of aesthetic experience, political detachment, the deified power of craft mastery, the humanely expressive capacities of folklore, and the need for a sharp individualism, was able, over the years, while saying the same things, to say them with a great deal of intellectual energy and even variety...
...condemned his novel as "not contributing to the liberation of black people," as I remember the cant phrase of the day...
...On another level, the novel's publication was only the start of his career, if one considers the career to be the position that Ellison was able to occupy as a result of the acclaim Invisible Man garnered...
...29.95, cloth...
...In defending the Ellison creed, he has been tied, rightly or wrongly, to the ideological tin can of neoconservatism...
...I highly recommend Conversations with Ralph Ellison...
...He insisted, until his death in 1994, that both blacks and whites take him on his own terms...
...As long as Negroes are confused as to how they relate to American culture, they will be confused about their relationship to places like Africa [1960...
...114 • DISSENT Books literary establishment...
...I think that Watts quite accurately describes the limitations of Ellison's attempt to disguise an elite view of culture with a great deal of talk about folklore, of Ellison's inflated claims about the influence blacks have exerted on whites, of his over-investment in a "blues" ontology that would ultimately free blacks from the prison of sociology and from being the sum total of their social pathologies, and of Ellison's belief in heroic individualism or a kind of exceptionalism as the standard for the group...
...409 pp...
...He is to be commended for this...
...Even more than the reputation of his white contemporary J.D...
...Whether Crouch's ingenuity as a critic will permit him not to be boxed in by this or whether the Ellison creed, carried to its end, is simply another call for the aesthetic and moral strictures of modernism, remains to be seen...
...HEROISM AND THE BLACK INTELLECTUAL: RALPH ELLISON, POLITICS, AND AFRO-AMERICAN INTELLECTUAL LIFE, by Jerry Gafio Watts...
...University Press of Mississippi, 1995...
...The less fair question, naturally, is whether this collection would have been published at all had some unknown writer put it together...
...Besides, it must be remembered that Wright was able to do something as a novelist, something of significance, that Ellison was never able to do—publish more than one in his lifetime and not to be paralyzed by his masterpiece, Native Son, as Ellison apparently was by Invisible Man...
...As Ellison makes clear in a 1954 interview, "I recognize no dichotomy between art and protest...
...It is easy for such a group, rightly and wrongly, to mistrust any prominent black who does not seem to be saying anything that bothers white people...
...And what dovetails with this: "Too many books by Negro writers are addressed to a white audience [1954...
...Interestingly, Wright never was a relativist and never claimed that black cultural life was equal in richness and possibilities to white life in America...
...Thus, Crouch's entire reputation has been built on his criticism and, unlike Ellison, he has not shied away from politics...
...Clearly, what is implicit in Ellison's view—since his problem with Wright is not that Wright saw art essentially as a form of protest or that Wright was "afraid to leave the uneasy sanctuary of race," as Ellison writes elsewhere, "to take [his] chances in the world of art"—is that Wright simply did not write novels well...
...Flying Home is of mild interest for readers interested in Ellison...
...Watts's Heroism and the Black Intellectual is a thoughtful if not always persuasive book, certainly a good beginning for a more intensive and extensive engagement with Ellison and his disciples...
...He wished to be among the most advanced artists and was willing to run the risk required [1967...
...But Ellison won the 1953 National Book Award, and in 1965, in a poll of more than two hundred authors, critics, and editors, Invisible Man was voted the most distinguished work of fiction published since the end of World War II...
...And he encouraged other writers—who usually rebuffed him—to become conscious craftsmen, to plunge into the world of conscious literature and take their chances unafraid...
...This is not easy to answer...
...23.00...
...Baldwin melodramatically and self-servingly made Wright into a father figure so that he might have someone ultimately to attack, in order, in part, to bolster himself in his early career...
...In it we seek not status, not class, but a reflecting consciousness—certainly in the hero who confronts the complexities of his situation [1968...
...Since both novels are first-person books, it might be said that each narrator is cured through the psychoanalytic treatment of making his life into a tour-de-force work of art...
...Watts's book accounts for the difference in writerly perspectives between the two men well enough...
...Wright's] underestimation [of Ellison's intellectual background] did make for a certain irony in our relationship...
...They have become seminal works in African-American intellectual history...
...ideologies as masks that humans adopt to manipulate or to delude...
...118...
...Both novels show that black community is an impossible idea, precisely the point that Wright was trying to make in his argument with Zora Neale Hurston, who believed, like Ellison, that the aesthetics of folklore would invent or invoke community...
...The success of the book made Ellison not only the exemplary black creative writer but also an intellectual of some considerable standing...
...But Ellison fails to understand that Wright also refuses to make peace with the forces that he feels have dehumanized him and that have made it impossible for a true black humanity to express itself on anything like its own terms...
...As a final assessment, Watts is right in saying "Both writers conveyed limited perspectives of black life...
...This stance helped assure that he would be taken seriously by whites as a literary intellectual, as someone who could theorize or instruct about the function of the novel and the role of the black writer, because it was in such agreement with the general views of the major white critics of the day...
...It is worth reading...
...Black community or a broad black humanity is impossible because the reality of white racist politics won't permit it, according to Wright...
...It is little wonder, in so lonely a position as Ellison occupied, that he crafted such a highly stylized public presence...
...Yet there is in Ellison's quarrel with Wright a sense that his stature is dependent on making clear that he is capable of doing something— did, in fact, achieve something with Invisible Man that Wright could not do in Native Son and Black Boy...
...Ellison had beaten out such white writers as Salinger, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, Mary McCarthy, Harvey Swados, Jack Kerouac, Flannery O'Connor, William Burroughs, John Cheever, Truman Capote, Vladimir Nabokov, Bernard Malamud, Eudora Welty, and at least a dozen more, a stunning feat...
...The relativism is, of course, contrary to modernism itself...
...His essential work remains Invisible Man and the essay collections...
...This is what lies behind his ambivalent treatment of Richard Wright, the major black literary figure before him, and a good friend as well, who is, as a model and enabler, both his entry point into Western literature and his entry point into marginalization...
...What he says is sometimes fasciSUMMER • 1997 • 115 Books nating and revealing: "There is a kind of ideal reader and that ideal reader would be a Negro who was in full possession of all the subtleties of literature and art and politics [1965...
...The problem is that these are obviously apprentice works, the equivalent of artbook sketches, practice-room exercises...
...The tendency is not to see the works in their own right, according to their strengths and weaknesses as short fiction...
...The more successful the story, the better it serves as a kind of prefiguration of the novel...
...Wright's point is that that culture could not have saved his character from his self-destructive rage...
...Ellison writes in his essay "Richard Wright's Blues" that what is unusual about Wright is that he "made no peace with [the black community's] essential cruelty," although he so clearly recognized it...
...Ellison's novel seemingly brought black writing of age beyond mere protest and sociology, as black fiction had been seen by the white BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY CONVERSATIONS WITH RALPH ELLISON, edited by Maryemma Graham and Amrijit Singh...
...I find the assumption that no Negro can do anything unless another Negro has done so before him rather simpleminded, and as far as I'm concerned, it's an inverted form of racism [1977...
...Native Son is a very powerful novel, but to my mind something is missing...
...because, sometimes, thanks to my own reading and quite different experience, I was in a position to have made suggestions for solving problems from which he might have benefited [1976...
...The early reviews of Ellison's novel, as Jerry Gafio Watts points out in his study of Ellison, were not wholly favorable...
...Once Ellison's reputation was firmly established there was always the tendency to relate Ellison to Wright in much the way Lionel Trilling related Henry James—who could write but didn't care about politics—to Theodore Dreiser—who couldn't write but who cared about politics...
...There are two important considerations for us here...
...That is to say, are the stories worthy of our attention apart from the person who wrote them...
...Random House, 1996...
...As members of my working-class family used to put it, "You work for who pays you...
...Wright] was constantly reading the great masters, just as he read the philosophers, the political theorists, the social and literary critics...
...176 pp...
...Both Ellison and Wright, staunch individualists, are wary of the harshness of conformity and antiintellectualism in black life...
...Thus, the appearance of Flying Home and Other Stories is, at least, of historical importance as it brings together most of Ellison's pre-Invisible Man fiction for the first time...
...Invisible Man really does not supersede Native Son as a novel if one considers what both novels wind up saying: despite all of his hero's access to black folklore and the like, the Invisible Man winds up in the end like Wright's Bigger Thomas, isolated from the black com116 • DISSENT Books munity, indeed, from human community entirely...
...One can go on in this way, but it would not address the issue of the true significance of these stories...
...Parker, with his one punched-in, throbbing eye and his creed about America, will become the narrator in Invisible Man, as will the pilot in "Flying Home...
...He also published two collections of essays: Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986), which set forth his views as a literary critic and public intellectual...
...Ellison's thought seemed to evolve even as he repeated himself...
...Holden Caulfield has a nervous breakdown and is being treated in a hospital after he could not escape or "light out for the territories...
...But the larger issue here is that an oppressed minority like African-Americans cannot be expected to show much patience with intellectuals and writers who want to appear above the fray...
...15.95...
...Ellison may have withdrawn from public politics or direct involvement in the civil rights movement, but he never withdrew from the public realm as a writerly presence...
...Moreover, Ellison, no less than Wright, rejects the black church as a vehicle for expression, which means both rejected the central communal institution in black life...
...156 pp...
...Salinger rests on The Catcher in the Rye, Ellison's rests on Invisible Man...
...some thought the book poorly constructed, despite scenes of astonishing brilliance (a criticism that is not unjustified, as Ellison himself admitted that he found making transitions difficult...
...The two books also deal with similar philosophical issues: the fluidity of human life bumping up against human systems of categorization...
...Isn't the entire premise of this collection the idea that they suggest a culmination, an arrival in Invisible Man...
...The old man who tells of his dream of flying around heaven in "Flying Home" obviously is a prototype of Invisible Man's Trueblood...
...The biggest problem for black intellectuals calling for modernism is that they are confounded by their own implicit need for relativism— the need to assert that blacks have had an influence on the United States, and thus the West, of the same magnitude as that of everySUMMER • 1997 • 117 Books one else who lays claims to the Western heritage...
...yet it seems to me that Watts misses a very important point because he accepts Ellison's (and generally the standard, until very recently) judgment about the literary worth of Wright's work...
...The curious, but essential, dimension of the Ralph Ellison literary myth is that he published only one novel, and that his entire authority as a writer and intellectual rests on this one work...
...Oddly, one finds more about black religion in the work of Wright the Marxist than in Ellison the folklorist...
...Ellison's conversation is often rich, indeed...
...The University of North Carolina Press, 1994...
...I am glad that Watts does not belabor his points (his book is mercifully short in this age of the academic tome, and highly readable) but I think that a closing chapter on Ellison's two closest disciples, Stanley Crouch and Albert Murray, and how they have dealt with or failed to deal with Ellison's contradictions, would have been very enriching and intriguing...
...I believe the book would have been greatly strengthened had he analyzed Invisible Man for its philosophical, political, and cultural ideas...
...I do not make the connection casually, as Invisible Man and The Catcher in the Rye were published within a few years of each other and both seem to have derived from the same principal American source, Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, the granddaddy novel about growing up male and absurd and being terribly miseducated by a hypocritical society...
...12.95, paper...
...After all, blacks knew they could never reward Ellison the way whites could and that, historically, is the core of the problem between blacks and their artistic elite...
...This is why Wright prizes rebellion...
...But neither writer, and here critics make the common mistake of favoring Ellison, is more successfully modernist than the other...
...This weakness aside, there is much to admire in Watts's work...
...However, once he decided to read out African American intellectual life using a literary figure, not a social scientist, the task demanded that he deal more directly with literature than he did...
...On one level, Ellison's career stopped with the 1952 publication of Invisible Man, because the rest of his life was a long effort to produce a second novel that never appeared and that, probably, was never even finished, though he scribbled endlessly...
...They are far more systematized, far more visualized in the novel, and, thus, far more complete, than in Ellison's essays...
...One of the weaknesses of Watts's book is his lack of deep reading of literary works...
...An interview he gave to a jazz magazine in 1976 is alone worth the price of the book...
...I find Crouch especially stimulating in this regard as he has not, unlike Murray, published any novels...
...This is the problem when one book absorbs a writer's career and justifies his or her claim to attention...
...This meant that he resisted the temptation to become a spokesman like James Baldwin (a wise move when one looks at what happened to Baldwin the writer as a result) and also resisted the quackery and opportunism of jealous black nationalist critics who...
...he approached the interview as if it were an art form...
...Unlike Salinger, who has published no other novels but has produced a few collections of shorter works, Ellison published no collections of his pre- or post-Invisible Man fiction in his lifetime, although he did publish fugitive pieces of fiction in magazines and journals both before and after his major novel...
...the Invisible Man has literally re-wired his hole in the ground after having undergone his own breakdown during a race riot where he, too, found escape impossible...
...the individual finding freedom, not through politics, but through a kind of aesthetic and psychological "re-wiring...
...But also unlike Salinger, Ellison kept himself in the intellectual and literary limelight by doing several dozen interviews over the years, many of which are included in Conversations With Ralph Ellison, a generous sampling of Ellison's elaborations on his artistic and political creed...
...He did not limit himself in the manner that many Negro writers currently limit themselves...
...In 1940 he was well aware that Native Son was being published at a time when The Grapes of Wrath and For Whom The Bell Tolls would be his main competition...
...I wasn't, and am not, concerned with injustice but with art," Ellison said in 1954...
...Ellison respectfully refuses to use Wright in quite that way...
...With the exception of "A Coupla Scalped Indians," all the stories in Flying Home and Other Stories were written before Invisible Man, from the late 1930s to the middle 1940s, and therein lies the problem in assessing these works...
...DISSENT...
...I say this not to put down my friend, but rather to point to something about the nature of the novel as humanist expression...
...Ellison, by necessity, was a relativist, as Watts astutely points out, which made him an oddball modernist...
...The interviews reveal, among other matters, Ellison's constant concern to create a literary lineage that connects him to the canonized Western tradition, asserting his right as a black man to claim this heritage as much as anyone while decrying the idea that a black writer can, in truth, only represent a marginalized, racialized corner of literature...
...He suggests that critics would better identify the weakness in black literature not by complaining about protest but "about [black writers' lack of craftsmanship and their provincialism...
...Aunt Kate in "That I Had the Wings" suggests Mary Rambo...
...FLYING HOME AND OTHER STORIES, by Ralph Ellison, edited and with an introduction by John F.Callahan...
...What is of more moment here is how much in these stories Ellison struggled to find his own voice...
...Was this career an engagement on the highest level of principle that a black artist heroically demanded of himself, his audience, and his society, or was it a kind of brilliant evasion, a failure of nerve that only a black artist could have experienced because of what he implausibly demanded of himself, a demand that in onerousness or pretension neither his audience nor society could lessen...
...This is why Ellison's complaint that "[Bigger] doesn't possess the culture of Chicago Negroes of his background of that period" would have sounded silly to Wright...
...I am aware that Watts is not a literary critic, although he seems enormously well read in intellectual history...
...Rather, one is inclined to see them as adumbrations of Invisible Man...
Vol. 44 • July 1997 • No. 3
