The World and the Jug

...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 requires real poverty of the imagination to think that this can come to a Negro only through the example of other Negroes, especially after the performance of the slaves in recreating themselves, in good part, out of the images and myths of the Old Testament Jews...

...Black Boy is not a sociological case history but an autobiography, and therefore a work of art shaped by a writer bent upon making an ideological point...

...Both are true Negro Americans, and both affirm the broad possibility of personal realization which I see as a saving aspect of American life...

...Here environment is all-and interestingly enough, environment conceived solely in terms of the physical, the non-conscious...

...Still I would write my own books and they would be in themselves, implicitly, criticisms of Wright's...

...Books which seldom, if ever, mentioned Negroes were to release me from whatever "segregated" idea I might have had of my human possibilities...

...We must express "black" anger and "clenched militancy...

...Speaking from the black wrath of retribution, Wright insisted that history can be a punishment...

...These were works which, by fulfilling themselves as works of art, by being satisfied to deal with life in terms of their own sources of power, were able to give me a broader sense of life and possibility...

...as one man's essay in defining the human condition as seen from a specific Negro perspective at a given time in a given place...

...Must I be condemned because my sense of Negro life was quite different...

...Thus he, too, in a limited way, is his own creation...

...1 saw that what had been taken for our emotional strength was our negative confusions, our flights, our fears, our frenzy under pressure...

...In Native Son Wright began with the ideological proposition that what whites think of the Negro's reality is more important than what Negroes themselves know it to be...

...Two days after arriving in New York I was to read Malraux's Man's Fate and The Days of Wrath, and after these how could I be impressed by Wright as an ideological novelist...

...He seems never to have considered that American Negro life (and here he is encouraged by certain Negro "spokesmen") is, for the Negro who must live it, not only a burden (and not always that) but also a discipline-just as any human life which has endured so long is a discipline teaching its own insights into the human condition, its own strategies of survival...

...And Wright, for all of his indictments, was no less its product than that other talented Mississippian, Leontyne Price...

...The same is true of James Baldwin, who is not the product of a Negro storefront church but of the library, and the same is true of me...

...I would also have pointed out that the American Negro novelist is himself "inherently ambiguous...

...Howe seems to see segregation as an opaque steel jug with the Negroes inside waiting for some black messiah to come along and blow the cork...

...Well, it all sounds quite familiar and I fear the social order which it forecasts more than I do that of Mississippi...

...Wright is his hero and he sticks with him loyally...

...For, in his zeal to champion Wright, it is as though he felt it necessary to stage a modern version of the biblical myth of Noah, Ham, Shem and Japheth (based originally, I'm told, on a castration ritual), with first Baldwin and then Ellison acting out the impious role of Ham: Baldwin by calling attention to NoahWright's artistic nakedness in his famous essays, "Everybody's Protest Novel" (1949) and "Many Thousands Gone" (1951...

...to make identifications as to values and human quality...

...etc...

...it made impossible a repetition of the old lies...

...It was a lesson, said Wright, with a touch of bitterness yet not without kindness, that the younger writers would have to learn in their own way and their own time...

...While Howe agrees with Baldwin that "literature and sociology are not one and the same," he notes nevertheless that, "it is equally true that such statements hardly begin to cope with the problem of how a writer's own experience affects his desire to represent human affairs in a work of fiction...

...Kill my parents and throw me on the mercy of the court as an orphan...

...And in this, although I saw with the black vision of Ham, I was, I suppose, as pious as Shem and Japheth...

...But what have these to do with the way Negroes feel, with the power of the memories they must surely retain...

...He must live it and try consciously to grasp its complexity until he can change it...

...But these defects Howe forgives because of the books "clenched militancy...

...Wright saw to that...

...One wishes he had stopped there...

...In his myth Howe takes the roles of both Shem and Japheth, trying mightily (his face turned backward so as not to see what it is he's veiling) to cover the old man's bare belly, and then becoming Wright's voice from beyond the grave by uttering the curses which Wright was too ironic or too proud to have uttered himself-at least in print: In response to Baldwin and Ellison, Wright would have said (I virtually quote the words he used in talking to me during the summer of 1958) that only through struggle could men with black skins, and for that matter, all the oppressed of the world, achieve their humanity...

...Wright remembered, and what he remembered other Negroes must also have remembered...

...Surely, this much can be admitted without denying the injustice which all three of us have protested...

...Being older and familiar with quite different lions in quite different paths, I simply stepped around him...

...Ralph Ellison is the author of the novel...

...But I believe that true novels, even when most pessimistic and bitter, arise out of an impulse to celebrate human life and therefore are ritualistic and ceremonial at their core...

...But if we are in a jug it is transparent, not opaque, and one is allowed not only to see outside but to read of what is going on out there...

...What, coming 18 years after Native Son and 13 years after World War II, does this rather limp cliché mean...

...To me Wright as writer was less interesting than the enigma he personified...

...And when I brooded upon the cultural barrenness of black life...

...Because it is his life and no mere abstraction in someone's head...

...Finally, why is it that so many of those who would tell us the meaning of Negro life never bother to learn how varied it really is...

...Andre Malraux First, three questions: Why is it so often true that when critics confront the American as Negro they suddenly drop their advanced critical armament and revert with an air of confident superiority to quite primitive modes of analysis...

...it brought into the open . . . the fear and violence that have crippled and may yet destroy our culture...

...Because it is human life...

...Yet Howe writes: When Negro liberals write that despite the prevalence of bias there has been an improvement in the life of their people, such statements are reasonable and necessary...

...Ellison also offends by having the narrator of Invisible Man speak of his life (Howe either missing the irony or assuming that / did) as one of "infinite possibilities" while living in a hole in the ground...

...Howe begins by attacking Baldwin's rejection in "Everybody's Protest Novel" of the type of literature he labeled "protest fiction" (Uncle Tom's Cabin and Native Son being prime examples), and which he considered incapable of dealing adequately with the complexity of Negro experience...

...All that has happened since bears him out...

...And to Baldwin's statement that one writes "out of one thing only-one's own experience," (I would have added, for the novelist, this qualification: one's own experience as understood and ordered through one's knowledge of self, culture and literature), Howe, appearing suddenly in blackface, replies with a rhetorical sweep of his own: What, then, was the experience of a man with a black skin, what could it be here in this country...

...Wright believed in the much abused idea that novels are "weapons"-the counterpart of the dreary notion, common among most minority groups, that novels are instruments of good public relations...

...But Howe's ideas notwithstanding, history is history, cultural contacts ever mysterious, and taste exasperatingly personal...

...There arc also negative criticisms: that the book is "crude," "melodramatic" and marred by "claustrophobia" of vision, that its characters are "cartoons...

...Why is it that sociologyoriented critics seem to rate literature so far below politics and ideology that they would rather kill a novel than modify their presumptions concerning a given reality which it seeks in its own terms to project...

...It has also taught me something of the cost of being an individual who aspires to conscious eloquence...

...Wright was able to free himself in Mississippi because he had the imagination and the will to do so...

...I asked myself if these human qualities were not fostered, won, struggled and suffered for, preserved in ritual from one generation to another...

...How could a Negro put pen to paper, how could he so much as think or breathe, without some impulsion to protest, be it harsh or mild, political or private, released or buried...

...and must wait for the appearance of a Black Hope before they have the courage to move...

...It is a lively piece, written with something of the Olympian authority that characterized Hannah Arendt's "Reflections on Little Rock" in the Winter 1959 Dissent (a dark foreshadowing of the Eichmann blowup...

...And in addition to a hero, Richard Wright, it has two villains, James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, who are seen as "black boys" masquerading as false, self-deceived "native sons...

...even as it shapes his attitudes toward family, sex, love, religion...

...just as all novels of a given historical moment form an argument over the nature of reality and are, to an extent, criticisms each of the other...

...Howe is so committed to a sociological vision of society that he apparently cannot see (perhaps because he is dealing with Negroes-although not because he would suppress us socially or politically, for in fact he is anxious to end such suppression) that whatever the efficiency of segregation as a socio-political arrangement, it has been far from absolute on the level of culture...

...And earlier: "If such younger novelists as Baldwin and Ralph Ellison were able to move beyond Wright's harsh naturalism toward more supple modes of fiction, that was only possible because Wright had been there first, courageous enough to release the full weight of his anger...

...It is a tradition which abhors as obscene any trading on one's own anguish for gain or sympathy...

...Can't I be allowed to release my own...

...And I was proud to have known Wright and happy for the impact he had made upon our apathy...

...or even, merely, a Negro writer.' " Baldwin's elected agency for self-achievement would be the novel-as it turns out, it was the essay and the novel-but the novel, states Howe, "is an inherently ambiguous genre: it strains toward formal autonomy and can seldom avoid being public gesture...

...He implies that Negroes can only aspire to contest other Negroes (this at a time when Baldwin has been taking on just about everyone, including Hemingway, Faulkner and the U.S...

...Thus they have the obligation of freeing themselves-whoever their allies might be-by depending upon the validity of their own experience for an accurate picture of the reality which they seek to change, and for a gauge of the values they would see made manifest...

...Southern whites cannot walk, talk, sing, conceive of laws or justice, think of sex, love, the family or freedom without responding to the presence of Negroes...

...Ellison by rejecting "narrow naturalism" as a fictional method, and by alluding to the "diversity, fluidity and magical freedom of American life" on that (for him at least) rather magical occasion when he was awarded the National Book Award...

...It takes fortitude to be a man and no less to be an artist...

...For even as his life toughens the Negro, even as it brutalizes him, sensitizes him, dulls him, goads him to anger, moves him to irony, sometimes fracturing and sometimes affirming his hopes...

...Which brings me to the most distressing aspect of Howe's thinking: his Northern white liberal version of the white Southern myth of absolute separation of the races...

...But without arguing Wright's right to his personal vision, I would say that he was himself a better argument for my approach than Bigger was for his...

...I must say that this brought a shock of recognition...

...Whenever I thought of the essential bleakness of black life in America, I knew that Negroes had never been allowed to catch the full spirit of Western civilization, that they lived somehow in it but not of it...

...No longer mere victim or rebel, the Negro would stand free in a self-achieved humanity...

...I was freed not by propagandists or by the example of Wright-I did not know him at the time and was earnestly trying to learn enough to write a symphony and have it performed by the time I was 26, because Wagner had done so and I admired his music-but by composers, novelists and poets who spoke to me of more interesting and freer ways of life...

...I could not and cannot question their existence, I can only seek again and again to project that humanity as I see it and feel it...

...A REPLY TO IRVING HOWE The World and the Jug By Ralph Ellison What runs counter to the revolutionary convention is, in revolutionary histories, suppressed more imperiously than embarrassing episodes in private memoirs, and by the same obscure forces...

...He was as much a product of his reading as of his painful experiences, and he made himself a writer by subjecting himself to the writer's discipline-as he understood it...

...He is no mere product of his socio-political predicament...

...It is not for me to judge Wright's courage, but I must ask just why it was possible for me to write as I write "only" because Wright released his anger...

...It was Baldwin's career, not mine, that Wright proudly advanced by helping him attain the Eugene Saxton Fellowship, and it was Baldwin who found Wright a lion in his path...

...Ironically, during the 1940s it was one of the main sources of Wright's rage and frustration...

...A blow at the black man, the novel forced him to recognize the cost of his submission...

...So in Macon County, Alabama, 1 read Marx, Freud, T. S. Eliot, Pound, Gertrude Stein and Hemingway...

...Native Son assaulted the most cherished of American vanities: the hope that the accumulated injustices of the past would bring with it no lasting penalties, the fantasy that in his humilation the Negro somehow retained a sexual potency . . . that made it necessary to envy and still more to suppress him...

...Wright could imagine Bigger, but Bigger could not possibly imagine Richard Wright...

...What does Howe know of my acquaintance with violence, or the shape of my courage or the intensity of my anger...

...But Wright was a friend for whose magazine I wrote my first book review and short story, and a personal hero in the same way Hot Lips Page and Jimmy Rushing were friends and heroes...

...What values emerging from Negro experience does he try to affirm...

...As he strains toward self-achievement as artist (and here he can only "integrate" and free himself), he moves toward fulfilling his dual potentialities as Negro and American...

...Thank God, I have never been quite that literary...

...Doubtlessly, this was the beginning of Wright's exile, the making of a decision which was to shape his life and writing thereafter...

...To whom does he address his work...

...Since he "knew" Negro experience better than I, I could not convince him that he might be wrong...

...And it is precisely at this point that Wright is being what I would call, in Howe's words, "literary to a fault...

...Well, cut off my legs and call me Shorty...

...How does the Negro writer participate as a writer in the struggle for human freedom...

...Some 12 years ago, a friend argued with me for hours that I could not possibly write a novel because my experience as a Negro had been too excruciating to allow me to achieve that psychological and emotional distance necessary to artistic creation...

...But if you would tell me who I am, at least take the trouble to discover what I have been...

...In his effort to resuscitate Wright, Irving Howe would designate the role which Negro writers are to play more rigidly than any Southern politician-and for the best of reasons...

...Further, in the platonic sense he is his own father and the culture hero who freed Ellison and Baldwin to write more "modulated" prose...

...His claims for Native Son arc quite broad: The day [it] appeared, American culture was changed forever...

...What moves a writer to eloquence is less meaningful than what he makes of it...

...Evidently Howe feels that unrelieved suffering is the only "real" Negro experience, and that the true Negro writer must be ferocious...

...He is a product of the interaction between his racial predicament, his individual will and the broader American cultural freedom in which he finds his ambiguous existence...

...A blow at the white man, the novel forced him to recognize himself as an oppressor...

...Need my skin blind me to all other values...

...About this we know very little and would be well advised not to nourish preconceptions, for their feelings may well be closer to Wright's rasping outbursts than to the more modulated tones of the younger Negro novelists...

...Howe is impressed by Wright's pioneering role and by the ". . . enormous courage, the discipline of selfconquest required to conceive Bigger Thomas...

...Thus they would preserve as they destroy, affirm as they reject...

...He told us the one thing even the most liberal whites preferred not to hear: that Negroes were far from patient or forgiving, that they were scarred by fear, that they hated every moment of their suppression even when seeming most acquiescent, and that often enough they hated us, the decent and cultivated white men who from complicity or neglect shared in the responsibility of their plight...

...But there is also an American Negro tradition which teaches one to deflect racial provocation and to master and contain pain...

...Indeed, very early in Black Boy Wright's memory and his contact with literature come together in a way revealing, at least to the eye concerned with Wright the literary man, that his manner of keeping faith with the Negroes who remained in the depths is quite interesting: (After I had outlived the shocks of childhood, after the habit of reflection had been born in me, I used to mull over the strange absence of real kindness in Negroes, how unstable was our tenderness, how lacking in genuine passion we were, how void of great hope, how timid our joy, how bare our traditions, how hollow our memories, how lacking we were in those intangible sentiments that bind man to man and how shallow was even our despair...

...Hence Bigger Thomas was presented as a near-subhuman indictment of white oppression...

...As Baldwin put it some years later, he hoped to 'prevent himself from becoming merely a Negro...

...that he could so dissociate himself from the complexity of his background while trying so hard to improve the condition of black men everywhere...

...For just as How Bigger was Born is Wright's Jamesian preface to Native Son, the passage quoted above is his paraphrase of Henry James' catalogue of those items of a high civilization which were absent from American life during Hawthorne's day, and which seemed so necessary in order for the novelist to function...

...How much, by the way, do we know of Sophocles' wounds...

...These questions are aroused by "Black Boys and Native Sons," an essay by Irving Howe, the well-known critic and editor of Dissent, in the Autumn 1963 issue of that magazine...

...most of all we should not become too interested in the problems of the art of literature, even though it is through these that we seek our individual identities...

...No, Wright was no spiritual father of mine, certainly in no sense I recognize-nor did he pretend to be, since he felt that I had started writing too late...

...Or because for me keeping faith would never allow me to even raise such a question about any segment of humanity...

...Nor is it clear what is meant by the last sentence-or is it that today Baldwin has come to out-Wrighting Richard'.' The real questions seem to be...

...Similarly, no matter how strictly Negroes are segregated socially and politically, on the level of the imagination their ability to achieve freedom is limited only by their individual aspiration, insight, energy and will...

...I started with the primary assumption that men with black skins, having retained their humanity before all of the conscious efforts made to dehumanize them, especially following the Reconstruction, are unquestionably human...

...The 'sociology' of his existence forms a constant pressure on his literary work, and not merely in the way this might be true of any writer, but with a pain and ferocity that nothing could remove...

...Attorney General...

...And in that way he kept faith with the experience of the boy who had fought his way out of the depths, to speak for those who remained there...

...If so there are no exemptions...

...Wright, for Howe, is the genuine article, the authentic Negro writer, and his tone the only authentic tone...

...It would seem to me, therefore, that the question of how the "sociology of his existence" presses upon a Negro writer's work depends upon how much of his life the individual writer is able to transform into art...

...Thus Baldwin's formula evades "through rhetorical sweep, the genuinely difficult issue of the relationship between social experience and literature...

...He is currently teaching literature at Rutgers University...

...I suggest that my credentials are at least as valid as Wright's, even though he began writing long before I did, and it is possible that I have lived through and committed even more violence than he...

...And so, to be fair and as inclusive as Howe, is James Baldwin...

...And between writing well and being ideologically militant, we must choose militancy...

...How awful that Wright found the facile answers of Marxism before he learned to use literature as a means for discovering the forms of American Negro humanity...

...Crucial to this view is the belief that their resistance to provocation, their coolness under pressure, their sense of timing and their tenacious hold on the ideal of their ultimate freedom are indispensable values in the struggle, and are at least as characteristic of American Negroes as the hatred, fear and vindictiveness which Wright chose to emphasize...

...IN HIS loyalty to Richard Wright, Howe considers Ellison and Baldwin guilty of filial betrayal because, in their own work, they have rejected the path laid down by Native Son, phonies because, while actually "black boys," they pretend to be mere American writers trying to react to something of the pluralism of their predicament...

...Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1952...

...But why strip Wright of his individuality in order to criticize other writers...

...After I had learned other ways of life I used to brood upon the unconscious irony of those who felt that Negroes led so passional an existence...

...Indeed, I understand a bit more about myself as Negro because literature has taught me something of my identity as Western man, as political being...

...While I rejected Bigger Thomas as any final image of Negro personality, I recognized Native Son as an achievement...

...even as it modulates his humor, tempers his joy-it conditions him to deal with his life and with himself...

...Howe must wait for an autobiography before he can be responsibly certain...

...To deny in the interest of revolutionary posture that such possibilities of human richness exist for others, even in Mississippi, is not only to deny us our humanity but to betray the critic's commitment to social reality...

...I felt no need to attack what I considered the limitations of his vision because I was quite impressed by what he had achieved...

...Everybody wants to tell us what a Negro is, yet few wish, even in a joke, to be one...

...This, then, was Wright's list of those items of high humanity which he found missing among Negroes...

...Wright himself is given a diversity of roles (all conceived by Howe): He is not only the archetypal and true-blue black boy -the "honesty" of his famous autobiography established this for Howe-but the spiritual father of Ellison, Baldwin and all other Negroes of literary bent to come...

...Howe admires Wright's accomplishments, and is frankly annoyed by the more favorable evaluation currently placed upon the works of the younger men...

...I would have said that it is always a public gesture, though not necessarily a political one...

...He was designed to shock whites out of their apathy and end the circumstances out of which Wright insisted Bigger emerged...

...There is a fullness, even a richness here...

...He had his memories and I have mine, just as I suppose Irving Howe has hisor has Marx spoken the final word for him...

...Critics who do so should abandon literature for politics...

...that he could be so wonderful an example of human possibility but could not for ideological reasons depict a Negro as intelligent, as creative or as dedicated as himself...

...Perhaps it takes even more if the black man would be an artist...

...I wondered if clean, positive tenderness, love, honor, loyalty, and the capacity to remember were native with man...

...One unfamiliar with what Howe stands for would get the impression that when he looks at a Negro he sees not a human being but an abstract embodiment of living hell...

...Howe, noting that this was the beginning of Baldwin's career, sees the essay's underlying motive as a declaration of Baldwin's intention to transcend "the sterile categories of 'Negroness' whether those enforced by the white world or those defensively erected by the Negroes themselves...

...and here despite the realities of politics, perhaps, but nevertheless here and real...

...must live it as he changes it...