Artists and Freedom

...Reviewed by Nathan Glick T know of no writing about the pre--1 dicament of the Negro artist that is as straightforward or large-spirited as this collection of Ralph Ellison's essays and interviews...

...Nor was his father immune to this vision, having named the boy Ralph Waldo, after the essayist and poet, and thereby provided the occasion for the splendidly tortuous autobiographical essay, "Hidden Name and Complex Fate...

...There are weaknesses in Dabbs' approach, of most of which he is plainly aware...

...W. J. Cash's The Mind of the South states essentially the same case more astringently, and Harry Ashmore has commented pertinently on the emergence of the urban South...

...However, even this will suffice for what is to follow...

...Essentially his Southerner differs little from Robert Penn Warren's picture of a man who is primarily characterized by his fear of abstraction and his devotion to the actual, the literal, and the immediate...

...Ellison finds the embattled vision of the Negro as totally trapped by brutality and segregation (and therefore incapable of any achievement apart from the struggle for freedom) to be more dangerous and damaging to Negro artists than the outright hostility of Jim Crow...

...At times, Ellison's determination to be precise and faithful to his own experience gives his style a certain pedantry...

...The review is, unavoidably, a hasty one, and the reader, if he has no prior acquaintance with the subject, may get only a dim and general notion of the subject...

...Others seem to feel that they can air with impunity their most private Freudian fantasies as long as they are given the slightest camouflage of intellectuality and projected as 'Negro.' They have made of the no-man's land created by segregation a territory for infantile self-expression and intellectual anarchy...

...For both showed the dangers of a personal religion that can separate itself from the social conscience and from action...

...The Southern literary renaissance is a crucial fact for the modem South and one that should not be unheeded or unheard...

...True novels," Ellison writes in one of his essays, "even when most pessimistic and bitter, arise out of an impulse to celebrate life...

...The Southerner has responded to the difficult or the intolerable with Stoic acceptance rather than Christian conscience, and he has produced neither poets nor saints, and, therefore, failed to judge himself against standards that would make him uncomfortable with his assumptions and attitudes...

...Notions of 'Race' Heredity and the Nature of Man, by Theodosius Dobzhansky...

...But his occasional awkwardness is more than outweighed by the absence of pose and the sober eloquence that adds a majestic note to plain argument...

...But this is not the image aspiring or talented Negroes live by at all...

...Indeed, one of Dabbs' weaknesses is that he who lamented the absence of the poet's voice in the Nineteenth Century South pays so little attention to that voice in the Twentieth Century when it is there to be heard...

...Obviously these opinions won't endear him to literary sensibilities addicted to apocalypse and alienation...

...Although Ellison has abandoned the trumpet for the typewriter, he still reaches back to the blues to explain the best writing done by Negroes...

...In one of the charming and telling reminiscences that salt these essays, Ellison recalls how in his native Oklahoma City he and six other young Negro friends naturally conceived of themselves as Renaissance Men, for whom all things were possible...

...For all the nightmarish reality the young hero encounters, his process of education is told with a zest and curiosity that impose their own reality...

...The problem of the South, as Dabbs sees it, is essentially the problem of a section seeking to establish community on a basis which excludes a significant portion of its people because their skin is black, whether they are slaves, freed-men, or citizens...

...4.75...

...Ellison's argument is simple enough: that the Negro, whatever his special disadvantages, has the same need for dignity and achievement and the same range of aspirations as the white man...

...Dabbs himself actually realizes or is willing to assume...

...For a Negro to accept an image of himself solely or even primarily in terms of his differences and handicaps tends to abort his natural reactions, ambitions, and sense of possibilities...

...Once more the literary artist has anticipated him, for this is the major theme in the work of Flannery O'Connor, and even in poetry like John C. Ransom's "Antique Harvesters" and Allen Tate's "Ode to the Confederate Dead...

...He feels that the Southerners fell into a Scotch-Irish "puritanism" which was essentially personal, subjective, non-communal, and that it has betrayed the essential sense of unity of man with God, with nature, and with his fellow men which must undergird a strong and free society...

...They write as though Negro life exists only in the light of their belated regard, and they publish interpretations of Negro experience which would not hold true for their own or for any other form of human life...

...Rarely has a region had its past viewed with a more deep-seated love and compassion wedded to a stronger sense of the weaknesses of its past and present than Dabbs here employs...

...Dabbs' major contribution is in his addition of a religious element as a major part of the structure of Southern life...

...The ultimate value of his book—and that value is great—is the clarity with which it shows a cultured, learned, and thoughtful Southerner wrestling with the great moral and ethical issues which the history and the present stance of his deeply beloved South create...

...398 pp...

...As a youngster he practiced to be a jazz trumpeter and then, without losing his affection for jazz, turned to serious study of composition at Tus-kegee Institute...

...Harcourt, Brace & World...

...The blues," he says in an early essay on Richard Wright's Black Boy, "is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism...

...What Thomas Wolfe and William Faulkner have portrayed of their region is fully as valuable as what the Southern historian has said...

...Since this definition applies equally well to a large portion of modern fiction written by whites, it is possible that just as Negro artists should feel free to choose any influences that serve their craft, white artists may find in Negro music and literature reflections of their own experience...

...Before getting down to the meat of the book, Dobzhansky gives a review of the mechanics of the process of inheritance, as presently understood...

...Dobzhansky's task is, primarily, not...

...nor will his defense of the mass media...

...The largest is that the South which he describes is the South of the Atlantic Coast...

...Dabbs argues that the South has always had a regional identity through its love of the land, its concentration on practical issues, and its deep respect for concreteness...

...He includes a funny piece, "Living With Music," about a cold but noisy war he fought years later, with a hi-fi set as his only weapon, against an indefatigable soprano in the apartment above...

...179 pp...

...C. Vann Woodward in his several studies of the post-Civil War South has defined many of the same issues...

...Dabbs writes beautifully and convincingly as a philosopher of history, but his work—as historical philosophy often is—is remarkably abstract and generalized...

...His Invisible Man, still the most brilliant and wide-ranging novel by an American Negro, stands as testimony to his wise choice of "ancestors...

...by James McBride Dabbs...

...Many of those who write of Negro life today seem to assume that as long as their hearts are in the right place they can be as arbitrary as they wish in their formulations...

...The South's Mystique Who Speaks for the South...

...The failure here, Dabbs feels, is essentially religious...

...Ellison makes a useful distinction between relatives and ancestors: "while one can do nothing about choosing one's relatives, one can, as artist, choose one's 'ancestors.' " Thus Negro writers like Richard Wright and Langston Hughes, who encouraged young Ellison, were "relatives," while Hemingway, Malraux, Dostoievsky, and Faulkner, whom he was able to read even in Alabama, were his literary masters...

...Much of Dabbs' thesis has already been developed by others, as he knows...

...He recalls that he was introduced to literature through Westerns, detective novels, pulp magazines, the newspaper columns of O. O. Mclntyre, and copies of Vanity Fair and the Literary Digest which his mother brought home from work...

...Although in it he pays his respects to the postwar existential modes, the power of the book comes from its traditionally adventurous view of experience...

...He senses but does not define the extent to which the ideals of this region—which were expressed in Virginia and South Carolina, which were shaped by the Eighteenth Century Enlightenment, and which helped to make the democratic nation—underwent major change in being transported to Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana...

...Reviewed by C. Hugh Holman In Who Speaks for the South...

...Funk and Wag-nalls...

...This would seem to be elementary scripture for the liberal modern mind...

...Thus his historical examination of the problem is less complete than one might wish, for it omits a major historical change...

...In his polemic with Irving Howe on this issue, the most supple and passionate statement in the book, Ellison rejects a wide range of efforts to pin down the Negro...

...James McBride Dabbs seeks in the religious, historical, and cultural roots of the southeastern United States the qualities of mind and attitude that merged with the accidents of history to place the Negro in the center of the problem of the South from before the Missouri Compromise of 1820 to the racial violence of the 1960's...

...Ellison's musical tastes developed with equal catholicity...

...Finally, Dabbs' religious solution, with its value on a religious perception of man and society in a total sense, is remarkably close to that which Harriet Beecher Stowe advanced in Uncle Tom's Cabin and which Mark Twain illustrated in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn...

...Reviewed by Isaac Asimov Qurely, in society today, there can ^ be few more frustrating tasks for a scientist to attempt than that of explaining, calmly and dispassionately, the true significance of the human variations that give rise .to the notion of "race...

...Because of this default, history has forced upon the Ne-go Southerner his role of poet-saint, and he becomes the region's hope and its spokesman—perhaps to a greater degree than Mr...

...William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom], in which Thomas Sutpen tries to create in Mississippi the order which he worshiped but was excluded from in Virginia, speaks with greater pertinence and with the authority of art on this subject...

...Yet much of Ellison's book is aimed at well-intentioned white liberals as well as doctrinaire Negroes who, in their excess of sympathy or in their yielding to bitterness, deny to Negroes the instinct for a full life, including the life of the imagination...

...Yet if it must be done, if some scientist is to undertake the task, few are as well-equipped for the purpose as Theodosius Dobzhansky...