Artist as Hero

...Invisible Man was the one novel he would complete in his life, a book that was immediately recognized as the powerful and subtle and richly complex work that it is...

...Speculating on the bust-up of Ellison's first marriage, his biographer writes: "Perhaps his coldness and cruelty—the result of his own lifetime of suffering—had worn her down...

...In this, he joins a long tradition of writers...

...Did I neglect to mention that he was a misogynist, pretentious, and without elementary sympathy for the young...

...From here it is a short hop to the fact that, in his winning the National Book Award for Invisible Man, Ellison "was lucky in having three young, progressive Jewish writers on the [judging] panel...

...I was not, though my single, utterly delightful meeting with Ralph Ellison, a four-and-a-half hour lunch he stood me to at the Century Association in New York, is duly recorded on page 516...

...He was befriended by Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, both of whom turned his ambitions away from music, and a passing interest in sculpture, and onto literature...

...He wanted to live the WASP life, at least as he imagined it...

...Gore Vidal and Fred Dupee (a once-famous teacher in the English Department at Columbia) thought Ralph was "pompous and overbearing...

...he was an elitist, insofar as he believed in the importance of pursuing the best in Western and American Negro folk culture above all others...

...Arnold Rampersad does not entirely ignore such problems and issues in Ellison's life and in America itself...

...Reading Rampersad's highly tendentious biography has had, at least on this reader, the reverse effect its author intended: It has convinced me that Ralph Ellison was an even greater man than I had thought...

...Ellison's correspondence, diaries, income tax forms, financial life generally have all been carefully scrutinized by his biographer...

...This, really, is the charge, the organizing principle behind Arnold Rampersad's attack on Ralph Ellison: He was a disgrace to the Negro (now African-American) profession...

...of his love for the black culture in which he was born and his deep understanding of its true richness...

...The novel lent him renown of a kind that he was able to live off for the remainder of his life (he died in 1994, at the age of 81...

...But possibly the saddest thing to have happened to Ralph Ellison came after he died, when the assignment of writing his biography was given to Arnold Rampersad...

...Kingsley Amis made this mistake in writing Lucky Jim, which he never topped, but Amis went on to write a long line of less good novels...

...Perhaps it is not a good idea to write a great book the first time out...

...he never even had an African in his and his wife's home...

...as an essayist, he commanded a prose style that seemed neither black nor white, but instead was authoritative, elegant, above race, in the best sense...

...He portrays Ralph Ellison as a thoughtless son...

...He held to a line of "liberal cosmopolitanism," which meant that he remained committed to the grandeur of high modernism in art and cultivated friendly contact with whites...

...The list goes on: He didn't care for the dark, often drug-driven Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker strain in jazz, preferring the music of Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong...

...in their view he was, as sixties radicals liked to say, part of the problem...

...But then, American literary ambition operates differently than English: Can You Top This...

...At the most trivial level, Ramp-ersad describes Ellison wearing a fedora in a photograph on the cover of the Atlantic "covering his baldness...

...Invisible Man was a novel that not only won all the prizes of its day, but in 1965, in a poll of critics and writers, was voted the most distinguished American novel written since World War II...

...Thomas Heg-gen, who wrote Mr...

...He was cold to Toni Morrison, Rampersad reports...

...But in Ralph Ellison, far from being reverential or uncritical, he is unrelenting in the persistence of his pinpoint attacks on his subject's character and politics and highly critical of much of his writing, only rarely giving his subject the least hint of the benefit of any possible doubt...

...Ralph Ellison did consider himself, above all, an artist...

...Ivan Turgenev, who felt as Ellison did, wrote: "I pay attention to politics only in so far as a writer is called upon to depict contemporary life must...

...The only black artist that he praised without qualification was the painter Romare Bearden...

...Everything in this indictment is true...

...Joseph Epstein is the author, most recently, of Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy's Guide...

...Redemption isn't Ramp-ersad's game...

...And he had done so in proportion to his distancing himself from his fellow blacks...

...He argued for the need for a solid black middle class...

...He tended to be optimistic in matters of race...

...Because of his stand on racial matters, he was often under attack by militant younger blacks, who accused him of being a sellout, calling him an Uncle Tom...

...Poor Ellison puffed away on his always-almost-nearly-completed second novel for more than 40 years...

...The rhetoric of public rage and the tactics of easy demagoguery never impressed Ellison, who held a low view of those who specialized in it, which included Malcolm X, LeRoi Jones (later, in his anti-Semitic phase, known as Amiri Baraka), and the youthful advocates of the Black Power movement...

...So what looked from the distance to be a charmed life was, viewed from closer up, a complicated, in some ways even a quite sad, life...

...is the name of the game as it is played here...

...Then there was the blasted question of the second novel, the novel to follow Invisible Man that, like Godot, was long awaited but never arrived...

...he rejected the Moynihan Report, arguing that Daniel Patrick Moynihan "looked at a fatherless family, and interpreted it not in the context of Negro cultural patterns, but in a white cultural pattern...

...he did believe in the ideal of integration of the races in America, with blacks never losing the valuable cultural experience that was theirs alone...

...His first ambition was to become a composer of classical music...

...He was early on to "the shrewd cultivation of whites on which Ralph, eager to succeed and optimistic about human nature, would build much of his success...

...the number of its pages was reported (by Ellison) to be in the thousands...

...He was not for affirmative action, even thought it in fact likely to be deleterious to young blacks...

...This biography is, in short, a lynching, and the coarse rope used to hang the victim is political correctness...

...Other than that he was not at all a bad guy...

...As a novelist, he had lost his way...

...he also played trumpet...

...Invisible Man was Ralph Ellison's first extended work of fiction...

...He wrote journalism and criticism for The New Masses and other party publications...

...Enchanted cigarettes" is what Balzac called books writers dream about but never get around to writing...

...He really didn't know many blacks, Rampersad contends, though he allows that Ellison's two closest friends, Albert Murray and Nathan Scott, were black...

...Bits and pieces of it appeared in little magazines...

...He was a spendthrift (on himself), a cheapskate (when it came to other people), a snob, an elitist, an ingrate, ill-tempered...

...instead he sets out to nail his subject more firmly to the cross by filling us in on all his personal peccad-dilos...

...He could be quite properly ticked, sometimes to the point of rage, when he felt himself the victim of racial discrimination...

...The torture of this great failure for Ellison must have been always present, souring all his private achievements...

...His greatness consisted of his never suggesting, when so many people would have been pleased to hear him do so, that America was a racist country and every black person in it born a victim...

...Rampersad has put together what at times feels like a day-to-day chronicle of the life of a writer who, increasingly as the years passed, did less and less writing...

...he knew, too, that, though things in the North were better, race prejudice remained very much a going concern there, too...

...His response to the death of Martin Luther King "would remain muted...

...At the same time, Ellison felt it important to keep a careful distance from full engagement with political action, and never sought to be a spokesman for his people...

...of his relentlessly insisting that we all make our own way, each with the unpredictable combination of gifts and talents and temperament that culture and race and nationality bestow...

...Of course, Ellison knew that the Jim Crow laws in the South were intolerable, for he grew up under them...

...The theme of Ralph Ellison is set out on the book's second page: Clinging fearlessly and stubbornly to the ideal of harmonious racial integration in America, [Ellison] found it hard to negotiate the treacherous currents of American life in the volatile 1960s and 1970s...

...After working at various servile jobs, he was able to scrimp up enough money to go off—riding the rails, hobo-fashion, to get there—to Tuskegee Institute in Alabama...

...Sometimes he spoke as if there were things more important than race: "Here's to integration," he wrote in later years to one of his teachers at Tuskegee, "the only integration that matters: integration of the personality...

...apropos of a woman with whom Ellison had an affair, Ramp-ersad notes that "he was already a cautious man [whose] instinct was to avoid risk...

...and finally, in the realm of art, he saw no reason to favor, or even lend particular sympathy, to black writers simply because they happened to be black...

...He loathed the notion of blacks as pure victims, which gained currency during the 1960s...

...Instead, Ellison relentlessly insisted on the complexity of Negro (a word he took and used as an honorific) experience in a pluralist America he hoped would continue along an integrationist path...

...He "refused to blame [the poverty and squalor of Pakistan and India] on European colonialism...

...The artist is always interested in the exception that proves no rule...

...Invisible Novel might cruelly be said to be his second...

...a large portion of it was said to have burned in a fire in his house in the Berkshires, though Ellison tended to exaggerate the extent of his loss...

...Most of these opinions, as we shall see, violate the canons of political correctness...

...how else would he come to hold such wretched opinions if, in the first place, he did not suffer grave flaws in character...

...of his keeping cool during a time of frenzy and easy rage while being insulted by many of the people who should have admired him most of all...

...He did encounter a few gifted teachers at Tuskegee and a librarian who befriended him and introduced him to the great modernist writers: T.S...

...For some of his critics, his life was finally a cautionary tale to be told against the dangers of elitism and alienation, especially alienation from other blacks...

...Eliot, Andre Malraux, James Joyce, and William Faulkner were the main figures in his literary pantheon...

...here Rampersad quotes William Styron saying that "Ralph had a deep-seated need to be a member of the establishment...

...Some of the parts were assembled after his death by his literary executor and editor, a man named John F. Cal-lahan, to form a disappointing book called Juneteenth...

...Just about everyone still alive who knew Ellison has been interviewed for this book...

...But Baldwin soon found another, more popular, way...

...He even claimed that "my problems are not primarily racial problems, that they are the problems of a writer...

...And, oh yes, he was a boring teacher—though, for some unexplained reason, he failed to sleep with his students...

...The developing countries, those in Africa prominent among them, meant little to him, or at least he failed publicly to voice his concern about them...

...The tip-off for the kind of book Rampersad has written comes in its blurbs, four of five of which are provided by writers who comprise the main body of the African American intellectual establishment in America: the literary critic and historian Henry Louis Gates Jr., the biographer (of W.E.B...

...As described by Rampersad, "he was attracting celebrities and many younger blacks alike with a combination of militancy and supplicating eloquence, his sensual hugging of America and yet his rejection of it...

...So strongly did he believe this that he even wrote a strongly negative review of Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma, even though the book was a strong argument against the injustice of American social arrangements to African Americans...

...The fame of Invisible Man brought Ralph Ellison lucrative university jobs (with little teaching required), gave him an allure as a candidate for membership on boards of various nonprofit organizations from the early National Council on the Arts to the founding of public television to the Williamsburg Foundation...

...Departing Tuskegee without a degree, Ellison moved to New York in the middle of the Depression, where he fell in with men and women connected to the Communist party...

...Although the book reads less powerfully today, having perhaps too heavy an anchor in the time of its creation, when the American Communist party was still a force and Jim Crow was a bird found aloft everywhere in American life, Invisible Man remains a dazzling achievement...

...His case against social science generally was that it treated people "as abstractions and ignored the complexity of actual experience...

...When the critic Irving Howe wrote an essay in the early 1960s suggesting that Ellison and (the not-yet-militant Baldwin) ought to write in the tradition of Negro protest, Ellison wrote a scorchingly brilliant reply that removed what remained of the scant hair on Howe's head: "The greatest difficulty for a Negro writer," Ellison wrote, "was the problem of revealing what he really felt, rather than serving up what Negroes were supposed to feel, and were encouraged to feel...

...This endless picking-away at Ralph Ellison's ostensible flaws, political and characterological, is finally put to the service of a literary criticism meant to supply the reason for Ellison's inability to complete a second novel: "His inability to create an art that held a clean mirror up to 'Negro' life as blacks actually led it," Rampersad writes, "especially at or near his own social level, was disabling him as a writer...

...Arnold Rampersad understands none of this, which is why, my guess is, his Ralph Ellison figures to be a strong candidate to win next year's Pulitzer Prize for biography...

...But what if he simply hadn't much regard for either Morrison or Baldwin, as a person or as a writer...

...It is probably still entitled to that accolade...

...He preferred to be called "Negro...

...Saul Bellow, always mindful of the possibility of malice extended to a fellow scribbler, once told me that Baldwin's problem was simple: "He wanted to be Martin Luther Queen...

...This enmity toward the social sciences plays throughout his career...

...Ellison did not think much of James Baldwin, who he thought was trying "to inflate his personal problem to the dimension of a national problem...

...He never opposed the Vietnam war, having felt indebted to Lyndon Johnson for his civil rights legislation and for his personal courtesy to him, Ellison...

...He did not cut himself off from blacks, but merely kept his distance from those whose calling card was the race card...

...And to complete the checklist, though he was generally liberal, "exuberant gay culture offended him...

...Rampersad's is a full-scale biography, running to 672 pages including scholarly apparatus, and has the dead, heavy feel of the definitive work on Ralph Ellison...

...The first is that Ralph Ellison knew African-American culture with a depth of understanding available to few others, and he demonstrated this in a number of brilliant pieces in his two essay collections (Shadow and Act and Going to the Territory...

...There's no difference between being fitted into this society and dying...

...At the most serious, and vicious, he writes that "each terrible event [referring to the riots and assassinations of 1968] meant, perversely, more prestige and money for Ralph" in honors and speaking fees...

...He used his friendship with John Cheever to get himself elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters...

...But the fact is, it was not close to finished—he could not give shape to all his scrib-blings on the book—and perhaps not really finishable...

...Rampersad highlights those flaws...

...He never says so directly, but it is clear that Rampersad would have preferred it had Ellison drop his critical scruples and got on the bus by showing a simpler, more direct solidarity with fellow blacks, no matter what their foibles...

...One has only to read Ellison on jazz and gospel music to realize how little cut off he was from African-American culture...

...This is unpersuasive, for various reasons...

...He had a low view of all-black colleges...

...Those may be fighting words, but they are also foolish and not in the least helpful ones...

...His inability to complete this book had to have been a crushing weight on Ellison, as an artist and as a man...

...Baldwin's fiction, much overrated, was described, accurately, by Truman Capote as "balls-achingly boring," though this hasn't stopped it from being enshrined in the Library of America...

...At Tuskegee he was stymied by lack of funds and a homosexual dean of students who made life difficult for him...

...Here, without the tedium of his repeated charges, is Rampersad's bill of complaint against Ralph Ellison: He was an ungrateful son, a bad brother, a cheating and otherwise often cruel husband, an unreliable friend...

...Artist as Hero Ralph Ellison, indivisible man by Joseph Epstein The novelist Ralph Ellison grew up, poor and black and (past the age of three) fatherless, in Oklahoma City under the reign of Jim Crow...

...Rampersad quotes, without comment, a standard Baldwin utterance: "I don't want to be fitted into this society...

...But literature for Ellison meant the novel...

...If one has to arrive at a reason for Ellison's failure to complete a second novel, my own best guess is that the enormous critical success of Invisible Man was too tough an act to follow...

...The author of two previous biographies—one of Jackie Robinson, another of Langston Hughes—Rampersad is an academic (a teacher at Princeton, now at Stanford), a writer one thinks of as reverential and hence quite uncritical toward his subjects...

...Once a member of the Century Association in New York, he put forth no fellow blacks and opposed the membership of women when it was up for a vote: "No women, and especially young black women," were among his inner circle of friends...

...Where, one wonders, was Maya...

...A man on the wrong side of so many right opinions cannot, surely, be very decent generally...

...Although Ralph Ellison had all the accoutrements of literary and intellectual success—those boards, lots of honorary degrees and other awards, high lecture fees and other emoluments that fall into the laps of the famous—his was far from a happy life...

...But the greater impression his biography leaves is of Ellison as a man of almost uniformly wrong, and therefore ultimately pernicious, opinions...

...Ellison, in fact, thought himself primarily an artist and, as such, felt that his art came before his politics...

...He and his wife had close friendships with Robert Penn Warren and Richard Wilbur and their wives—not, apparently, a good thing...

...he chose not to eulogize James Baldwin at his funeral...

...Ralph Ellison was an artist and an independent intellectual and he didn't want anyone to tell him what stands to take or how he ought to interpret his own experience as a Negro, an American, or a writer...

...He is always the operator...

...Du Bois) David Levering Lewis, the philosopher Cornel West, and the novelist Toni Morrison...

...Here are the opinions, or absence of acceptable opinions, for which Ramp-ersad holds Ellison at fault: He gave insufficient credit to the influence of the writers of the Harlem Renaissance on his own career...

...After publishing a number of short stories, he worked for more than seven years on Invisible Man, which he published in 1952, at the age of 39...

...For these same reasons, Ellison was an early opponent of sociology, with all its studies of how American blacks lived and felt and believed...

...With such ghastly opinions as these, is there anything that could redeem Ellison...

...also condescending, disloyal, a sloppy, sometimes mean, drunk...

...Such are the counts on which Rampersad puts Ralph Ellison on trial...

...Ellison insisted on the complexity of his own experience as a Negro, feeling that no one from outside that experience was in a position to interpret it...

...Roberts, and Ross Lockridge Jr., who wrote Raintree County, two enormous commercial successes, each killed himself because he couldn't finish a second work...

...Although he always saw himself as above all an artist, and published a dazzling book of cultural commentary in 1964 [Shadow and Act, a collection of essays], his later successes were relatively modest...

...The book is filled with useful information—in the Oklahoma City of Ralph Ellison's youth, blacks could buy clothes in shops owned by whites but were not allowed to try them on (nor, one assumes, return them if they were ill-fitting)—and is richly detailed about its subject's personal life...

...In a letter about Vermont to his friend Ida Guggenheimer he failed to mention "the tragic fate of the Algonquin and Iroquois nations...

...Although Rampersad does not do so in any large-scale way, the figure whose career Ralph Ellison's might be most profitably compared to is that of James Baldwin...

...As a young man, Baldwin wrote against the protest novel...

...Rampersad is excellent at finding quotations from others to use against Ellison...

...Ellison saw the latter as "a disruptive force that depended on insult, rage, and antagonism...

...The greater the ambition," remarked Stanley Crouch apropos of Ellison's inability to complete a second novel, "the greater the failure...

...The question is, Do any of them constitute real crimes, or do they bring honor to the man who has been put into the dock by his prosecutorial biographer...

...of his unflagging assertion that separatism, racial or any other kind, is always a mistake...

...In his play Purlie Victorious, Ossie Davis has one of his characters say to another, "You are a disgrace to the Negro profession...

...He didn't think Norman Mailer much of a writer, and thought that he and the Beats were "all trying to reduce the world to sex...

...In good part, his attractiveness to the people who made such appointments was that, during the most feverish days of the civil rights movement, he refused to conduct himself as angry or in any way as a victim...

...Ellison would, of course, have understood, for there were few things he disliked more than the notion of black establishments and an African-American profession...

...he abominated the heightened racial rhetoric of Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, and other of the young radical civil rights figures, rhetoric that is, alas, still occasionally put into play today...