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Books by Ralph Ellison
Invisible Man: A Novel
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The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison /
Juneteenth: A Novel /
Shadow and Act /
Flying Home and Others Stories
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Going to The Territory /
Trading Twelves; The Selected Letters of Ralph
Ellison and Albert Murray
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Arnold
Rampersad. Ralph
Ellison: A Biography
(2007) 686 pages
Book
Review by Kam Williams
“I
know by now that all my little triumphs are in reality
defeats.” Ralph Ellison, 1961
When Ralph Ellison
(1913-1994) won the National Book Award for
Invisible Man in
1953, little did he know that he’d never publish another
novel during his lifetime. Still, his acerbic
examination of racism through the eyes of a black man in
search of an identity was a masterpiece which
permanently established the author in the pantheon of
great African-American writers on the strength of this
contribution alone.
Ellison, a World War II
veteran and college dropout, would spend the next forty
years in a futile quest to replicate the success of that
literary feat. According to his biographer, Arnold
Rampersad, all the attention and accolades which arrived
in the wake of Invisible Man, probably prevented the
perfectionist from ever focusing on his work to the
degree necessary to attain the same level of excellence
again.
Rampersad, professor of
English at Stanford University, devotes almost 700 pages
to chronicling his subject’s confounding spiral towards
irrelevancy, if not obscurity. Fortunately, this
encyclopedic examination of the enigmatic Ellison’s life
proves to be fascinating, partially because Ralph was so
outspoken and given to making controversial,
conservative remarks which ultimately left him
ostracized by and estranged from the community he had
once so eloquently spoken for.
A black beatnik still
banging on his bongo, Daddy-o, long past the time when
his people had begun marching to the beat of a different
drum.
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Other Views
On the strength of just one novel, as well as a series
of lasting essays in cultural criticism, Ralph Ellison
stands as one of the major literary figures of the last
century. The novel, of course, is
Invisible Man, and
much of the drama of Ellison's life, as told by Arnold Rampersad in the first major biography of Ellison, is
twofold: how Ellison came to write his masterwork, and
how he failed to write another. Given complete access to
Ellison's papers, Rampersad tells the story of Ellison's
long apprenticeship as a musician and writer and his
long life, full of honors and frustrations, after the
great success of
Invisible Man, capturing the
complexities, to use of one of Ellison's favorite words,
of his elusive subject, at once passionate and
patrician, fiercely critical of his country's racial
divisions and stubbornly hopeful about its democratic
possibilities.
—Amazon.com
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Books by Arnold Rampersand
Jackie Robinson: A Biography /
Ralph
Ellison: A Biography /
The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes
The Life of Langston Hughes (vol. 1), !902-1941 /
The Life of Langston Hughes (Vol II), 1914-1967
Richard Wright: A Collection of Critical Essays /
The Art and Imagination of W.E.B. Du Bois
Slavery and the Literary Imagination
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Questions
for Arnold Rampersad
One of the leading
scholars of African American literature and the author
of major biographies of
Langston Hughes and
Jackie Robinson, Arnold Rampersad is an ideal
biographer for one of the great figures of 20th-century
American writing. We asked him a few questions about
Ralph Ellison.
Amazon.com: Ralph
Ellison came from Oklahoma—the
"Territory," as he liked to call it—and
in his essays he wrote evocatively of the conditions
there that nurtured his creative life (although he
rarely returned as an adult). What was Oklahoma like for
an ambitious but poor young African American like him?
Rampersad:
Ellison, who spent the first 20 years of his life in
Oklahoma, was intensely aware of the pioneers, white and
black, who had migrated toward the end of the 19th
century, from the South especially, into what had been
demarcated as "Indian" territory. These pioneers had
come first as homesteaders, then as founders of the
state of Oklahoma in 1907, six years before Ralph's
birth. For the rest of his life he carried with him a
keen, precious sense of Oklahoma as an extraordinary
American site, one that captured much of the complexity
of America as it had been shaped by frontier life.
Oklahoma City meant excellent jazz and the blues—black
culture in its artistic exuberance—as
in the pioneering jazz guitarist Charlie Christian (who
played later with Benny Goodman) and the equally famous
blues singer Jimmie Rushing. But Ellison also knew
Oklahoma as a place where Jim Crow was a disturbing,
often ruinous force. Moreover, his father had died there
when Ralph was only three, and the result was that his
mother was forced to toil in humble jobs that sorely
embarrassed a proud boy.
Later overlooking the
slights and snubs he experienced as a youth, and
dwelling especially on his various friendships with
fellow students at the local "colored" schools, Ellison
cherished his memory of Oklahoma as a region of almost
mythic proportion and magical charm. He took immense
pleasure in going back home—but
he went home only after he had become famous and could
command the respect and attention he had craved in his
bittersweet youth.
Amazon.com:
Ellison spent a long and varied creative apprenticeship
before writing Invisible Man. What did he learn along
the way that allowed him to make such a stunning debut?
Rampersad:
Ellison's many years of training as a musician (on the
trumpet) as a youth served him in good stead when he
committed himself (influenced first by his friends
Langston Hughes and Richard Wright) around 1937 to
become a writer. He was then 24 years old--pretty late
as a start for most important fiction writers, but not
too late for a man of enormous drive, wide reading, and
restless intelligence. As Ellison served his
apprenticeship, he kept his major literary masters close
at hand. They were Dostoyevsky for his distillation of
the turbulence, vitality, and tragic gloom of Russia in
the 19th century; Hemingway for his terse, virile
elegance; Richard Wright (although the competitive
Ellison would play down his influence) for the gritty
American realism that sought to expose and redress
American social injustice; Andre Malraux, for combining
in an often breathtaking way the life of radical action
and the life of the mind; and in some ways above all,
T.S. Eliot, whose landmark poem of 1922 The Waste Land
encouraged Ellison in his mature commitment to
modernism, a pervasive if mild surrealism, jazzy
improvisation, and cosmopolitan learning.
Ellison was a sometimes
crudely Marxist writer until about 1942, when he began a
zealous conversion away from the literary and political
left. Three years later, he started Invisible Man. By
that time, after years of hard work as a reader and a
consciously apprentice writer, he was fully committed to
an esthetic based in liberal humanism, with a particular
passion for explorations of American literature and
culture.
Amazon.com: The
great question with Ellison is, of course, what happened
after Invisible Man? Why do you think he struggled so
with his second novel?
Rampersad: In some
ways, the winning of the National Book Award in 1953 for
Invisible Man , and not the mere publication of the novel
itself, transformed Ellison's life for better and for
worse. This prominent award to a young black man (who
beat out Hemingway for the prize) set in motion a flood
of honors, big responsibilities, and financial rewards.
These tokens of professional success steadily combined
with Ellison's proud perfectionism to make it
increasingly hard for him to offer the world anything
less than a work conceived and executed on a scale that
reached grand—perhaps
impossibly grand--heights of excellence. Committed to a
literature of myth, symbol, and surrealism, instead of
the literature of everyday life, he found himself often
entangled in fiction writing that drew on techniques
borrowed from James Joyce and on Faulknerian myths and
fables about race, miscegenation, social injustice, and
American culture.
He also prized
improvisation, which called for powers of organization
and discipline that proved finally to be beyond him as a
novelist. And he was not helped by his principled
refusal to allow himself to be comfortable with the many
African Americans who were attracted, starting in the
1960s, by black cultural nationalism and black power.
Although he believed in African American culture, he
became increasingly and painfully isolated in ways that
led him away from the completion of vivid fiction set
largely in that culture. He liked to blame his writing
problems on the fire in 1967 that destroyed his country
home in Massachusetts, but the facts about the fire do
not support this claim.
Amazon.com: You've
written major biographies of Langston Hughes and Jackie
Robinson as well. How did Ellison's public path through
the mid-century compare to theirs?
Rampersad:
Langston Hughes was the polar opposite of Ralph Ellison
in many ways. Hughes loved the masses of black Americans
unconditionally; he believed in world travel and in
varieties of friendship that covered almost the entire
social spectrum; he was almost compulsive in his desire
to help younger artists, especially younger black
artists; he wrote consistently in a variety of forms of
which poetry, drama, and fiction were only the most
conspicuous; he also cared little for esoteric art and
Olympian esthetic standards.
Ellison was a different
man. He traveled little; guarded his resources zealously
and believed that young writers should make their way by
their individual efforts as he believed he had done for
himself; he didn't hesitate to criticize black leaders
when he thought they were abusing their authority, which
was often, as far as he was concerned; and he set the
highest esthetic standards for himself and others. He
stuck to writing fiction and essays, and his total
output is dwarfed by that of Langston Hughes—except,
Ellison would say proudly, in terms of quality. Hughes
paid, in the 1930s and through the 40s and early 50s,
for his once deep attachment to radical socialism;
Ellison quietly shed similar attachments in the name of
a complex patriotism. In doing so, he escaped the rough
treatment meted out to Hughes and others.
Jackie Robinson was by
far the most famous of the three, and no doubt had the
greatest impact, as a force for desegregation, on
American culture. While he was not an artist or
intellectual, he was drawn to politics especially after
the end of his baseball career. He was a moderate
Republican; the others were Democrats, although Hughes
was more critical of party politics than was Ellison,
who was befriended and advanced by President Johnson.
Both Johnson and, later, Ronald Reagan awarded Ellison
the prestigious Presidential Medal of the Arts.
Amazon.com:
Invisible Man is
one of only a few novels from its era that has kept its
power and popularity for readers in later generations.
Has it had a similar influence on younger writers?
Ellison's prickly relations with his successors may have
discouraged immediate followers, but can you see his
influence today?
Rampersad: Young
writers today, black as well as white, have many sources
to draw on and many beacons of inspiration to guide
them. And yet Invisible Man is in many ways as
admirable, fascinating, and complex today as when it was
first published. Among novels by black Americans, its
only true rival in terms of quality of craft might be
Morrison's Beloved, and the wide range of effects in
Ellison's novel is probably unmatched by any other black
novelist. Ellison, we should remember, set out
consciously to write a novel that was simultaneously
about a black man and about an Everyman who transcended
race, and to a surprising extent he succeeded in doing
so. His novel continues to appeal to blacks and whites
alike, and especially to men. Moreover, in writing so
brilliantly about race, which remains and probably will
remain the most challenging topic in American culture,
he practically guaranteed the continuing resonance of
Invisible Man.
The superiority of
Shadow and Act,
his 1964 collection of essays and interviews, to
virtually every other book on the subject of black art
and culture is evident. Its only serious rival in this
respect is probably Du Bois's
The Souls of Black Folk
(1903). But
Shadow and Act lives
while much, although not all, of Du Bois's classic book
is dated.
Shadow and Act continues
to serve as a primer for younger black writers who are
seriously interested in questions of literary craft and
race in America.
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update 11 August 2008 |
