The test of a first-rate mind,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, “is the
ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still
retain the ability to function.” No one better exemplified that skill
than the novelist Ralph Ellison. Born Negro (the term he preferred) in
1913 in Oklahoma City, where punishing Jim Crow racial laws were still
observed, Ellison, in his life and work, was able to understand the
crushing effect of those laws and of race prejudice generally and still
retain a belief in the rich complexity and endless possibilities America
life held out to all. Of those writers and thinkers who dwelt on the
subject of race in America, Ellison may well have been the most subtle,
the most sensible, and, alas, the most ignored.
He is, of course, best known as the author of the novel Invisible Man (1952).
The novel won the National Book Award, at a time when that prize
brought great prestige. For Ellison it also brought instant recognition
and enduring fame. The sadness of Ellison’s life was that he was never
to complete a second novel, though he spent the remaining 42 years of
his life attempting to do so. (He died, at 81, in 1994.) He did publish
two collections of essays, Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986).
But the refusal of his second novel to reach the finish line has given
his literary career, if not his life, a tragic tinge.
Worse luck, a
Stanford professor named Arnold Rampersad produced a 672-page biography
in 2008 that judged Ellison by strict politically correct standards and
found him woefully, deplorably wanting. Ampersand’s bill of complaint
is lengthy and includes Ellison’s preferring “harmonious racial
integration” over black power and protest, eschewing the notion of black
victimhood and with it black militancy, refusing to go out of his way
to praise black writers, failing to oppose the Vietnam War, being put
off by “exuberant gay culture,” ignoring the fate of the Algonquin and
Iroquois nations when living in upstate New York, knocking Miles Davis
and Charlie Parker while esteeming Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington,
finding friendship among such white writers as Robert Penn Warren and
Richard Wilbur when keeping his distance from James Baldwin and Toni
Morrison… and more, a great deal more.
Rampersad also accuses
Ellison of being a bad son and brother, a cheating and often cruel
husband, an unreliable friend. He was also, in this telling, an elitist,
a snob, a misogynist, ill-tempered and condescending, pretentious, a
boring teacher, wanting in sympathy for the young, and just about
anything else one can think of with the exception of using a surfeit of
plastic straws.
The newly published Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison,
a nearly thousand-page collection of Ellison’s correspondence over six
decades, from the age of 20 to 1993 (or a year before his death from
pancreatic cancer), is a fine antidote to Rampersad’s aspersions. The
volume is edited by John F. Callahan and Marc C. Conner, with
introductory pages supplied by Callahan before each decade of
correspondence. Callahan was a friend of Ellison’s during the last years
of his life and has served him well since his death. He helped bring
out a posthumous collection of Ellison’s short stories and assembled for
publication two different versions of his uncompleted novel. One,
titled Juneteenth, is a 368-page condensation of the roughly
2,000 pages of the full manuscript; the other is the full manuscript of
the unfinished novel, called Three Days Before the Shooting.
Callahan is one of those unknown soldiers of literature who devote the
better part of their own lives to bringing forth and promoting the works
of others, and Ellison was fortunate in his friendship with him. ... [mehr] https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/ralph-ellison-in-opposition/
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