Ralph Ellison
By Arnold Rampersad
Knopf, 657 pages, $35
When Ralph Ellison published his first novel, “Invisible Man,” in 1952, his ascent to the heights of American literary culture was swift and enduring. The book’s sales were initially respectable if not spectacular. But, according to Arnold Rampersad’s new and outstanding biography of Ellison, the response of the reviewers and the literati were akin to “the first tremors of a major earthquake.”
The following year saw Ellison win the National Book Award. Soon a required text on college reading lists, “Invisible Man” went through multiple editions, selling countless copies, ensuring Ellison’s permanent place in the literary cannon and transforming the author into a major intellectual figure and one of the best known black authors in American literary history.
Rampersad’s respectful, engaging and penetrating study offers a detailed and often fascinating examination of Ellison’s life and literary contributions. Born in Oklahoma in 1913, Ellison grew up in poverty following the death of his father. Despite his family’s lack of money (his mother was a hotel maid), he took to music with gusto. A skilled trumpet player, he “poured his rage and righteousness” into his music, which “kept him under control.” Although he was an undisciplined student, he spent considerable time at the local segregated library in Oklahoma City, where he absorbed westerns and detective stories before moving on to Maupassant, Twain, Shaw and Freud. “Novels fed his chronic daydreaming,” Rampersad says.
Ellison’s dreams of attending Harvard University or the Juilliard School of Music were merely fantasies; ultimately, he hopped a freight train (he couldn’t afford rail fare) and traveled to Alabama, where he attended Tuskegee Institute, founded decades earlier by conservative educator Booker T. Washington. His three years at Tuskegee were hell (Ellison later described it as his ” ‘heart of darkness’ “), and he disdained the “shallow” yet dictatorial administrators who made his life so difficult there. Tuskegee’s saving grace was its library, which provided him “both rest and intellectual stimulation” as he sought to satisfy his “intense reading” habit with volumes by Dostoevski, Bronte, Hardy, Austin, James and T.S. Elliot. Literature, both European and American, and a bus ticket to New York provided him with a means of permanent escape.
In New York, Ellison endured relative poverty but found his way to writing and the political left. In the late 1930s he was befriended by radical black writers Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, who introduced him into the larger orbit of the Communist party. “He probably became, at least for a while, a dues-paying Party member,” Rampersad concludes. Inspired and encouraged by Wright — whose manifesto, “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” insisted on politically committed literature — Ellison wrote reviews, short stories and journalistic pieces for various radical periodicals like New Masses and the Daily Worker. As a writer, Rampersad notes, he was “mainly . . . a [party] hack.”
A dedicated communist ideologue for several years, Ellison eventually came to resent party dogma and discipline, as did so many intellectuals. The “process of repudiation and reappraisal between 1940 and 1942 was the single most trying passage in his evolution as an artist and intellectual,” Rampersad writes. Retaining his commitment to the cosmopolitanism and interracialism represented by the party at its best, Ellison moved decisively toward the political center. Unlike Wright, who publicized his break with the party in the two-part Atlantic Monthly essay “I Tried to Be a Communist,” Ellison quietly withdrew. Later, Rampersad concludes, Ellison “would never be frank in public about his former links to the Communists.”
His anti-communist bona fides were cemented with his portayal of the Brotherhood — an organization remarkably similar to the Communist Party — as an opportunistic, cynical and unprincipled group in the pages of “Invisible Man.” Although the novel was “not Ralph’s autobiography,” Rampersad observes, “he clearly drew on distinct elements of his past” in its construction. These included his deeply unhappy experiences at Tuskegee and his observation of the Harlem riot of 1943 and the black nationalists he encountered on the streets of Harlem. “Sixteen years after arriving in New York as a disillusioned, humiliated, and fairly ignorant youth from Oklahoma City,” Ellison “had reason to believe that he had arrived.” With the novel’s appearance, “he was now a respected presence on the New York literary scene.”
In the decades following his departure from the orbit of the Communist Party, Ellison adopted and maintained a consistently upbeat view of American society. He emphasized “not sordid Jim Crow laws and customs,” Rampersad notes, but “the auguries of black racial advancement that validated American ideals.” The visibility of “many prosperous, well-dressed blacks,” the opening of previously closed doors at universities and other institutions, and the advancement of a small number of black officials in government ranks all represented, to Ellison, unambiguous evidence of improvements in American race relations. “The events in the South were not destroying his idealism about America,” Rampersad notes of Ellison in the early 1960s. “If anything, his rhetoric reached new heights of patriotic fervor in response to what he saw as deepening [black] cynicism about America.”
Such a stance indeed set him apart from most blacks. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Ellison largely abstained from the civil rights revolution that erupted in the 1950s and 1960s. He was indifferent to the anti-colonial movement in Africa and Asia that so inspired many black activists. When others marched in Washington, D.C., in 1963 and Selma, Ala., in 1965, Ellison observed from the sidelines while pursuing his professional and personal interests. In 1966, for instance, while the civil rights movement was “enduring another fierce summer,” Ellison “rode his tractor or eased his car down sleepy arterial roads looking for bargains on antiques” near his Massachusetts summer home.
The extent of his involvement consisted of participating in public discussions, signing the occasional open letter of protest (he was more inclined to lend his name to letters against communist abuses overseas than against American racism), or sending small amounts to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Ellison remained consistent in his resolute belief that “politics and art [should be kept] separate. . . . Fiction exists for itself, not to advance the cause of civil rights.” In his mind, he was above all else “an artist” not a politician or a civil rights activist. He felt his personal and professional success were evidence of the nation’s progress and constituted his part in advancing it.
As growing numbers of intellectuals broke with the administration of Lyndon Johnson over the Vietnam War in the 1960s, Ellison remained steadfastly loyal to the president. For the growing Black Power movement Ellison had nothing but contempt, viewing it as “a disruptive force that depended on insult, rage, and antagonism.”
In Rampersad’s view, Ellison’s “refusal to kneel before anti-intellectualism, separatism, and cynicism” suggested that “he would not give in to what he saw as the lunacy of the age.” Although Ellison loathed black radicalism, it proved financially advantageous for him. Social and racial unrest across the nation ensured his constant presence on the university lecture circuit, where his rising speaker’s fee (as well as his appointment to a chaired professorship at New York University) contributed to his growing financial prosperity.
But for all of his accomplishments, Ellison expended little energy assisting other black writers and artists. Quick to criticize but reluctant to praise them, he assumed the role of gatekeeper and promoted the careers of few younger professionals. Adhering to what he believed were high standards, he credited himself as “eminently qualified” for whatever positions he achieved; those same standards, in practice, disqualified most other blacks.
From the 1950s on, Ellison traveled in increasingly elite circles. His admission to membership of the male-only Century club in New York (he remained staunchly opposed to the admission of women) was a source of considerable pride. Over the years he was named honorary consultant in American letters at the Library of Congress and appointed to various governmental bodies, including the National Council on the Arts and the advisory board of the National Portrait Gallery. He served on Carnegie Corp.’s Commission on Educational Television and on the board of Colonial Williamsburg. In early 1969, President Johnson awarded him a Presidential Medal of Freedom; later, Ellison was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He and his wife dined regularly with the cultural and economic elite, and invitations to White House receptions were common.
What Ellison failed to achieve, however, overshadowed all of his accomplishments. During his lifetime, he failed to complete a second novel. His cultural criticism kept him in the public eye (“Shadow and Act,” his 1964 collection, was a significant contribution), but the failure to follow up on the success of “Invisible Man” perplexed many in the literary Establishment and clearly haunted Ellison. The thousands of pages he is said to have produced failed to cohere. Ellison’s repeated claims to be nearing completion were empty; his excuse that a fire destroyed most of the work, setting him substantially back, was a fabrication. “As a novelist, he had lost his way,” Rampersad writes. “And he had done so in proportion to his distancing of himself from his fellow blacks.” Only after his death were portions of his unpublished manuscript assembled and released under the title “Juneteenth.”
The Ellison in Rampersad’s pages is a complex figure. There is the Ellison who delighted his friends and listeners with crackling prose and insight. To white historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a fellow Century club member, Ellison was ” ‘very popular,’ ” ” ‘confident’ ” yet not ” ‘overbearing.’ ” To the young Cornel West he was ” ‘a hero,’ ” both ” ‘cosmopolitan . . . [and] wise.’ ” One-time friend Saul Bellow viewed him as ” ‘ponderous,’ ” while literary nemesis Amiri Baraka saw him as ” ‘a snob, an elitist.’ ” When he drank, poet Quincy Troupe recalled, ” ‘he could be a mean drunk.’ ” Toward his second wife, Fanny, he could be indifferent, cold and cruel. The figure who adopted unpopular if principled stands in the 1960s and 1970s appears as self-absorbed and indifferent to the well-being of others.
Rampersad, an accomplished biographer of Langston Hughes and Jackie Robinson, and a professor of English at Stanford University, has created a compelling portrait of Ellison. While less attentive to the specifics of Ellison’s political philosophies — his earlier communism and his later conservatism — than toward his personal and public life, Rampersad’s study is nonetheless a significant contribution to our understandings of race, literature and politics in the second half of the 20th Century.
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Eric Arnesen is professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago and current president of The Historical Society, based in Boston.
