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Ralph Ellison |
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With one book, published in 1952, Ralph Ellison established himself among the most important American novelists of his generation, a position that was not only maintained but enhanced in the following decades, as the successor to that volume was awaited with unabating eagerness. Through an accelerating series of vividly rendered and powerfully written episodes, many of them veering wildly from absurd humor to nightmarish violence and horror in their combination of realistic descriptions with surrealistic visions, Invisible Man portrays its nameless narrator's repeated attempts to define himself as he reels from one community and system of values to another, only to find disillusionment at every turn. In recognition of its depth and brilliance, a 1965 poll of two hundred American writers, critics, and editors selected Invisible Man as the most distinguished American novel published in the twenty years since the Second World War. If a similar poll were to be conducted now, it would in all likelihood produce the same result.
Ralph Waldo Ellison was born on March 1, 1914, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, the second of three sons—the first had died before the novelist's birth—of Lewis Alfred Ellison and Ida (Millsap) Ellison. His father, a former restaurant operator and an army veteran who had served in Cuba and the Philippines, was a construction foreman who had to come Oklahoma from Tennessee in 1911. His mother, originally from a farming family in Georgia, was also active in socialist politics, and would later be arrested for protesting segregated housing conditions in Dayton, Ohio. Named by his father for the nineteenth-century American philosopher and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ellison had a complex attitude toward his full name, as described in his 1964 essay "Hidden Name and Complex Fate," which, over and above its discussion of the specific issue of his own name, addresses larger implications of the great theme of Ellison's work, the quest for personal identity. On the one hand, when he was young, he was somewhat embarrassed by the oddity of his name, at a time in life when one's greatest desire is to fit in; on the other hand, it lay upon him like a set of expectations for his own life, which he felt an obligation to try to fulfill.
In 1917, when Ralph Ellison was three years old, his father died, forcing his widow, with two very young sons to support, to work as a custodian, a cook, and a domestic. According to Ellison's own testimony, Oklahoma was not as rigidly segregated as states in the Old South—a situation that would change for the worse in the 1920s—and in his early years, he and his family lived among middleclass white neighbors, and, based in part on a shared interest in electronics, he formed a close friendship with a white boy. The child of parents with cultural interests, Ellison was raised in an atmosphere of learning and intellectual curiosity. Responsive as he was to the history, the folktales, and the popular music that were the most prominent aspects of life in his own African-American community, he was also introduced to a wider world, one that he aspired to "make my own," through magazines and recordings of classical music discarded by the white families in whose homes his mother worked, and from a very early age he felt the desire to link the two worlds together.
Music was his first love among the arts, and it remained a lifelong passion. Jazz and the blues would figure prominently in Invisible Man, and Ellison would write essays on the work of Mahalia Jackson, Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, and other black musicians. Oklahoma City's lively night life provided him the opportunity to hear many of the popular bands of the time, and at Douglass High School, from which he graduated in 1931, he played the trumpet in the school band. While a student, he mowed the lawn of the conductor Ludwig Hebestreit in exchange for lessons in trumpet and orchestration. For two years after graduation, he worked as an elevator operator in an unsuccessful attempt to save enough money for college, but in 1933 he was awarded a music scholarship to Tuskegee Institute, an esteemed black college in Alabama. Unable to afford the train fare, he traveled there by hitching rides on freight trains.
In his sophomore year, he embarked seriously upon a course of private reading, discovering for the first time the power of serious fiction, although, ironically, given his own subsequent achievement as a novelist, it was a poem that stimulated him most profoundly: "Wuthering Heights had caused me an agony of unexpressible emotion, and the same was true of Jude the Obscure, but The Waste Land seized my mind. I was intrigued by its power to move me while eluding my understanding. Somehow its rhythms were often closer to jazz than those of the Negro poets, and even though I could not understand then, its range of allusion was as mixed and as varied as that of Louis Armstrong." Seeking to make the connections that eluded him, he read the works that Eliot had cited in his source notes to the poem, and from there was led to modern writers such as Pound, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald, and back to Melville and Mark Twain.
After some confusion about the status of his scholarship, Ellison was forced to leave school for financial reasons in 1936, and he traveled to New York in the hope of earning money to continue his studies. On his second day in Harlem, where he would work at a succession of odd jobs while continuing to study music and sculpture, he met the poet Langston Hughes. In 1937, through Hughes, Ellison met Richard Wright, who was then seeking a publisher for his first book, the short story collection Uncle Tom's Children. Wright was also co-editor of a magazine called New Challenge, to which he invited Ellison to contribute a book review and then a short story. In October of that year, his mother's illness brought Ellison to Dayton, Ohio, where she was living with his younger brother. She died shortly after his arrival, and the brothers supported themselves by hunting and selling quail, which Ellison taught himself to shoot on the wing by reading a description in Hemingway. After they lost their home, a local black lawyer named Stokes allowed the two young men to use his office for living quarters, and allowed Ellison to write some of his earliest short stories on his office typewriter.
Back in New York in 1938, Ellison read Native Son, Richard Wright's new novel, as it was written. Impressed as he was by the power and intensity of Wright's masterpiece, he was also distressed to discover that its protagonist, Bigger Thomas, demonstrated none of the humor, charm, intellect, and complexity of Wright himself, and distressed by what he perceived as the limitations of protest fiction in general, in its failure to reflect the richness and many-sidedness of the whole range of human existence. In Ellison's experience, intellect, insight, reflective and ironic self-awareness were all as much a part of black life as the elements of violence, passion, and oppression that were more commonly emphasized in the work of both white and black novelists, and he was determined to incorporate these qualities in his own work.
From 1938 to 1944, Ellison published a number of essays and short stories in The Negro Quarterly (with which he was briefly associated in an editorial capacity), The New Republic, The Saturday Review, New Masses, and other periodicals. Although he would later publish two volumes of essays, the stories were not collected in book form until 1996, two years after Ellison's death. In 1943, wishing to contribute to the fight against Fascism but unwilling to serve in the segregated armed forces, he joined the merchant marine. A civilian again in 1945, he began planning a novel whose central character would be a black American pilot held by the Germans, along with his white subordinates, as a prisoner of war. His bizarre personal experience would lead the pilot to reflect on the absurdities of his situation, including his willingness to give his life for freedoms that were denied to him, and his awareness that his German captors could immigrate to America after the war and be more accepted there than the pilot, a war hero, would be on his return. But Ellison's intentions for this work were suddenly crowded aside when he was seized by the inspiration for what, after seven years of intense work, would become Invisible Man. During the period of its creation, Ellison would survive through freelance photography assignments, including book-jacket portraits of fellow authors, and through building audio equipment and installing high-fidelity sound systems. His principal source of income was provided by his wife, Fanny McConnell, whom he married in 1946 after an unsuccessful earlier marriage.
Upon its publication in 1952, Invisible Man did receive several negative reviews. The Communist newspaper The Daily Worker absurdly dismissed it as a lifeless sop to "world white supremacy," and the black novelist John Oliver Killens was equally motivated by political rather than artistic considerations when he called its portrayal of black life "a vicious distortion." Even some of the more positive reviewers pointed out the relative weakness of the novel's characterization, especially of the narrator himself, and some felt that its final affirmation of the possibility of personal fulfillment was empty and inconsistent with all that had gone before. But the consensus was expressed by fellow novelist and future Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow, who felt that, while Ellison had expressed the absurdity and the pain of black life in America, he had also transcended the usual stereotypes and self-imposed limitations of black writers, and of ethnic writers in general, to create a powerful work whose themes and implications were universal in scope. Bellow concluded that the book was "not by any means faultless; ...but it is an immensely moving novel and it has greatness." Invisible Man brought Ellison both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and inaugurated a cycle of honors, appointments to learned bodies, and teaching positions that would continue for three decades.
In the early 1960s, his publisher announced that Ellison's second novel was nearly completed. But its publication continued to be postponed, especially after a large portion of the manuscript was destroyed in a fire that consumed the Ellisons' summer home in the Berkshire hills of western Massachusetts. In the meantime, eight segments from the book appeared in various periodicals between 1960 and 1977. In 1964, Ellison published Shadow and Act, a collection of his probing and beautifully written essays on such subjects as literature, music, and issues of personal identity. Although his ongoing commitment to African-American assimilation into the larger American society caused him to be attacked by militant black nationalists in the late 1960s, he continued to be one of the most respected writers in the United States.
In 1986, Ellison published Going to the Territory, a second volume of essays on the themes that had preoccupied him throughout his life and career. At the time of his death, from cancer, in New York City on April 16, 1994, his long-awaited second novel, on which he had been working every day, was said to be nearly completed, and it is expected to be published some time in the near future.
Ellison combined great imaginative gifts with a profound intelligence, a style of exceptional grace and strength, and an unswerving respect for all of the mystery and complexity of human life. Our culture is immeasurably the richer for his short stories and especially his essays, but even if he had published nothing but Invisible Man, that novel alone would guarantee him a permanent place among the great American writers.
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