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Tonya
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 5839
Registered: 07-2006
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, June 17, 2007 - 08:08 pm: | 
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Biography captures complexity of Ralph Ellison
By CHRIS VOGNAR / The Dallas Morning News
Sunday, June 17, 2007
Ralph Ellison won the 1953 National Book Award for Invisible Man, but he never finished another novel before his death in 1994.
He was anointed the most gifted and visionary black writer of his time, but he blanched at the idea of being defined by his race.
He looked down on black writers who sought his help and didn't develop their own aesthetics, even though he was helped in ways large and small by patrons and mentors black and white.
So it seems perfect that his favorite word was "complexity," which he was known to enunciate in four dramatically drawn-out syllables. For Mr. Ellison, author of the landmark novel Invisible Man and the nonfiction collection Shadow and Act, the word described the thorny, labyrinthine nature of American identity and character. It was the favorite subject of this self-fashioned renaissance man from Oklahoma City, and it was never far from his mind.
And as we learn in Arnold Rampersad's exhaustive new Ralph Ellison: A Biography (Knopf, $35), there was little simple about him, as a man or as a writer. As his friend Charlie Davidson says in the book, "Ralph was like a drop of mercury. Just when you thought you knew him, he showed you something more, something else."
The book is unsparing in exploring Mr. Ellison's faults, but it's hardly a hatchet job. Mr. Rampersad respects his subject too much for that. But the book will certainly change the way we think about the author and his work. It includes the good, but it doesn't flinch from the bad, the ugly, and, of course, the complex. Over the course of 566 pages, Mr. Rampersad reveals a visionary, determined but deeply flawed man. "The idea that he was some kind of superhuman black person is diminished now," says Walton Muyumba, an assistant professor of English at the University of North Texas in Denton who teaches seminars on Mr. Ellison and black intellectual traditions. "He's a regular human being like the rest of us, and his psychological hang-ups and his anger caught up with him. Maybe they kept him from producing that second work."
But what a towering first work.
A masterwork
Mr. Ellison's opus, published when he was but 39, remains blisteringly relevant as literature and social criticism some 55 years after its much-ballyhooed publication.
Mr. Ellison sends his protagonist on a picaresque odyssey of 20th century America. But he can't be seen by anyone – not by the powers that be at the state college for Negroes (a stand-in for Alabama's Tuskegee Institute, which Mr. Ellison attended but abandoned for the cultural fertility of New York before he could graduate); not by the Brotherhood (a stand-in for the Communist Party, which Mr. Ellison supported, then vociferously repudiated); not by the street hustler Rinehart nor the black nationalist Ras the Destroyer.
Each sees Invisible as a pawn, a means to some end or another. And each sees but a color, a shade of black, not a complex human being.
"What Ellison points out is not just that the Negro in the middle of the 20th century can't be seen by white folks," says Mr. Muyumba. "He's also saying your brown skin limits your reception in black political and social circumstances. His invisibility becomes a self-born reality, because he has no sense of his own humanity. That's the real problem of invisibility."
It's a pungent metaphor that gets at the very heart of racial stereotypes and pigeonholes. The idea of invisibility applies everywhere you see skin color before the person: the tall black man immediately assumed to be a basketball player; the black woman at a hotel assumed to be the maid; the college basketball team labeled "nappy-headed hos" by a radio shock jock. Mr. Ellison turned invisibility into a bold symptom of America's unease with the subject of racial identity.
Then there was his life outside of literature, which grew increasingly strained as the '50s gave way to the '60s.
The turmoil and triumphs of the civil rights and black power movements left Mr. Ellison a man out of step with the times. "He didn't think Black Nationalism had anything to offer except chaos and a collapse of black culture on several fronts," Mr. Rampersad says in a phone interview. "He also believed he had made his own way. He thought nobody had helped him, although that was not quite true."
Mr. Ellison fashioned a steadfast individualism that made him reluctant to help or even sympathize with young black writers. Mr. Ellison, however, was helped early and often, first by black mentors including Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, who gave him guidance and connections, and later by white novelists including Saul Bellow and Robert Penn Warren. Without Warren's sponsorship, Mr. Ellison would not have received the Prix de Rome fellowship, which sent him to live and write in Italy (where he had a tempestuous extramarital affair).
In his efforts to gain entry to the Century Association, the prestigious arts and letters social club based in New York, Mr. Ellison compiled a list of members he knew, including Mr. Warren, John Cheever and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. He eventually got in, and spent many an afternoon there sipping martinis in elite company while vocally objecting to granting membership to any women.
At a party hosted by Iowa's Grinnell College in 1967, Mr. Ellison burst into tears when another black man called him an Uncle Tom. But the Ellison that emerges from Mr. Rampersad's pages is less an Uncle Tom than a dashing curmudgeon, an impeccably dressed social climber who slid easily into old boys' networks and defended tradition whenever possible.
This is part of what so irked the Black Nationalists. At a time when dead white males were under attack, Mr. Ellison continued to worship at the altar of greats such as Faulkner, Twain and Melville. To Mr. Ellison, these writers cut to the heart of American race relations more directly than, say, Amiri Baraka, the popular Nationalist writer with whom Mr. Ellison shared a mutual hostility.
He saw that America was a key component of Western culture, and black identity was tightly intertwined with America. But embracing the radical social change of the 1960s was simply not a part of his character. Addressing a Notre Dame literary conference two days after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Mr. Ellison stuck rigidly to the topic of "The Function of the Novel in American Democracy" while cities burned throughout the country. You could call this stubbornness, principal or inflexibility. You could also say it played a key part in his failure to finish his second novel. Determined to create a work that captured an era, he watched with dismay as the era shifted violently and rapidly into the one thing that scared him most: chaos.
"Almost everyone was thrown into some measure of confusion" by the times, says Mr. Rampersad. "But they tried to regain their balance and move on. He wasn't able to regain his balance, and that's unfortunate."
His failure
An abridged, posthumous version of Juneteenth was met with generally hostile reviews upon its 1999 release; a more extensive Modern Library version is due out next year. But he never got it done in his lifetime. The biography is filled with variations on the theme "It should be done next year," or "It's on the way."
The fire that destroyed the Ellisons' New England summer home in 1967 is often assumed to have burned the bulk of the novel in progress, as Mr. Ellison argued on many occasions. Mr. Rampersad doesn't buy it; he says the novel should have been completed by that point, and that the losses were minimal.
Mr. Ellison's 1964 nonfiction collection Shadow and Act was no slouch. As Mr. Rampersad writes, "Its blending of polemics, reflections, retorts, assertions, and engaging, often lyrical essays showed off his high intelligence, his intricately loving feel for the realities of Negro mass culture, his love of learning, and his love of America." Mr. Ellison also taught at Bard College, Rutgers and New York University. He kept busy. He just never finished his second novel.
In 1955, just three years after Invisible Man, Mr. Ellison appeared on a panel about the American novel. His editor, Albert Erskine, commented on the possible debilitating effects of not following up a great first novel. Mr. Ellison concurred. "It destroys your integrity," he says.
Mr. Rampersad, like most Ellison followers, is disappointed that the older, distinguished Ellison never followed up Invisible Man. But he's also amazed that the younger, inexperienced Ellison could write Invisible Man in the first place.
"The first question people ask is why didn't he write a second novel," says the biographer. "I say the question you should be asking is, 'How did he come to write the first novel?' He was able to make this mighty effort, to train himself as an intellectual and a novelist. What a personal victory that was in terms of character and intelligence."
Indeed, Mr. Rampersad's book leaves Mr. Ellison with integrity intact. But it also renders him painfully visible.
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/ent/stories/DN-ellison_0617gl.ART.State.Edition2.4363c82.html |
Tonya
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 5842
Registered: 07-2006
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, June 17, 2007 - 10:02 pm: |
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Visible man
Arnold Rampersad illuminates the life and literary contributions of Ralph Ellison
By Eric Arnesen
Published June 16, 2007
(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. ----------- Eric Arnesen is professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago and current president of The Historical Society, based in Boston.
Copyright © 2007, Chicago Tribune
http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/booksmags/chi-ellisonbw16jun16,0,7347312. story |
Cynique
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Username: Cynique
Post Number: 8875
Registered: 01-2004
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, June 18, 2007 - 01:36 pm: |
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Interesting articles. "Complex" is certainly the word to characterize Ellison, and certainly an apt word to describe what is symtomatic of being a black man in America. |
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