One of the greatest of all American books, Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” was published by Random House sixty years ago, on April 14, 1952, and became an immediate sensation. Almost everyone who cared about such things knew that something remarkable had happened. Ellison, a passionate reader of Twain, Dostoyevsky, Faulkner, Hemingway, Joyce, Malraux, T. S. Eliot, and Richard Wright, had marshalled a good part of the literary past and broken new ground as a novelist. His novel moves back and forth between stern realism and fantasia, despair and rhapsody, formal syntax and jazzy, impassioned riffs. Ellison pushed black folklore into surrealism and play—both sombre play and the most exuberant shenanigans.
Explicitly, he rejected the limited point-of-view strategies of Henry James and the stylized austerity and gruffness of the hard-boiled writers. “Invisible Man” is a tumultuous book, an enormous book, liberated and responsible at the same time, a novel that, even now, turns readers upside down. I’ve just read it with a group of eleventh-graders in New York who seemed a little overwhelmed, at times, but, under the guidance of a good teacher (not me; a pro), they hung in there and did well by it. Ellison presents American experience with a luscious eloquence and an abandon corralled by a stern sense of form, and the students responded to both the wildness and the control.
The reputation of “Invisible Man” has suffered no serious hits over the years. Yet Ellison’s reputation as a man is in very serious danger. Eventually, in our culture, where literature is of relatively little importance, and gossip and personality matter enormously, the book may come to suffer by association with the artist who created it. Many people, with a sense of righteousness that we can only wonder at, now disapprove of Ellison. He has been sternly rebuked, never more so than when the literary critic Arnold Rampersad’s biography came out in 2007.
Born in Oklahoma, in 1914, Ellison knew what it was like to be a black man in both the segregated South and the treacherously half-accepting North. As a teen-ager, he had worked as a shoeshine boy, a busboy, a hotel waiter, and an assistant in a dentist’s office. He escaped those jobs, studied music at the Tuskegee Institute for a couple of years, then left for New York to earn money to continue school, but never returned. In New York, he set up as a writer under the active guidance of Richard Wright. He drew close to the Communist Party in the thirties, during its ambiguous but not entirely dishonorable period of interest in American Negroes as a natural proletariat and therefore as a possible vanguard of revolution. By degrees, he became disillusioned with the Party and broke with it.
Brilliant and handsome, the young man was both lionized and patronized by whites; he knew a great deal about promise, about pride, about humiliation. He put much of this into his book. His nameless protagonist, searching for identity and selfhood, falls in and out of school, various jobs, affiliation with the authoritarian “Brotherhood” (i. e., the Party); he gets razzed by black nationalists, vamped by white women, caught up in a bizarre and spectacular Harlem riot. He undergoes one bruising encounter after another as he looks for himself among the ambitious, the mad, the defeated. Ellison had experienced much of this, but he often warned readers against taking “Invisible Man” as a literal autobiography. Whatever else it is, the book is an intricately wrought structure of myth and symbol, a novel devoted to initiations, rites of passages, testing, annihilation and rebirth. Its protagonist, like Dostoyevsky’s underground man, begins and ends in a literal hole—a filthy room, somewhere near Harlem. He is shaken, enraged, but ready for more.
Ellison’s problems began almost immediately after the publication of “Invisible Man.” Within a few years, it became clear that he was having trouble finishing another work of fiction, and his monumental funk, stretching into decades, became an occasion for concern and derision. For some it was a national tragedy. For others, it was an embarrassing comedy of ambition. For still many others, it was a portentous case. Ellison, it was said, had lost touch with his roots and his primal energies and had betrayed himself and his race and thereby deserved his punishment in the form of years of futile composition. (Ellison completed and published two books of essays and wrote thousands of pages of his second novel. After he died, in 1994, his literary executor, John F. Callahan, cobbled together the novel’s best passages and published “Juneteenth” in 1999, a book that satisfied almost no one.) As Ellison struggled, many people thought they had his number: he had ascended to fame, to honors, to establishment friends and clubs, and all of that finished him as a writer.
What I want to say on the anniversary of “Invisible Man” is that everyone should get off Ellison’s back. Just get off his back. Stop lamenting what he didn’t do and celebrate what he did do—which was to create a work of art that, as it happens, has never been more “relevant” than now. Ellison’s hero is “invisible” because no one has much interest in seeing him as he is in all his ornery individuality. Virtually everyone—blacks and white alike—wants to use him, to make him over in their own image, to turn him into a portent, a warning, a threat, a possibility. Has not the same thing happened to Trayvon Martin in the last few weeks? (It has happened to George Zimmerman, too, which makes the case more complicated.) Ellison, like his hero, didn’t want to be used. He was wary and experimental, looking to break the code, to find the key to making his way in a white-dominated society, a problem that also intrigued the young Barack Obama. In “Dreams For My Father,” Obama writes, “There was a trick somewhere, though what the trick was, and who was doing the tricking, and who was being tricked, eluded my conscious grasp.” It is a sentence that could have been uttered by Ellison’s hero at his most baffled.
It is time, I think, that Ellison is forgiven his sins—his aloofness, his elitism (he hung out with intellectuals and musicians), his notorious clubbiness (he was a great one for exclusive institutions), his becoming the favorite black intellectual of white literature professors and novelists (Robert Penn Warren, Kenneth Burke, R. W. B. Lewis, Saul Bellow, John Cheever, et al.), his honors and awards (you name it, he won it), his distaste for appeals to racial solidarity. When Rampersad’s biography came out in 2007, Brent Staples complained in the Times that Ellison had lost touch with younger black intellectuals and writers. That was a sore point with many. Younger black writers wanted his support, his sympathy, his leadership. They didn’t often get it, and they accused him of being out of touch. He no longer knew the poor, the desperate, the hustlers and bullshit artists, the nationalists—he had lost the voices playing in his head that burst out of “Invisible Man.” But, of course, “Juneteenth,” whatever its faults, is full of voices, too.
Ellison himself has become an invisible man in just the sense that he meant it. So many people wanted him to be their Ralph Ellison, not the man he actually was, and they moralized his inability to finish his novel in terms of his unwillingness to do what they wanted him to do. If only he had hobnobbed with Amiri Baraka rather than Saul Bellow! If only he had taken Charlie Parker or feminism more seriously! But there is no single way that a black writer and intellectual should behave, and the calls for Ellison to embrace black radicalism (say) can be seen as a call to a certain kind of conformity.
Surely Joyce and Faulkner, two of Ellison’s heroes, were aloof, too, and Mailer and Bellow were nothing if not competitive with other writers. They may have made people sore, but they weren’t accused of betrayal. Ellison became a man of conservative temperament and comfortable personal habits. Yet despite these “faults,” he had written an eternal work of art. He was obsessed with art and culture, not with the politicization of art and culture. He struggled to define a black culture as something precious but indissolubly linked to white culture—a task always difficult and always controversial. It was a heroic effort, and it may have helped form the temperament of Obama, who also refused to be defined by exclusion and rage, and who lives with the same double consciousness (black, and universal) as Ellison.
My guess is that the “if only Ellison had done X” attacks are mostly nonsense—malice mixed with Schadenfreude. Ellison had to be brought down, reduced to his misdemeanors. Isn’t it possible—even likely—that the reasons for his not finishing his book were mainly literary? Norman Podhoretz said sympathetically that Ellison couldn’t get Faulkner out of his head. Bellow said that Ellison couldn’t get the critic Stanley Edgar Hyman out of his head, which may be true in the sense that Hyman was always urging Ellison to think in epic terms. Stanley Crouch, who was Ellison’s friend, has backed this up: Ellison was convinced he had to outdo himself, and outdo Melville, too. As Rampersad notes, Ellison thought obsessively about myth, archetype, symbol, and metaphor. He elaborated his new novel to the point where he couldn’t tame the material.
And then there’s another, simpler possibility: perhaps he had said all that he really wanted and needed to say in “Invisible Man.” It’s a very full book, and it kept a group of sixteen-year-olds busy for five weeks. I think Ellison would have been pleased with the way the ethnically mixed eleventh-grade class read “Invisible Man.” They talked about race and identity, of course—how could they not?—but they also did a strenuous literary reading. They worked on structure, metaphor, symbol, rhetoric, myth. The approach felt alive in an Ellisonian way. He was an artist to his fingertips and when he failed, he failed as an artist. It’s amazing how many people wanted him to be something else.
Photograph by Bob Adelman/Magnum.
