Leo Robson: Sick of the Subject

Leo Robson

Ralph Ellison described Invisible Man as an account of his narrator’s movement from ‘purpose to passion to perception’, terms borrowed from the critic Kenneth Burke. By the time Ellison began writing the book, in the summer of 1945, he believed that anyone could gain a clearer mind, but only through an encounter with failure or anguish. According to the Greek proverb quoted by Burke in A Grammar of Motives, ‘the suffered is the learned.’

Invisible Man is the story of a young African American who is convinced he will find the ‘something’ he is looking for if he submits to the demands or expectations of the powerful people he encounters, or colludes in their grand schemes. The recognition of his error, following what he calls ‘much painful boomeranging of my expectations’, forms the basis for the high-spirited reflection on self-sufficiency, or ‘invisibility’, that bookends the narrative. The idea that even ‘negative experiences’ can be ‘turned into an advantage’, as Ellison put it shortly after the book’s publication, became one of his convictions. But what about the moment of triumph? Invisible Man appeared in the spring of 1952 and was immediately recognised as the outstanding novel of its time. Ellison worked hard on a second novel, about a boy raised by a black minister who grows up to be a white supremacist politician. Eight sections of it appeared in print, one of them in the first issue of Saul Bellow’s magazine the Noble Savage, and Ellison issued a series of optimistic forecasts. In 1955 he told Paul Engle, the director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, that ‘I hope to finish by 1956.’ In November 1961 he wrote of ‘a long novel I hope to publish next year’. But he was still tinkering with the manuscript at the time of his death more than 32 years later.

Success may bring a feeling of pressure or fear, pomposity or hauteur, a loss of hunger – all of them blocks to further growth. Invisible Man was not only a transmuted record of Ellison’s own arrival at perception but the product of that perception – a statement of his ‘affirmative’ position on African American identity and a display of the non-naturalistic literary techniques he considered best suited to expressing it. In his address on receiving the National Book Award, he spoke of ‘the inheritance of illusion through which all men must fight to achieve reality’. On the basis of the book he published next, Shadow and Act (1964), which collected that speech along with 21 essays and interviews, and of the correspondence he wrote during the 1950s and 1960s, it is tempting to conclude that in his own case he felt the fight had been won for good.

Ellison was born in 1913 and raised in Oklahoma City, the older of two boys. His father, a former soldier from South Carolina, died after an accident when Ellison was three. His mother, born in Georgia, worked as a housemaid. An accomplished jazz trumpeter, Ellison aspired to write symphonies, and with the benefit of a state scholarship enrolled at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, where he studied under the conductor and composer William L. Dawson. In 1936, at the end of his junior year, he took a leave of absence and went to New York, with the intention of studying sculpture and enjoying what he called a summer of enrichment. Walking through the Harlem YMCA on his first morning he bumped into Alain Locke, the head of philosophy at Howard University and author of The New Negro, whom he had met at Tuskegee a few months earlier. Locke was talking to the poet Langston Hughes, and after Locke left, the pair discussed poetry, criticism and politics. Handing Ellison a parcel containing two novels by André Malraux, Hughes asked him to return the books, but suggested he might want to read them first.

Through Hughes, Ellison met Richard Wright, who had moved to New York from Chicago to edit New Challenge and help out in the Harlem bureau of the Daily Worker. Wright commissioned a book review from Ellison, and then a short story. He also encouraged Ellison’s interest in radical politics. Over the following years Ellison contributed reporting, essays and reviews to New Masses, Tomorrow and Negro Quarterly, where he served as managing editor from 1942 until it ceased publication the following year. His writing reflected his belief that Marxism offered the best theoretical defence against the mystifications of racism, and that the organised workers’ movement was the greatest hope for improving conditions for African Americans. In 1941 he wrote that Wright’s novel Native Son, which had appeared the previous year, made possible the sort of freedom ‘which usually is only to be attained through the unlimited freedom provided by ownership of the means of production’. But he was soon put off by the patronage and paternalism of the American Communist Party’s white leadership and its acceptance of Soviet policy on everything from the treatment of American fascists to the segregation of the armed forces.

Looking back on his early years in New York, where, apart from some time in Ohio after his mother’s death and a two-year stay in Rome in the mid-1950s, he remained for the rest of his life, Ellison tended to present Wright and Malraux as warring influences on his thinking about the relationship between personal fate and abstract or collective forces. In the terms Ellison borrowed from Burke, Wright represented purpose and passion, as reflected in his continued – though evolving – commitment to radical politics and the ferocity of Native Son. Malraux, though on the left, counselled a wariness of dogmatism and determinism, and the cultivation of individual virtues through the exercise of what he called ‘conscious thought’. The change in Ellison’s perspective became evident during the Second World War, and was accelerated by his discovery of Burke, who had abandoned the revolutionary cause in favour of a wide-ranging theoretical project encompassing literary criticism, semantics, psychology and the study of ritual.

The disenchantment that many American communists felt with the Soviet Union and the American Communist Party had far-reaching implications: a ‘resolve … to be done with utopian illusions and heady expectations’, as Philip Rahv put it. In fact, Ellison was only done with the first of these. Freedom had ceased to be a historical ‘necessity’ but remained a personal ‘possibility’, while the concerns of racial equality or ‘race consciousness’ were replaced by questions about vocation and destiny, as itemised in the introduction to Shadow and Act:

Who am I, what am I, how did I come to be? What shall I make of the life around me, what celebrate, what reject, how confront the snarl of good and evil which is inevitable? What does American society mean when regarded out of my own eyes, when informed by my own sense of the past and viewed by my own complex sense of the present? How, in other words, should I think of myself and my pluralistic sense of the world, how express my vision of the human predicament, without reducing it to a point which would render it sterile before that necessary and tragic – though enhancing – reduction which must occur before the fictive vision can come alive?

His review of Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma, written in 1944 but published for the first time in Shadow and Act, is a record of this transitional moment. He proposes that the ‘wisest attitude for democrats’ is to make use of the ‘positive contributions’ of Myrdal’s book and disregard the ‘negative elements’ – a hint of the tendency towards affirmation that was beginning to dominate his thinking. He objects to the sociological approach not for burying the individual under generalisations but for its role in justifying racism. Both Northern and Southern social scientists, he claims, use ‘their graphs, charts and other paraphernalia to prove the Negro’s biological, psychological, intellectual and moral inferiority’. And though he welcomes the prospect of a democracy in which ‘the Negro will be free to define himself for what he is,’ something he later suggested African Americans were empowered to do under segregation and even slavery, he also emphasises that ‘American Negroes’ have played an active role in creating themselves: ‘Men have made a way of life in caves and upon cliffs, why cannot Negroes have made a way of life upon the horns of the white man’s dilemma?’

Ellison took a similar approach in ‘The Shadow and the Act’, an essay on the representation of black characters in film, occasioned by the screen adaptation of William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust:

After Reconstruction the political question of what was to be done with Negroes … came down to the psychological question: ‘how can the Negro’s humanity be evaded?’ The problem, arising in a democracy that holds all men as created equal, was a highly moral one; democratic ideals had to be squared with anti-Negro practices. One answer was to deny the Negro’s humanity, a pattern set long before 1915. But with the release of The Birth of a Nation the propagation of subhuman images of Negroes became financially and dramatically profitable. The Negro as scapegoat could be sold as entertainment; it could even be exported.

Ellison was not reprising this history in order to indict Hollywood. To do so would be to confuse image with reality:

In the beginning was not the shadow but the act, and the province of Hollywood is not action, but illusion. Actually, the anti-Negro images of the film were (and are) acceptable because of the existence throughout the United States of an audience obsessed with an inner psychological need to view Negroes as less than men. Thus, psychologically and ethically, these negative images constitute justifications for all those acts, legal, emotional, economic and political, which we label Jim Crow. The anti-Negro image is a ritual object of which Hollywood is not the creator, but the manipulator. Its role has been that of justifying the widely held myth of Negro unhumanness and inferiority by offering entertaining rituals through which that myth could be reaffirmed.

Invisible Man also shows the changes that Ellison underwent during the 1940s. The villains are not white bigots but well-intentioned liberals and revolutionaries of different races – the wily Southern university administrator Dr Bledsoe, the members of the Brotherhood and Ras the Exhorter (later Ras the Destroyer) – who can only view the narrator as a type. ‘This is a power set-up, son,’ Bledsoe tells the narrator, ‘and I’m at the controls.’ By the end of the novel, the narrator has traded role-playing for self-realisation, complicity for ‘invisibility’. He is hibernating in a vast cellar with 1369 lightbulbs, using electricity drained from the circuit of the Monopolated Light & Power. ‘I use their service and pay them nothing at all … All they know is that according to the master meter back there in their power station a hell of a lot of free current is disappearing somewhere into the jungle of Harlem.’ The narrator is convinced that he has ‘come a long way from those days when, full of illusion, I lived a public life’.

Reviewing Invisible Man in Commentary, Bellow identified ‘a very significant kind of independence in the writing’:

For there is a ‘way’ for Negro novelists to go at their problems, just as there are Jewish or Italian ‘ways’. Mr Ellison has not adopted a minority tone. If so, he would have failed to establish a true middle-of-consciousness for everyone … Negro Harlem is at once primitive and sophisticated; it exhibits the extremes of instinct and civilisation as few other American communities do. If a writer dwells on the peculiarity of this, he ends with an exotic effect. And Mr Ellison is not exotic. For him this balance of instinct and culture or civilisation is not a Harlem matter; it is the matter, German, French, Russian, American, universal, a matter very little understood.

The democratic socialist Irving Howe, writing in the Nation, saw things differently. To him, Invisible Man was ‘a Negro novel’ and this was the source of its power: ‘It tells us how distant even the best of the whites are from the black men that pass them on the streets; and it is written from a particular compound of emotions that no white man could possibly simulate.’ The novel’s problems came from Ellison’s ‘wish to be intellectually up to date’, which is reflected in ‘the unqualified assertion of individuality’.

It was an argument not just about the relationship between history and the individual but also that between history and literature. According to one view, the sanctity of the aesthetic was compromised by dealings with anything other than form, language and abstract ideas. As Howe characterised this position, ‘literary judgment must not be defiled by political ideas.’ It was a time, he later wrote, when ‘“the imagination” was allotted an absolute sovereignty, beyond challenge and sometimes beyond specification.’

Reaction to Invisible Man was divided along these lines. The mid-century vogue for post-ideological criticism, represented in different ways by the New York Intellectuals and the New Critics, provided Ellison’s novel with the sort of home that its narrator is forced to create for himself. Seymour Krim, writing in Partisan Review, added a postscript to his essay ‘The Fiction of Fiction’ to hail the arrival of a novel that was ‘trying to pioneer in the direction we’ve been discussing’. Leslie Fiedler in Love and Death in the American Novel (1960) wrote that Invisible Man was ‘superior to any of the passionate, incoherent books of Richard Wright … because Ellison has bypassed all formulas of protest and self-pity and cast off the restrictions of mere realism.’ The reviewer in Masses & Mainstream, a journal descended from New Masses, was more critical, arguing that the novel conforms to ‘the central design of American Century literature – anti-communism’.

As a result in part of the book’s success, Ellison found no reason to doubt his position or his judgment, or to re-evaluate the legitimacy of the beliefs he had given up. If he didn’t fear the possibility of slipping into another error, a fresh set of illusions, this was because, as he saw it, his earlier credulity had been more like curiosity. Writing in 1963, he regretted that Wright had ‘found the facile answers of Marxism before he learned to use literature as a means for discovering the forms of American Negro humanity’. Fortunately in Ellison’s own case, it had been the other way round. His belief in the primacy of the individual had originated in childhood, and ‘served to mock and caution me when I became interested in the communist ideal’. He had received further protection through his reading of Malraux. As he told the Paris Review, ‘whenever the heroes of Man’s Fate regarded their condition during moments of heightened self-consciousness, their thinking was something other than Marxist.’ And it’s true that in a letter to Wright written as early as 1940, he had asked: ‘Does the writer who accepts Marxism have the freedom to expound a personalised philosophy?’

It was an irony apparently lost on Ellison that while the narrator of Invisible Man achieves clarity by sequestering himself, his creator spent much of his time out in the world, travelling, giving interviews, delivering speeches, serving on boards and commissions, attending conferences and, in the assessment of one of his detractors, Ishmael Reed, stuffing himself ‘with lobster and duck at the Johnson White House’. The success of Ellison’s individualist crusade lured him into an extreme version of public life.

It seems likely that Ellison’s sense of vindication had an impact on his novel in progress. But whatever its repercussions for his creative work, his oracular certitude is plain to see in his non-fiction. Around 1950 he abandoned the last vestiges of his Marxism. When ‘Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity’ appeared in Confluence in 1953 – under the editorship of Henry Kissinger – Ellison appended a note acknowledging that he had ‘left in much of the bias and shortsightedness’ of the time it was written, seven years earlier. The closing passage argued that the artist is ‘no freer than the society in which he lives’ – the opposite of what he had come to believe.

Philip Roth was sure that the ending of Invisible Man was ironic. In ‘Writing American Fiction’ (1961), he argued that ‘the hero is left with the simple stark fact of himself … it does not seem to him a cause for celebration.’ To Ellison, though, individualism stood for everything he believed in: freedom, pride, mobility, irreducibility, mental toughness, honesty, responsibility. A cost of pursuing this agenda in essays was a persistent vagueness when it came to discussing specifics or attempting to define his vision. The critic Nathan Scott recalled listening carefully to an hour-long lecture by Ellison and finding himself unable to ‘get hold of anything, except the vernacular and the marvellous capacity it had for capturing “complexity”’. Ellison never stopped pursuing this, but it was a quest treated as a destination already reached – an approach that resembled awarding full marks to one’s own uncompleted homework.

Ellison acquired his sense of the special complexity of American identity from Henry James, going so far as to suggest – half jokingly – that he heard ‘Afro-American folk idiom … sounding beneath the sonorities of old Henry’s prose’. The apolitical aestheticism underpinning the reception of Invisible Man had also powered the critical revival that, in Fredric Jameson’s words, transformed James from ‘a minor 19th-century man of letters into the greatest American novelist of the 1950s’.

Invisible Man is not simply an allegory, a vehicle for ideas that might just as easily be paraphrased. It unfolds as a succession of brilliantly sustained set-pieces. The novel starts with the battle royal in which the narrator is made to fight blindfolded against other black students and ends in a Harlem riot, taking in along the way an incestuous rapist, a factory that specialises in white paint, a psychiatric ward, a succession of radical meetings and a night-time battle between the Brotherhood and Ras the Destroyer. It delivers an overwhelming aesthetic experience through an immersion in comic extremity, vernacular, streetscapes and – frequently ineffable – imagery. Here is the narrator describing the riot:

The briefcase swung heavy against my leg as I ran, going away, leaving Scofield cursing his lack of bullets behind me, running wildly and swinging the briefcase hard against the head of a dog that leaped at me out of the crowd, sending him yelping away. To my right lay a quiet residential street with trees, and I entered it, going towards Seventh Avenue, towards the district, filled now with horror and hatred. They’ll pay, they’ll pay, I thought. They’ll pay!

The street lay dead quiet in the light of the lately risen moon, the gunfire thin and for a moment, distant. The rioting seemed in another world. For a moment I paused beneath a low, thickly leaved tree, looking down the well-kept doily-shadowed walks past the silent houses. It was as though the tenants had vanished, leaving the houses silent with all windows shaded, refugees from a rising flood. Then I heard the single footfalls coming doggedly toward me in the night, an eerie slapping sound followed by a precise and hallucinated cry –

Time’s flying

Souls dying

The coming of the Lord

Draweth niiiiigh!

– as though he had run for days, for years. He trotted past where I stood beneath the tree, his bare feet slapping the walk in the silence, going for a few feet and then the high, hallucinated cry beginning again.

I ran into the avenue where in the light of a flaming liquor store I saw three old women scurrying towards me with raised skirts loaded with canned goods.

‘I can’t stop it just yet, but have mercy, Lord,’ one of them said. ‘Do, Jesus, do, sweet Jesus …’

Ellison saw the novel as a rarefied mode, but it was also his way of paying homage to what he had learned from other forms. When he told Burke he was writing a novel as a way of thanking him for his work, he added: ‘Anything else seems to me inadequate and unimaginative.’ Essay-writing provided opportunities ‘to reduce my thinking … to publishable form’, and performed ‘the grateful function of making it unnecessary to clutter up my fiction with half-formed or outrageously wrongheaded ideas’. (He said that he ‘lay no claims to being a thinker’.) But by carrying out ‘his chosen task’, Ellison wrote, the novelist has ‘the possibility of moving beyond the given level of either his talent or his cold perception of life’s meaning – of “playing beyond his game”, as it were’. Howe noted that, at the end of Invisible Man, the narrator says that his ‘world has become one of infinite possibilities’. He added: ‘It is hardly an accident that Ellison’s hero does not even attempt to specify those possibilities.’ He meant that this revealed the vapidity of Ellison’s good cheer. But there’s another way of framing that contention, or Roth’s reading of the ending: as the recognition of a tell or slip, a supra-authorial intimation, a glimmer from beyond Ellison’s game. As the narrator says, ‘only in division is there true health’: ‘I condemn and affirm, say no and say yes, say yes and say no.’ Ellison’s essays at their best are incisive and exhilarating, but they rarely dwell in ambiguity.

When Ellison collected his non-fiction in Shadow and Act, he included his most substantial essays but also gave priority to the expression of his present views over those from earlier in his career. In editing the essays, his executor, John F. Callahan, took a similar approach. Only one of the 25 items in the revised reissue of Collected Essays (first published in 2003) that didn’t appear in Shadow and Act and its successor, Going to the Territory (1986), predates Ellison’s renunciation of his political or ‘racial’ mode: ‘A Congress Jim Crow Didn’t Attend’, a report on the third National Negro Congress. Callahan doesn’t explain why he included Ellison’s 1954 essay on flamenco and the two-page draft of a talk he gave to a class at Columbia University in 1990, but not ‘Modern Negro Art’ from 1944, or ‘Recent Negro Fiction’ from 1941, or his Negro Quarterly editorial ‘The Negro and the Second World War’. And while this work might be dismissed as juvenilia, it is striking, given Ellison’s status as the least prolific of front-rank American novelists, that so much of his writing has never appeared in book form.

The challenge he faced as an eminent African American writer with a dwindling interest in racism is evident in ‘Tell It Like It Is, Baby’. He worked on a first draft in Rome in 1956, after receiving a letter from his friend Virgil Brannam asking whether he had read about the Southern Manifesto condemning racial integration, which had been signed by more than eighty congressmen. The essay was eventually completed in 1965 and published in the centenary issue of the Nation. Reflecting on his earlier failure to complete the essay, Ellison reached for a familiar alibi, claiming that he was unable to describe ‘the reality experienced by our group’ because it is ‘often bafflingly complex’.

The bulk of ‘Tell It Like It Is, Baby’ is a description of a dream Ellison had after getting Brannam’s letter. In it he was a child slave swept up in a carnival celebrating the death of the ‘coon’ Abraham Lincoln, although in ‘the dislocated, is-and-isn’t world of dream’ Lincoln was also still alive. A detail goes unparsed, perhaps because its significance is too obvious. At one point four black men were sent ‘fleeing into the darkness’. Ellison ‘wished to join them in their forced detachment, I envied them their anonymity, their freedom to not participate.’ Instead, he found himself ‘forced to the front of the crowd’. Here the ending of Invisible Man comes up against the perceived obligations that followed the book’s success.

In 1960, while preparing an introduction to the work of Stephen Crane (the only essay he published about a novelist), Ellison wrote a letter to the writer Albert Murray. He observed that in his fiction, Crane struggled with ‘Mose’ – a term for the black man – ‘just as hard’ as Mark Twain. ‘I won’t ignore what I always preach,’ he told Murray, ‘that the literary imagination of the country … has to smuggle the black man into its machinery in some form, otherwise it can’t function.’ But if Ellison always preached that, why register the possibility of ignoring it?

The essay itself contains no preaching, only circumlocution. Ellison replicates the ‘moral evasion’ that Crane diagnosed in the decades after the Civil War. He celebrates The Red Badge of Courage, published in 1895, for its willingness to address the Civil War, but goes out of his way to occlude what it was fought over:

For all our efforts to forget it, the Civil War was the great shaping event not only of our political and economic life, but following Crane, of our 20th-century fiction. It was the agency through which many of the conflicting elements within the old republic were brought to maximum tension, leaving us a nation fully aware of the continental character of our destiny, preparing the emergence of our predominantly industrial economy and our increasingly urban way of life, and transforming us from a nation consisting of two major regions which could pretend to a unity of values despite their basic split over fundamental issues, to one which was now consciously divided.

So that was its legacy: America’s awareness of itself as a single, albeit fractured, continent. Having alluded to a split over ‘fundamental issues’, Ellison writes that in the novel, social reality is presented through the limited perspective of Henry Fleming, a Northern soldier ‘only vaguely aware’ of the war’s ‘larger issues’. He adds: ‘We note that for all the complex use of the symbolic connotations of blackness, only one Negro, a dancing teamster, appears throughout the novel.’ We note it, or note that he does – but in what spirit, and to what end?

Ellison writes that Crane leaves the reader of The Red Badge of Courage ‘to fill in the understated background’. The same is true for the reader of Ellison’s essay. But ‘Stephen Crane and the Mainstream of American Fiction’, unlike Crane’s novel, is not narrated from the point of view of someone too young, self-centred and preoccupied to be aware of the ‘matters’ at hand. Even when Ellison argues that the reader is presented with the moral challenge of whether ‘to confront the public issues evoked by Henry’s private ordeal’, he refuses to name them. The Red Badge of Courage is described as ‘a novel about a lonely individual’s struggle for self-definition, written for lonely individualists’. The spectre of secession is raised, but only via Henry’s desire to ‘secede from society’.

Despite the pledge in his letter to Murray, Ellison ends up saying almost nothing about Crane’s portrayal of African Americans. Writing about the story ‘The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky’, Ellison refers in passing to a black train porter who humiliates the marshal, Jack Porter, and his new wife. The only indication that another story, ‘The Monster’, is about small-town racial prejudice comes when, touching on a favourite theme, he writes that in Crane’s eyes ‘there is no question as to the Negro’s part’ in American life – ‘nor to the fact that the issues go much deeper than the question of race’.

Ellison frames Crane’s fiction as an attack on the ‘postwar society’ of the 1870s and 1880s. Twain’s ‘bitter satire’ on this subject, ‘The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg’, had been mistaken for mere comedy, Ellison lamented, and so the ‘challenge flung down to Crane by history’ was to compel Americans to confront the corruption and moral laxity of the preceding decades (in fact, Twain’s story appeared after Crane’s novel). The relevant background for stories like ‘The Monster’ was not the materialism or skulduggery of the early Gilded Age, but the legal agenda, pursued notably in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which established conditions that still obtained at the time Ellison was writing: Jim Crow.

The essay concludes by arguing that ‘The Monster’ anticipated many of Hemingway’s themes and techniques, and ‘stands as the link’ between Twain and Faulkner. At last, in this pairing – the author of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with that of Light in August – the confrontation with race seems unavoidable. But Ellison simply invokes those writers in order to single out the way Crane looked ‘at the wholeness of American life’ and ‘discovered such far-reaching symbolic equivalents for its unceasing state of civil war’.

Ellison’s best-known intervention concerned the depiction of African American experience in his own time. In 1963 Howe published an exercise in polemical criticism, ‘Black Boys and Native Sons’, a belated defence of Wright against a pair of essays that James Baldwin had published in Partisan Review: ‘Everybody’s Protest Novel’ (1949) and ‘Many Thousands Gone’ (1951). Ellison found himself caught in the crossfire. After considering Baldwin’s essays and fiction, Howe praises the humour and invention of Invisible Man and notes Ellison’s success in escaping ‘the formulas of protest, local colour, genre quaintness and jazz chatter’. But he argues that the novel’s freedom from ‘the ideological and emotional penalties suffered by Negroes in this country’ is not ‘quite so complete as the book’s admirers like to suppose’. Howe describes the outlook adopted by intellectuals such as Ellison, Baldwin and Bellow during the period of ‘postwar liberalism’ as ‘not very different from conservatism’.

In Howe’s view, to write about African American experience with cool distance is ‘a moral and psychological impossibility, for plight and protest are inseparable from that experience’. But his point also concerns the unavoidable limits on individual potential: ‘We do not make our circumstances; we can, at best, try to remake them; and the arena of choice and action always proves to be a little narrower than we had supposed.’ This is hardly a far-fetched claim. But after the appearance of Howe’s piece, Ellison wrote an essay in the New Leader, ‘The World and the Jug’, and when Howe gave a short reply, he published a rejoinder, which formed the second half of an essay that appeared in Shadow and Act later that year under the title of his original response. Ellison accused Howe of presenting segregation as ‘an opaque steel jug’ in which the black man is trapped, when the jug is in fact transparent and the black man able to see and read and ‘make identifications as to values and human quality’. In the introduction to Shadow and Act he referred to ‘a freedom which for all its neglect by the sociologists and subtle thinkers was implicit in the Negro situation’.

Ellison’s problem with Wright’s work – the occasion for Howe’s essay – was its element of submission. By the 1960s, Ellison had come a long way from ‘Richard Wright’s Blues’, his essay of 1945, which argued that Wright demonstrated a ‘tragicomic’ attitude, acknowledging brutality and transcending it (this was, in fact, a description of Ellison’s own worldview). He had even found a trace of affirmation in a passage that spoke of ‘the essential bleakness of black life in America’. But he had mentioned misgivings about Wright in a letter to Burke the same year, and by 1961, the year after Wright’s death, he was ready to express them publicly. In his interview with Richard Stern, Ellison said he saw ‘more complexity in life’ than Wright had and thought he was ‘much less a social determinist’. Bigger Thomas, the violent central character in Native Son, ‘had none of the finer qualities of Richard Wright, none of the imagination, none of the sense of poetry, none of the gaiety’.

Howe, Ellison complained, had never considered that ‘American Negro life’ is ‘not only a burden (and not always that) but also a discipline teaching its own insights into the human condition, its own strategies of survival’. Ellison wrote on behalf of ‘an American Negro tradition which teaches one to deflect racial provocation and to master and contain pain … a tradition which abhors as obscene any trading on one’s own anguish for gain or sympathy; which springs not from a desire to deny the harshness of existence but from a will to deal with it as men at their best have always done’. He stressed African Americans’ ‘resistance to provocation, their coolness under pressure, their sense of timing and their tenacious hold on the ideal of their ultimate freedom’ – values that were ‘indispensable’ to the struggle and at least as characteristic as ‘the hatred, fear and vindictiveness which Wright chose to emphasise’.

Ellison claimed to fear the social order anticipated by Howe’s essay ‘more than I do that of Mississippi’. It was, he wrote, ‘far less painful to have to move to the back of a Southern bus, or climb to the peanut gallery of a movie house … than to tolerate concepts which distorted the actual reality of my situation or my reactions to it’. He recognised the absurdity of ‘parallel theatres’, but the movies were ‘just as enjoyable or boring’ in both, and it wasn’t as if he went to the cinema to be ‘with whites’. As for the limits on his education, he had ‘no need to attend a white university’ because he had found an academic with whom he wanted to study at Tuskegee, and it also had a well-stocked library.

Ellison acknowledged that he had been formed by unusual circumstances. He was the beneficiary of ‘accidents’ which revealed a world ‘beyond the Negro community’. He had grown up in a state that had no indigenous tradition of chattel slavery and, though segregated, enjoyed ‘more fluid and thus more human’ race relations than in ‘the old slave states’. Oklahoma was ‘a territory of hope’, a place where African Americans ‘could create their own opportunities’. Yet despite Ellison’s explanation for his own broad horizons, he didn’t write about African American resistance to oppression exclusively in the first-person singular. Though he hated generalising, he fell into the habit when it suited him. A generalisation amounted to more than simply the erasure of individual differences if it promoted the cause of affirmation or complexity – or both, in his claim that ‘for an endless variety of motives’ the American is ‘a self-confident man or woman who is engaged in projecting a second self’.

But when writers or critics characterised African American experience in terms of adversity, Ellison’s response was not to identify a difference of opinion but a flaw in reasoning. His logic seemed to be that a description of the ‘Negro American as self-hating and defensive’ corroborated the idea of the ‘limited’ black man, whereas his own philosophy reflected the fact that against steep odds, a community had flourished. In an essay from 1969, he described Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong as ‘the stewards of our vaunted American optimism’.

At other times a refusal to generalise was a pretext for sidestepping simple historical truths. In his tribute to the Oklahoma journalist Roscoe Dunjee, Ellison argued that African Americans ‘sometimes forget that our experience is diversified’. But Ellison didn’t, and nor did their ‘forefathers’: ‘They understood that slavery on rocky ground was different from slavery near watercourses. They understood that slavery in the Delta was different from slavery in the Tidewater country.’ He added, bafflingly: ‘They understood because through understanding they got some conception of who they were and how diversified they were.’ It’s true that historical detail can provide nuance. But nobody ever argued that ‘slavery’ referred to a single thing, and the salient fact about it was plainly not its diversity.

The belief in the affirmative took precedence over all other convictions. In ‘Society, Morality and the Novel’, which appeared in 1957, Ellison defined serious novels as being ‘committed to optimism’. Elsewhere he talked about a kind of psychology that is not only unable to deal with complexity ‘but implicitly negative’, as if the second were obviously the greater vice. Key to his aesthetics was a generational reflex, intensified by his training in jazz and classical music, which devalued overt statements. Though he acknowledged that the novel, unlike poetry, is not concerned primarily with words, but with ‘actions depicted in words’, he believed that fiction could attain a certain degree of abstraction, and argued a little fancifully that the American writer was at an advantage because ‘the major ideas of our society were so alive in the minds of every reader that they could be stated implicitly in the contours of the form.’ Yet he held Wright to a different standard. Considering Wright’s final novel, The Long Dream (1958), he argued that the failure to register – in a book set in the late 1930s and not exactly realistic – the recent negligible improvements to the lives of black people was a betrayal of ‘social reality’.

Though Ellison’s recourse to a sociological standard amounted to shifting the goalposts, the argument was consistent with his sanguine attitude towards the South. In ‘Harlem Is Nowhere’, he wrote that the Black Southerner who moves to the North finds himself without ‘certain important supports to his personality’, in particular ‘a relatively static social order in which, having experienced its brutality for hundreds of years – indeed, having been formed within it and by it – he has developed those techniques of survival which Faulkner refers to as “endurance”’. The essayist who disdained categories and believed above all in the individual case found himself, under the spell of his most potent idée fixe, invoking the idea of a transhistorical faculty bestowed on all black people from below the Mason-Dixon line.

At times he seemed to treat Jim Crow as a mere nuisance. In a letter to Joseph Frank written not long after the debate with Howe, he speculated that in a recent lecture in Paris, Hughes ‘probably had to tell the French … how difficult it is for Negro writers to be served hamburgers in Mississippi’. Noting that the citizens of McComb had decided to desegregate, he expressed his hope that ‘the rest of Mississippi follows their lead, then maybe Negro writers can turn their attention to the problems of craft … and get on with the work of contributing something of real literary value to American culture’.

As it turned out , what followed the triumphs of the civil rights movement was a new set of challenges. To the proponents of black nationalism, Ellison looked even more misguided than he did to Howe. James Alan McPherson, in a profile included in the Collected Essays as a ‘collaboration’, described the situation in which Ellison found himself in the summer of 1969. Ellison’s name, McPherson wrote, was being ‘defamed’ at conferences. ‘One man has said that he would like to shoot Ellison.’ When he visited Oberlin, students dismissed him as an Uncle Tom. A hint of the challenge had been evident in 1964, when he accepted a commission from the New York Review of Books to review Blues People by LeRoi Jones, who was soon to change his name to Amiri Baraka.

Blues People, like much that is written by Negro Americans at the present moment, takes on an inevitable resonance from the Freedom Movement, but it is in itself characterised by a straining for a note of militancy which is, to say the least, distracting. Its introductory mood of scholarly analysis frequently shatters into a dissonance of accusation, and one gets the impression that while Jones wants to perform a crucial task which he feels someone should take on – as indeed someone should – he is frustrated by the restraint demanded of the critical pen and would like to pick up a club.

The mid-century posture of indifference to social pressures had been a reaction to radical tendencies that would emerge in new forms in the 1960s. Reflecting on Robert Lowell’s open letter to Lyndon Johnson about Vietnam, Ellison said that he was ‘amazed, having gone through the political madness that marked the intellectual experience of the “Thirties”, to see many of our leading American intellectuals, poets and novelists – free creative minds – once again running in a herd’.

It was in this hostile climate that Ellison chose to revive the debate about African American writing, after Life published an essay in May 1970 by a young writer called Clifford Mason. Writing to the editor via his lawyer, Ellison objected to the assertion that he had helped create the image of Wright as a novelist ‘too much given to social protest, too preoccupied with one level of black society and too constrained by the limitations of his brutish protagonist really to qualify as a master’. Even if he hadn’t openly criticised Native Son until 1961, Ellison’s entire approach had been developed in opposition to what he saw as Wright’s excesses and omissions. He acknowledged that in ‘Richard Wright’s Blues’ he had tried, ‘as a critic, to suggest what I considered a more fruitful approach to his autobiography than that provided by a stress upon the mere sociology of racial relations’. A letter to the critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, written shortly after, shows that his real grievance was being pegged as a black writer and as Wright’s epigone. Invisible Man, as Ellison frequently insisted, drew on James, Conrad, Twain, Dos Passos, Joyce, Eliot, Hemingway, Malraux. Its image of the narrator in his hole, he said, came from Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, not Wright’s novella ‘The Man Who Lived Underground’.

A few months later, Mason struck again. In a special issue of Black World devoted to Ellison’s work, he wrote: ‘What might have been an instructive allusion to white writers in the 1960s is Tomism in the 1970s.’ But accusations relating to literature were always liable to provoke a stronger response from Ellison than those about his politics – even one as incendiary as Mason’s reference to Ellison’s ‘obsequious bleatings of white appeasement’. Such a claim was not simply extrapolated from Invisible Man or from Ellison’s attitude to political advocacy and black causes. Delivering his lecture ‘Hidden Name and Complex Fate: A Writer’s Experience in the United States’ at the Library of Congress in 1964, Ellison had said he would ‘avoid boring’ his audience ‘by emphasising those details of racial hardship which for some forty years now have been evoked whenever writers of my own cultural background have essayed their experience in public’. Though he then explained that he wasn’t denying the ‘validity’ of these testimonies, he couldn’t resist referring to them as ‘by now stylised recitals’. In 1945 Ellison had written that ‘perhaps no major problem affecting the destiny of a nation has ever received such superficial treatment.’ By 1964 he could take it for granted that everyone was sick of the subject.

Ellison wasn’t just refusing self-pity on his own account. As in the Crane essay, he was reluctant to invoke historical injustice. Talking about the ‘problems which have arisen’ from America’s ‘beginnings’, he doesn’t use the words ‘racism’ or ‘slavery’, but refers to ‘this basic moral predicament’ and then – on five occasions – to ‘it’. If Invisible Man risked a too easy transcending of the pain it described, fulfilling one half of the ‘tragicomic’ or ‘blues’ formula but stinting on the other, Ellison’s essays went much further. One of his oddest rhetorical manoeuvres was to emphasise resilience while at the same time minimising adversity. Commemorating Roscoe Dunjee, he said that he mentioned the devastation wrought by the Tulsa riot of 1921 not ‘to bore you with how hard life has been for us’, but to emphasise Dunjee’s ‘courage’. There was so much silver lining in Ellison’s account of African American history that the cloud is barely visible.

Callahan makes various attempts to defend Ellison’s bona fides. He writes that Ellison was ‘receptive’ to generations of African American writers, but that isn’t true. Toni Morrison, for instance, said that ‘he made no attempt to make me feel welcome’ when they were both members of the Century Association, a members’ club for writers and artists. In one of the few explanatory notes in the letters, Callahan points to a blurb Ellison wrote about Wright’s book on the Gold Coast, Black Power, claiming it shows ‘an interest’ in Africa overlooked by Ellison’s biographers. If this note of praise is ‘one of Ellison’s most pronounced commentaries’ on the subject, you can see why it might not merit extended biographical treatment. Among the few other references to Africa in the letters are Ellison’s argument that ‘even though those Africans have Ghana they still haven’t developed to the point where the blues start,’ and the question ‘who the hell wants to live in Africa?’

Charges of collusion and indifference didn’t dog Ellison for ever. By 1983, he was able to refer to the ‘pounding I took during the 1960s and 1970s’. The following year he noted that ‘some of those who attacked me most bitterly’ during that period had ‘changed their minds’. He also mellowed a little, at least when it came to discussing race. He complained that Lewis Mumford’s study of 19th-century American literature, The Golden Day (Ellison borrowed the name for a speakeasy in Invisible Man), ‘denied my people the sacrificial role that they had played in the drama’: ‘What else, other than sheer demonic, masochistic hell raising, was that bloody war all about if not slavery and the contentions which flowed there-from?’

In an erudite essay on the bicentennial of American independence, ‘Perspective of Literature’, Ellison addresses the injustices of American democracy directly. He starts by recalling his childhood apprenticeship to J.D. Randolph, the custodian of the law library at the Oklahoma state capitol, whom ‘white men of power’ exploited for his compendious knowledge.

I never heard him complain about the situation, but I felt that there was something … rotten in the lawyers, if not indeed in the law itself. Nor was it possible for me to ignore the obvious fact that race was a source of that rot, and that even within the mystery of the legal process, the law was coloured and rigged against my people.

Ellison often spoke reverentially of America’s founding documents, but here he observes that they were ‘written in the language of the very hierarchy which they had overthrown’. Jefferson provided

his pro-slavery colleagues an escape from having to undergo the rigours of economic and perhaps spiritual mortification that would have given full credibility to their proclaimed principles of freedom and equality … Thus the new Edenic political scene incorporated a flaw similar to the crack that appeared in the Liberty Bell and embodied a serpent-like malignancy that would tempt government and individual alike to a constantly recurring fall from democratic innocence.

With the passing of time, even Ellison’s fiercer arguments gained a more sympathetic hearing. He never recanted the claims in ‘The World and the Jug’, writing in 1985 that he was ‘damned’ if he was going to let Howe ‘impose his narrowness of view upon whatever the hell I wrote’. Howe, for his part, revisited the debate one last time in 1990, acknowledging that he had possibly ‘underestimated the capacity of oppressed people like the American blacks to create a vital culture apart from social protest’.

Having first been celebrated in a period associated with ‘the end of ideology’, Ellison found himself embraced again in one that proclaimed the end of history and even the end of race. Isaac Julien, in an essay published in 1992 called ‘Black Is, Black Ain’t’, drew on his example to ‘de-essentialise’ black identity. In a New Yorker profile published in March 1994, a few weeks before Ellison’s death, David Remnick argued that his literary and academic ‘godchildren’, among them John Edgar Wideman and Henry Louis Gates Jr, were ‘at least as influential’ as the Afrocentrists and black nationalists, and that Ellison’s ‘integrationist position has shaped black studies programmes at Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford and many other leading universities’.

It was odd, given this development, that Ellison’s executors approached Bellow to write the preface to the first edition of his Collected Essays, published in 1995. He produced a dignified piece of appreciation, measured and affectionate, with the expected reference to Ellison’s having interests beyond ‘the race problem’ and his insistence ‘on the priority of art and the independence of the artist’. But by this time Bellow was hardly a suitable spokesman for such a position. He had taken the conservative element Howe identified in postwar liberalism to its reactionary extreme, as reflected in his widely quoted retort to critiques of the canon (‘Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans?’) and in the portraits of fearsome young black men in his novels Mr Sammler’s Planet and The Dean’s December. Not long after Ellison’s death, Bellow told Remnick that ‘with Ralph Ellison you could say anything, just speak freely, as he did.’

Invisible Man, for all its intricacies and coiled ironies, has an element of stridency, and Ellison’s pronouncements leave little room for debate about his views. His recent boosters have been cultural conservatives such as Thomas Chatterton Williams and Joseph Epstein. While the most prominent African American novelists, Colson Whitehead and Percival Everett, have talked about the liberating effect of Ellison’s example and his insistence that a black writer in America can do anything, they have won their Pulitzer Prizes for books dealing explicitly with racial injustice.

The narrator of Ellison’s novel is uncertain whether ‘accepting the lesson’ of his invisibility ‘placed me in the rear or in the avant-garde’. Then, somewhat predictably, he disregards the question as a matter of ‘history’. His proper area of study is ‘my own life’. For the writer, though, there can be no question of separating solitary endeavour from the shared priorities of a given moment. Today the career of Baldwin in his later iterations – political, emotive, dandyish, fluently creative – commands an infinitely greater mystique than Ellison’s does. Yet if Ellison seems not only an idiosyncratic figure but a slightly desolate one, his reputation will surely undergo further transformations. As he wrote in 1982, expressing a notion he cherished but sometimes found it convenient to repress, ‘change is ever with us and will continue after we’re gone.’

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