Ralph Ellison's Unfinished Second Skin

Abstract

The Ralph Ellison papers in the Library of Congress contain a short story dated 1983 and titled, simply, “Norman.” The story’s four pages describe a Jewish couple that takes its pampered son “Luddle Normundt” for a walk in New York. The couple imagines their son’s golden future even as it ogles “long lean swartzas full of Super spade larceny” (2). He will, they hazard, “Spikindt the language like a dook uv de realm. A cool thinker in a cool shade of greenbacks, tellin all the goys whose the boss” (3). The African Americans, one guesses, are the source of the cool that the child will someday exploit to his advantage. This gratuitously nasty piece—which concludes with “luddle Normundt” throwing a tantrum and shitting on the sidewalk—captures Ellison’s abiding distaste for Norman Mailer. Indeed, so offended was Ellison by Mailer’s pronouncements about black life that he was still, when he died in 1994, planning to include a send-up of “The White Negro” (1957) in his long-awaited second novel. Mailer’s notorious essay celebrated white “psychopaths” who emulate ostensibly hip black men to achieve an “apocalyptic orgasm” (349). Mailer, Ellison wrote to Albert Murray, “thinks all hipsters are cocksmen possessed of great euphoric orgasms” (“To Albert Murray” 195). This was, he pointed out, “the same old primitivism crap in a new package” (197–98). Ellison’s second novel, recently released as Three Days Before the Shooting (2010), strips Mailer’s primitivism of its new packaging, when an outraged but obviously titillated elderly southerner named “Norm A. Mauler” writes his Senator to protest a sexual technique called “backwacking.” The technique, which he describes in detail, leaves its black practitioners “as close to dying as any normal human being can possibly come and still not die” (1099).