Reinventing Ralph Ellison

Abstract

Jackson, Lawrence. 2002. Ralph Ellison: The Emergence of Genius. New York: John Wiley and Sons. $30.00 hc. 444 pp. Warren, Kenneth W. 2003. So Black and Blue: Ralph Ellison and the Occasion of Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. $37.50 hc. $15.00 sc. 108 pp. Ralph Ellison invested a great deal into the project of inventing himself; late in life, he granted interviews only with the condition that he be allowed to edit the transcript. A decade after his death, interest in Ellison is as strong as ever, as biographers and critics have continued to look beyond the mask that Ellison showed the world and to appropriate the ongoing process of reinventing Ralph Ellison for contemporary readers. Lawrence Jackson's Ralph Ellison: The Emergence of Genius, the first volume of the first major Ellison biography, will alter critical views of Ellison. Although he does shape his biography around themes that Ellison would [End Page 170] have appreciated—Ellison as a loner with a deep belief in himself, Ellison's rejection of Communism after the Communist Party's emphasis on black equality diminished with the Soviet Union's entry into the World War II, and Ellison's emergence as a critic and eventually a novelist with high standards for art—Jackson manages to get behind the images that Ellison projected to the public. A picture of Ellison's poverty growing up the child of a single mother in Oklahoma City emerges, as well as one of his turbulent three years at Tuskegee, where Ellison needed to assert his own interests in the rigid environment of William Dawson's music program. Few readers will forget the photograph of Ellison taken upon his arrival at Tuskegee, with his head bandaged from injuries he received in an encounter with railroad bulls in Decatur, Alabama, after hoboing from Oklahoma in order to arrive at college early and fulfill the requirements of his scholarship. Ellison downplayed this incident when he acknowledged it at all, writing a semi-comical version of it in Going to the Territory, although Tuskegee officials at the time were surprised that he could walk. This incident and others is a reminder of the private depths that Ellison kept in reserve—although readers did get a glimpse of those depths in the anger Ellison sometimes displayed, as in his rebuff of Irving Howe in perhaps his most famous critical essay, "The World and the Jug." Jackson reminds us that Ellison became an important critic before he was a major novelist, thus making the appearance of two works of nonfiction after Invisible Man somewhat more understandable in the context of Ellison's work as a whole. Ellison gained his reputation in the early 1940s as the tireless defender of Richard Wright's Native Son. Explaining Wright's work in the pages of left wing journals (the Communist New Masses but also Direction), in many public addresses and panel discussions in the Village and in Harlem, and finally in his aesthetic manifesto, "Richard Wright's Blues," in the Antioch Review in 1945, it is not surprising that Ellison grew tired of his close identification with Wright when he emerged as a novelist. The relationship between Ellison and Wright—who Jackson portrays as a difficult man to befriend—has been discussed many times before, but no one before Jackson has discussed Ellison's life in the thirties and forties in such detail. Jackson demonstrates Ellison's deep engagement with the left, so much that, instead of a sub-title ("the emergence of genius") that reminds us of Ellison's relation to high modernism, the biography might have been subtitled "Ralph Ellison: the Working-Class Years." That Jackson chose the sub-title he did reveals the tension within his work between telling the story of Ellison's emergence as a major modernist and telling the story of the left of the 1930s and 1940s in which Ellison was clearly immersed. Jackson notes that Ellison, although never a member of the Communist Party, became a New Masses reviewer...