The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison ed. by John F. Callahan and Marc C. Conner

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison ed. by John F. Callahan and Marc C. Conner Ross Posnock John F. Callahan and Marc C. Conner, eds. The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison. New York: Random House, 2019. 1,072 pp. $50.00. “Editions of letters and diaries say that a writer has arrived, or is still with us, much more than biographies do,” Darryl Pinckney remarked in his review of Trading Twelves (2000), the Ellison/Albert Murray letters. The warmly celebratory response in major media to The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison upon its publication in the fall of 2019 ratifies Pinckney’s point. Expertly introduced decade by decade by the incomparable John Callahan, The Letters arrive as a great gift to American literature, an intellectual feast of over a thousand pages, a volume that easily takes its place among the most important collections by any American author. The letters above all allow us to bear intimate witness to the birth of Ellison’s ideas (highlights include the 1941 and 1945 letters to Richard Wright, the 1945 letter to Kenneth Burke, and the 1970 letter to Stanley Edgar Hyman) expressed with remarkable force and pungency. Yet intellectual ferment is only one strand in this tapestry; another reveals the private Ellison. His early letters to his mother Ida are often preoccupied with requests for money—he hangs with a fast crowd at Tuskegee—but eventually come to express anguished empathy for her isolation (deserted by her second husband and “toiling from morning to night”), some reassurance that he is special even if unemployed (“every one thinks I’m a little odd and a bit gifted”) and outrage at a world so indifferent to poor people (“I find myself wishing that the whole thing would explode”). These feelings culminate in an August 30, 1937 letter to Ida, the last one she reads before dying unexpectedly two months later. His romantic pain is vivid in two 1941 letters to Sanora Babb, herself a fledgling (white) novelist with whom Ellison was in love; in letters in the 1950s, he confesses to his wife Fanny his guilt and confusion in the wake of an extramarital affair while at the American Academy in Rome. A third strand are the exchanges with his literary circle—Murray, of course, but also during the 1950s, Saul Bellow, and more enduring if less intense friendships with Robert Penn Warren and Richard Wilbur. A fourth thread are the long, nostalgic letters to family and friends recalling the world of his fatherless childhood in Oklahoma City. “I have been returning on the average at least once over the last seven years,” he writes in 1971. “And when I get there, I’m like a ghost—or a Rip Van Winkle” who awakes to discover his world has changed. Each of these strands—I have summarized only the major ones—has its own particular cadence and voice, which makes The Selected Letters a virtuoso display of American prose. The Fall 2019 reviews and events (including a reading of letters at the Schomburg Library) reaffirmed Ellison’s cultural stature. And two of the major reviews (in The New Yorker by Kevin Young and on the front page of the New York Times Book Review by Saidiya Hartman) suggest that a younger generation of critics still find Ellison of considerable value even when some of their political and cultural views are at odds with his (I am thinking of Hartman’s feminism and Afropessimism). Hartman (December 19, 2019) subtly balances judgments: “ ‘Complexity,’ ” she begins, “was the term that Ralph Ellison deployed most often to describe black life and culture. And it is the term best suited to convey the character of this brilliant, often [End Page 241] disapproving and unsparing man.” Although “complexity” has long been a piety of literary humanism associated both with Ellison and with his fellow New York intellectual (and occasional antagonist) Lionel Trilling—suggesting their reverence for literature in the face of political and sociological reductionism—Hartman means something else by the word. This is clear from what soon follows upon “unsparing”: that Ellison’s “cult of the masculine hero” sought to restore “to the native son truth and...