Remembering Ralph Ellison - African American author of 'Invisible Man'

American Visions, August-Sept, 1994

The year 1994 will be remembered for the passing of Ralph Ellison, the author of Invisible Man and the first black writer to win the National Book Award America's pre-eminent literary distinction. Ellison's life and his creative work, which included two volumes of essays that underscored the breadth of his interests, were an exuberant exploration of America.

His first love was music, whose classical component he studied with the conductor of his hometown Oklahoma City Orchestra. All the while, Ellison stayed closely in touch with the blues and jazz, which he also loved. At Tuskegee Institute he continued his study of music; however, an exposure to T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" marked the beginning of his creative turn toward literature.

From rural Alabama, Ellison headed to New York City, where he met Langston Hughes, whom he had read as a youth; Alain Locke, to whom he had earlier introduced himself when Locke had visited Tuskegee; and Richard Wright, who sponsored Ellison's initial writing and introduced him to the world of the Communist Party.

After a World War II stint in the merchant marine, Ellison retired to the serenity of a Vermont farm, where one day, as he sat at his typewriter, his imagination spontaneously led him to strike the keys that spelled out, "I am an invisible man." Uncertain of the phrase's meaning or origin, Ellison pursued his vision across seven years of hard work - and enriched the world.

Seeking an appreciation of a writer who secured immortality on the basis of a single novel, we at American Visions have turned to Ellison's friends, contemporaries, colleagues and critics.

Albert Murray, the author of The Spyglass Tree and other novels, was Ellison's closest friend. The two were students together at Tuskegee Institute. Shortly before Ellison's death, Ellison noted with pleasure that "Booker T. Washington's school" had produced two reasonably good writers.

Charles Johnson made clear his admiration of Ellison in his acceptance speech when he won the National Book Award in 1990 for Middle Passage.

Amiri Baraka, who has secured renown for his poems, plays and meditations on the African-American experience, was an early critic of the limitations and orientation of Ellison's work - a criticism that he has not renounced.

Leon Forrest's literary career began with There Is a Tree More Ancient Than Eden. It also began with the benefit of Ellison's endorsement, for he not only recommended the work to Toni Morrison, who was then Forrest's editor, but also let his endorsement stand as the preface when the book was published.

Gwendolyn Brooks shared with Ellison post-World War II national literary recognition, which has remained steady from 1950-when her volume of poems, Annie Allen, won the Pulitzer Prize - to her recent selection as the National Endowment for the Humanities 1994 Jefferson Lecturer.

AV:Will Ellison last?

JOHNSON: When the list of the most globally important authors of the 20th century is drawn up, Ellison will be one of the pre-eminent writers for that 100-year period, and I'm sure his work will endure into the 21st century. There are things that he manages to achieve intellectually and artistically in Invisible Man that will stand the test of time.

Writing well is the same thing as thinking well. Ellison thinks quite well. His mind has been very influential for the last 40-something years.

MURRAY: When he ends the book by saying, "Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?" he's saying this is not just about the obvious subject matter that the images are based on, but about being a human being. ... That's why I think it's of greater resonance - philosophical, literary resonance - than a book like Native Son, or the fiction of somebody like James Baldwin. That's campaign literature - as serious as it is, people only deal with that when they address that particular problem. If the problem goes down in interest, then their interest in that goes down.

JOHNSON: You find this novel spanning Mark Twain to William Faulkner. It moves from conventions of the slave narratives to the 20th-century Kafkaesque-type parable. It moves from blues to Freud. ... The major intellectual movements, at least in terms of black American life, are embodied in that novel.

I often describe his prose as magisterial and fugue-like. It's about language. It's really an eruption of voices that we find in Invisible Man.

FORREST: As long as we turn to literature as the highest form of verbal expression about the human condition, his work will indeed continue to last and instruct.

AV: Would you say that appreciation of Ellison is now at its peak?

JOHNSON: When [Invisible Man] came out, I think it was justly celebrated, and all the way through the 1960s it was taught virtually everywhere, seems to me - on college campuses and universities. It's always been in print.

FORREST: The rich thing about Ellison's work is the sustained power of it. When you think back since the end of World War II, so many novels have come and gone, but his maintains such a steady audience, intrigue and power, and it doesn't depend on fluctuations of public taste.