Invisible Man and African American radicalism in World War II

African American Review, Fall, 2005 by Christopher Z. Hobson

The first shift, felt earlier in the novel, certainly reflects Ellison's close relationship with Wright. By 1942 Wright had silently dropped out of the Communist Party, while Ellison and Angelo Herndon, in the short-lived Negro Quarterly, were maintaining ties with it while taking a more critical view of the war than the CP would then countenance. In 1944 when Wright made public his break with the Communists, Ellison regarded Wright and presumably himself as favorable to communism but not to the Party or its leaders, whom he called "bankrupt" (Letters, 29 Aug. 1944; see also 5 Sept. 1944). Ellison's continuing closeness to Wright, the dissident leftist's hatred for the Communist Party, and the maturing radical's belief in freedom and popular upheaval are all on display in a letter of August 1945, written when he was starting Invisible Man. Calling the Communists dangerous because "they still speak in the name of the only possible future," Ellison goes on:

   I would like very much to talk with
   you concerning independence of
   thought. I believe we should serve
   notice on them [the CP] that, godamit,
   they are responsible to the Negro people
   at large even if they do spit in the
   faces of their members and that they
   must either live up to their words or
   face a relentless fire of mature,
   informed criticism.... If they want to
   be lice, then by God let them be
   squashed like lice.

Ellison predicts, "The moment that I begin to speak and write like a man they'll use all their energy to jam me off the airways, because, like you, I'll be speaking on the wavelength of the human heart"--a reference to the closing paragraphs of Wright's "I Tried to Be a Communist" (Ellison, Letters, 18 Aug. 1945). (16)

Ellison may also have been influenced by contact with the Trinidadian Marxist C.L.R. James, whose biographer, Kent Worcester, states that in 1942-44 "Constance [Webb, later James's wife] and C. L. R. spent a great deal of time in the company of the ex-Communist author [Wright] and his wife, Ellen. The Wrights introduced Constance and her future spouse to ... sociologists Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake, [future] novelists Ralph Ellison and Chester Himes, and others such as ... E. Franklin Frazier" (75). James, a figure of striking intellect and personal presence who was then an unorthodox Trotskyist, had already worked out some conceptions that might have appealed to Ellison, notably that the African American movement was not to be taken in tow by the trade union or socialist movements but was itself an independent factor in the struggle for socialism. He was beginning to develop the ideas for which he was later best known, notably that expressed in a 1948 document: "Organization as we have known it is at an end.... The task today is to call for, to teach, to illustrate, to develop spontaneity--the free creative activity of the proletariat. The proletariat will find its own method of proletarian organization" (117). Wright was familiar with James's ideas on the African American movement and tried to involve him and perhaps Ellison in abortive editorial projects in 1944-45; Ellison had some acquaintance with James through Wright for several years. (17)