Writer on the left: Class and race in Ellison's early fiction

College Literature, Fall 2002 by Mazurek, Raymond A

Eight years after his death, Ralph Ellison's work is undergoing a reassessment. Invisible Man, the only volume of fiction Ellison published during his lifetime, has long been recognized as a major novel; indeed, it has been named as the most significant post-- 1945 US. novel in three different surveys published from 1965 to 1990 ("American Fiction," 1965; Freidman, 1978; Mazurek, 1990). However, the last five years have seen the publication of a posthumous volume of stories, Flying Home and Other Stories, along with the Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, both containing previously unpublished material, as well as the controversial novel Juneteenth, patched together from the copious material Ellison was working on during the last four decades of his life. While Juneteenth and the controversies surrounding its editing by John F Callahan will provide scholars with plenty to talk about for many years to come (see Feeley, 1999; Kirn, 1999; Menand, 1999), it would be unfortunate if Juneteenth overshadowed the volume of stories that Callahan edited as Flying Home. For while the unfinished Juneteenth raises many questions about Ellison's intentions, the six polished but previously unpublished stories in Flying Home raise to new prominence the issue of Ellison's relationship to his leftist past, a past Ellison suppressed as he became a major US. writer during the early years of the Cold War. Ellison's place in literary history as a writer whose formative period occurred in the radical years before the Cold War can now be seen more clearly, despite his ambivalent attitude toward-and even denial of-his deep involvement with the Left. There is an additional irony in the way Ellison will be remembered by actual readers in the future. Flying Home and Other Stories, with its radical, posthumously published stories from the late 1930s and early 1940s, is now the most conveniently teachable volume of Ellison's work. I am surely not alone in frequently choosing to teach Flying Home rather than Invisible Man in undergraduate courses in recent years, and one of the unpublished stories, "Party Down at the Square," has already appeared in the influential Heath Anthology. It is now likely that Ellison will be remembered by a new generation of readers-who are likely to encounter canonical writers as undergraduates, to the extent that they encounter them at all-at least partly as a writer of the left from the 1930s and 1940s.

If this becomes Ellison's place within the historical memory of many of his readers, however, it will be both ironic and fitting. It is ironic because the harshest criticism of Ellison has come from critics on the left since Invisible Man was first published in 1952, and because of Ellison's later repudiation of his leftist involvement during the 1930s and 1940s. It is fitting because much of Ellison's work grows out of his experience on the left as part of a generation of working class intellectuals for whom the 1930s and 1940s were formative years. As I hope to demonstrate, the posthumously published stories in Callahan's collection suggest Ellison's closeness to the working class movements of the 1930s and 1940s-and perhaps this is one reason why they were not published when Ellison became a prominent writer in the early years of the Cold War. In addition, although a detailed discussion of Invisible Man is beyond the scope of this essay, a reading of the early stories helps illuminate the extent to which the political conflicts of both the thirties and the fifties are inscribed, in complex and ambivalent ways, in Invisible Man and its critical reception.

The Politics of Ellison'S Reception

Ellison's emergence as a canonical writer came at a crucial moment in US. cultural history, when the Left aesthetic of the 1930s and 1940s was displaced by a triumphant ascendance of what Thomas Schaub has identified as the "new liberalism." Therefore, it is not surprising that, until recently, Ellison's connection to the working class movements of the 1930s and 1940s has been downplayed. According to Schaub (1991), the new liberalism was a new cultural consensus fashioned by the New York Intellectuals and New Critics, an aesthetic that distrusted the ideological commitments of the 1930s and foregrounded aesthetic complexity and the importance of the individual.1 From the beginning, Invisible Man received positive reviews as a novel in tune with the new aesthetic. Many of the reviews of Invisible Man stress ideas associated with the new liberalism, such as the universality of Ellison's theme and his concern for the individual (see Barrett, 1952; Bellow, 1952; Cassidy, 1952; Chase, 1952; Lewis, 1952; Mayberry, 1952; Morris, 1952; Rollo, 1952; Delmore Schwartz, 1952;Webster, 1952). Other reviews directly associate Ellison's novel with anti-Communism and identify the Brotherhood, the political organization the Invisible Man joins, as a "euphemism for the Communist Party" (Hedden 1952, 5; "Black and Blue," 1952, 112; see also Howe 1952; Mayberry 1952).While the new consensus enabled the favorable reception of works like Invisible Man, the cultural shift in the early years of the Cold War also involved suppression. Along with the overt suppression of witch hunts and political attacks on anyone associated with the Left of the McCarthy years, those years suppressed historical memory. The complexity and vitality of the cultural formations of the popular frontin which the young Ralph Ellison participated-were rewritten as an unfortunate interruption in the triumphant story of American modernism.