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

Notes

1 In an argument that parallels Schaub's, Lawrence Schwartz has suggested that a consensus of the New York Intellectuals and New Critics allowed William

Faulkner's reputation to rapidly reverse itself, as Faulkner was transformed from minor novelist to one of the figures in American literature (1988). However, Schwartz also points out that the shift in Faulkner's reputation depended less on Faulkner's actual merits or demerits than on the way he fulfilled the requirements of the new aesthetic that emerged at the dawn of the Cold War. Not surprisingly, both Schaub and Schwartz identify Ellison as part of the new critical consensus.

2 For example, Foley notes that "Ellison's charge that the Brotherhood engineered the 1943 Harlem rebellion echoes the claim made in the 1951 Warner Brothers movie, I Was a Communist for the FBI ... that the CP arranged the 1943 rebellions in both Harlem and Detroit" (1997, 542). However, during the Harlem riot, CP leaders joined with other authorities in an attempt to cool down unrest (539). She also claims that Ellison's characterization of Brother Jack is drawn in part from descriptions of a Communist leader variously named as Timmy, Yasha, and Golos in the accounts of professional anticommunists such as Elizabeth Bentley and Louis Budenz (542).

3 Wright was appalled at the effects of party discipline, and at the internal paranoia that led him to be suspected as a traitor because of his attempts to record incidents in the life of Ross, who was put on trial for supposed disloyalty. Wright associates democratic centralism and the "witch hunts" (1993, 433) of the Party against its own membership with the oppression he has experienced in the South: "It was inconceivable to me, though bred in the lap of Southern hate, that a man could not have his say. I had spent a third of my life traveling to the North just to talk freely, to escape the pressure of fear. And now I was facing fear again" (405-06). Wright finds the racial attitudes of Party circles liberating (despite some examples of racism), but he nevertheless finds parallels with the oppression he experienced in the South.

4 In the special issue of Black World, Nick Aaron Ford, Clifford Mason, and John Henrik Clarke all find positive things to say about Invisible Man, however much they dislike some of Ellison's critical comments on race, and John Williams offers only a little negative comment on Ellison for waiting too long to publish a second novel and for being too critical of"younger Black writers for producing second-rate material" (1970, 11). Even less critical is Eugenia Collier, who makes no mention of Ellison's criticism, and of course, Larry Neal, who repudiates his own earlier criticism of Ellison in Black Fire (1968, 652).

5 Foley suggests that the union organizer "with the scarred hand is a familiar type of mentor character from the conventions of proletarian fiction" (1999, 330).

6 Ellen Schrecker has suggested that one of the lasting effects of the Cold War was the way the anti-communism of the McCarthy era limited the Civil Rights movement. McCarthyism "narrowed the movement's agenda, separated it from potential allies, and kept it from seriously challenging the poverty that blighted the lives of most African Americans" (1998, 395).