Tracking the Invisible Man (A Walk Through Ralph Ellison's New York)

Village Voice ^ | July 17 - 23, 2002 | David Taylor

[PJ-Comix]

Becoming a literary classic can spell death to one's street cred. For the last three decades of his life, Ralph Ellison spent a lot of time defending Invisible Man from a younger generation of black radicals, and defending himself for not finishing a second novel. By the 1980s, Invisible Man's subversively democratic last line—"Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?"—spoke mainly to students in college classrooms.

Lawrence Jackson's new biography, Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius avoids academic overgrowth by focusing on Ellison's early life and work, following the author through Invisible Man's 1952 publication and leaving him at the threshold of his fame. Jackson charts Ellison's intellectual growth and convincingly describes the tightrope of making a living as a black intellectual at midcentury. It's the first in-depth portrait of Ellison in his times, a deeply researched account of his early years, and one that should spur a re-awakening to the vitality of Ellison's achievement.

A walk can clear away the cobwebs of canonization. An April afternoon presented me with a chance to make a trip across Harlem during the week when, 50 years before, Invisible Man hit bookstores. In his first 15 years in Harlem, Ellison went from Okie college dropout to radical to freelance critic to National Book Award winner. I wanted to shadow him and see how he did it.

On the first leg from the Bronx across the Harlem River, my transport is the Bx 33. As I board, the driver waves me back to any seat I choose. Jackson reports that Ellison savored such choices when he first arrived in New York from the segregated South. The bus then drops me off at St. Nicholas Park, which glows with a spring flush of grass, daffodils, and hyacinths. The sun is sliding down as a cold breeze kicks up.

On early spring nights in 1938, the park benches here were a young Ellison's only shelter. He had just come from his mother's funeral in the Midwest, an orphan with no money and few connections. It was his second time in New York.

Ellison, fortunately, learned self-confidence from his mother, Ida Ellison, who had raised two boys alone after her husband died when Ralph was small. Her love and high expectations pointed him to Tuskegee for music studies (he played the trumpet; his mother wanted him to be the next Ellington). After three years there he went for a summer in Harlem. On his second day in the city he strolled into the lobby of the 135th Street YMCA and joined a conversation with Alain Locke and another man. Ellison recognized Locke from the poet's visit to Tuskegee. The other man was Langston Hughes. When Locke excused himself, the kid from Oklahoma continued to bend the ear of Harlem's poet laureate about T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," music, and his plans to study sculpture at Augusta Savage's studio on 125th Street.

Ellison knew intuitively how to network. In Harlem there were writers, sculptors, and thinkers to meet. Hughes introduced him to Richard Wright, who helped shape Ellison's views about art and politics and inspired him to write. In Harlem, even politics was jumping. As Jackson notes, "the Party was also a party, and its reputation for revelry appealed to the twenty-four-year-old Ellison." A Young Communist League leader from that time later said that being a communist in Harlem "was like being the swinging present and the swinging future simultaneously . . . you were enjoying all the boogying and boozing and everything in the present, while you had your socialist perspective to give you the inspiration to continue."

Wright helped get Ellison's first book reviews published in New Masses and The Daily Worker, but to pay his rent Ellison joined the Federal Writers' Project, part of the WPA. The Project was more chaotic than the Communist Party (to whom it was accused of playing handmaiden), but it offered fertile ground for a writer. It connected Ellison with other writers and material that grounded him in New York. He researched black life in the city and conducted interviews throughout Harlem for the Project's folklore division. Jackson writes, "Ellison saw the WPA, with all of its shifting political ground, contested hallways, and cross-purposes, as a model for interracial antagonistic democracy in cooperative action."

Ellison learned much from the residents he interviewed for the folklore division: a Pullman porter in Eddie's Bar, on St. Nicholas Avenue near 147th; a trucker at the Harlem Labor Center on 125th; schoolchildren taunting cars with out-of-state plates; and a South Carolinian who told him about Sweet, a black man who made himself invisible by cutting out the heart of a black cat, climbing a tree backward, and cursing God. After that, Sweet defied whites with impunity, robbing banks and giving cops the slip. ("I hope to God to kill me if this ain't the truth," the man insisted, like any good storyteller.) The interviews, typed up from memory or notes (recording equipment was too cumbersome) and now filed in the Library of Congress, show Ellison sharpening his ear for dialogue. He transcribed an older man's take on the last days, when the arrogant and the exploiters will "be floating down the river. You'll go over to the North River, and over to the East River and you'll see 'em all floating along. And the river'll be full and they won't know what struck 'em."

Ellison himself later hinted at the impact of all those interviews when he wrote that Invisible Man's narrator edged out another attempt at a novel, about a Tuskegee flyer. That got sidetracked by a voice that entered his head uninvited, "a blues-toned laugher-at-wounds." Ellison's musicality, having listened to all those Harlem voices, internalized them.

---

I turn left on 150th. On the front steps of an apartment building there one summer afternoon in 1939, Ellison spoke with a young drummer disgusted with the hypocrisy of whites who asked him to escort them around hip Harlem but who would never think of inviting him to their neighborhoods in the Bronx. ("Jack, I'm just sitting back waiting," the man said. "Hitler's gonna reach in a few months and grab and then things'll start. All the white folks'll be killing off one another. And I hope they do a good job!") In that same building Ellison lived with his first wife Rose and made a stab at a novel he called Slick. I pause before the building's glass doors, recalling his daily work on the manuscript despite loud conversations outside his first-floor window, the soprano practicing upstairs, the uncertainty of publishers. Ellison wrote slowly, revised, probably overanalyzed. Langston Hughes joked about his mounting gravity and his eternal novel. And in the seven years of composing Invisible Man, Ellison saw the world change. He already felt a new generation of black writers, including James Baldwin and Chester Himes, breathing down his neck. He revised again, paring out the most overt radicalism from his earlier days.

Reading Invisible Man now, it's hard to appreciate the leap the novel represented for an American fiction, like going from acoustic folk to B.B. King's Lucille. (Electric guitar sounds nearly concluded the book: Some drafts end with the narrator opening a storefront church filled with electric guitars, records and a p.a. system.) Ellison was old enough to have known former slaves, but young enough to consider himself an avatar of a new age. He was at home with technology and Einsteinian physics; his models were Malraux, Hemingway, and Kafka; he designed stereo equipment and built amplifiers for extra cash. He felt the Kafkaesque surrealism of racism intensely. (One of the most bizarre episodes occurred among friends. Jackson recounts that the Ellisons' group on Long Island referred to Ralph and Fanny as "Spaniards" for a week in order to shield the sensibilities of a young white girl visiting from the South.) With Wright, Ellison shaped a radical rage in response, but unlike him, and more like Zora Neale Hurston, he recognized the redemptive power of folklore and art.

I cross upper Broadway at 155th Street, where cobblestones sweep downhill to Riverside Drive. The late sunlight slants over the Hudson's night blue and Trinity Cemetery, where Ellison is buried. A sign at the gate urges me to check in at the office, but as I reach the entrance a maintenance pickup emerges. The driver is gracious but firm. Yes, he said, Ellison is in the stone mausoleum beyond. But my visit will have to wait for another day.

"We'll show you when you come back," he says. "We're closing up."

What is the Invisible Man's journey but a series of thwarted destinations? The evening sunlight strikes the top of the building across the street, and highlights an epigraph carved into the capitals: ALL ARTS ARE ONE ALL BRANCHES ON ONE TREE.

It turns out that the building houses the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which inducted Ellison in 1964. ALL PASSES, the inscription continues on the other side. ART ALONE UNTIRING STAYS TO US.

[PJ-Comix]

Anybody else here ever read Ellison's Invisible Man? There is much in the book for Conservatives to like. When I first approached it, I feared it would be full of Maya Angelou PC type crap. However, I was pleasantly surprised. Ellison's writing style is incredible. Not only that he has some really hilarious scenes of the inner workings of the American Communist Party. Most liberal folks nowadays conveniently ignore the scathing but funny commentary on American Communism in Ellison's book when talking about it. I definitely RECOMMEND Invisible Man.

[2right]

I read it in high school. At the time I read it I didn't know what PC was (early 80's) but was skeptical about what it would be like. I enjoyed the book. Incidentally, my English teacher was a black Franciscan Friar.

[PJ-Comix]

Surprisingly, Invisible Man could qualify for the Top 10 Conservative Books of all time. Ellison's commentary about the inner workings of the American Communist Party had the most detailed descriptions of that organization that I have ever read in a novel. Plus it was FUNNY!

[Salman]

Cthonian BUMP.

[laconic]

I agree; one of the best books I ever read. Definitely among the top five American novels. Ellison probably couldn't write a second because he couldn't improve on a masterpiece.

[PJ-Comix]

That got sidetracked by a voice that entered his head uninvited, "a blues-toned laugher-at-wounds." Ellison's musicality, having listened to all those Harlem voices, internalized them.

Definitely the truth. The books narration was written in a sort of blues tone. An amazing feat. Freepers, put down those rehashed Sci-Fi books for a few days and check out Invisible Man to read some INCREDIBLE writing.

[PJ-Comix]

I've noticed that way too many Freepers read Sci-Fi to the exclusion of good literature such as Invisible Man. Mention this to them and they sure get defensive about it. Hey, I've read Heinlein, Asimov, Vonnegut, etc.. All fine and good but there is a whole other world of literature beyond Sci-Fi which way too many folks use as an escapist crutch. Why not read Heinlein AND Ralph Ellison, read Asimov and James Jones, read Vonnegut AND Tolstoy. Unfortunately way too many folks stick strictly with the Sci-Fi and operate under the illusioin that they are somehow culturally well-rounded.

[PJ-Comix]

FYI

[mhking]

Black conservative ping

If you want on (or off) of my black conservative ping list, please let me know via FREEPmail. (And no, you don't have to be black to be on the list!)

[dennisw]

Thanks for ping/ I will be picking up this Ellison book which I've know about but never read.

BTW... No one was PC back then and amen for that!! 1952 is time capsule material/

[AmishDude]

What are you talking about? It is sci-fi! Although I prefer the original -- H.G. Wells was a genius.

[PJ-Comix]

Invisible Man is an INCREDIBLE piece of writing. Not only is it written with incredible style, but it is one of the few (maybe the only) novel that talks about the inner workings of the Communist Party. I rank this book right up there with From Here To Eternity.

[PJ-Comix]

Although I prefer the original -- H.G. Wells was a genius.

I've read them both and Ellison's book is much better, both in writing style and depth.

[dennisw]

 

Both from Cleveland and made their mark in NYC. Both gay but who cares. Major artists and thank you to them 

The Billy Strayhorn biography was interesting. Read it last year. No one was PC back then. People just did!
_____________________________________________________________________________________________

 

(February 1, 1902 - May 22, 1967)
Born in Joplin, Missouri, James Langston Hughes was born into an abolitionist family. He was the grandson of grandson of Charles Henry Langston, the brother of John Mercer Langston, who was the the first Black American to be elected to public office in 1855. Hughes attended Central High School in Cleveland, Ohio, but began writing poetry in the eighth grade, and was selected as Class Poet. His father didn't think he would be able to make a living as at writing, and encouraged him to pursue a more practical career. His father paid his tuition to Columbia University on the grounds he study engineering. After a short time, Langston dropped out of the program with a B+ average, all the while he continued writing poetry. His first published poem was also one of his most famous, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers", and it appeared in Brownie's Book. Later, his poems, short plays, essays, and short stories appeared in the NAACP publication Crisis Magazine and in Opportunity Magazine and other publications.

Billy Strayhorn, Take the 'A' Train
Billy Strayhorn Manuscript Editions. Momentum, Chronicling the Strayhorn
Legacy. copyright 1997 Billy Strayhorn Songs, Inc. LIFE. MUSIC. MORE. LINKS.
Description: Life, manuscript editions, appreciation, links, sound files.
Category: Arts > Music > Composition > Composers > S > Strayhorn, Billy
www.billystrayhorn.com/ - 5k - Cached - Similar pages

[What Is Ain't]

Your enthusiasm duly noted. I'm adding Invisible Man to my reading list.

[PJ-Comix]

Ellison himself later hinted at the impact of all those interviews when he wrote that Invisible Man's narrator edged out another attempt at a novel, about a Tuskegee flyer. That got sidetracked by a voice that entered his head uninvited, "a blues-toned laugher-at-wounds."

I found this interesting. Sometimes when you're struggling to write a story and then get that voice in your head, you gotta go with the flow. The entire book was written from that perspective of the Invisible Man narrator. BTW, I'm surprised there hasn't been a movie made based on this book. Most likely Hollywood can't deal with the scathing (but funny) material in the book about the Communist Party of the 1930s.

[mafree]

Invisble Man is a classic- very deep and insightful.

[Ciexyz]

I read "Invisible Man" in high school. It was highly superior to another classroom read, "Black Like Me", about a white man who smeared his face black to experience the "Black experience".

[mafree]

Invisible Man was much deeper, especially the insights into the Communist Party.