One-Hit Wonder
It is a curious but perhaps
essential dimension of the Ralph Ellison literary myth that he published only
one novel, Invisible Man , and that his entire authority as a writer and
intellectual rests on this work, which whites felt brought black writing of
age, beyond mere protest and sociology. Ellison, who died in 1994, published no
other collections of fiction in his lifetime. Some of the fugitive pieces of
fiction he did publish in magazines and journals are collected in Flying
Home and Other Stories, along with some very early unpublished work. The
book appears during something like an Ellison revival, as the last year has
also seen the publication of a volume of his collected essays and one of his
interviews.
The
creative-writing teacher's cliché is that we each have one good novel in us.
Ellison seemed to have discovered instantly that his one good novel was his
first. Maybe that is why he never published his second, that most talked-about
advent that produced only excerpts here and there. The adulatory reception of
the first may have made a second impossible--if Ellison felt he had to produce
an even greater book, that is. He might have especially felt this pressure as
the years went by and public expectation grew with the wait. Perhaps he said
everything he had to say in Invisible Man .
Whatever the case, the payoff from Invisible Man was
everything a writer could want. No black writer roughly of Ellison's
generation--not Richard Wright, not Langston Hughes, not Zora Neale
Hurston--was able to parlay one novel into a position of being a respected
critic and theorist of American literature. Ellison became a true intellectual
as no other black novelist had been. The full apparatus of American
intellectual life--the major universities, the literary organs, the forums for
speaking--were open to him in ways they were not even to James Baldwin, the
most noted crossover black literary star of the 1950s. Ellison drew this
welcome partly because he was the first black writer to win a National Book
Award (in 1953) and the only novelist among his contemporaries to win one of
the major literary prizes. In the age of integration, this endorsement of
Ellison's genius by the white mainstream meant he had "transcended" his
race.
Yet, his
reception also had much to do with his attitude toward writing and toward race.
Ellison believed firmly in the artist's detachment from politics and political
engagement, in the primacy of aesthetics over the political and sociological
dimensions of literature. These beliefs are reasonable enough, even liberating
for black artists burdened by the political demands of their race. But they
were also in concord with the dogma of the white literary establishment (a
dogma that persists to this day): that art should transcend the social
conditions that produced it. The white literati appreciated Ellison because he
didn't drag the bugaboo of race into the literary act. "I wasn't, and am not,"
he said, "concerned with injustice, but with art."
With one exception, all the stories in
Flying Home and Other Stories were written before Invisible Man ,
from the late 1930s to the middle 1940s. Thus, the tendency is to see the
stories not in their own right, judging them strictly on the basis of their own
strengths and weaknesses as short fiction, but as adumbrations of Invisible
Man . The less-fair question is: Would these stories have been published if
some unknown writer had written them? Are they worthy of our attention when
considered apart from the person who wrote them?
This is
not easy to answer. These are obviously apprentice works, the equivalent of
art-book sketches, practice-room exercises. Ellison was clearly trying to learn
how to write fiction. And while it is true that no author, no matter how
accomplished, ever ceases to struggle with the craft of writing, there is
surely a difference between that stage when one is fumbling around, trying to
discover if one can even be a writer, and the stage where one is fully
confident of addressing the world as nothing but a writer, because one is as
compelled to write as to breathe. Isn't the entire premise of this collection
based on the idea that they suggest a culmination, an arrival, in Invisible
Man ?
Some of the adumbrations of Invisible Man are not
hard to spot. The old man who tells of his dream of flying around heaven in
"Flying Home" obviously is a prototype of Trueblood, the novel's storytelling,
incestuous black farmer. Aunt Kate in "That I Had the Wings" suggests Mary
Rambo, the down-home black woman who nurses the Invisible Man back to
health.
But such a
literary game does not address the significance of these stories. What is of
moment here is how much in these stories Ellison struggled to find his own
voice, not to replicate, say, the voice of Richard Wright, but to use Wrightian
elements in an Ellisonian way, as he did in "A Party Down at the Square," a
story about a lynching and an airplane crash told from the point of view of a
visiting white adolescent. Here Ellison uses Wright's preoccupation with
interracial violence and graphic, near-surrealist detailing to provide the
reader an ironic, ambiguous tale of a white boy, a moral innocent, coming of
age. "A Hard Time Keeping Up" is very much a Chester Himes-type of hard-boiled
story told through Ellison's prism. Taking Himes' unromantic, harsh view of
black urban underground life, Ellison delivers a payoff not of violence but of
a seeming violence that is, in fact, comic.
Ellison wrote these stories after having
abandoned a career in music for one in literature. He was reading a great deal,
trying to establish his literary ancestry and ascertain precisely the kind of
writer he could be. The struggle with influences and the experiments with
points of view, narrative mode, characterization, realism, surrealism,
vernacular language, and the like is all very natural--even predictable--and
thus, baldly apparent here. There are several stories about "riding the rods,"
as illegally riding trains was called (Ellison did this as a college student),
as well as tales about growing up in the Midwest, with Ellison making use of
his Oklahoma upbringing. We see the apprentice writer trying to transform his
raw autobiography into art, with varying success.
Of the
notable stories in this collection, "A Coupla Scalped Indians," published in
1956 and possibly a fragment for a new novel, is the biggest disappointment,
since it is the latest Ellison work here. The unnamed narrator seems to be the
same person as the narrator of Invisible Man , and the story seems to
replicate what was done in the earlier novel. Buster and the narrator are
camping out in the woods, in a male initiation ceremony like the Australian
walkabout. What Ellison is doing here, as Hemingway did, is equating the
process of becoming an artist with that of becoming a man. Throughout the
story, Ellison uses the symbol of horns, investing them with a number of
meanings relating to sexual desire (the horny young boys), artistic creation
(the instrument of jazz), and masculinity (the symbol of a bull). But the
symbolism ultimately overwhelms the story. The story seems self-conscious,
heavy-handed in its intimations of meaning via symbols, preoccupied not with
its characters but with its intention of being larger than itself.
The two most successful stories here, "That I Had the
Wings" and "Flying Home," are less self-conscious than "A Coupla Scalped
Indians." They show Ellison exploring black folklore as a source for black
fiction, using flight, for example, as a metaphor for escape--a common trope
among slaves who imagined themselves able to fly back to Africa. The two
stories further illustrate the unease, even hostility, that blacks have tended
to feel about their folklore, and about black history generally: In "That I Had
the Wings," Riley, a young black boy Ellison uses in several stories, hates his
Aunt Kate and wishes she "had died back in slavery times"; in "Flying Home,"
the black pilot who seeks escape hates the black farmer who rescued him after
his crash. In Invisible Man , the Talented Tenth narrator must overcome
not only the various ideologies that are presented to him as masks or
subversions of identity, but also the various roles and prescriptions for
leadership his own race wishes him to fulfill. Similarly, in these two stories,
the pilot and the two boys are, in effect, fighting against the power of race
consciousness as a form of conformity, even as they are trying to find their
meaning through their race.
These stories particularly
reveal Ellison's concerns with the individual's complex confrontation with his
society and his group, and the way they assign him roles and identities.
Ellison was not, by any means, the first black writer to explore these issues.
But he was among the first to explore them with a level of intellectual verve
and artistic sophistication that suggested to blacks and the world that there
was, within the American dilemma of race, not only the expression of mere local
and immediate political protest but the broad and rich possibilities of the
human condition itself. Whatever the merit of these stories, it is certainly
clear from them how Ellison was able to write his masterpiece, Invisible
Man .
