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Thursday, April 19, 2007
Rose on Rampersad on Ellison
Phyllis Rose reviews Arnold Ampersad’s Ralph Ellison: A Biography in The American Scholar. Rose tells us that:
Arnold Rampersad, as fine a biographer as is working today . . . is fully up to answering the obvious question “Why no second novel?” But his book suggests, more interestingly, that it may be the wrong question to ask. The right one would be “How did he manage to write Invisible Man?” For, as Rampersad shows, Ellison’s instincts and core talents were not those of a novelist.
He was cerebral, judgmental, meaning-oriented oriented rather than experience-oriented in his approach to fiction. He had no impulse merely to represent life in its variety, an impulse that, like the urge to chronology, can sustain a fiction writer when all else fails.
Comments
Jesus, that was awful. Ellison must have peed in her cornflakes at some point.
I just taught Invisible Man last week.
Maybe the ‘obvious question’ is, why do so many people write fourteen novels which don’t add up to a chapter of this one?
Why is it people want to believe anEllison who never qwas and resist what this fine biography informs us of?
We haven’t read the biography, just the awful review of the biography. No facts were harmed in the preparation of our responses.
Maybe it was a good review of a good biography of a nasty man.
This is the “would you want to have a beer with” level of criticism. A lot of the authors we like to read behaved badly, with arrogance being a pretty pervasive trait.
Does the reviewer really think that “East of Eden” or “The Old Man and the Sea” are superior to “Invisible Man”. That’s stupid, but if she didn’t think so she shouldn’t have written what she did. How many of the people Ellison thought of as mediocrities really were mediocrities?
Ellison was an advocate of jazz and other forms of black music. Where do we get “His scorn of black culture”? Are we really angry about Ellison’s dog’s poop, and his joke to Bellow about it?
Don’t know about the biography (should Ellison be blamed for its excessive detail?) but the review reminds me of a long string of “X’s ultimate failure” critiques, where X could be Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Mark Twain, or any of the other actual writer inevitably envied by non-writer critics.
John Emerson is right. But what I found even worse was the paragraphs around: “I love knowing exactly how much Ellison spent on stereo equipment and that there was at least one year when he made more money as a photographer than as a writer. But this is not the way you create the portrait of a great mind.” How many scholars really wish that there was *less* information so that it would be easier to make up a coherent, more-fictional narrative? In between the “have a beer with” criticism and the “facts get in the way, I want a narrative” criticism, it’s like a replication of the media’s dominant mode of political reporting.
As it happens, Ellison was most scornful of black culture, and blacks in general, If one reads his essays—so few people do—he speaks in gllowing generalities but so specifics; what he praises is his hometown of Oklahoma City—self love in camouflage. As it happens, “The Old Man and the Sea” and “East of Eden” are QUITE superior to “Invisible Man,” the most overrated novel of post-World War II American literature.
If I agreed about the relative merit of those three books I’d be more sympathetic to your point of view. It would be nice to have more specific examples of Ellison’s scornfulness, because I’ve read two books of his essays, one of which is right here with me now, and I can’t think of any examples. It’s very common for writers to be a bit unhappy with others of their own ethnicity, e.g. Joyce.
Begin with the preface to “Shadow and Act” with the vicious putdown of other black writers. The continuing denigration of Richard Wright, vastly his artistic (and intellectual) superior. But overall., notice that when Ellison praises black culture, he does so because he can relate it to white culture; he does not praise black culture in and of itself.
Well, I have “Living with Music” right here. He’s pretty much unreservedly positive about Duke Ellington, Mahalia Jackson, Charlie Christian, Jimmy Rushing, and the birth of bepop at Minton’s. His feelings about Charlie Parker are more mixed, but everyone’s feelings about Parker are mixed. He doesn’t like LeRoi Jones’s book on Blues, but not because he doesn’t like blues. He says good things about his teacher William Dawson. His thing about Richard Wright is complex, and one of its themes is the difficulty that all black writers and intellectuals (including Wright and Book T. Washington, and especially progressive or politically aware intellectuals) have dealing with the actual black community—pretty much the same problems that intellectuals from all communities have.
Is “Invisible Man” obviously better than “Old Man and the Sea”? I haven’t read either in a while, but the claim that “Old Man and the Sea” is better doesn’t strike me as particularly outrageous.
The honors that rained down on Ellison in the 1950s and on into the next decades are astonishing. Invisible Man won the 1953 National Book Award over Steinbeck’s East of Eden and Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. (If we need any proof that these awards are representative and political as much as pure testimonies to literary excellence, the fact that Hemingway had not received either a National Book Award or a Pulitzer Prize by this point should do it.)
I really doubt that many readers prefer the two books named to “Invisible Man”. I certainly don’t. But in any case, there’d have to be a very clear superiority of Hemingway’s or Steinbeck’s book over Ellison’s for the above to be a meaningful statement about Ellison’s award. Otherwise it’s a content-free snide remark.
You could say that there were three strong candidates that year and it was unfortunate that two had to lose. You could regret that Hemingway never won a NBA. But there’s no case against Ellison.