BOOKS-USA: Ralph Ellison’s Hidden Stories Come to Light

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Jan 7 1997 (IPS) - One of the strangest things about Ralph Ellison’s career as a writer is that he is readily acknowledged as one of the major U.S. novelists of this century even though he has only published one novel, the 1952 opus ‘Invisible Man’.

Now, with a new collection of stories called ‘Flying Home and Other Stories’ (published by Random House for 23 U.S. dollars), Ellison is in the strange position of consolidating his reputation as a fiction writer two years after his death.

Ironically, Ellison is regarded as perhaps the leading African American writer of his time on the basis of the surreal, witty ‘Invisible Man’ and on two subsequent collections of succinct essays. But until now, his talents as a fiction writer have remained shrouded in mystery, since his long-planned second novel, ‘And Hickman Comes’, never materialised in his lifetime despite four decades of work that the author invested in it.

However, following Ellison’s death in 1994, his friend and literary executor John Callahan has unearthed unpublished material that could finally bring the writer’s fictional accomplishments into perspective.

Callahan is planning to release a version of the second novel, which was largely complete by Ellision’s death and which has been published in part in several magazines over the years. More importantly, he discovered many new, unpublished pieces that comprise many of the real delights of the ‘Flying Home’ collection.

Callahan says he found many of the stories while rummaging through Ellison’s files after his friend’s death, in a bulky envelope entitled ‘Early Stories’. “The stories were typed on paper brown with age and beginning to crumble,” he writes. “Here and there passages were crossed out and revisions inserted in Ralph’s hand.”

The stories may be in some cases unfinished — or unacceptable to a perfectionist like Ellison — but they reveal a lively, passionate writer whose complex views of the United States’ racial divide were among the most gripping and well articulated of any writers’.

Here, for example, is ‘A Party Down at the Square’, a chilling, straight-faced account of a lynching by a white boy: “I have to give it to that nigger; he was really tough. He had started to burn like a house afire and was making the smoke smell like burning hides.”

The story, at its simplest level, is a horror: the execution of a man treated as a lower life form, for no apparent reason save the racism of the crowd whose views are recounted.

But Ellison always made matters more complex, by making his wide- eyed narrator unwittingly reveal both the depth of racial contempt and the grudging respect the boy has for the lynched black man: “It was my first party and my last. God, but that nigger was tough.”

Other stories deal with topics ranging from police brutality, in ‘Hymie’s Bull’, to childhood, in a series of stories about two black friends, Buster and Riley. But racism, and the prospect of racial understanding, always looms in the background.

In ‘Hymie’s Bull’, the black narrator recounts how a white bum, Hymie, is harassed by a police ‘bull’, and kills the officer with his switchblade. Yet at the story’s end, the narrator notes that he and his black friends stand to lose the most as the result of Hymie’s killing when the police seek their revenge: “We knew Hymie’s bull had been found and some black boy had to go.”

The story ‘I Did Not Know Their Names’, unpublished until this year, also recounts the travels of a black narrator travelling with bums, black and white, on freight trains and captures the feelings of camaraderie between the races that the travels encourage. Although this narrator, too, faces harassment by the police and ends up in jail, he thinks back fondly to one incident in which an elderly white couple shared a meal with him on a trian.

In many ways, the magic at the heart of ‘Invisible Man’ — the way in which the troubled relationship between black and white Americe is captured, in all its horrifying and sympathetic aspects — is seen in all 13 short stories, written between 1933 and 1954.

This was the period when, Ellison admitted, he was inspired by T.S. Eliot’s modernist poem ‘The Waste Land’ to try his own hand at writing. As he put it, Eliot’s variations on old themes was “as intriguing as a trumpet improvisation by Louis Armstrong”, and Ellison soon wanted to try his own hand at reworking old formats into new forms.

Ellison’s gift was to be able to create dreamlike worlds in which the difference between what the United States is and what it aspires to be is laid bare. Many of his strongest characters, including a black merchant marine who is troubled and delighted to hear the U.S. national anthem sung in Wales in ‘In a Strange Country’, want desperately to be American, but bitterly realise how far they are from being equally regarded as Americans.

The stories also include some of Ellison’s best writing, as in ‘King of the Bingo Game’, a nightmarish tale of a bingo game rigged to ensure that no black player can ever win.

The title story, a meditation on a pilot, Todd, who tries literally to fly away from the world of black and white only to crash back into it, contains Ellison’s best writing.

As with ‘Invisible Man’, Ellison shows here the difficult task an individual faces in becoming conscious of social forces: although Todd thinks that excellence in flying can free him from being black, he comes to learn that his only freedom can come when he is reconciled to his blackness.

The puzzle of attaining consciousness is the centre of Ellison’s modernist art, and this collection demonstrates his substantial achievements at grappling with that concern. Each story attests to Ellison’s own growing awareness of race, of democracy, and of the American dilemma: how his country, as ravaged by racism and hatred as it was and is, would ever attain equality. Those topics would fascinate and provoke Ellison for the rest of his life.