Second Novel No End: An Open Letter to Ralph Ellison

March 8, 2014¹
Skirvin Hotel
Oklahoma City

Dear Ralph,

I’ve arrived in Oklahoma City for the first time. I’m recalling how you and I talked about Oklahoma City the first time I visited you and Fanny at your Harlem apartment. I was twenty-six and a graduate student at Yale. I wrote you a letter during the fall of 1976. I received your reply just before Christmas—a long eloquent letter—a special Christmas gift indeed. The letter, which I still treasure, has evidence of your characteristic style and wit: “once I shocked a white man whose shoes I was shining by revealing that I was familiar with Freud’s theory of dreams, but neither of us was prepared to communicate on that level, for it would have placed too great a strain on the arrangements of social hierarchy—and on the two of us!”² You suggested that I come to see you. On Friday, February 17, 1977, I visited you and Fanny. I’ve already written about that special day.³ Suffice it to say on this occasion that it was an unforgettable and inspiring afternoon.

Now thirty-seven years later, I’m standing here in Oklahoma City’s Skirvin Hotel, where you worked as a teenager. I’m reading this open letter to you at a conference and symposium dedicated to your work. We’re also celebrating your hundredth birthday. It’s quite a party. Many professors of American and African American literature are here—an unprecedented gathering of literary experts and beautiful minds. Given the array of talent in the room, I’ve been struggling to avoid redundancy and find a worthy subject. I’ll make a brief suggestion that we move beyond our adoration of Invisible Man and focus at least as much on your essays, speeches, and reviews. We should think about your overall contribution as a cultural critic and man of letters. I’ll also urge my colleagues to reconsider the rhetoric of failure that usually accompanies discussions of your second novel.

Your essays alone are an impressive body of work.⁴ Several essays are devoted to the aesthetic concerns of major American novelists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries–Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, William Faulkner and Richard Wright. You’ve written essays on the early years of blues and jazz—providing vivid portraits of your first music teacher, Mrs. Zelia Breaux; blues women such as Ida Cox and Ma Rainey; and jazzmen including Louis Armstrong, Charlie Christian, Jimmy Rushing, Lester Young, Duke Ellington, and Charlie Parker. You discuss artists and politicians like Mahalia Jackson, Romare Bearden, and Lyndon Johnson. In several essays, you describe the ethnic and cultural diversity of your Oklahoma childhood—especially the complex intermingling of Negroes and Indians.⁵

Furthermore, your essays display your profound understanding of the dynamic nature of the cultural DNA of the United States. You illustrate ways in which African American culture represents a definitive strand. You describe the unity in the diversity of American culture, including the “blending of identities” and “deceptive metamorphoses” we often see. Stanley Crouch has said that you were attuned to “a score written in the sky and in the mud, where the tales of heartbreak and hope . . . tell us all of the cosmopolitan bloodlines that make us all Americans.”⁶ However, Invisible Man, given its “bright magic” and canonical status, has cast a regrettable cloud over your eloquent essays. But new books, taking into account your posthumous works, are providing revisionary analyses of your writing and complex portraits of you.

A novelist with your penetrating intelligence and clairvoyant vision would’ve known that critics and biographers would research, discover, and disclose unknown details about you as a talented writer and a flawed man. To your own and Fanny’s credit, you were both gracious archivists—leaving the Library of Congress your papers—including everything appropriate and indeed some things rather awkward for us to ponder. I applaud you both for deciding against a campaign of concealment. The documents are a treasure trove for which we...