In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

TradingTwelves 45 sponding to Ralph’s 1952 letter with a confident burst of learned African American vernacular. [T]here are some other bop riffs that I did hope would operate. Miss Eunice was rendered in bop and was supposed to operate crucially. I felt that that was the only way to render her this time (since she’s going to be used again!) eunice means happy victory, man, and I can’t say a hell of a lot about that yet. In my mind it also suggests union, oneness, equilibrium. Notice that the full name is Eunice Purifoy. I was hep to eunuch implications too, but in the sense of un­ readiness, unfitness. Remember, this guy must fear abortions in the sense that he is unready, he is a eunuch and I described her to look as much like that Egyptian princess that Mzle [Mozelle] looks like as I could—but in another sense he is not a eunuch at all but a prince in disguise preparing to—well, he’s running around with Falstaff and them. (TradingTwelves 32) Likewise, when Ralph delivers his “Brave Words for a Startling Occasion” address upon receiving the National Book Award, Murray declares himself a fellow recruit in the same literary battalion: “Proteus is the right kick, boy; and it is my kick, too. Both the writer and the hero have got to learn to riff on it.You got to be nimble or nothing, I keep trying to tell them (& myself too)” (Trading Twelves 37). Nor in Ellison’s view was Murray engaging in bravado. Later in 1953 Ellison declares allegiance to his friend’s vernacular learning and his originality as a thinker and writer whose style, substance, and point of view all have that swing: “I hope you’ll get work done on your book and that you’ll start turning out essays on jazz which can later be part of a book. You have the stuff and I think it’ll do you good to have part of your identity anchored outsideTuskegee.Thus far you’ve stayed there and transcended its limitations.You’ve evolved the stuff, so now put it on the line.You’re the only one I know who makes sense of all the ramifications and since it looks like no one is going to do anything with this material we might as well get started” (80). I love Ellison’s shift from the somewhat avuncular you of the younger, unpublished man to the we of full partner and collaborator. Certainly Ellison and Murray each were of the mind that neither would realize his objective— Callahan 46 what Murray called creating “stories to provideAmerican literature with representative anecdotes, definitive episodes, and mythic profiles that would add up to a truly comprehensive and universally appealing American epic” (xiii)—unless both of them made a distinctive and connected contribution to the common project. Reading a very early draft of an episode from Ellison’s second novel sent from Rome in 1956, Murray responds with a riff calling Ralph to keep on keeping on. “You writin’ good, boy, real good, blowin’ good, cuttin’ good, keen and deep. If you getting any of this stuff working in there with old Cleofus & em you still swinging that switchblade and you aint got nothing to worry about. For my money you’re in there with that shit, man.” And he closes with his own report. “Me, I’ve finally begun to get a few notes down for that jazz novel I’ve got to take a crack at” (TradingTwelves 118–19). Still in Rome a year later and frustrated by what others are writing (and failing to write) about the black heroes of African American folklore and culture , Ellison urges Murray to get cracking on the blues. Hell, [Stanley Edgar] Hyman don’t know that Ulysses is both Jack the rabbit (when that Cyclops gets after his ass) and Jack the Bear, Big Smith the Chef, John Henry and everybody else when he starts pumping arrows into those cats who’ve been after his old lady. Or if he does recognize this, it’s only with his mind, not his heart . . . : Mose can’t rise vertically so he’s restless; he can’t get a good job here so he goes there—missing the fact that there is a metaphysical restless built into the American and Mose is just another form of it, expressed basically, with a near tragic debunking of the self which is...

Share