Ralph Ellison’s Unfinished Second Skin

The Ralph Ellison papers in the Library of Congress contain a short story dated 1983 and titled, simply, “Norman.” The story’s four pages describe a Jewish couple that takes its pampered son “Luddle Normundt” for a walk in New York. The couple imagines their son’s golden future even as it ogles “long lean swartzas full of Super spade larceny” (2). He will, they hazard, “Spikindt the language like a dook uv de realm. A cool thinker in a cool shade of greenbacks, tellin all the goys whose the boss” (3). The African Americans, one guesses, are the source of the cool that the child will someday exploit to his advantage. This gratuitously nasty piece—which concludes with “luddle Normundt” throwing a tantrum and shitting on the sidewalk—captures Ellison’s abiding distaste for Norman Mailer. Indeed, so offended was Ellison by Mailer’s pronouncements about black life that he was still, when he died in 1994, planning to include a send-up of “The White Negro” (1957) in his long-awaited second novel. Mailer’s notorious essay celebrated white “psychopaths” who emulate ostensibly hip black men to achieve an “apocalyptic orgasm” (349). Mailer, Ellison wrote to Albert Murray, “thinks all hipsters are cocksmen possessed of great euphoric orgasms” (“To Albert Murray” 195). This was, he pointed out, “the same old primitivism crap in a new package” (197–98). Ellison’s second novel, recently released as Three Days Before the Shooting (2010), strips Mailer’s primitivism of its new packaging, when an outraged but obviously titillated elderly southerner named “Norm A. Mauler” writes his Senator to protest a sexual technique called “backwacking.” The technique, which he describes in detail, leaves its black practitioners “as close to dying as any normal human being can possibly come and still not die” (1099).

To Ellison, Mailer’s Negroes were “dream creatures” and, as such, enactments of personal need (“Word and the Jug” 178). But Mailer was part of a larger problem. Ellison viewed him as one of “those [white] professionals, who in order to enact a symbolic role basic to the underlying drama of American society assume a ritual mask” (“Change the Joke” 102). A residue of nineteenth-century minstrelsy, that mask simulated black skin on behalf of a far-reaching pantomime. As Ellison had it, “the mask was an inseparable part of the national iconography” (“Change the Joke” 103); its persistence confirmed not simply the mystique of blackness, but the abiding importance of white racial fantasy, we will see, to the American political imagination. Seen in this context, Ellison’s animosity toward Mailer is evidence of a struggle central to the literary landscape in the decades following the Second World War, not simply over who controlled the national iconography, but over how and on behalf of whose political interests fantasies of blackness were mobilized. Ellison was not the only African-American writer to express alarm over Mailer’s essay. James Baldwin despaired that “so antique a vision of the blacks should, at this late hour, and in so many borrowed heirlooms, be stepping off the A train” (Fire Next Time 296). Lorraine Hansberry added her voice to Baldwin’s and a swelling chorus of protest when she declared, “who knew where to begin in the face of such monumental and crass assumptions” (qtd. in Saul 69). But Ellison’s response to Mailer was particularly freighted, and revealing, because, their considerable differences aside, the two were fascinated by the “symbolic role” that the conspicuously hip “ritual masks” played in the postwar Democratic Party.

On the eve of the 1960 Presidential election, Mailer dubbed John F. Kennedy “The Hipster as Presidential Candidate” (“Superman” 44); Kennedy “was In” (55). The candidate had just enough “patina of that other life, the second American life, the long electric night with the fires of neon leading down the highway to the murmur of jazz” (31). Mailer branded Kennedy, and the Democrats, with the shimmering patina of bebop in particular. In his literary renditions of the styles arrayed around that revolutionary music, the burnt cork of nineteenth-century blackface reappears, dematerialized, as a figurative “second skin...