Ralph Ellison: A Biography.
By Arnold Rampersad.
New York: Vintage Books.
704 pp. $17.95.
ISBN: 978-0-375-70798-8

Ralph Waldo Ellison consistently turned down flat John Henrik Clarke’s invitations to contribute to several of the latter’s literary collaborations. A pity, that, since the two men shared a common exodus experience: they both escaped bad situations by hopping boxcars—Clarke from Georgia to New York City, and Ellison from Oklahoma to Tuskegee, Alabama. Ellison refused Clarke because Ellison had left Clarke’s radicalism long ago. In Ellison’s mind, he was an American writer, and suffered no exile save a voluntary one from the Black Power Movement and those influenced by it.

Rampersad tells this American story, now in paperback, with his usual mastery, delineating the complexity of Ellison’s personal and professional visibility. Like the biographer’s subject, the work spans the 20th century, intersecting with most of the now-standard roads of classic Black writer’s biography: rural poverty, the now-legendary WPA’s Writers Project, the Communist Party, white leftist intellectual magazines and white patrons. Ellison’s personal chronicle is almost absorbed by The Goal: to write himself into the canon of 20th century Western, English-language literature, on his own terms, using the “best” of Negro culture as part of the American experience. Ellison believed in the democratic nature of both America and art. He said of the latter: “It is a world that is available to any individual whose consciousness has become sensitized to his power.” Standing in the center of the 20th century, Ellison, ignoring the psychological prices that had to be paid, willed himself into that history, and enjoyed—as much as this prickly man could enjoy—decades of privilege as a result.

Ellison the jazzman, and former Tuskegee University trumpeter, battled in the world of ideas using an intellectual solo. Mentored by Richard Wright and befriended by Langston Hughes, the writer authors the novel “Invisible Man,” a classic of American alienation. He then battles himself for the rest of his life, unsuccessfully trying to surpass that feat. Ellison consoles himself by bringing forth two essay collections, “Shadow and Act” and “Going to the Territory,” that help set the standard for that genre. Ellison, explains Rampersad, “wanted genuine fame—not the kind of condescending, provisional compliments that major critics had accorded even the best of African-American writers, including Wright.” His receipt of that fame, sadly, had him for decades holding his note instead of forming quintets. “His sense of difference and superiority,” writes Rampersad, “expanded even as he continued to want to live among Blacks and as he sought to interpret their culture through the lens of fiction.”

Fully embracing Afro-Saxonism, Ellison constructed a Black artistic reality around him that included only his friends Albert Murray, Romare Bearden and Gordon Parks. In that reality, guided by Ellison, art is for its own sake, not for sociology’s. Using Ellison’s collected papers, the biographer details how the great novelist refused to in any way embrace the younger artists who came behind him. What Rampersad writes about Ellison’s views of Black women writers of the 1960s and 1970s—Maya Angelou, Ntozake Shange, et. al.—could be applied to both genders: they had “created a literary country Ralph seemed to have no interest in visiting.” Rampersad misses no opportunity to show how Ellison repeatedly refused to play the beloved elder, missing opportunity after opportunity to help the younger writers.

The biographer fashions a complex personality of the writer, to and fro the typewriter. Ellison was against Black nationalism and Pan-Africanism, but collected African art. He refused to be a Movement activist, but gave support to the NAACP for decades. (While Ellison epitomizes the self-absorbed artist, Fanny Ellison fights with but ultimately accepts the stereotypical casting of the suffering artist’s wife.) Rampersad excels at his tale of a man who took the only way out he saw—to, and through, the Great White Way—but, ultimately and unfortunately, stayed there.