Ralph Ellison Biography | Arnold Rampersad | Talks at Google

Want to introduce a little bit Professor Arnold Repersat. So he is a Sarah Hart Kimball professor in the Humanities and a member of the Department of English at Stanford University. His other books include the Art and imagination of W.E.B. du Bois, the Life of Langston Hughes Days and a memoir co authored by Arthur Ashe and Jackie A Biography. He's here today to talk to us about his new biography about Ralph Ellison. So without further ado, welcome, Professor Rappersat. Thanks. Thanks very much. Thanks very much. It's a lot of fun being here. Once I found a place to park, it was fun. So to talk about this book, I guess there are copies out there, and Ralph Ellison biography. I was chatting at lunch with a couple people and I was asked how I came to write the book. And I explained that a publisher had asked me to consider writing a biography of Ralph Ellison. And I said, well, I'm really not interested in that, in Ralph Ellison. And then the person came back again and I said, well, I'm still not interested, but I will check out for you what the situation is with the papers and the estate. Ralph Ellison had died in 94. Mrs. Ellison was still alive. It was around 2000, but she was to some extent over the top, as we might say. There was someone, an English professor from Lewis and Clark named John Callahan, who edited Juneteenth, taken to be Ellison's second novel, which also came out after his death. So I asked him if he intended to write the biography and he said no. And I said, well, what about so? And so this other scholar who has been interested in Ralph Ellison for a long time, but who is very young. And he said no, we're not going to allow him near the papers. So I thought that was the end of that. But then he said, but if you would like to write the biography, then I'm sure we would, you know, we would be interested in that. So I thought about it for a while. I checked my, what you call it, calendar, and I saw that I had about a decade free in front of me, which is what you need for a biography of a complicated figure. And then I decided that, heck, I should just go ahead and try to do it. Ellison, after all, was quite interesting, was quite accomplished. I mean, he published Invisible man, which many people take to be one of the great novels of American novels, at least of the 20th century. And I think that's correct. He also published Shadow and Act, which is a collection of essays and interviews that really, to me, amount to in some respects, the most penetrating volume on African American culture, especially located within the greater American context that we have had since the Souls of Black Folk by du Bois in 1903. So I thought very highly of him as an intellectual, especially on the subject of the American republic and American experience, and also as a writer of fiction. What I thought from the outset was that there would be nothing really sensational about the life. I was going to say interesting, but I really mean, I suppose, sensational about the life. In fact, I looked up the proposal recently that I made to Alfred A. Knopf Incorporated, my publisher, with this book, with the Jackie Robinson book, and also with the Arthur Ashe book. And I didn't want to fool them in any way. I didn't want to make them think that I. Oh, I had some hot information in the papers that would turn into a sensational book. And I remember writing to them, and I quote, for myself, I do not intend to write mainly an intellectual biography, and so on and so forth. Frankly, there is little that appears to be sensational about the texture of Ellison's private life. His first marriage ended quickly, but his second endured. He left no children. Still, I said, Ellison is one of the important American literary figures of this, the 20th century. And the importance of his example and also of his ideas about the fluidity of American culture seems only to grow even as his first, his only novel, persists as one of the grander achievements in American literary history. So there I was saying that there really wasn't anything special about the life apart from the art. Well, I was wrong. As I got deeper into the papers, I saw that I was wrong. The life wasn't sensational in the sense that, say, Edith Wharton's life proved to be sensational in the hands of the biographer R.W.B. lewis, who's an important figure for me, a friend, a close friend of Ellison's, but also someone who influenced my own writing of biography in the case of Langston Hughes. Well, what Lewis discovered about Edith Wharton, for example, is that she had this interest in pornography and wrote at least one pornographic story, which he helpfully publishes at the end of his biography of Wharton. So there was nothing sensational in that respect, but there was a sensational in Ellison's life. When one considers the veneer, the sleek veneer, or patina, or patina, however you want to pronounce it, of circumspection, command and control that he seemed to epitomize, and he seemed to want people to, you know, that's the way he wanted people to see him. Command, control, smoothness, authority. But as Cornel west told Me one morning in an airport in Madison, Wisconsin, when I ran into him. He had known Ellison briefly in Ellison's lifetime. But he had a good sense about Ellison's interior life, despite the brevity of that meeting. And he said, what is true about Ellison is true. It reflects what is true of the core of Ellison. Reminds me, Cornell said, of what T.S. eliot wrote about Matthew Arnold. He had no real serenity, only an impeccable demeanor. He had no real serenity, only an impeccable demeanor. And as soon as I began pushing into the life, I saw the element of command and control, the authority, the dignity and so on. I see it began to fall away. And we saw a somewhat. Much more human figure underneath. In some respects, a more desperate figure, more controversial figure, sometimes an unpleasant figure at all times. A figure who had to be respected intellectually. But not always from the point of view of private humanity. Let's put it that way. The most frequently asked question about Ellison that I get, and I still do get it, is why didn't he publish a second novel in his lifetime? He published Invisible man in 1952, and he died in 1994. And he kept writing from 52 to 94. And kept promising that the novel was about to come out that fall, next fall, in the spring, and so on. Well, he turned out to be one of the most egregious slowpokes in American writing. But equally important, I think, although it was very seldom asked, is how did he come to write the first novel? How did he come to write a book as sophisticated, given his background in particular, as sophisticated, as complex, and possibly as timeless as Invisible man, given his background? How did he do it, given his late start as a writer? Because he started writing really in his early 20s. And that's almost too late to be serious about anything of a creative nature. You can't, for example, pick up the violin at 22 and think you're going to become. Well, you name your favorite violinist. How did he get to write Invisible man, despite the relative weakness of his formal education, despite his entrapment by a communist aesthetic during his first years when he was trying to be a writer, that is, around, say, 1937, when he was 24? How did he get to the point, after being a communist hack for some years, to being able to write a novel of the texture of Invisible Man? Well, it soon became clear that I was dealing with an extraordinarily complicated man, One much admired and liked in certain circles, but also despised in certain other circles. Someone who was haunted by a Powerful sense of family pride. Except that the sense of pride was really tainted. His mother used to tell him, beware of Ellison pride. She wasn't an Ellison by birth, so beware of Ellison pride. It's going to be, you know, it's a damaging thing. That's the pride in his father's side of the family. The sense of pride was tainted really, when he was a growing boy and also an adolescent, and later on by an overwhelming sense of frustration, denial, loss and rage. Ellison wrote once of how close he came to killing people until he said, I discovered that I was so strong. He went around in a rage until he realized he was so powerful that physically. And became so angry that he might one day kill somebody. And then he just pulled back, he said. And both James Baldwin and Albert Murray called him one of the angriest men they had ever known. And Norman Mailer, in advertisements for Myself, if you remember that book, called him at one point, quote, essentially a hateful writer, which a lot of people don't understand. What I don't understand is how Mailer, with a limited knowledge of Ellison, could have penetrated so deeply to the core of Ellison. Because I think that in some respects, it's an extraordinarily astute remark. The Ellison pride. Pride went with a sense of being constantly humiliated. The family pride had to do with achievements, especially during the reconstruction in South Carolina of his father's side of the family. His father's father, his paternal grandfather had lived in Abbeville, S.C. had been a person of some standing in the town during the Reconstruction. That period after the Civil War, before the Union armies withdrew, before whites reclaimed the south, the positions of power. And his father's father was able to build a big house and to have a large family and to be a respected person and to be elected to office before, with the onset of the restoration of neo slavery, Jim Crow, before blacks began to slide to the bottom of the social scale. So there was that pride in Ellison that I never just to jump ahead. I was never totally aware of the extent to which what his grandfather had accomplished and the life his grandfather had lived and his grandfather's immediate family, including his son, had lived in South Carolina. How that affected him. There was only one thing that I kept noticing about him as he grew more and more prominent and well off and so on, was the incredible kinship he felt with certain powerful white southern men. Some of his greatest supporter in the literary world. His patron in some respects was Robert Pen Warren. He was very close friend with William Styron of Virginia. Author of Nat Turner. In fact, Styron spoke at his death, the only writer to do so at Ellison's funeral. He seemed to want to have this connection to powerful white Southern men. And this, of course, did not play very well. At a time, say, in the 60s and 70s, in the heyday of black power and the black arts movement, a lot of people couldn't understand Ellison's fascination with the South. What I did not quite cotton onto, because there seemed almost something not treacherous by any stretch of the imagination, something that was poignant but verged on the bizarre about this fondness for this particular kind of company. Then it was only after the biography was done that I realized that Abbeville, South Carolina, was not just any ordinary little Southern town. It was a town where the Confederacy held its last cabinet meeting, and John C. Calhoun lived there. So wrapped up in Ellison's sense of self and of the Ellison past was this idea of sort of twinned ideas or contradictory ideas, but amounting to. I mean, I think he harkened back at times to this world in which his grandfather had lived as a powerful man, able to provide for himself and for his family in an attractive way. And in the mind's eye, at least, Abbeville, South Carolina, was a kind of harmonious world. Of course, a lot of people would say, how could it be harmonious if it's the center of the Confederacy? But in Ellison's mind, in any case, and I think it's mediated, importantly, this attraction to the south, to the white south, to white Southern men, it's mediated by his total devotion, after a certain point, to William Faulkner. And although Faulkner was critical of the South, Faulkner was very much of the patrician South. And I think somehow in Ellison's mind, these things came together. What was really terrible was that this vision really conspired to keep him from finding, refinding his own voice and I think stood in the way of his finishing that second novel. Great parts of it are Joycean, like James Joyce, Finnegan's Wake, which is not a novel a lot of people read or having read it once, want to reread. And a lot of it is like Faulkner, which, I mean, who is a powerful, wonderful novelist. But there are parts of Ellison's second novel that read like beautiful Faulkner. And then there are parts that read like an entry in the Faulkner lookalike competition that I think American Airways or somebody used to publish. There was a kind of enthrallment, I mean, a kind of entrapment, too, by this whole idea of the past. But the most important thing in his childhood, as I probed it, was the death of his father. And this had something to do, obviously, with the way he viewed the past. A kind of breaking off, a cutting off of himself from his rightful place of privilege. His father dies when he's three. And with that, his father had moved from South Carolina to Oklahoma City. And that's where Ralph Ellison was born. That's where he grew up. But his father dies in a freak accident when the boy is three. And thereafter, the family just begins to sink in the social scale and economic scale, economic order. His mother, for most of her life, works as a hotel maid. It is very, very difficult for a woman to find work, for a black woman to find work at that time and have enough money to sustain an ambitious child. Just very hard to come by. As a result, I think in some respects, he both loved and hated his mother. I mean, it's almost inevitable that if one of your parents dies, you're going to, at some point, in moments of stress, blame the other and perhaps even wish that the other had. One had lived and the other had died. Also, the fact that his father died almost guaranteed that he would sink economically, whereas if his mother had died, his father would have still gone on producing the money, the income that he had produced all along. So I think constantly as Ellison was growing up, he lived in this double world of sensing his father's loss, sensing his mother's love, feeling, Ellison pride. Learning to be a trumpet player, leader in the student orchestra, big man in the school, the local school, the local high school school, dressing well, having certain kinds of friends, but also always aware of grinding poverty, but also of fatherlessness, a profound fatherlessness. So that he was unprotected for much of his life. And it drove him to becoming a rather bitter figure, I would say. He has no money. When he leaves high school in order to go off to college, he watches his lesser, lesser students go off to college at this place or that place in the south or in the North. Till finally, after two years after leaving high school, he sets out for Tuskegee, Alabama. He does so riding the rails as a hobo in one of the really decisive and frightening moments, episodes in his life. Something on which he would draw, but something which also underscored the extent to which he was vulnerable as a person. And much of his later life, especially when he became well to do and acclaimed, I mean, I think he never lost that sense of vulnerability. And it played out as it often. That kind of feeling often plays out in his creation and maintenance of certain kinds of antagonisms. At Tuskegee Institute, he was sort of tricked into going there to be a trumpeter in one of their three orchestras. Music was important at a certain level. At another level, it was not important because Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute was essentially an ag school. Washington had always emphasized practical training for blacks, someone with an artistic temperament, something one interested in books, as Ellison quickly became, in addition to serious music. While you were really on the fringes there. He claimed, too, to have been hounded out of Tuskegee by a homosexual dean of students. And I was able to find evidence of that. In his junior year, 1936, after a frustrating time at Tuskegee, he decides to go to New York, see if he can make some money and come back and finish his senior year. But I don't know if he ever really intended to come back. In any event, he never did come back. The next time he saw Tuskegee was when he came back as a somewhat famous author. So he goes to New York in 1936. On the second day, he is in Harlem at the famous 135th Street Y. He runs into Langston Hughes, who takes him up, helps him, encourages him, gives him various opportunities. And through Hughes, he meets an even more important literary figure, really, and that's Richard Wright. Hughes is so generous that Hughes writes to his friend Richard Wright in Chicago, who lives in Chicago, and says, if you ever come to New York, you must look up this young man named Ralph Ellison, who is so interested in your work and who is so bright and promising. And in fact, in 37, Wright does move to New York. He is on the brink of extraordinary success, Greater success than any black American author had ever had. I think he was about to publish Uncle Tom's children in 1938, which would bring him to the fore. But then also in 1940 would come native Son, which would sell at least a quarter of a million copies right off the bat as a book of the month club selection. And in 45 would come black Boy's Autobiography, which would sell equally well and make confirm Wright as really the greatest living African American author. And it is Wright who says to Ralph Ellison, after Ralph Ellison has been hanging around a long time. Ellison, Wright was editing a magazine. Well, why don't you try your hand at writing a review? And Ellison said, well, I've never written any reviews. And he said, well, time to start. And he writes a review, and it's published. And then Wright says, well, that was good. Now, why don't you try a short story. And Ellison said, well, I'm not interested in fiction, you know, I'm a musician, sculptor. Well, why don't you start? And it was. The short story was published posthumously. But from that moment on, around 1937, the year his mother dies, Ellison begins a long, hard groan towards making himself into a writer. If you look at his pieces in communist journals like New Masses, you see him really operating as a kind of hack. But around 1942, along with many other American authors, people like Hemingway, for example, were far on the left in the 1930s. But around 1942 he breaks with the Communist Party. It's also the year that Richard Wright breaks with the Communist Party and publishes a piece called I Try to Be a Communist in a Atlantic Monthly. And Ellison then delivers himself wholesale to the kind of universalist, liberal, humanist tradition of the Western intellectual unfettered by ideology. And that's the position he would have for the rest of his life. And he would hold to it even when it was being challenged by, say, black power. In the late 60s, 60s and 70s, he saw himself as a Western intellectual and artist wanting to be of the first order. He enshrined his pantheon, his ancestors, as he called them. And they were Dostoevsky above all, Mark Twain among Americans of the 19th century, but also Herman Melville, Moby Dick. Moby Dick is all over Invisible man, the first part of Invisible man, as you may remember. Who else? T.S. eliot, the Anglo American in 1922 who published the Waste Land, that book length poem that is perhaps the most important modernist poem of the 20th century. And Andre Malraux, the French leftist writer, and then eventually William Faulkner. As I've said, those were his ancestors. He had no time really for black writers. At one point he differentiates between his, his ancestors and his relatives. His relatives are people like Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Du Bois and others. Those are relatives. And he learned nothing from them. He said he never praised any of them, just as later on he would not praise any younger black writer, as far as I know, not even Toni Morrison, who is working for Random House, when he is a God at Random House. So he calls these people his relatives. He prefers his ancestors. And he begins, as I said, this long steady march between 42 and, say, 52, when Invisible man comes out. He believes in not the old realist, grim realist, social realist, somewhat ideological writing that Richard Wright produced so powerfully. A native son, even in a much more complicated kind of writing. He believed in myth and symbol and surrealism and what we might call even magical realism. And all of those elements are there in Invisible Man. In 1952, Invisible man appears. It gets wonderful reviews, some bad reviews, too. The black communist press really hates the book. One reviewer says black people need Invisible man like they need a hole in the head because it is so anti communist and it is so hard on black communist leaders. But then in 1953, the following year, he wins the National Book Award. He beats out Ernest Hemingway, who has published the Old man and the Sea. And he beats out John Steinbeck, east of Eden. And with that not so much this being America publicity being what it is in this country, it is, I think, the winning of the award and not so much the book itself that propels him on his way. People suddenly sit up and take notice. Tuskegee, which, you know, didn't deign to notice him when the book appeared to find reviews, esoteric reviews. Now they welcome him now that he's won this big prize. Ernest Hemingway to that point, had never won a National Book Award. Ernest Hemingway had never won a Pulitzer Prize. But here was Ralph Ellison having done so. He was beautifully poised. Ellison winning that prize in 53. It was big news that a black writer should have won this prize for the first time. Beautifully poised to take advantage. The following year, 54 of the Supreme Court decision, the doors of segregation begin to crack. Creek open. They've been shut since at least 1996, when the Supreme Court ruled segregation, racial segregation, basically to be the law of the land. And he is the first through the door, as it were. He is accomplished. He's super accomplished. And he goes on to a succession of honors and awards that are quite striking. He would win two presidential medals, one from Lyndon Johnson, another from Ronald Reagan. He would win a wonderful award from the. The French government, in some respects their top cultural award for foreigners. He would be a member of Century Club in New York, which is perhaps the most prestigious club to which you can belong, with a connection to the arts. He would be in the tiny group of people who helped to found public television. He would be in the tiny group of people so selected again by Lyndon Johnson, who would organize the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts. So at some point, he is really perhaps the most powerful American writer. Writers in power, political power, often don't go well together. But for example, during the Vietnam War, when Johnson was under powerful attack, Ellison sticks by his side and outrages a lot of people by appearing to be for the Vietnam War. And for Johnson, I mean, it's not Simply that he loved power. He also respected what Johnson had done with the Civil Rights Acts and so on of 65. But he has this closeness with him. And there, you might say, begins, if you want, you could say it shows Ralph Ellison in the fullness of his being as a cultural force. Or you could say he begins to be corrupted either way. Or you could find some room in between. What would happen is that a gap would open up between himself and younger blacks. I would say younger Black writers around 64 or so, a foundation writes to him and says, we have these fellowships we want to give to young black writers. Send me the list. Send me a list. And he would say, I'm so, so, so very sorry. I don't know any of them. You'd have to ask someone else. And he seems to be quite proud of this. With him, you know, there was this mixture, as with his attitude to the south and so on, this mixture of what seems to be a kind of reactionarianism, ultra conservatism. On the other hand, he has very positive feelings about America, and they help to keep him rooted in his beliefs. He believes in what he calls the sacred documents of American life. He believes in the Declaration of Independence, in the Bill of Rights, the Constitution and so on. And he believes that blacks should never be so radical, so separatist, that they do not realize that they are also entitled to the fruits of those sacred documents. By the 60s, he is being reviled on the campuses. Even as his sales. The sales of his books go up in response to the whole black power movement and the black studies movements on the campuses. Even as he gets richer and richer and the speaking fees go up, he is reviled on the campuses. And there are some terrible moments when he is shouted down and called, call to his face and Uncle Tom and he retreats and so on. All along, since 1954, since 52, he's been trying to write the second novel. And then it gets more and more embarrassing. In 1967, he buys a house, a country home. Like a good bourgeois New York intellectual. He buys a country home upstate New. Not upstate New York, in the Berkshires, in Massachusetts. Unfortunately, that same year, 1967, the house burns down. And thereafter he would use that burning down. I mean, it was a crushing kind of thing. He wanted so much to belong to the American past, the heritage, the tradition, the grand tradition of American writing. He wanted to be in the place where Emerson and Thoreau and Whitman and Melville and so on had lived. And here his house burns down. The very year that he he buys it. So there's a period of confusion. But he would use this again and again as an excuse. When people say, where is the book? You keep saying that you're writing this book. Or when his publishers say, well, we did give you that $100,000 fresh advance. Where is the book? They wouldn't dare say, put it quite that way. But they would come and ask the same question all the same, and he would use it. It became my duty to try to track down the facts, to look at correspondence after the fire, to see what he was saying. In the first few years, first few weeks, actually, first few days, even he had lost. And it was very clear that he hadn't lost that much. But increasingly, he needed this support, this excuse. And it became a very painful thing for some people to watch. Eventually, at the end of his life, I was pleased to say, I am pleased to say, or was pleased to see, there came a kind of rapport, Shimon. A kind of younger writers turning to him despite his coldness, despite his turning to him and recognizing what he had achieved with Invisible man, what he had achieved with Shadow and Act. The essays I spoke about. I mean, someone like Toni Morrison is working at Random House. And she has begun to put out novel. Has put out her first novel. At least she's bright and so on. But she says to me, said to me, if somebody had said to Ralph Ellison, you know, you are like a God here. Would you like to meet this woman? We have just hired, this black woman, very attractive woman, very bright woman and so on, who is also a very promising writer. She said, he would have said, no, I'm not interested. And indeed, there are many stories like that where he just put this gap between himself and people who look like him. I was. The book was attacked. My book was attacked by someone in the Times of London who said that I claimed that Ralph Ellison couldn't write a second novel because he liked white people too much. Well, that's gross misrepresentation of what I'm saying. It's not that he should have loved white people less. It's just that I think he should have been more comfortable around black people, with younger blacks in particular, because he was trying to write about the black world. If he wasn't trying to write about the black world, he could have done what he wanted with his relationships in the black community. But since he wanted to write a novel that partook of the texture, the living texture of black culture, it was fatal, I think, for him to have this, to have set up and Maintain this kind of distance between himself and people who looked like him. As I said, by the end of his life, he was able to come to a kind of meeting of the Mayans with them. He never budged from his own positions. He was not one to second guess himself, but they came around and sort of forgave him. As an older writer who could therefore be. Whose faults could be excused. He maintained his high standing. He was very close friends with people like Saul Bellow, Alfred Kazin, Robert Pen Warren, as I've said, William stone, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. He had lots of powerful people as friends who also considered him extremely brilliant and fun to be around and so on. He lived this dual life to the end of his life. He published a second collection of essays and whatnot in the 1980s, late in the 1980s. Died in 1994. I think happy to some extent with himself. But if he, in fact, was unhappy with himself or saw himself in any way as having failed at a critical moment of his life, he certainly never showed it. His reputation, I think, remains relatively high because of the. The Power of Invisible Man. It is a book that some people don't care for as much as others do. The African American writer Ernest Gaines, for example, I spoke to him and he said, you know, that book In Shadow and Act? I think it's the finest collection of essays I've ever read, certainly the finest collection of essays on black literature. I said, well, what about Invisible Man? He says, oh, I read that book once. I tried to read it again. I just couldn't get through it. Just like a collection of essays to me, which doesn't make quite make sense. These writers are envious of one another. I think to some extent, maybe we all are of one another, to begin in the final analysis. But it is true that some people find Invisible Man a ral cold novel. Certainly it does not favor the domestic. It doesn't deal at all with romantic love. It is not soft in certain ways that some people find crucial. But any way you look at it, I think you circle it. You see a novel that is very extraordinarily well constructed and displaying brilliant strengths of a young writer. The. The brilliant strengths of a young writer who is taking on the world and aiming for the heights, the absolute heights of literature. A very exhilarating thing. Even though I think side by side with that ambition goes the overreaching that would result in many people seeing his life as a kind of tragedy. Morrison himself said, well, I don't see his life as a true tragedy. I See it as. It doesn't have the dimensions to be a tragedy. Other people see it as a tragedy. Then still other people see it as an unqualified, absolute success, not the novel. What a mistake. The biography reveals a lot that is unflattering about Ralph Ellison. And reviewer after reviewer has noted that. But I'm glad to say that most of the also say that finally the biography is very fair about Ralph Ellison. What I think my final sort of statement about the book in this respect, the extent to which it exposes some of the meaner sides of Ellison. For example, he's dealing with his wife of almost 50 years, the woman who supported him through thick and thin when he was not working and bringing any money, and she was working and bringing money. The way he treated her, the way he treated his mother. In some respects, these things, some people absolutely do not like. What I say about a book like this. I mean, it is about finally, the price of great art. And I talk to audiences and I say, you know, you think you like great art, and no doubt you love great art. Yes, you love great art, but great art always, almost always, I would say perhaps always exacts a great price. It exacts a great price of the spouse, usually a wife. It exacts a price of the children in terms of neglect and abuse and so on. It doesn't have to be that way, but it so often is that way, friends. And finally, it exacts a great price on the artist himself or herself, who often turns towards melancholia, depression, alcoholism, suicide, even despair in the act of producing great art. It doesn't come cheaply. And if you want a biography that pretends that great art doesn't have exactly great price, well, this is not the one for you. Find some other kind of hagiography or whatever. But for me, it was exhilarating. It was an obligation to give a kind of as much much as possible a full accounting of the cost it took to be Ralph Ellison and to have produced Invisible man and the other books that he put out, and also the books that came out after his death. Ellison may yet be like Ernest Hemingway in that Hemingway. There are more books published by Ernest Hemingway after his death, in before his death. And I think there are already more books published by Ralph Ellison after his death than before his death. It's all his work, in any case. It's a complete picture. It's something that. It's, I think, a very, very admirable achievement in American literary history and African American literary and cultural history. The fact that it's controversial, I think, only makes it that much more appealing. And on that, I think I will stop talking. On that note, and thank you. If you have any questions, I'd be happy to try to answer them. If not, we can go back to our algorithms.

Was there one particular challenge about writing this book that, in retrospect, you feel was the greatest challenge in writing this book?

The greatest challenge in writing the book? One challenge. Well, I mean, there were different challenges. I mean, for three years, for example, in the process of writing it, I became a dean at my university, and that just consumed a lot of time and led to a lot of frustration. How can I keep the book going? The book is affecting the deanship. The deanship is affecting the book adversely in both cases. But there's the normal challenge of writing a biography, of writing a long book, which is to find evidence and then to be able to see the nature of the evidence, what is exciting about it, what is telling about it quickly. And that's the beautiful part. I mean, that's the fascinating and rewarding part of the job, I would say. It's hard work, sure, to sort of go off to Washington, D.C. and sit in the Library of Congress and the Manuscripts Division and have these trays come out over a long period of time. But I actually find that fun. I like reading other people's mail, and then I like putting the story together, writing it. Because biography, it's not just about facts. History is not about facts. History is all about interpretation. History is, in many respects, a subjective and romantic activity, and biography is but a form of history. So there's the downside to slogging it out, getting through. Through the material and so on. But then there's also that which is both punishing and at the same time, profoundly rewarding, like digging up the stuff and then converting it into a narrative. Because, I mean, I had in. Biographers have an obligation, a fundamental obligation to hold the reader's interest and to hold a reader's interest without doing violence to the facts. So the bitter and the not. So the bit and the suite are mixed up. Yes. Oh, yeah. In the course of doing the research and writing this book, were there individuals that you felt, I'd like to write a biography about them? Well, I've always thought of, you know, I'd like to write a biography of Toni Morrison. That is not going to happen. Probably. You know, you meet powerful people and accomplish people. But do I want to write a biography of Saul Bellow? I'm not sure. I mean, he's been well served. I mean, there's a long line of people who either have written about Saul Bellow or are going to write about Saul Bellow or Arthur M. Schlessinger Jr. Sure. I mean, I think he's very interesting. But, no, given my interests. I mean, I like to. Although I've written a book with a tennis player and a book about a baseball player. I'm essentially a literary person. I need to remember that. And there are not that many literary figures who appeal to me. For one thing, I am committed to writing about African Americans. Because I think it's an aspect of our history and culture that has been grossly neglected. The painting of the painting, a portrait of the African American face. Because that's basically what I've been doing from early on with Du Bois and then Langston Hughes and these various people. It's a male face, unfortunately. But I can do only so much. So I am committed in that way. And I don't know of anybody that I really would like, besides Morrison, say that I would really like to do their life. Because it's daunting. It takes a long time to do a biography. And I wouldn't want to plunge into it recklessly. Yes.

I came a little late, so I'm sorry if this has been addressed. But I couldn't help noticing that there are a couple parallels between Ralph Ellison's life and the life of the main character in Invisible Man. Can you comment on, like, to what extent do you think that character is autobiographical, if at all?

Well, I think in one respect, I mean, it's not autobiographical at all. And Ellison would often become slightly impatient by people who see autobiography in the character who's never named, of course, a character. I call him invisible. There are some parallels. One chapter takes place at a school in the South. And it's not altogether unlike Tuskegee Institute. Ralph Invisible goes up north and he works in New York in a paint factory. And I was able to find out, in fact, dig up some stuff that showed that Ellison had worked in a paint factory not long after moving to New York. But I think the crucial connection is. And a crucial moment for Ralph Ellison in writing his novel was that moment in 1945. I mean, I think he'd been writing a novel about an invisible man or about a black man who is treating him as invisible. The way blacks saw themselves as invisible in the eyes of the larger community. But then when Ellison. The sentence that came to him is, I am an invisible man. And Ellison then knew he had found the key to telling his Story. And it was a key that had been used repeatedly in American literature by Melville. Call me Ishmael, you know, the first line of the movie Dick, or Huckleberry Finn or the Great Gatsby, you go again and again. So many major accomplishments in American fiction are written in the first person. Although Henry James warned about first person narratives as leading to baggy monsters, as he called the novels. But I think what it enabled, what it really helped Ellison, and especially as he tried to move away from the kind of gritty, social realist fiction of Richard Wright, was that it allowed Invisible then to have a lot of the richness of sensibility and, of course, knowledge, even that Ellison himself had. Somebody said about Ralph Ellison, about Richard Wright, that his mind was such that he could not imagine or write about, could create a character, a man, a black man, who was as intelligent and sensitive as he himself was. He just had to have these brutes at the center of his fiction. Well, within the case of Ralph Ellison, it helped enormously that slipping into the first person, he moved easily into seeing having his principal character see the world with something of the richness of sensibility and also the peculiarity of sensibility. I don't think it's an accident that the book is so loveless, as I've put it, so unromantic, because I think Ellison in many ways was not. But that's where, I mean, that was a great source of strength. So in some respects, it's autobiographical. The Invisible man ends up, as, you know, in a kind of hole in the ground after taking part in this, caught up in this riot. And then he's down there and he has 1,369 lights in this basement hole. And he wants five gramophones where he can play five different recordings of what Did I Do to be so black and Blue? But then he also says at the end, but I'm coming out. I'm going to. You know, I'm confident I'm going to emerge from this hole and come back into the world. I'm confident. Well, I think that's Ellison. Both possessed both by a kind of anarchy of consciousness and a rebelliousness and a sense of futility and despair on the one hand, but also idealistic. A dedicated artist believing in the alchemy and the therapy of art on the other. That is. I mean, there are moments in the text where you might say, well, the central character is not really consistent or perhaps not really attractive. But I think, having said all of that, the central character is kind of Ellisonian and especially when one remembers that Ellison was much younger than the Ellison he became, the less attractive Ellison, who antagonized so many people later on. This was the Ellison of possibilities as he created this novel with the world in almost total anonymity, but hoping to do this great piece of work. So in that respect, I think the two people are very, very similar. And of course, it is invisible who writes the novel. I mean, that's how we have it in the first person, because he writes the novel. So although he seems to be a nutty loony down in his hole, we have proof that he came out there and did this. And I think Ellison would himself believe that he conquered so many of his demons, his own personal demons, in being able to create this work of art, which is really unlike any African American novel before it and unlike many American novels before it, because it is Invisible man is very much a work of art that came out of America in the post World War II period. It belongs with Ginsburg's Howl and On the Road and Bellows Adventures of Augie March, which comes out of the. After Invisible man also wins the National Book Award. It belongs to a new America, a much more complicated America in the post World War II period. But it's a very good question and it remains to be answered fully. I think we have time for perhaps one more question. Okay. Did you wait for the microphone one second?

You were speaking about the sacrifice of producing art. And I wonder if in. Because I've read your books on, your book on Langston Hughes and the book written with Arthur Ashe and just love them. And I wonder if there is a sacrifice in writing art about art in the sense that you're writing about such completely different people. And Arthur Ashe and Langston Hughes seem like such warm, huge personalities and, you know, very big hearted people. And the depiction of Ellison is so completely different. And I wonder if as a writer, if there was a sacrifice in writing about someone with such a completely almost opposite character, particularly in relation to African Americans. Langston Hughes seemed to have very different relationship than Ellison.

I mean, that's a very good question. I wouldn't want to overstate. I don't know. I said something about the price that great art exacts. I don't know if the price that scholarship exacts is the same thing. I don't think it's nearly the same thing. Especially when you have a chair and your university supports you and so on and so forth. It's not quite the same thing. The scholarly life is. I mean, scholars can be anybody who becomes Obsessed by their work, can be nasty to their spouses and their children and so on. But. So I don't want to go too far. I mean, I think a lot of scholars don't commit suicide, you know, they don't go. So it's a different level of pain involved in creating great art. I would say though, that it was a real exhilarating pleasure, although a pain to bring it off. To write a two volume biography of Langston Hughes. Yes, I mean, it was an enormous challenge, especially since when I started out, I really didn't know what I was doing. I'd never really written a full scale biography before. I'd written an intellectual biography of Du Bois, but never a full scale biography. Soup to nuts, you know. As for Ellison, I mean, working with a person, I really could not, I could fall in love with Langston Hughes. I mean, he's an enormously attractive, generous, creative, lyrical person, a poet and so on. I could admire Jackie Robinson almost without reservation. Arthur Ashe, it was, you know, astonishing to work with him as he was dying in the last year of his life, knowing that he was going to die and he was knowing he would know, admit it, but I think he had to know that he was going to die. So those were troubling, but I hesitate to say enriching, but somehow. Those were rich moments, richly textured episodes in my career and my life. I mean, I think with Ellison, it. It's not, you know, one is not dealing with the sweet Langston Hughes or the noble Arthur Ashe, but one is dealing with a major creative artist. And therefore one has to have respect for him. And that I never lost. I never lost my respect for Ash, respect for Ellison as a creative writer. Never lost sight of the. That fact. Fact that one could write about his life and say this and that about him, but you have to come to terms with and acknowledge that he's left this body of work behind. And it is going to endure and will endure long after your little sorry biography has been absorbed by Google, preserved for the ages. I hope that's a good answer. Thank you all very much. I enjoy this.