Arnold Rampersad. Ralph Ellison: A Biography.

Arnold Rampersad. Ralph Ellison: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 2007. 658 pp. $35.00.

Late in his life, Ralph Ellison observed that "the duty of a writer is to speak truth to power but also accept the punishment that goes with telling the truth" (561). Arnold Rampersad's Ralph Ellison: A Biography fully explores Ellison's extraordinary individualism as he tried "to speak the truth to power" and his equally remarkable integrity in accepting the punishment that invariably accompanied his articulating the truth in his writing. Rampersad, who has written superb biographies of Langston Hughes, Arthur Ashe, and Jackie Robinson, does full justice to the complexities of Ellison's character, examining the many-faceted personality which lay beneath the public persona which Ellison carefully constructed in his discursive writings and public appearances. He offers a fair assessment of Ellison's achievement as a writer while honestly probing what he considers the personal weakness and critical blind spots which prevented him from following up the extraordinary success of Invisible Man with a significant body of subsequent fiction. The result of many years of careful research, Rampersad's book examines Ellison's life from his birth in 1913 to his death in 1994 and thus extends and complements Lawrence Jackson's 2002 biography, Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius, which concludes with Ellison receiving the National Book Award in 1953.

The Ellison who emerges from Rampersad's study resembles in certain ways one of his most elusive characters from Invisible Man, Bliss R Rinehart, a protean figure who has as many identities as people perceiving him. We see Ellison from many perspectives, ranging from Allen Tate's view of him as an "authentic culture hero" (423) to Robert O'Meally's demonizing him as "suspicious, corrupt, decadent and evil" (557). We likewise alternate between Shelby Steele's image of him as "a prophet who would be vindicated" (549) in the future and the view of black militants in the 1960s who saw him as an Uncle Tom who had betrayed his race. Cornel West also had reservations about Ellison's political commitments but regarded him as "a formidable intellectual and a challenge to us all" (549) while Houston Baker criticized Ellison for spending too much time in the "butter soft seats at exclusive Manhattan clubs" (548) when he should have been hard at work on his second novel. Toni Morrison, as much as she admired and was influenced by Ellison's Invisible Man, finally saw him as a man who succumbed to literary silence because he could neither assimilate late twentieth-century American experience nor coherently shape his Oklahoma past into durable art.

Rampersad has high praise for Ellison's "wonderful books" (521), regarding Invisible Man as a major achievement in twentieth-century literature and Shadow and Act and Going to the Territory as landmarks in American literary criticism. But he laments the fact that Ellison never could deliver the second novel which he promised for forty years and lapsed into the kind of literary paralysis which crippled earlier black writers such as Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen. Rampersad explores more deeply than any other previous scholar the dilemmas faced by Ellison as be labored on a novel which he began in 1953 but remained unfinished at his death in 1994. He examines Ellison's improvisational writing habits which enabled him to create brilliant fragments of fiction but left him without the organizational skills he needed to structure a long and sustained narrative. He wonders if the 1970 death of Stanley Edgar Hyman, who played an important role in helping Ellison to shape Invisible Man, left him without a valued confidant whom he needed to somehow bring order to the vast manuscript he had created by that time. Rampersad strongly believes that Ellison was distracted by the celebrity status he had achieved by the mid-1960s, becoming "a black literary patrician" (549) who spent too much time as a public figure and not enough time at his writing desk. He also places some credence in Stanley Crouch's view that Ellison may have set his literary standards too high, thus putting a "weight ... on himself" (551) that made it impossible for him to match the excellence of his first novel by attempting to create "literature at the level of Faulkner, Hemingway ... or Melville" (551).

Rampersad puts a new slant on this often-discussed matter by arguing that Ellison would have been better off abandoning the ambitious series of novels he projected after completing Invisible Man and concentrating instead on more limited and doable projects. He speculates about "what might have been if Ralph had managed his career differently" and believes that Ellison's career might have had "a sense of wholeness" which would have relieved him of his "burden of failed expectations" if he had produced "two or three collections of stories" and "one or two books of autobiography" (554) to go along with the three books which he did publish. An interesting question is raised here of why Ellison did not devote more time to the writing of short stories, a genre which seemed to match well with his mercurial temperament and his ability to generate brilliant episodes which he had difficulty welding into continuous narrative. For reasons which have never been clear, he all but abandoned the short story in the mid-1940s after producing two brilliant pieces, "King of the Bingo Game" and "Flying Home."

For all its considerable merits, Rampersad's book is marred in one troubling way. He sometimes accepts the now standard view that Ellison's problems as a writer can be neatly traced back to his identifying too closely with the white critical establishment and distancing himself from African American cultural life and literary tradition. He thus sees Ellison as a high modernist caught in the traps of excessive concern with literary theory and a narcissistic withdrawal into self. Occasionally buying into this view of Ellison, Rampersad chides him for not paying sufficient attention to the political struggles which blacks faced in the latter half of the twentieth century and also for showing little interest in helping black writers emerging during this period. Ellison in this way provides a cautionary tale for Rampersad of the crippling problems which black writers will experience if they swim too far out in the mainstream of American life.

The problem with this narrative which has been constructed about Ellison is that, like the fictions which entrap the protagonist of Invisible Man, it oversimplifies reality at best and falsifies the truth at worst. Ellison was indeed unsympathetic and sometimes hostile to a younger generation of black writers like Amiri Baraka and Don L. Lee because he believed their work was driven by political agendas which reminded him too much of the proletarian literature of the 1930s which he practiced as a young writer but had outgrown. However, he worked closely with and exerted a strong influence over many black writers such as Michael Harper, James Alan McPherson and Leon Forrest who deeply respected him as a person and greatly admired him as a novelist who could distill universal meanings out of the particularities of African American experience. Moreover, Ellison continues to exert a powerful influence on contemporary black fiction writers like Colson Whitehead, Jeffrey Renard Allen, and Trey Ellis, each of whom admire his ability to use the techniques of high modernist art to express uniquely black realities. (Rampersad grudgingly admits that such writers were "offspring" of Ellison but complains that he was a "cold" or "absent" (548) father to them. Very few of these writers would agree with him.)

It should be noted also that Ellison, who remained until his death "unabashedly an American integrationist" (490), was part of a circle of friends and advisors who were both black and white. He drew inspiration not only from mainstream figures such as Kenneth Burke, Stanley Edgar Hyman, Robert Penn Warren, and Saul Bellow but also from black writers and intellectuals like Richard Wright, Nathan Scott, and Albert Murray. Ellison's fiction, like his friendships, were both broadly American and distinctively African American. (Even Irving Howe, who became one of Ellison's sharpest critics, was forced to admit when discussing Invisible Man that "no white man could have written it.")

These objections aside, Ralph Ellison: A Biography is an impressive achievement and a very welcome addition to Ellison scholarship. While not being entirely free of the biases which have damaged Ellison criticism in recent years, Rampersad's biography provides a wealth of new information about and insights into Ellison's complex life. It thus opens doors widely to the further research which is necessary if we are to develop a deeper, broader understanding of this important writer.

Reviewed by

Robert Butler

Canisius College