Flying Home and Other Stories.

Reviewed by

Robert J. Butler Canisius College 

Scholars and teachers have eagerly awaited the publication of a book of this kind for many years. For a variety of reasons which are still difficult to understand fully, Ralph Ellison's short stories have never been collected until now, making many of them all but impossible to use in the classroom and extremely difficult to use for scholarly purposes, since many of his stories were published in obscure journals which have been defunct for quite some time. The Buster/Riley stories, despite their intrinsically high quality and the considerable light they shed on Ellison's development, are virtually unknown to all but a small group of Ellison specialists. "Flying Home" and "King of the Bingo," two extraordinary stories which rank with the very best American short fiction published since 1945, have appeared in a variety of anthologies, but most are now out of print and some have become too expensive or too specialized for many courses. Ellison's unpublished stories, like his much-awaited second novel, have been rumored for years to be very high in quality, but could only tantalize several generations of critics, scholars, and teachers, who have hoped for their eventual publication.

Flying Home and Other Stories, superbly edited by John F. Callahan, is therefore an important event in American and African American literary life, since it collects for the first time what Callahan considers to be "Ellison's best published and unpublished freestanding fiction." Designed as "a reader's edition" and not intended to be a "variorum or scholarly edition," the book contains thirteen stories, six of which were unpublished in Ellison's lifetime. (Two were published in 1996 issues of The New Yorker.) These stories are of enormous value, since they now make possible a careful study of Ellison's considerable achievements as a short story writer and also enable us to see in a much clearer way Ellison's development as an artist in the crucial period when he emerged as a writer in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Moreover, this book finally makes it possible to bring Ellison's short fiction productively into the classroom, where it can be studied for its own merits and for the ways in which it illuminates his great novel Invisible Man.

Certainly the most eye-opening part of this book is its cluster of six new stories, which Callahan aptly describes as "stories that had never been published, never-mentioned, stories no one knew about." Most of them are initiation stories of one kind or another in which young protagonists are abruptly awakened into a painful awareness of the harsh realities of adult experience. "A Party Down at the square," for example, is narrated by a nameless white boy who describes a lynching which he is forced to watch while making a summer visit to his uncle in Alabama. "Boy on a Train" focuses on a young black protagonist who is suddenly thrust into the early stages of adulthood after the death of his father as he, his mother, and brother are forced to take a train to a strange new place where they hope to begin a new life. "Hymie's Bull" and "I Did Not Learn Their Names" deal with anonymous black picaros riding the rails during the darkest years of the Great Depression, all the while encountering shocking moments of violence and surprising experiences of human tenderness and solidarity. "The Black Ball," which Callahan describes as "perhaps the most subtly crafted of the unpublished stories," brilliantly dramatizes the psychic wounds of a single father and his son as they try to establish a decent life for themselves in a racist society intent on "blackballing" them. The only bit of comic relief in this group of previously unpublished fiction appears in "A Hard Time Keeping Up," which culminates in an amusing episode of mock-violence.

Of these six stories, only "Hymie's Bull" can be precisely dated, since it was scheduled to appear in a 1937 issue of New Challenge, but the journal folded before the story could be published. "A Hard Time Keeping Up" and "The Black Ball," judging from convincing external evidence, were completed during the period from late 1937, when Ellison was in Dayton, Ohio, following his mother's death there, until April 1938, when he returned to New York to work for the New York Writers Project of the WPA. Callahan speculates that the other three stories were completed before 1940, since they were found in an envelope labeled by Ellison as "Early Stories" and containing his 1940 address of 25 Hamilton Terrace in New York City. All six stories, therefore, are a rich source of information about Ellison's early development as a writer when he was strongly influenced by leftist politics in general and Richard Wright's example in particular. (The lynching described in the collection's opening story, for example, clearly reflects Wright's commitment to depicting racial violence in an uncompromisingly frank and graphic manner, and the proletarian sympathies implicit in "I Did Not Learn Their Names" and "The Black Ball" demonstrate with equal clarity that Ellison was strongly influenced by leftist thought, even though he never became a member of the Communist Party.)

Those who have unfairly charged Ellison throughout his career of lacking sufficient anger and militance will find very little evidence in these six unpublished stories to support their claims. Most of the stories smoulder with anger and repulsion which often match that found in typical Wright stories of the period. Just as the white boy in "A Party" is finally sickened by the lynching which he wants to run away from but is forced to watch, the young protagonist in "Boy on a Train" is so outraged by the sudden loss of his father and the segregated conditions which he and his family must endure that he finds himself "smouldering inside" and finally acknowledges a fierce, nearly Ahabian desire "to kill God and not be sorry." The nameless central character in "Hymie's Bull" takes a perverse pleasure in observing a fellow hobo coldly slit the throat of a railroad "dick." And his counterpart in "I Did Not Learn Their Names" perhaps speaks for most of the central characters in these stories when he frankly reveals, "I was having a hard time not to hate in those days."

One crucially important thematic pattern which informs these six unpublished stories, and which becomes even more pronounced in Ellison's later fiction, is Ellison's unwillingness merely to express this rage; throughout the stories he searches for ways to enable his characters to transcend raw anger and resentment which will either paralyze or destroy them and to develop human resources which enable them to deal productively with such feelings. As Callahan has arranged the stories, one can see the outlines of an overall narrative portraying the central character's growth from an alienated and impotent observer to a more mature person who can master his feelings and deal with the world in existentially productive ways. Although the first two stories end with characters emotionally and psychologically blocked by traumatic experiences, later stories describe ways of overcoming this condition. The narrator of "I Did Not Learn Their Names" thus balances his suspicion of people and his resentment over his marginalized position in American society with the fact that a crippled white man has saved his life and an elderly white couple not only share their food with him but also reveal to him some of the intimate details of their lives. He is finally able to go beyond his own suffering by identifying with the pain of others and sensing a common bond between them, realizing that on the most fundamental levels "you were all the same." In a similar way, the single father in "The Black Ball" is able to contain and transcend his frustrations with a racist society by identifying with and joining the cause of a white union organizer who has also been wounded by a society which ostracizes him for defending a black man who was wrongfully accused of rape. In each case, Ellison's protagonists are able to repair the damage done to the self by moving beyond their personal grief to a larger vision of solidarity with others. In this way, they are able to overcome "a smouldering sense of self-hate and ineffectiveness."

The four Buster/Riley stories in this collection provide Ellison with another resource for mastering and transcending pain, a comic tradition rooted in American and African American folklore. The humor which sparkles throughout these pieces is closely tied to the blues which Ellison has described in Shadow and Act as "a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism" that enables one to triumph over pain by developing a "sheer toughness of spirit" characterized by deepened consciousness and emotional resilience. The three stories which bring the collection to such a brilliant conclusion ("King of the Bingo Game," "In a Strange Country," and "Flying Home") likewise dramatize a process of self-actualization in which the central characters overcome a numbing alienation by a comic reintegration with the world which is triggered by deepened and expanded consciousness.

What these thirteen stories emphatically demonstrate is that Ellison's Invisible Man did not spring like Topsy out of nowhere but were the product of a long period of artistic and philosophical growth dating back to 1937, when he emerged as a writer. For all of his career Ellison was fascinated by stories of initiation and was able to endow these narratives with richer, more nuanced meanings as he was able to conceive of more complicated central characters and bring them to life with techniques which became increasingly more expressive, and subtle. His existential heroes can finally turn the "black eye" of pain into a very different "black eye" of deepened consciousness and broadened sympathies. As Ellison developed this remarkable blues vision, he was forced to experiment with and master a great variety of styles. Starting with a very disciplined and understated realism which he learned from Hemingway, he learned to see the small details of real life in fresh ways. He combined this with a lucid naturalism which he picked up from Wright and which gave him a deepened understanding of how the social environment impacts upon the lives of individuals. He then developed an ability to alternate these styles with a finely textured, many-layered symbolism which he learned from Joyce and Malraux. Going one step further, he was able to judiciously blend these styles with comic techniques from American and African American folk tradition, developing a distinctive voice which can only be called "Ellisonian." Flying Home and Other Stories is an important book because it documents more fully than any other primary source this remarkable literary development, in addition to adding six stories of high quality to the Ellison canon.

This book should not be seen as merely filling in lacunae in Ellison's work in order to bring certain aspects of Ellison studies to a closure. Rather, it should whet our appetite for new investigation which needs to be done so that we can finally have an adequate view of Ellison's entire career and his achievement as a writer. Not only do the previously unpublished stories need to be critically analyzed and assessed, but Ellison's long-awaited second novel should finally be put together and published. Ellison's superb nonfiction prose, which has only been fitfully explored by scholars and critics, deserves much closer scrutiny. And, of course, biographies of Ellison are desperately needed, especially to provide us with a better understanding of his early years in Oklahoma, his formative years as a writer in New York, and his later years after he had achieved fame as a major novelist. Ellison studies, therefore, are about to enter an exciting new phase, thanks in no small measure to the publication of Flying Home and Other Stories.