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Wrestling with the Left: The Making of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man
Author(s): Barbara Foley (Author)
- Publisher: Duke University Press
- Publication Date: 3 Dec. 2010
- Language: English
- Print length: 464 pages
- ISBN-10: 0822348179
- ISBN-13: 9780822348177
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Review
“[A] compelling, detailed work. . . . Recommended.”–A. Hirsh, Choice
“Fans of Ralph Ellison must put Barbara Foley’s Wrestling with the Left on their reading list. This substantial critical study, some fifteen years in the making, returns to early drafts of Invisible Man to offer a bold new reading of one of the most acclaimed American novels of the twentieth century…. After Foley’s analysis of the material in Ellison’s drafts, one in fact gains an even greater appreciation for the richness and complexity of what remains one of the great works of American literature.”–Brian Dolinar, African American Review
“We are not likely to get a more capacious and visionary political re-reading–or re-writing–of Invisible Man.” —Bill Mullen, Science & Society
“Wrestling with the Left is profoundly significant. It is a monumental, scrupulously researched, solidly argued reading of Invisible Man, a novel central to the history and teaching of African American literature and American modernism.”–Dan Colson, Modern Fiction Studies
“Foley is careful, lucid, thorough, and fair, and her book stands as a strong corrective to more reductive readings of Ellison’s novel and of his life.”–Alan Nadel, American Literature
“Impeccably scholarly and full of imaginative surprises, Wrestling with the Left ranks with the most revealing criticism ever produced on Ralph Ellison. Nowhere else is the gestation of Invisible Man and the youngish intellectual who conceived it discussed so fully and incisively.”–William J. Maxwell, author of New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism Between the Wars
“Seeking the truth (pro and con) about Ellison’s complex engagement with Communism, Barbara Foley has written a book indispensable to Ellison studies. She is a tireless scholar who has mastered, like no one before her, the daunting jungle of manuscripts that amply documents Ellison’s indebtedness to, and also his calculated later airbrushing of, the vitality and generosity of the radicals who nourished him on the long road to Invisible Man. Stern but fair, Barbara Foley is a shrewd, lively, lucid writer with a fascinating if controversial tale to tell. This book ably fills perhaps the biggest gap in our critical and biographical understanding of Ralph Ellison.”–Arnold Rampersad, author of Ralph Ellison: A Biography
From the Back Cover
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
WRESTLING WITH THE LEFT
The Making of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible ManBy BARBARA FOLEY
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2010 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4817-7
Contents
Acknowledgments…………………………………………….ixNote on the Text……………………………………………xiIntroduction: Reading Forward to Invisible Man…………………11. Forming a Politics……………………………………….272. Developing an Aesthetic…………………………………..693. Writing from the Left…………………………………….1094. Living Jim Crow………………………………………….1535. Becoming Proletarian……………………………………..1876. Finding Brotherhood………………………………………2377. Recognizing Necessity…………………………………….2818. Beginning and Ending……………………………………..325Notes……………………………………………………..351Selected Bibliography……………………………………….429Index……………………………………………………..433
Chapter One
Forming a Politics
A leader while leading the ruled is still controlled by the laws which rule the group. A revolutionary transcends both the group and the laws. He is under the spell of another picture of reality. He breaks the laws of the status quo emotionally and intellectually under the influence of his will to create the new…. Spartacus will come. —Ralph Ellison, Negro Quarterly, notes, 1942-43 [History consists] … not … in repetition but … in a spiral. —Ralph Ellison, undated notebook, c. 1941
Over the decade and more during which Ellison affirmed, queried, and finally rejected the theory and practice of the Communist-led left, his writings reflecting these shifts in political outlook. The process of reading forward through his oeuvre, both published and unpublished, will enable us to examine his changing stances as a series of choices among available courses rather than an odyssey whose homecoming is known in advance. Despite his later denials of having taken leftist politics seriously, Ellison was anything but nave: the Marxism of the CPUSA supplied the analytical paradigm that for many years guided his understanding of the world, continuing to exercise significant influence even after he cut his organizational ties to the left. Ellison came of age thinking of the relationship of past to present to future as a spiral; it would take a major reordering of his thinking to reconfigure history as a boomerang.
“Everybody’ll be equal, in God’s time”: Urban Folklore and the Federal Writers Project
Within two days of his arrival in New York in the summer of 1936, Ellison had made contact with Langston Hughes in the lobby of the Harlem YMCA (“Men’s House” in Invisible Man). Hughes opened the doors to Harlem’s leftist artistic community, including such figures as the writer and activist Louise Thompson and the sculptors Augusta Savage and Richmond Barth, and Ellison was soon helping to edit the Champion, a radical youth journal. He wrote to his mother, Ida Ellison, of his “[disgust] with the whole system in which we live” and, in an early statement of his preoccupation with rebirth, of his desire that “the whole thing would explode so the world could start again from scratch.” In mid-1937 Ellison met Richard Wright, then head of the Harlem Bureau at the Daily Worker, where Ellison would visit and peruse the drafts of the stories that would soon be published as Uncle Tom’s Children. Although following the sudden death of his mother in the fall of 1937 Ellison spent several months in Dayton, Ohio, he was already hooked on radical politics and beginning to pen his first works of proletarian fiction. He founded the Dayton Youth Movement and wrote to his new mentor, “Workers of the world must write!!!” Soon after returning to New York in March 1938 Ellison, with Wright’s assistance, obtained work as a writer for the Harlem branch of the Federal Writers Project.
Part of Ellison’s job for the FWP entailed digging up the history of the Negro in New York. Revealing his early attraction to Marxist categories of historical analysis, he summarized Carter Woodson’s The Beginning of Miscegenation of the Whites and Blacks, stressing the class-based multiracial solidarity in early colonial life. “The slaves and white indentured servants having a community of interests frequently intermingled,” Ellison writes, “but when class lines were drawn in a locality and laborers were largely of one class or other intermixture was not so prevelent.” A piece about the New York slave rebellion in 1741 draws explicit parallels between the insurgents’ trials and the Scottsboro case. In these writings of 1938 Ellison evidently sought out historical instances of black and white unity and viewed present-day Communist organizing as part of the red line of antiracist history.
During most of his time with the FWP Ellison worked as an interviewer for the Project’s Living Lore Unit. In this capacity he collected the songs and chants of Harlem’s children and conducted numerous interviews that exposed him to the urban folklore of its recent migrant population. The Pullman porter and former Floridian Lloyd Green, a precursor of Mary Rambo, claims to have been in the city for a quarter-century but continually maintains, “I’m in New York, but New York ain’t in me.” The storyteller Leo Gurley remembers a legendary trickster down South named “Sweet-the-Monkey,” who had the power to “make hisself invisible…. He was one sucker who didn’t give a damn bout the crackers…. The white folks would wake up in the morning and find their stuff gone. He cleaned out the stores. He cleaned out the houses. Hell, he even cleaned out the damn bank! … [But] couldn’t nobody do nothing about him. Because they couldn’t never see im when he done it.” For this class-conscious folk hero invisibility was evidently a means to reappropriating wealth extracted through Jim Crow economic practices.
Other interviewees evinced bitterness toward continuing manifestations of Jim Crow in the North. The musician Jim Barber describes his rebuff of a white patron who has made clumsy overtures of friendship: “You ain’t got nothing and I sho ain’t got nothing. What’s a poor colored cat and a poor white cat gonna do together? … Hell, that skin ain’t no more good to you than mine is to me. You cain’t marry one a Du Pont’s daughters, and I know damn well I cain’t. So what the hell you gon do up to my place?” Barber cynically anticipates, “Hitler’s gonna reach in a few months and grab and then things’ll start. All the white folks’ll be killing off one another. And I hope they do a good job!” But, he bitterly jokes, even Hitler’s triumph will not solve the problem of domination: “When Negroes start running things, I think I’ll have to get off the earth before it’s too late!”
The religious zealot Eli Luster combines a prediction of biblical apocalypse with a call for social revolution. Claiming that God “step[ped] in” to sink the Titanic because it carried “all big rich folks: John Jacob Astor—all the big aristocrats,” Luster prophesies that “God’s time is coming”:
Money won’t be worth no more’n that dust blowing on the ground. Won’t be no men down in Washington making fifty thousand dollars a week and folks cain’t hardly make eighteen dollars a month. Everybody’ll be equal, in God’s time. Won’t be no old man Rockefeller, no suh! … Them what done took advantage of everything’ll be floating down the river. You’ll go over to the North River, and over to the East River, and you’ll see em all floating along, and the river’ll be full and they won’t know what struck em. The Lawd’s gonna have his day.
Like Barber, Luster prophesies, “They’ll be a war.” He tells Ellison, “[But] it won’t bother me and you…. It’ll be the wicked killing the wicked!” More class-conscious than Barber, Luster too views the coming war as a conflict in which Harlemites have no stake.
Most likely drawn from Ellison’s FWP interviews are several fragments of conversations, filed among Ellison’s short stories at the Library of Congress, that sound more like transcriptions from interviews than fictional narratives. One piece, supplied with the thematic title “Their Arms Are Strong,” transmits the voices of women laundry workers. Their songs develop from a traditional spiritual, “Rock of Ages,” to a rebellious one, “Dare to be Daniel,” to a chant related to the pressures of their workplace, “I Lift My Iron.” Through this sequence Ellison traces the women’s movement from South to North, spirituals to urban blues, folk religiosity to proletarian class consciousness. The women move into a discussion of the brutishness of their boss, their attempts to form a union called Equity, and the causes and results of the riot in 1935, which is evidently in recent memory. One woman concludes, “We need to have some more riots. We ought to have one every six months to keep things straightened out.”
Another sketch, titled “No Discrimination,” records the voice of the leader of an unnamed organization of the unemployed. Having called upon “Brother Finance” and “Brother Membership” to be ready to report, the speaker opens the meeting with a prayer:
O, Lord, we are here gathered to say a prayer unto You for help and inspiration. … We are gathered here, all of us, black and white folks, in this here organization because we are going to do something to get ourselves and our children food and clothes and decent lodging. We’re all of us poor folks, Lord. We ain’t never had much and now this here relief don’t give us much…. We’re going to decide at this meeting what’s going to be done, and whatever we decides we knows we’re in the right, for we’re fighting hard for our rights…. We ain’t used to be gathered here like this before, for we were separated before—the whites from the blacks, and we didn’t have no respect for each other. It’s different now. This here’s a united front because we’re all suffering alike…. They ain’t no discrimination in Your eyes, Lord, and they ain’t none in this here organization.
Like Wright’s Reverend Taylor in “Fire and Cloud,” this preacher views multiracial solidarity as a necessity for those who are “suffering alike” and must “decide what’s going to be done.” As the Alabama Communist organizer Hosea Hudson recalled, it was commonplace for red-led working-class gatherings, especially those involving African Americans, to open with prayers. Whether or not Ellison added the Leninist embellishment, the speaker’s “what’s to be done” echoes the title of Lenin’s famous pamphlet What Is to Be Done?, which in 1902 called for the emergence of revolutionary leadership from the ranks of the working class. This question would crop up frequently in Ellison’s notes and writings over the next few years.
In 1978 Ellison would fondly recall his FWP-era contacts with Harlem’s rich oral lore; hearing several strapping African American men debating the relative merits of various sopranos at the Metropolitan Opera, he learned that their sophistication derived from their moonlighting as silent extras on the opera stage. Forty years after the encounter he viewed the men’s anomalous expertise “in the clear, pluralistic melting-pot light of American cultural possibility”; from the “smoke” of the melting pot he watched “the phoenix’s vernacular, but transcendent, rising.” His younger self was apparently more fascinated by the wry commentaries on social inequality embedded in the vernacular of urban folklore.
“A well organized Fascist offensive in Harlem”: Popular Front-Era Journalism
While working for the FWP Ellison began writing book reviews for leftist publications. In his first New Masses contribution in 1938, a review of God’s Faithful Pilgrim, a biography of Sojourner Truth by the anthropologist Arthur Huff Fauset, Ellison stresses Truth’s emergence from the crucible of religious mysticism, emerging as a “fight[er] for Negro freedom,” the “Mother Bloor of the anti-slavery movement.” But Fauset failed to “[allow] … scope for development and change of the individual through dynamic contact with the social and economic factors constituting environment,” complains Ellison; instead he substituted “static philosophy” based in racialized notions of the Negro’s “healthy paganism.” Ellison’s comparison of Truth with Ella Reeve “Mother” Bloor, in the late 1930s the leftist godmother of unionization struggles, suggests that Fauset would have avoided racial essentialism if he had grasped the continuity between the abolitionist movement of Truth’s day and current red activity.
Ellison’s notebooks from this period further display his interest in the parallels between past and present radical movements. Among his notes on an article published in 1939 by the historian Benjamin Quarles on the relationship between Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, Ellison writes, “Douglass / Vesey / Washington / Dubois / Ford / Patterson.” Another entry, titled “Notes for Essay on Negro Personality, Intellectuals, or what have you,” contains a longer list, starting with the fugitive slave and abolitionist orator and activist “WW Brown” (William Wells Brown) and ending with “the Marxists.” Already preoccupied with the issue of Negro leadership, Ellison evidently viewed Communists as culminating the past century’s development. Still another entry contained the observation, “The South from slavery and secession has captured … the government and are pushing the country toward fascism; slavery has once again become international. … [History consists] … not … in repetition but … in a spiral.” The growth of fascism both international and domestic, here paralleling chattel slavery, leads the young radical to discern in history movement that is simultaneously forward and backward. The Marxist-Hegelian spiral of history— which the invisible man will ruthlessly lampoon in the epilogue to Invisible Man—here serves a vital explanatory function.
Departing from the format of the book review, Ellison explored the international dimensions of racism in a commentary on “anti-Semitism among Negroes” that appeared in the Jewish People’s Voice in April 1939. In the ecumenical spirit of the Popular Front, Ellison praises “Negro leaders” such as the NAACP’S secretary Walter White, the president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, A. Philip Randolph, and the pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, Adam Clayton Powell Sr., for helping raise funds for Jewish refugees from Nazism, urging their constituencies to reject anti-Semitism, and “cooperating … on the broad front … for Democratic rights.” He condemns the “Tory capitalists” who have created a “well organized … Fascist offensive in Harlem,” such as the pro-Franco Concha Espana, the Pittsburgh Courier, the New York Amsterdam News, and the Harlem Bulletin. This last, warns Ellison, carries the program of anti-Semitic black nationalists Sufi Abdul Hamid and Arthur Reid, who “advises Negroes to follow Hitler.” African Americans are more fortunate than Jews in Hitler’s Germany, Ellison states, because “the Government of the South is but a reactionary segment of a constitutional Democracy.” But “the question is not whether or not Negro and Jewish discriminations can be linked,” he concludes; “the question is whether discrimination toward any group can be tolerated in this, the greatest of Democracies.”
The continuity between racial violence in the South and in the North is the subject of Ellison’s article “Judge Lynch in New York,” published in August 1939 in the New Masses. Describing the brutal mob beating of three young Negro college students who had come to the city in search of summer jobs, Ellison notes the increasing frequency of such attacks, comparing this incident with another in which a Negro youth was beaten, thrown into the Hudson River, and “missed drowning only because a white longshoreman who happened to be passing did not share the feeling of the mob and rescued him.” Ellison connects these incidents with overcrowding and rent gouging: “An attempt is being made to bottle Negroes up in the narrow confines of Harlem to the advantage of those landlords who charge exorbitant rents.” Ellison charges police complicity, remarks on the mob’s association with the Christian Front, organized by the notorious fascist “radio priest,” Father Coughlin, and notes that downtown earlier that day the young Negro men had witnessed Christian Front members attacking a Jew.
Ellison’s original conclusion to “Judge Lynch in New York” dwells on the parallels between northern and southern fascisms. Echoing the conversation among the African American youths in Wright’s “Big Boy Leaves Home,” Ellison writes, “If there’s a section where you are not supposed to go you know it; even if you’re not told by a sign that says ‘No Dogs and niggers allowed.’ The only difference between the North and South … is that [in the North] they’re beating the Jews as well as the Negroes.” Ellison more optimistically concludes the published version with the observation that Negroes “are fighting back but in a democratic way.” Community leaders of different religions and races are “making every effort … to curb these incidents, which, if allowed to continue, are sure to precipitate the sort of emotional reaction that made for the riots of 1935.” Less sanguine than the laundry workers in “The Arms Are Strong” about the beneficial effects of urban rioting, Ellison refocuses his anger against “Judge Lynch” toward “democratic” resistance.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from WRESTLING WITH THE LEFTby BARBARA FOLEY Copyright © 2010 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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