May 2, 2007
Ralph Ellison Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:05 AM EST In today’s lead article for AmericanHeritage.com, Jack Kelly reviews a new biography of Ralph Ellison by the author Arnold Rampersad. According to Kelly, “Rampersad lets the air out of the notion that Ellison’s inability to finish his novel-in-progress was connected to a house fire that destroyed much of the manuscript. At the time of the 1967 fire, Ellison acknowledged that he had lost only a few months’ revisions and some notebooks. Later, increasingly embarrassed by his writer’s block, he inflated the loss to hundreds of crucial pages. His failure to finish the book before his death in 1994 had numerous causes, starting with the daunting challenge of matching the success of Invisible Man.” Though he never completed work on it, Ellison’s long-awaited novel, Juneteenth, was published posthumously and reveals the author’s tremendous range and creativity. The novel opens in mid-century Washington, D.C., where a group of black Southerners have converged on the Senate gallery to watch Sen. Adam Sunraider, a crude bigot patterned roughly after Mississippi Sen. Theodore Bilbo, deliver one of his typical racial screeds. “Daddy” Hickman, the group’s leader, urgently tries to deliver a message to the senator, explaining to an unsympathetic Capitol secretary that he and Sunraider are old acquaintances. “Knows you?" she replies incredulously. ". . . the only colored he knows is the boy who shines shoes at his golf club.” In a remarkable plot twist, we learn that Hickman and Sunraider do indeed share a long and complicated personal history. Some writers develop a style and stick to it. Ellison didn’t. Juneteenth reads more like William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! than like Invisible Man. Heavy on stream-of-consciousness devices, its narrative is sufficiently fragmented to lend it a foreboding, gothic air. As Jack Kelly reminds us, Ellison worried that he might never match the literary accomplishment of his first novel. Arguably, he did.
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