Ralph Ellison's Endless Blues

The great Stanley Crouch, on The Daily Beast, discusses why the acclaimed author of the classic Invisible Man never publish another book, the tortured brilliance of Ellison’s unfinished work and how America failed to appreciate him.

From the piece...

Ellison did not join the furious black propagandists in believing that protest was right as long as the target was in the wrong. The writer believed in the craft of fiction and was dedicated to unraveling the snarls of cultural yarn that made it so hard for Americans to comprehend themselves, their interconnected national identity, and the deeper meanings of their shared history. So Ellison was hated by certain white people because he knew much more about America and much more about Western literature than they usually did; and he was also hated by leftist ethnic nationalists who brought their narrow ideologies to the circumstances of race and class, where anything almost always goes, from the academy to the media.

Book Cover - Crouch Ralph Ellison Three Days Before the Shooting…By Ralph Ellison. Edited by John Callahan and Adam Bradley. 1136 pages. Modern Library. $50. Ellison emerged when American literature had been bequeathed a large measure of formal possibilities by William Faulkner in particular, because the Southern novelist was more taken by the meanings and the epic complexities of ethnic conflict than anyone since Herman Melville or Mark Twain. Faulkner saw the peculiar aesthetic possibilities of ethnic conflict in our unavoidable democratic context, and attempted to make use of the turbulent history of the South, where so many Indian tribes had made their presence felt, where African slaves had lived as highly prized chattel who influenced the nation so indelibly, and where all of the great battles of the Civil War had been fought, with the exception of Gettysburg. Faulkner understood the hysterical blindness that came with the defeat of the Confederacy and recognized how it allowed white Southerners to dehumanize themselves, the white lower class, and the Negro.

There is never anything more unforgivable in the United States than good taste and imposing, undeniable talent. Ellison never lacked heat; he just had better judgment and more talent than any black writers of his generation and perhaps any since he came to power as a novelist. In conversation, following a memorial for the embattled writer, the great Joseph Frank and his wife, Marguerite Straus Frank, took the position that Ellison was superior to all of the writers who arrived after 1945 because his was actually what became known as a “world class talent.”