Arts and Letters

Joseph Mitchell: Saul Bellow isn't able to be here tonight to read the tribute to Ralph Ellison that he has written, and he has honored me by asking me to read it for him, but before I do so I want to say a few words about Ralph myself. Ralph and I were friends for over fifty years. We became acquainted back in the thirties, during the Great Depression, when he was a writer on the WPA Writers' Project and I was a reporter on an afternoon newspaper for which I had very little respect. In other words, we got to know each other back in the hard times. I saw him most often, however, years later, during the seventies and eighties, when he was a professor at the City University Graduate School and my office was directly across the street at The New Yorker. Every now and then we would have lunch together, either in the Graduate Center cafeteria or up the block at the Century Club. And after lunch, almost always, if the weather was good, we would go for a long, aimless walk, and as we walked we talked every step of the way about the state of the world and about the state of the human race and particularly about the state of American literature. Ralph had a cast of mind that was distinctly humorous and what he had to say was often remarkably funny and it was a great pleasure to walk along beside him and listen to him. In those days, we joked a lot, but by and by changes began taking place out in the great world and also in our own little world that neither of us had the heart to joke about. On our last few walks together I noticed that he was becoming more and more austere, and I also noticed that what he had to say was becoming, and I think justifiably so, increasingly sardonic, but I certainly don't mean to imply that he was growing bitter, for bitterness was not his style, and in my entire life I have never known anyone as good as Ralph Ellison at practicing that wonderful old-fashioned virtue known as rising above it. For example, I remember a conversation I had with Ralph the last time I saw him which was at a party celebrating his eightieth birthday. It was held in a restaurant on the Upper East Side. I arrived early and so did Ralph and we went to the bar and ordered martinis. Ralph asked, "How've you been?" And I said that reading the New York Times was beginning to get me down, and that I was seeing all kinds of signs and portents in it. I said that invisible man had fought his way out of invisibility but that I was afraid he was in danger of becoming invisible again. Ralph laughed and it was his old-time deep, hearty laugh, which pleased me. "You never got over the depression, did you Joe?" he said, "No I did not," I said. "Nor did I," Ralph said. "But this is an excellent martini—almost as good as the ones Fanny makes. So let's drink these good martinis and talk about those signs and portents some other time."

I want to say one more thing. Through the years, I grew to think of Ralph as a brother, a beloved brother, and I also grew to think of him as a great writer, a great American writer, and in our latter days I also grew to think of him as a great man, a truly great man.

And now I shall read Saul's tribute.

Ralph Ellison, who died last year at the age of eighty, published only one novel in his lifetime. At a Bard College symposium dinner attended by foreign celebrities, Georges Simenon who was at our table asked Ellison how many novels he had written and when he heard that there was only one, he said, "To be a novelist one must produce many novels. You are not a novelist."

The author of hundreds of books, writing and speaking at high speed, could not stop to weigh his words. Einstein, a much deeper thinker, has said in reply to a sociable lady's question about quantum theory, "But isn't one a lot, Madame?"

In Ralph's case it certainly was a lot. Simenon remains readable, enjoyable, but Inspector Maigret belongs to a very large family of cops or private eyes or geniuses of detection like Sherlock Holmes, or the heroes of Dashiell Hammet, Raymond Chandler, et al. These honorable and gifted men worked at the writer's trade. Ellison did no such thing. What we witness when we read Invisible Man is the discovery by an artist of his true subject matter, and some fifty years after it was published this book holds its own among the best novels of the century.

Toward the end of the fifties, the Ellisons and the Bellows lived together in a spooky Dutchess County house with the Catskills on the western horizon and the Hudson River in between. As writers are natural solitaries, Ralph and I did not seek each other out during the day. A nod in passing was enough. But late in the afternoon Ralph mixed the martinis and we did not always drink in silence. During our long conversations I came to know his views, some of which I shall now transmit in his own words:

"We did not develop as a people in isolation," he told James McPherson in an interview. "We developed within a context of white people. Yes, we have a special awareness, because our experience has in certain ways been different from that of white people; but it was not absolutely different."

"I tell white kids that instead of talking about black men in a white world or black men in a white society they should ask themselves how black they are because black men have been influencing the values of the society and the art forms of the society…. We did not develop as a people in isolation."

"For me," he said, "some effort was necessary… before I could identify the areas of life and personality which claimed my mind beyond the limitations apparently imposed by my racial identity."

And, again: "This was no matter of sudden insight but of slow and blundering discovery of a struggle to stare down the deadly and hypnotic temptation to interpret the world and all its devices in terms of race."

It took great courage, in a time when racial solidarity was demanded, or exacted, from people in public life, to insist as Ralph did on the priority of art and the independence of the artist.

"Fiction," he says, "became the agency of my efforts to answer the questions: Who am I, what am I, how did I come to be? What should I make of the life around me?… What does American society mean when regarded out of my own eyes, when informed by my own sense of the past and viewed by my own complex sense of the present?… It is quite possible," he adds, "that much potential fiction by Negro Americans fails precisely at this point: through the writers' refusal (often through provincialism or lack of courage or opportunism) to achieve a vision of life and a resourcefulness of craft commensurate with the complexity of their actual situation. Too often they fear to leave the uneasy sanctuary of race to take their chances in the world of art." Ralph did no such thing.

I have let him speak for himself. But there is one thing more, of a personal nature, that I should like to add in closing. Often, when I think of Ralph, a line from E. E. Cummings comes to me: "Jesus! He was a handsome man," Cummings wrote. He was referring to Buffalo Bill. Ralph did not ride a watersmooth stallion, nor was he a famous marksman. But he did have the look of a man from an earlier epoch, one more sane, more serious and more courageous than our own.