Books in Brief: The Craft of Ralph Ellison

The Craft of Ralph Ellison, by Robert G. O’Meally (Harvard, 212 pp., $14). One-novel novelists, a phenomenon as American as fast food or the situation comedy, come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes: Norman Mailer, who used to try to confuse the issue from time to time by publishing a new novel; Katherine Anne Porter, who played a decades-long game of hide-and-seek before bringing out her lone novel; J. D. Salinger, who wrote his novel first and saved the fun and games for later. Ralph Ellison fits more or less into the third category, but with a significant difference: his novel was really good, almost as good as its reviews. Indeed, Ellison’s Invisible Man (published in 1952), flaws and all, still added up to a first-rate work of fiction—not to mention one of the few novels of any genuine literary merit to deal with the “black experience.” All of this makes Ellison’s subsequent descent into the dismal limbo of work-in-progress at once poignant and exasperating; and one of the various things wrong with Robert G. O’Meally’s The Craft of Ralph Ellison, billed by the publishers as “the first full-scale analysis of the work of one of America’s leading men of letters,” is its failure to stare down this distressing semisilence and its implications for Ellison’s long-term stature as an artist. (Ellison has published a total of eight chapters from an unfinished novel since the appearance of Invisible Man thirty years ago, a sure sign of a terminal writer’s block.) Moreover, Mr. O’Meally’s prose is pedestrian and his critical acumen blunt. Witness his grand peroration: “Ralph Ellison is a progressive and accomplished writer and intellectual, an American ‘man of good hope’ in the tradition of Emerson, Mark Twain, Du Bois, and James Weldon Johnson. His importance lies in his unsinkable optimism concerning his race, his nation, man’s fate.” Academic Anemia, Thesis Division! The Craft of Ralph Ellison, however, isn’t entirely hopeless; Mr.

O’Meally is surprisingly strong on both Ellison’s pre-invisible Man writings and on the novel’s rich, idiosyncratic use of folk and blues material. One wonders if he intended the rather bland title to have ironic overtones, though. (Probably not.) After all, it’s hard to talk seriously about the “craft” of a writer who, for all his promise and achievement, still fell down so decisively on the First Literary Commandment: thou shalt bear down hard, publish that second novel, and face the music.

RC

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Ross Chandler

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The Craft of Ralph Ellison, by Robert G. O’Meally (Harvard, 212 pp., $14). One-novel novelists, a phenomenon as American as fast food or the situation comedy, come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes: Norman Mailer, who used to try to confuse the issue from time to time by publishing a new novel; Katherine Anne Porter, who played a decades-long game of hide-and-seek before bringing out her lone novel; J. D. Salinger, who wrote his novel first and saved the fun and games for later. Ralph Ellison fits more or less into the third category, but with a significant difference: his novel was really good, almost as good as its reviews. Indeed, Ellison’s Invisible Man (published in 1952), flaws and all, still added up to a first-rate work of fiction—not to mention one of the few novels of any genuine literary merit to deal with the “black experience.” All of this makes Ellison’s subsequent descent into the dismal limbo of work-in-progress at once poignant and exasperating; and one of the various things wrong with Robert G. O’Meally’s The Craft of Ralph Ellison, billed by the publishers as “the first full-scale analysis of the work of one of America’s leading men of letters,” is its failure to stare down this distressing semisilence and its implications for Ellison’s long-term stature as an artist. (Ellison has published a total of eight chapters from an unfinished novel since the appearance of Invisible Man thirty years ago, a sure sign of a terminal writer’s block.) Moreover, Mr. O’Meally’s prose is pedestrian and his critical acumen blunt. Witness his grand peroration: “Ralph Ellison is a progressive and accomplished writer and intellectual, an American ‘man of good hope’ in the tradition of Emerson, Mark Twain, Du Bois, and James Weldon Johnson. His importance lies in his unsinkable optimism concerning his race, his nation, man’s fate.” Academic Anemia, Thesis Division! The Craft of Ralph Ellison, however, isn’t entirely hopeless; Mr.

O’Meally is surprisingly strong on both Ellison’s pre-invisible Man writings and on the novel’s rich, idiosyncratic use of folk and blues material. One wonders if he intended the rather bland title to have ironic overtones, though. (Probably not.) After all, it’s hard to talk seriously about the “craft” of a writer who, for all his promise and achievement, still fell down so decisively on the First Literary Commandment: thou shalt bear down hard, publish that second novel, and face the music.