The Iowa Review Volume 19 Issue 3 Fall 1989
An Interview with Ralph Ellison Ralph Ellison Richard Kostelanetz
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Article 2
An Interview with Ralph Ellison Richard Kostelanetz RK: What follows is an interview that I did with Ralph Ellison for the BBC in the fall of 1965. Keep that date inmind when you hear some of as one of America's these replies. His reputation best writers one novel, which was in 1952. Invisible Man published only
on
is based received
the
National Book Award the following year and in 1965 a large poll of American
critics and writers
of the post-war period. born in Oklahoma Ellison, he has been
youth studied music
haunted
judged
Invisible Man
to be the best
in 1914, once wrote City, of a renaissance the ideal by
at Tuskegee
single novel
that from his man.
He
first
in Alabama,
then sculpture in New interest. He has also worked in
University before writing became his dominant In addition to fiction audio-electronics and as a professional photographer. criticism of jazz, literature, and culture. He has lectured at he has written
York,
and from 1970-79 was the Albert Schweitzer universities, many American is particularly What Professor at New York University. if not impressive, awesome about Ellison, is not only the diversity of his cultural interests but he achieves in those he chooses to favor. the high excellence RK:
Your
of essays Shadow and Act I have wondered and like others, who collection
Sprague; you look at him
is dedicated isMorteza
to Morteza Sprague? Do
as a hero or as a friend?
a was a Sprague, graduate of Hamilton College, professor of a and hardly older than several of his students. As Tuskegee fresh English, man I took his senior course in the nineteenth He novel. Century English RE:
Morteza
was
an honest
teacher, for when
Iwent
to him about Eliot
and such people, to attention much and them that given they weren't me what to do about it: the at But he told taught Tuskegee. places to find discussions and criticism. he told me
he hadn't
at Tuskegee ?it wasn't until we I didn't know Albert Murray Although made contact in New York City that we became friends ?he was also one of Sprague's students. Then, after graduating and pursuing graduate on the staff of the studies elsewhere, Murray joined Sprague English de and they became close friends. Yes, I consider Sprague a friend partment and dedicated my essays to him because he was an honest teacher.
1
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first as a composer Tuskegee to become there as one who wanted
RK:
You went
RE:
Iwent
. . .
to
a composer,
because
Iwas a trumpeter. They had a good band and an orchestra. music L. Dawson, school. They also had William thriving who
had become
quite
famous
as a choir
director.
The
they had a rather
a composer choir Tuskegee
opened Radio City Music Hall when Iwas still in high school; this really got me excited! It didn't seem possible that Imight at Tuskegee. I got the offer of a scholarship
go to Julliard,
but then
RK: Did you feel at all disadvantaged being in a Negro college in the South? RE: No, I didn't feel disadvantaged. Oddly enough, the library,which was
so
important time there?worked
was what
I needed.
a rather well-rounded a lot of library. I spent one there year. I always hung around the stacks; that I knew about Kittredge of Harvard, and so on; those in the air. A few of us used to talk about how nice it
to me, was
names were people's have been, ifwe would
could have attended Harvard, and to have studied under such teachers, but the sense of being disadvantaged was nothing that bothered me. You got there to study music It and you studied music. ex at a Negro wasn't any easier because you were college. You always a little later on you would that finish there and then go somewhere pected else; perhaps to Julliard, where you were pretty certain that you would get some of the best. But the teachers themselves held degrees from Oberlin and the Boston Conservatory, and so on. Hazel Harrison had been one of prize pupils who lived in his Berlin house along with a few others, out of like Percy Grainger, before the rise of Nazism drove the non-Aryans to ?I She had Prokofiev used handle Prokofiev Germany. manuscripts Busoni's
at Tuskegee! I didn't play the piano beyond the small tech manuscripts on one's harmonic to work I needed but learned a great exercises, nique deal about music and the related arts from Miss Harrison. of being a Negro when you don't think about the problems to get an education. When you're trying you're in the classroom, you're not is about the that before the you, thinking specific problem larger socio are ?even aware that you are Negro, logical problem quite though you and that in leaving the sanctuary of the college you're likely to run into Anyway,
. . . and even violence discourtesy, turn to writing? I turned to writing before I realized what
possible discomfort, RK: How did you RE:
2
Actually,
had happened.
Sometime
been around the elev during my high school days, it must've to me. The school nurse, enth grade, I had a very bad cold that just clung saw me on the street one was still Miss Waller, she day?I coughing ?and made me go to a lung clinic at one of the to wait in a recep I had hospitals. tion room with
all these obviously ill people. Iwas rather horrified and I began to try to describe what was going on to some of the people who were around me. Iwas doing it in the style, I thought, of O. O. Mclntyre, who was a syndicated columnist who used to appear in the Oklahoma City The next thing I papers. I remember that as a first doodling with writing. to set to verse a on the swamp did was country by the Southern thing writer Albion Tourg?e. I took this to the American literature teacher and at me
as
though I had gone out of my mind, interest in the class itself. I got passing shown too much never tried to do any or shown any real interest writing he looked
was
because
I hadn't
grades but I had in literature as it
I read quite a lot; so you have that in the back taught, although was or with It that I did consciously any intensity, but ground. nothing those were the beginnings. The other thing was, reading the prefaces of being
Shawwhen Iwas in high school. A friend's parents' libraryhad all of Shaw
? I think the first one I read was a and I thought those prefaces to preface ? most Candida I remember but there it was. that in my incongruous, themes in school, I tried to get some of the Shavian in my writing quality but there again, no one paid any attention to it and I didn't take it seriously. was the RK: What point after that? RE:
The point after that was that I became letters after I read The Waste Land.
modern
all the commentaries
reading Wilson's
Axel's
that
Harriet
Castle, of criticism.
very, very much involved with Iwas so intrigued that I started I could find. Among them Edmund
Monroe's
book
of criticism,
and Babette
I read a lot of Pound, and Eliot's essays. Evi was I dently poetry during those days, actually trying my hand at writing because years later Al Murray pointed out to me that he had found some of In my attempts in a library book. I suppose I blanked that out of my mind. Deutsch's
cidentally,
book
a decent
I never wrote
there at Tuskegee:
writing began was a forecast of what
Iwas
poem, but again without
going
to do.
the conscious
Itwas
concern with
that it my being conscious a kind of innocent word
play. Then I came toNew York during my junior year (1936) intending to work
that summer
after I'd been
in New
and return. That York
didn't work
Imet Richard Wright.
out, He
but
a few months
asked me
to review
3
a book for the New Challenge, that he'd come to New York to magazine, he asked me to do a short story. I had edit. After my review was published, never tried to do a piece of fiction, never in my life! So Imade my first at to the tempt at a short story atWright's suggestion. My story got galley a and his fellow stage, but then, thanks to dispute between Wright was discontinued before my story could be published. editors, the magazine was I that's but how I got started writing fiction. disappointed, Naturally, proof
did you find in Eliot?
RK: What
a sort of one imagery for thing; I found overtones of religious a saw own I I also could which with my background. style pattern identify to is close of ?that which of improvisation very jazz. improvising quality
RE:
I found
I say this but it grows out people think I'm being pretentious when to a the classics, just as Armstrong of similar and quite American approach take a theme and start im ofthat period would and any other jazz musician
Most
to any number of respects to Aida, course came out or to in to music. All the this operas, religious light opera, It was these pinpoints of familiarity that made me of the improvisation. to solve the mystery. want The Waste Land had the quality of a conundrum provising.
Then
he would
pay his
so you were to trace the thing down anyway, really trying own mind. whole within your American RK: What's about The Waste Land?
and make
it
in the it's American from its being the creation of an American, rather ruthless assault it makes upon the literature of the past. It assumes sense of life and his it recasts in terms of Eliot's it abstracts, possession,
RE:
Aside
sense of the of language, of poetry, possibility . . . in its references Also American
and of culture.
RK: RE:
Eliot
would've
is full of American
folklore.
He
knew
from St. Louis,
been
a lot about it. It quite not to have been aware
inescapable, coming that you get in this country of cultural forces, of the odd juxtapositions For the it's all mixed. cultural products; high culture, popular culture, is and everything poet, he can mix them up any way he wants. Anything
reverence which to be used, and there is this kind of irreverent are apt to have for the Americans good products of the past. I think you get there
all ofthat in Eliot. RK:
So when
tradition,
RE:
4
but
means not only the classical speaks of the tradition, he around him in St. Louis? the tradition of cultural materials Eliot
I think so. This is often missed but I think it is very much there for
to listen. It amuses me that "under the the eye, and the ear that iswilling comes out of aNegro line under the boo" bam, song written by Cole and a group of in one of their popular musicals of the 1890s, when Johnson dominated the American musical stage. Negroes RK:
Unlike
America,
some other Afro-American near Harlem.
indeed,
writers,
you
choose
to live in
Why?
RE: Living here is the only living that I could do as a novelist. I lived in I had the Rome Prize. But, for all of its diffi Italy for two years when to I of the States. Now face the United that's one had culties, challenges Because I have to hear do I live always close to other Negroes? thing. Why is language, and there is aNegro the language. My medium idiom, in fact I have to hear that there are many Negro idioms in the American language. or any American to. in I A have my ears, sounding place like Harlem, is almost Eliza has an expressiveness about it which community, Negro in speech in the streets. There's a lot of humor the language is always feeding back to the past; it's throwing up wis it's throwing up patterns and I never know but when I'm going to to street in is the the of some which be going something just making of fiction that I'm trying to write.
bethan. and dom, hear piece RK:
are revealed
Things
as a Is it fair then to speak of Harlem ghetto? I think that this is one of the most damaging misuses of a concept RE: a cultural States. A ghetto has ever come about in the United implies That's
distance.
religious It came RK: RE: RK:
to describe
That's right. ... on the Lower
where
that and
the term came from.
the Jewish East Side
neighborhoods
. . .
. . .
Not only the Lower East Side but it comes from Europe, aswe know, and it had a content there which obscures further the relationships between American whites and American Negroes. for one thing, for an Language ? so to other the patterns of myth of universal myths, speak, of Christian
RE:
in terms of Negro and so on as they have been given embodiment to not too at It's look difficult and see the Hercules John Henry patterns. to look. It's If you are aware of the connections, if you know where myth.
myth,
not
too unusual
of a Negro sermon, for instance, to look, or to the if you know where
to see that the rhetoric
can be traced back
to
Shakespeare, not I'm saying that these very often unlettered minis metaphysical ters have read John Donne, but on the other hand they are possessors of a living tradition. poets.
5
have read John Donne. now that the great tradition of nine find you right. Actually com in oratory ismost alive within the Negro teenth century eloquence so much it in it We but find find don't you anymore, Congress munity. in the churches. among Negroes, especially right RK:
And
RE:
That's
have heard people who
RK:
This
RE:
Yes,
is because
it is still more
it as primitive,
upon
culture is more oral? Negro oral than literary but itwould be amistake
American
because
it is informed
by
to look con
the usual American
cerns.
mean By this you culture?
RK:
RE:
In the United
language if itwere
that Negro
States
culture
can't be anything
but American
it's a part of the general American culture, not have the same music would English
itself. The American
the in it
of great numbers of Negroes and great num have learned their who Southerners, English partially from This is not true on the other hand where you have people who
not for the existence
bers of white Negroes.
or who a different so In Harlem, in fact in most speak language. spoke a lot of do not spend most of their time called Negro Negroes ghettos, as domestics in white there. They work outside. homes; They work care of children, they're teaching them their they're taking they're cooking, in their diapers; they are completely involved manners, they're changing the dances that Americans do are greatly America on that level. The music, a sense of ele determined style, by Negro American by Negro American sense of what the American gance, by an American Negro experience feel about how an American should be, by what Negroes should move, should express himself. The ghetto concept obscures this. It's much better to say you have slums. It's an old term and it doesn't not cultural. sion. It's economic,
cause asmuch
confu
is One way inwhich tradition appears in Invisible Man the American are in the tradition of s tory-telling. stories about experi People telling
RK:
ences.
RE:
Yes,
that's
true. And
I connect
this with
in the problems to say about the first
certain
had some negative things for loose and baggy monsters. And I happen person point of view making to prove, to at least, was that to feel that one of the things Iwanted myself a dramatic novel using the first person. you could write novel.
RK:
6
James,
But
for instance,
the blues
singer
sings
in the first person,
too.
singer is one of the most developed of existentialist Itwasn't until Sartre began poets, but we never think about it in that way. to have his novels translated here that I became aware that some of the
RE:
Yes,
and the blues
blues were was
much
RK:
RE: Well,
statements
better
able to embody, For example? "Troublin'
of the existentialist . . .
inNausea
for instance
Mind"
is an example,
than he
position
any number
of Leroy Carr's
. . .
blues
your book is toWestern you say then analogously as jazz is toWestern in effect a product of Negro music? And, is still American, is still Western? culture? Which which
RK:
Would
literature American
are both Western, are both just point out that they they to use any and American has precisely because they try everything which on music As and for been developed literature. the music, great by great
RE:
other
I suspect States?which
hand,
United we
What
American RK:
Iwould
Yes,
the one body of music this continent ?is expresses
that
have with Western version
of Western
music,
with
so-called
the expresses and the blues.
jazz classical music,
is an
classical music.
do you mean when you say that many are intended for awhite audience?
What
writers
which
books written
by Negro
RE: Well, I think that when you examine these books you will find that in expressing Negro protest the writer directs his protest, his emotion, his even toward awhite mean I I is audience. what this that suppose, by plot tend to be overly
that they are ultimately about civil sociological, an attempt to reveal per conditions rather than rights, sociological certain conditions. sonality living within to be RK: Isn't there a sense inwhich the white audience expects aNegro the books
about
in America? of being Negro angry about the condition I'm afraid so, and if the conditions were good I think RE: white
readers would
wasn't
white.
I mean
expect
that many because he
to be angry the Negro writer that thing operating underneath.
have
you use an to I is dictated not by my anger try seriously, approach which or not of lack anger, any lack of feelings of protest, by my protest the logic of the art itself. Iwrite what my imagination throws up
More or my but by to me
and Imust feed this back throughmy own critical sensibility. That critical is informed by a sense of life which grows in its out sensibility immediacy of my being part of the Negro American I find an oral group. That's where
7
tradition,
that's where
I found my
closest
are a great part of my friends were.
friends who
that's where
that's where
my parents were, content of ideas and that is the emotional emotion, symbols can to is I be found, where release myself, and dreams, release whatever is a kind of ideal reader and that ideal creative capacity that I have. There was a in full possession be Negro who of all the subtleties of reader would
life, my That's where
Imean? Not out of racist mo and art and politics. You see what to tives do I imagine this ideal reader, but both give my own experience, was born with, I its and that broadest which acquired possibilities. Is there any particular person who is your ideal reader? RK: literature
RE:
I don't
No,
think
so. The best reader of course
is the person who has his color is. Some readers, I suspect than the author has put into it. And
the imagination, regardless of what more to a work imagination bring when you get that kind of reader you're you RK:
very
fortunate
because
he gives
a stature,
let's say, that you haven't really earned. there are ways of misreading Invisible Man. One way
Well,
is to think
that it's autobiographical. that's true. It is not Yes,
RE:
autobiographical. the first person narrator? I could write in RE: Yes, I did this, as I say, as an attempt to see whether it dramatic it interesting, make and give it a the first person and make dramatic drive. strong RK:
But
RK:
But
there's a sense inwhich
a
of adverse experiences
catalogue a correct interpretation? Iwould think that itwas RE: inasmuch
as the narrator
Invisible Man might first strike a reader as in America. Is this of an innocent Negro an incorrect
of the book
and sentimental
interpretation much of his ex stopped the harsh nature of reality. He
could have
to accept perience had he been willing creates much of his own fate. I don't look upon him as heroic in that way. I But many white readers certainly are think that he made a lot of mistakes. see that. so sentimental about the Negro thing that they can't RK: doesn't
Isn't one of his more understand
his own
universal
failures
experience.
He
a failure doesn't
He of perception? understand why he
fails. so. It's a failure of and it's a sort of wrong-headed perception on an desire to summon up, to take identity imposed upon him by the out we know each individual has to discover himself well that when side, very
RE:
8
I think
many
this is done through some sort of pain. Usually a say that this is tough guy because he goes through many, have driven him to himself and to his real should which experiences
ity. RK:
Inwhat
for himself.
and the world Imust
But
sense does
or the Negro
is the narrator
the title apply? How
an invisible man? I wasn't
RE: Well,
specific character,
about
writing
the Negro. at a
in specific circumstances,
I was
about
writing time. The specific
a
invisibil
ity, there is ajoke about thatwhich is tied upwith the sociological dictum States have a rough
in the United
that Negroes
time because we
have high
visibility. RK:
Your
color
is very
RE:
High pigmentation, ever mistake me for white.
apparent. so the formula
is true. No
one will
for the narrator of Invisible the problem to a certain extent not assert invisibility by
But
is that he creates his own
Man
has it, which
ing himself. He does not do the thingwhich will break the pattern, which reveal himself, until far along in the book. So he is not a victim. At a victim. He is aman who is wrong-headed. least not merely on a second novel. Parts For some years now you have been working RK: a have appeared to critical acclaim. Why does it take so long to write
will
novel? a long time because I have deep uncertainty to I of deal with bodies try large doing. experience which a to is such reduce the American complex. There tendency it takes me
RE: Well, what I am quite ence,
when
a
it centers
For me,
RE:
experience tion, and project dilemmas,
form ?that does
RK:
think is the ultimate
purpose
of your pro
it is to seize upon the abiding patterns of the Ameri come up within my own part of the American na they those patterns, those personality types, those versions of
I think
can
man's
experi con I'm the Negro experience. I have to put it aside. It has to gel, then to it, if I can still see of de possibilities
around
especially a lot?but stantly writing ?I write I come back. If I still react positively
then I keep it. velopment, RK: As a novelist, what do you fession?
about I see as
as
in terms
sounds perhaps
of
symbolic
pretentious
actions. but
Reduce
I think
it to eloquent the novel
that's what
?
Oh,
so modest!
9
RE:
Oh, Do
I don't mean
to be too modest.
that you don't assume that the novelist can have any you mean social power or have any great expansive power or any great reforming great power as a spokesman? I think that the good novelist tries to provide his reader with vivid de RE: RK:
of certain crucial and abiding patterns of human existence. This he to artistic form. attempts to do by reducing the chaos of human experience a fresh vision of the reader with And when successful he provides reality. pictions
For then through the symbolic action of his characters and plot he enables the reader to share forms of experience not immediately his own. And thus ex the reader is able to recognize the meaning and value of the presented as awhole. This may, perience and the essential unity of human experience or may not, lead to social or as a the novelist recognition bring change a an form of social action, and spokesman. But it is, nevertheless, impor a form of social power. tant task. Yes, and in its own right
thanks to Kristen E. Gandrow helping edit this interview.
With
10
and Rebecca
L. Johnson
for transcribing and