Flying Home (2 page)

“You have to leave home to find home,” Ellison, years later, scribbled in the margin of a page of his novel in progress. And that October 1937, stranded in Dayton and emptied of emotion, Ellison, like his future character Invisible Man, descended into the abyss of himself, confronted the darkness, and emerged resolved to write his way through the pain and loss. If “geography was fate,” as Ellison liked to say of his Oklahoma birth and upbringing, in Dayton fate followed from geography. Before long, an ambassador from the gods appeared in the form of Lawyer Stokes. One of the first black attorneys in Dayton and a man whose youngest son was Ellison’s age, William O. Stokes befriended the motherless, fatherless stranger. Seeing Ellison take refuge in a nearby restaurant and scrawl away in a cheap spiral notebook, Lawyer Stokes gave the young man a key to his law office. Consequently, as Ellison told it in a 1985 letter to his old friend Mamie Rhone, “some of my earliest efforts at writing fiction were done on his typewriter and stationery.” (In fact, manuscripts of several early unpublished stories were typed on letterhead of the Montgomery County Republican Executive Committee, Colored Section, an organization that had four committeemen, one of whom was Atty. W. O. Stokes.)

Stokes was Ellison’s benefactor in more fundamental ways. “When my brother Herbert and I had lost our living quarters, Lawyer Stokes allowed us to sleep in his office and make use of its toilet and bathing facilities.” A staunch Lincoln
Republican despite the Depression and the emergence of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Stokes argued politics with Ellison, then a self-described young radical, who wrote on October 27, 1937, from what he called his “exile” in Dayton, to Richard Wright in New York, that “there is no
Daily [Worker]
nor
[New] Masses
to be had here”; and on November 8, “all I have here is the
New Republic
and the radio.” Ellison recalled this “most incongruous and instructive friendship” with Lawyer Stokes in his 1985 letter to Mamie Rhone, confessing that Stokes’s “aid and encouragement” had helped him through “what seemed a period of hopelessness.”

Stokes’s friendship and hospitality to Ellison, after the desolation caused by his mother’s passing, must have conjured up memories of Mr. J. D. (for Jefferson Davis) Randolph, custodian of the State Law Library back in Oklahoma City and self-taught expert in the law, who had treated Ralph like a kinsman in the wake of his father Lewis’s death. Having once more lost closest kin, the young Ellison again found kith, this time in Lawyer Stokes. In effect, Stokes showed him the way home. He gave him shelter in his office, engaged his mind, and, by encouraging him to know his work as a writer, helped him prepare to emerge as a man in the world. Little wonder Ellison told Wright that he found the streets of Dayton “very much like those of Oklahoma City, home.” In Dayton he was not as lucky finding odd jobs as he had been while growing up in Oklahoma City. He lived hand to mouth and, as he told Wright, spent most of his time in the woods picking “pears growing wild” and gathering walnuts and “fine full flavored butter nuts.” In the cold, snowy surrounding countryside, relying on Ernest Hemingway’s prose and what he’d learned shooting
game with his stepfather in the Oklahoma brush, he hunted rabbit, quail, and pheasant for his living. In his essay “February,” written almost twenty years later, Ellison remembers his discovery of a single apple on the ground, “preserved by the leaves and grasses, protected by the snows.” He remembers the serene, poignant beauty of a cock quail dead by his gun, and he remembers his sudden exhilaration at having come through the barren fields of his mother’s death and “crossed over into a new phase of living.” Like the subsequent journey of fellow Tuskegeean Albert Murray in
South to a Very Old Place
, Ellison traveled from New York City west to a very old place, and found Oklahoma in Ohio.

Ellison closed his November 8 letter to Richard Wright with the words “Workers of the World Must Write!!!!” He wasn’t kidding. And what he did not say—but what manuscripts of his early unpublished stories make clear—is that, after hours, in Lawyer Stokes’s office, Ralph Ellison became a writer. In Dayton during the seven months from October 1937 to April 1938, he wrote drafts or partial drafts of several stories, two or three sketches, and more than a hundred pages of a novel referred to simply as
Slick
—a work he abandoned but which survives as a substantial fragment. In this new world, memories of his former life in Oklahoma fought through layers of loss and grief, and Ellison used the hurt as a passport to literature’s country of the imagination.

2.
Like Odysseus, Ellison faced what in his essay “Tell It Like It Is, Baby” he was to call “our orphan’s loneliness.” Seeking
the way home, he came to realize that home’s true geography lay within. New York was the future he aimed at, Oklahoma the country of memory, and Dayton the strangely familiar spot of his life’s crossroads. Years later, in the Introduction to
Shadow and Act
, he told how in his most secret heart he continued to regard himself as a musician. But during those seven months in Dayton he untied the Gordian knot of his “complicated, semiconscious strategy of self-deception, a refusal by my right hand [the musician’s] to recognize where my left hand [the writer’s] was headed.” Musician and writer remained enough in cahoots for Ellison’s artistic identity to emerge in an ambidextrous, advantageous equilibrium between music and literature. The young man who had dreamed of composing a symphony by the time he turned twenty-six pledged allegiance to the novelists’ tribe and ended up writing
Invisible Man
, a novel with traces of symphonic form as well as the beat and breaks of jazz.

Though a first novel,
Invisible Man
was an artistic culmination, for in Dayton, and for a good while afterward in New York, Ellison was an apprentice slowly mastering his craft. Earlier, he had learned his lesson the hard way as an aspiring musician at Tuskegee. In “The Little Man at Chehaw Station” (a whistle-stop not far from Tuskegee) he remembered a public recital wherein, “substituting a certain skill of lips and fingers for the intelligent and artistic structuring of emotion,” he suffered embarrassing, withering criticism from his teachers. More soothing and salutary was the scolding administered in private by Hazel Harrison, the concert pianist and confidante who, while in Europe, had enjoyed the respect of Ferruccio Busoni and Sergei
Prokofiev. Harrison’s honesty gave Ellison the key to the relationship between the artist and his audience—“you must
always
play your best, even if it’s only in the waiting room at Chehaw Station, because in this country there’ll always be a little man hidden behind the stove” and “he’ll know the
music
, and the
tradition
, and the standards of
musicianship
required for whatever you set out to perform.” Harrison’s words made a deep impression on Ellison. Embracing a very stern discipline, he resolved to perform or write always as if the little man at Chehaw Station were looking over his shoulder.

In an undated meditation, Ellison traces his commitment to that same “structuring of emotion” he had once neglected as a trumpet player at Tuskegee. He recapitulates the impact of three nineteenth-century novels—
Wuthering Heights, Jude the Obscure, Crime and Punishment
—when, as an undergraduate, he first discovered the artistic power of fiction. “Oddly enough,” he adds, as if already possessed of the writer’s soul, “these works which so moved me did not move me to the extent of trying to write fiction.” Instead, it took a poem, T. S. Eliot’s
The Waste Land
, which Ellison discovered at Tuskegee in 1935, to stimulate the wild idea that fiction, not music, might be his true art form. Ever loyal to his musician’s bent, while his eye read Eliot’s fragments, his ear heard Louis Armstrong’s “two hundred choruses on the theme of ‘Chinatown.’ ” And it was mastery of tradition, vernacular and classical, Ellison felt, that enabled jazzman and poet alike, in Invisible Man’s words, to “slip into the breaks and look around,” then improvise in an original individual style.

Ellison’s reminiscence does not solve the mystery of why
an aspiring symphonic composer and trumpet player would be moved toward fiction from creative expression in music. But moved he was, though moved in the still waters below the surface of his conscious ambition to compose symphonies. Ellison followed up on
The Waste Land
by reading Edmund Wilson’s 1931 study of the moderns,
Axel’s Castle
, with its concluding stiff drink of Soviet Marxism, then the sources mentioned in Eliot’s notes and as many other modern poets and their critics as he could get his hands on. There were plenty in Tuskegee’s library, and it was a lifelong source of pride and gladness for Ellison to have discovered Eliot and Joyce, Pound and Yeats, Conrad, Stein, Hemingway, and others at his school, and read them first there.

Finally, in the same account of his first stirrings as a writer, Ellison remembers the epiphany of Hemingway’s prose—how “its spell became like a special iris to my eyes through which scenes and physical action took on a new vividness.” Later, writing stories like “Flying Home,” and still later, in
Invisible Man
, Ellison finds the American language and his African-American tradition more expansive, fluid, and eclectic than the hard-boiled utterance and attitude often favored by Hemingway. But as a young man trying to learn to write during the thirties, “in the work of Hemingway I discovered something of that same teasing quality that had moved me in the poetry, that quality of implying much more than was stated explicitly.” This technique, Ellison recognized, presented certain difficulties, difficulties that were next of kin to the challenges of his peculiar American condition. “For I found,” he observed in the Introduction to
Shadow and Act
, that “the greatest difficulty for a Negro writer was the problem of revealing what
he truly felt, rather than serving up what Negroes were supposed to feel, and were encouraged to feel.”

Learning to write, Ellison amends Hemingway’s creed. He does not seize upon Hemingway’s difficulty of “knowing truly what you really felt”; rather, conscious of the dangers implicit (and explicit) in being a member of the Negro minority in the United States, he stresses not the question of knowing what he felt—he knew that—but the rhetorical problem of how to express it. (This will be Ellison’s genius in
Invisible Man:
From the opening assertion—“I am an invisible man”—to his closing question—“Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?”—the eponymous protagonist narrates
how
he feels in a progression of jazz breaks taking off from and returning to the bass line of invisibility.) Was Ellison thinking of the breaks, the syncopations, the swing of jazz when he wrote in that same reflection on becoming a writer that Hemingway’s prose “did not move straightforwardly as did the familiar prose I knew, and its rhythms were shorter and circular”?

Ellison notes that Hemingway “could distill the great emotion from the most deadpan, casual-appearing, understated effects.” Hemingway’s courage in taking on the “difficulties of convention” and the rhythms and “understated effects of his prose” appealed to Ellison’s sense of his own artistic situation. So it was, he explains, that “several years later when I started trying to write fiction, I selected Hemingway for a model.” As a college student, he had read Hemingway’s stories in barbershop copies of
Esquire
and his books in the Tuskegee library. Later, in the winter of 1937-38, when he began to feel the writer’s fever, Ellison recalled in a 1984 letter to John Roche, he “walked a mile or
so from the Negro section into downtown Dayton” every day to find a copy of
The New York Times
and “read Hemingway’s dispatches from the Spanish Civil War which [he] studied for style as well as information.”

For young Ellison style was the donnée of art and personality. As a boy living in a state changing rapidly from a frontier territory to the Oklahoma of both the infamous Tulsa riot of 1921 and the hokum and Jim Crow spawned by perennial candidate and eventual governor “Alfalfa Bill” Murray, Ellison yearned, he wrote later in
Shadow and Act
, “to make any-and-everything of quality Negro American—to appropriate it, possess it, re-create it in our own group and individual images.” Along with several African-American Oklahoma boyhood friends, he dreamed of becoming a Renaissance man in no small part because of the elegant assertions of style by men most would never have associated with such an exalted idea. “Gamblers and scholars, jazz musicians and scientists, Negro cowboys and soldiers from the Spanish-American and First World wars, movie stars and stunt men, figures from the Italian Renaissance and literature, both classical and popular, were combined with the special virtues of some local bootlegger, the eloquence of some Negro preacher, the strength and grace of some local athlete, the ruthlessness of some businessman-physician, the elegance in dress and manners of some headwaiter or hotel doorman.” From these individuals Ellison and his friends sought to create composite models of self. Although these types do not show up per se in his early fiction, the style and feel of their attempts to subvert the world and make reality over in their image mark Ellison’s prose.

3.
After
Invisible Man
, Ellison’s fiction was given over almost entirely to his novel in progress. And this project, after the amazing, unanticipated success of his first novel, accentuated his natural penchant to revise, revise, revise, and only slowly come to satisfaction about his work. Nonetheless, more than once during the last year of his life, the short stories came to the forefront of Ellison’s consciousness.

The last time I saw him in his apartment before his final illness—on a cold, bright February afternoon ten days shy of his eightieth birthday, in 1994—Ellison spoke of the novel—“the damn transitions are still giving me fits, but I’m having fun”—and then he told me that he wanted to publish his short stories. (A few months earlier, I had collected the published stories and sent them to him in a loose-leaf binder.) Now he hinted that there might be more, and joked about the files crammed into what Mrs. Ellison called “the little room,” off the long, book-teeming hallway of their apartment. But soon he turned his attention to the window and a lone seagull breasting the whitecaps that blew across the Hudson River below. And I forgot his words about the stories until another windy afternoon two Februaries later when I was hunting for a certain section of the novel.