A Novel's Invisible Ending

[Dave Monroe]

>From Julie Salamon, "A Novel's Invisible Ending," New
York Times, Tuesday, February 19th, 2002 ...

Two incidents reverberate with special force in Avon
Kirkland's richly layered portrait of Ralph Ellison,
showing tonight on PBS's "American Masters." In one, a
young Bryant Gumbel, interviewing Ellison on "Today"
in 1982, asks him why he has failed to produce a novel
in the 30 years following the astonishing success of
"Invisible Man." 

Ellison, slender and elegant, assures Mr. Gumbel that
writer's block isn't an issue. He's had a major
setback — in 1967 a fire destroyed more than 350 pages
of work — but the new novel is progressing. 

He wasn't lying, at least not about the writer's
block. When he died in 1994, Ellison left behind files
and files of episodes, notes and drafts totaling more
than 2,000 pages. But the novel would never be
finished. He wasn't blocked so much as stymied by the
magnitude of his ambition, which was to write an epic
vision of American identity, seen through the lens of
race. This would be an enormous undertaking by anyone,
but carrying particular weight for Ellison, whose
literary stature had been called into question by
radical African-American writers in the 1960's.

"The most dangerous thing in the world is a skilled
artist with backward ideas," says Amiri Baraka, the
poet, appearing in tonight's documentary as he is now,
gray-haired and reflective, and as he was when he was
young and fiery.

A second incident, vividly recollected on the program
by Judge Henry T. Wingate, took place at Grinnell
College a month before the devastating fire that
obliterated so much of Ellison's work. As Judge
Wingate relates the story, Ellison had been invited to
Grinnell to be honored along with the Rev. Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr. and the writer Willie Morris. Judge
Wingate, then a student at the college, attended a
party for those being honored.

A young man accosted Ellison and lambasted him for the
apolitical, humanist ending of "Invisible Man." "You
are nothing but an Uncle Tom," he shouted.

Judge Wingate, looking shaken at the memory, describes
how Ellison, always so careful about appearances, came
unglued. He put his head on Mr. Wingate's shoulder and
cried, repeating, "I'm not an Uncle Tom."

It's a moment of great poignancy, one of many such
moments in Mr. Kirkland's sensitive examination of the
relationship between race and Ellison's artistic
aesthetic. Mr. Kirkland also brings intellectual
muscularity to the inquiry, through insightful
interviews with academics, writers, critics and
Ellison's friends. They give context to the
dichotomies in his life. He was criticized at various
times by blacks (and white critics like Irving Howe)
for failing to produce protest literature, yet he
wrote most powerfully about a black man's experience.
He won a place in the literary pantheon with
"Invisible Man," yet died having spent more than half
his life not finishing his second novel.

[...]

The documentary handles this biographical material
well, but it also takes the risky step of dramatizing
scenes from "Invisible Man." These could have been
awkward interludes but instead become strong visual
reminders of the book's ferocity and beauty....

[...]

Ellison was a cornet player who once thought jazz
would be his career, and he was explicit about how
music influenced him as a writer. In a 1966 filmed
interview, Ellison compares the experience of reading
T. S. Eliot's "Waste Land," to listening to a jazz
riff.... 

[...]

Ultimately this is the story of a man's search for his
voice and his place in the world. "Perhaps I like
Louis Armstrong because he's made poetry out of being
invisible," Ellison writes in "Invisible Man." "I
think it must be because he's aware that he is
invisible." 

[...]

AMERICAN MASTERS 
Ralph Ellison: An American Journey

On most PBS stations tonight
(Check local listings) ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/19/arts/television/19SALA.html?todaysheadlines

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