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Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius By Lawrence Jackson (John Wiley & Sons, $30)

Half a century after his magnum opus Invisible Man first hit bookshelves, the literary landscape is still littered with Ralph-- inspired adjectives like "Ellisonian," "Ellisonesque" and, my personal favorite. "Ellisonic." With the notable exception of Toni Morrison's Beloved. Ellison's 500-- plus page existential sojourn has been viewed as the signal achievement of the African American novel. Having graduated from noun to adjective, I strongly suspect that Ellison is now a verb: "to Ellison," meaning to write with characteristic insight into the tragicomic, blues-suffused lives of Black people in America.

Given the near ubiquity of his name, it is ironic that Ellison's own life has been underexplored. Lawrence Jackson's impressively researched and elegantly written biography, Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius, is an effort to correct this.

To be clear, this is not a standard birth-- to-death biographical narrative; Jackson's book concludes in 1953 with Ellison being virtually canonized with the National Book Award. Emergence of Genius is best taken as a study of the forces that shaped and produced Ellison's particular brilliance, elements that Ellison would channel into the feverish prose of Invisible Man. Along the way, Jackson challenges the received wisdom of Ellison as aloof, socially detached and politically neutered - criticisms that echo down from the radical aesthetes of the Black arts movement - and constructs a portrait of Ellison that is multilayered and nothing if not complex.

Born in Oklahoma in 1914, Ellison was nurtured in a frontier environment that was, at least early on, more racially tolerant than the deep South, where he would receive his college education. Ellison's father, Lewis, a veteran of the Spanish-- American War with enough of a literary sensibility to name his firstborn son Ralph Waldo after the poet Emerson, died when his son was just 3 years old. Deprived of his father's presence (and income), the Ellison family, Ida (his mother), Ralph and Herbert, who was born shortly before Lewis' death, began a slow decline into a hardscrabble, nomadic existence.

The young Ellison found his salvation in music, taking up the trumpet under the careful tutelage of a local music teacher and eventually earning a scholarship to enroll in Tuskegee Institute's newly established School of Music. Pressed for money, Ellison hopped the freight trains for the arduous journey from Oklahoma to Alabama and arrived literally bloodied and bruised for his efforts.

Chafing at the restrictive blend of Victorian morality and racial accomodationism, Ellison found himself at odds with William Dawson, the autocratic director of Tuskegee's music program. Burrowing through the underused collections at the school's Frissell Library, he cultivated an interest in literary expression that gradually supplanted music. In the summer of his junior year, he traveled to New York hoping to earn enough money to finance his final year at Tuskegee. He was not to return to the famed institute for almost 20 years.

The summer sojourn to Harlem (he initially thought of taking a sculpture class with Augusta Savage) was to be Ellison's colloquium in modern letters. Within short order he had established relationships with Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Richmond Barthe and Alain Locke. Matriculating through the left-wing circles frequented by Wright, Ellison began his literary apprenticeship writing small articles and eventually reviews for radical outlets like Daily Worker and New Challenge.

These radical circles and the byzantine politics of the left between 1941 and 1948 provided Ellison with material for the anticommunist threads in Invisible Man. Ellison's eventual fame and success were, in Jackson's telling, anything but the product of fortuitous accidents. The novelist's prominence was self-- orchestrated. Early on we learn that "Ralph loved distinction." With critics like Anatole Broyard and the upstart novelist James Baldwin to contend with, Ellison obsessed over craft, determined to deliver a bold artistic statement.

Emergence of Genius is the most definitive treatment of Ellison to arrive thus far. The volume has two distinct virtues: Jackson meticulously details the fault lines in the relationship between Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. And to his credit, Jackson has constructed a in-depth cartography of Ellison's ideas and the way in which they found manifestation in his early essays, stories and Invisible Man.

Given the depth of Jackson's insight on Ellison's intellectual trajectory, one wishes that the author had given an informed conjecture about the internal conflict at the root of Ellison's failure to publish another novel during his lifetime. This tantalizing question notwithstanding, Lawrence Jackson has written an engaging and intellectually sharp treatment of Ellison's life - a book worthy of the Oklahoman genius himself.

William Jelani Cobb is an assistant professor of history at Spelman College and editor of The Essential Harold Cruse: A Reader (Palgrave Press).

Copyright Crisis Publishing Company, Incorporated Sep/Oct 2002
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