"One afternoon I wrote some words . . . and these words were 'I am an invisible man.' I didn't know quite what they meant, and I didn't know where the idea came from, but the moment I started to abandon them I thought: 'Well maybe I should try to discover exactly what lay behind the statement.'"
Thus began a seven-year enterprise that ended in the creation of a literary masterpiece.
The book is Invisible Man, and the writer, who died in 1994, is Ralph Ellison. In February 1996 Dr. Billington announced that over the next four years the Library will acquire the complete Ralph Ellison papers from his widow, Fanny McConnell Ellison. When reporting the acquisition, Dr. Billington said: "The preservation of his personal papers is a major event in 20th century cultural history. . . . By giving voice to the inarticulate invisible elements in American society, Ralph Ellison illustrated his belief that art and democracy are intertwined."
Ellison's rise - the struggle of a poor, fatherless youth who through talent and perseverance became a major literary figure - is the prototypical American success story. But instead of gaining material wealth, Ellison achieved artistic triumph.
Born in 1914 in Oklahoma City, the grandson of slaves, Ellison and his younger brother were raised by their mother, whose husband died when Ralph was three years old. His mother supported her young family by working as a nursemaid, a janitor and a domestic.
From an early age Ellison loved music and expected to be a musician and a composer. He played his first instrument - a cornet - at age eight. By 19, he had enrolled at Tuskegee Institute as a music major, playing the trumpet. Although drawn to jazz and jazz musicians, Ellison studied classical music and the symphonic form because he was looking forward to a career as a composer and performer of classical music.
In the summer of 1936, Ellison went to New York City to earn expenses for his senior year at Tuskegee. It was a fateful decision: He never returned to his studies at Tuskegee and never became a professional musician. "The morning after my arrival in New York," he said, "I encountered figures standing in the entrance of the Harlem YMCA, two fateful figures. They were Langston Hughes, the poet, and Dr. Alain Locke, the then head of the philosophy department at Howard University."
This chance encounter led ultimately to Richard Wright. "Hughes wrote Richard Wright that there was a young Negro something-or-the-other in New York who wanted to meet him," Ellison said. "The next thing I knew I received a postcard - which I still have - that said, 'Dear Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes tells me that you're interested in meeting me.'"
When they first became acquainted, Ellison had every intention of returning to Tuskegee. But the Great Depression prevented him from earning the needed funds. Ellison wrote: "Then, in talking with Wright, my plans and goals were altered; were, in fact, fatefully modified by Wright's."
The two young men had much in common and exchanged opinions on topics from politics to jazz to literature and everything in between.
During this period, Ellison had the opportunity to read Wright's first major piece, "Uncle Tom's Children," as each page emerged, literally, from the typewriter. Wright also was editing a new magazine, New Challenge, and he encouraged Ellison to write for it.
According to Ellison: "To one who had never attempted to write anything, this was the wildest of ideas. . . . Wright kept after me, and I wrote a [book] review and he published it. But then he went even further by suggesting I write a short story!
"I said, 'But I've never even tried to write a story. . . .'
"He said, 'Look, you talk about these things, you've read a lot and you've been around. Just put something down. . . .'"
The rest is history. Ellison remained in New York City and became a writer.
Although he always admired Wright's literary brilliance, Ellison never adopted or assumed Wright's political philosophy. (At that time Wright belonged to the Communist Party and was active in communist circles.) Ellison wrote: "Wright set out to come into a conscious possession of his experience as Negro, as political revolutionary, as writer and as citizen of Chicago."
Novelist Saul Bellow's 1995 description of Ellison differs markedly: "Unlike the majority of his Negro contemporaries [Ellison] was not limited in his interests to the race problem. He was an artist. It took great courage in a time when racial solidarity was demanded, or exacted, from people in public life, to insist as Ralph did on the priority of art and the independence of the artist."
Ellison's existence in New York was precarious. At times he slept in a park near City College because he could not afford lodgings.
Eventually he got a job doing research and writing for the New York Federal Writers Program, an offshoot of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). He also began writing essays and short stories for the New Masses, The Negro Quarterly, The New Republic, Saturday Review and other publications.
Interestingly, he has noted that such national disasters as the Great Depression have often led to "the possibility for a broader African American freedom. . . . For Negroes, a gift of freedom arrived wrapped in the guise of disaster. . . . The most tragic incident of our history, the Civil War, was a disaster which ended American slavery." And the Depression brought the WPA, which, in turn, "gave the African American cultural style an accelerated release and allowed many Negroes to achieve their identities as artists."
With the outbreak of World War II, Ellison joined the U.S. Merchant Marine as a cook, saw action in the North Atlantic and began to think of writing a major novel. However, not until after the war did he begin writing what was to become Invisible Man. Narrated by a nameless man, the novel is the story of a young African American and his many, often harrowing, adventures as he makes his way from the Deep South to Harlem and, ultimately, underground. The novel vividly demonstrates the effects of bigotry on the victimizer as well as the victim.
While working on his book, Ellison was concerned with "just why our Negro leadership was never able to enforce its will. Just what was there about the structure of American society that prevented Negroes from throwing up effective leaders? Thus it was no accident that the young man in my book turned out to be hungry and thirsty to prove to himself that he could be an effective leader."
While working on Invisible Man, Ellison read and reread classical American writers from Henry James to Walt Whitman. From them he learned that "the point or the universality of literature was to be relieved of the burden of interpreting all of life and its works in racial terms. . . . Therefore, for me personally, it was a matter of saying, 'I am going to learn how to write a novel; I will not ignore the racial dimensions at all, but I will put them into a human perspective.'"
He believed that "American society cannot define the role of the individual or at least not that of the responsible individual. For it is our fate as Americans to achieve that sense of self-consciousness through our own efforts."
In explaining his uniquely American vision of democracy, he wrote: "Relying upon race, class and religion as guides, we underestimate the impact of ideas and the power of life- styles and fashion to upset custom and tradition. . . . Such is the nature of freedom in our democracy that even shoeshine boys may criticize the life-styles and tastes of great entrepreneurs - which shoeshine boys are given to doing - and that they can also go to the library and read books which entrepreneurs should be reading but usually don't."
From the time Invisible Man first appeared in 1952, it was a popular and critical success. On the best-seller list for 16 weeks, in 1953 the novel won the National Book Award. And more than 40 years later, Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow declared, "This book holds its own among the best novels of the century."
Invisible Man established Ellison as a serious and important literary figure, and he spent the next two years (1955-57) in Rome as a Fellow of the American Academy. He returned to the United States to teach at a variety of colleges and universities including Bard College, the University of Chicago, Rutgers, Yale and New York University, among others.
He always maintained his wide range of interests - from music, both classical and jazz, to sports, the theater and photography - and in 1964 he published Shadow and Act, a collection of essays on these and other subjects. Ellison has described the volume as an attempt "to relate myself to American life through literature." Going to the Territory, a subsequent collection of essays, lectures and criticism, appeared in 1986. For many years, Ellison worked on a second, long piece of fiction, but it has never appeared in print.
Ellison first spoke at the Library of Congress in 1964 when he delivered the Gertrude Clark Whittall Lecture; from 1966 to 1972, he served as the Library's Honorary Consultant in American Letters.
In later years, as a world-renowned literary figure, he received many honors and awards. In 1970 he received the Chevalier d'Ordre des Artes et Lettres, presented by Andr‚ Malraux, then French minister of culture and a writer whom Ellison greatly admired. In 1985 Ellison received the National Medal of Arts.
After a short-lived first marriage, Ellison married Fanny McConnell in 1946. A devoted couple, they lived together in an apartment on Riverside Drive in New York City until Ellison died in April 1994. There were no children.
For more than 30 years the Library had been interested in Ellison's papers and had mounted a strong effort to acquire them. Even before Ellison gave his first lecture at the Library, John C. Broderick, then the cultural manuscript specialist and future head of the research department, met Ellison at an academic conference; later he wrote him a letter explaining the Library's interest. The Librarian Emeritus, Daniel J. Boorstin, a fellow Oklahoman and longtime friend of Ellison, also was interested in the acquisition.
Today, Alice Birney, the American literature specialist in the Manuscript Division, has responsibility for the papers. Upon completion of the terms of acquisition, the Library will receive approximately 140 cartons of various sizes containing manuscript drafts and notes for both published and unpublished works, speeches, correspondence, files, photographs and recordings and Ellison's entire working library.
Dr. Birney has made some interesting links to Library collections, such as the contextual connection between the papers of writers Shirley Jackson and her husband Stanley Edgar Hyman and letters they received from and sent to Ralph and Fanny Ellison. Among the other gems so far discovered is a receipt for Ellison's first musical instrument, the cornet, as well as correspondence dating back to the 1930s with such literary figures as Bellow, John Cheever and Robert Penn Warren.
As Ellison's papers are unpacked and organized, an archivist will prepare a "finding aid," an unpublished register that describes the material. Dr. Birney expects to write an essay on the Ellison papers to be included in the Manuscript Division's annual publication on acquisitions. She expects that preservation will be a primary consideration and is working to clarify the conditions under which the material will eventually be used.
Because modern paper contains such a high degree of acidity, legal pads, foolscap and newspapers can easily disintegrate. Dr. Birney must assure that necessary precautions are taken that could ultimately affect the mode of release of the documents. The Library may use what are termed "surrogates" instead of the more fragile originals; a research copy could be reproduced on archival-quality paper because it is stronger and can be handled more safely than the original.
In 1997 the general public will have the opportunity to view Ralph Ellison's "working library," which will be displayed in an alcove near the Great Hall of the Jefferson Building, in keeping with his wishes that it be housed in a unique institution that belongs to all Americans.
