Bright Book of Life : Novels to Read and Reread (9780525657279)

by Bloom, Harold

  Ellison deliberately absorbs into his style and narrative stance elements of Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, and André Malraux. But to my ear the crucial influence is Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, particularly Father Mapple’s wonderful sermon on Jonah. Following Mapple, Invisible Man listens to a recording of Louis Armstrong playing and singing “What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue,” a song composed by the great Fats Waller in collaboration with Harry Brooks and Andy Razaf:

  How will it end? Ain’t got a friend

  My only sin is in my skin

  What did I do to be so black and blue?

  Suddenly, within Louis Armstrong’s jazz, Invisible Man hears a different music, in which a preacher cries out to his congregation: “It’ll put you, glory, glory, Oh my Lawd, in the WHALE’S BELLY.” The reluctant prophet Jonah survives, and so does Invisible Man, Ellison’s version of Melville’s Ishmael, who narrates much of Moby-Dick.

  I feel very somber as I reread Invisible Man in June 2018, when the United States is in many ways hopelessly divided between so-called whites and people of black, brown, Hispanic, East Asian, Native American, and other groupings. My friend Ralph Ellison died a quarter-century ago, and we are more split and shattered as a nation than ever before in my long lifetime. We cannot despair; there are millions among us who resist the racist regime that must be ended, before the country itself begins to die. It is not the function of the greatest prose fiction to redeem us or our society. Faulkner, the best we have had since Theodore Dreiser, who died in 1945, knew he could not heal us, and Ellison once told me sadly that Faulkner’s powers were beyond him.

  Ellison’s grandfather had been a slave, and Lewis Ellison, Ralph’s father, had to watch a lynching when he was five years old. Ralph’s mother, Ida Millsap, belonged to the Socialist Party of Eugene V. Debs and was a radical activist. After studying music at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, Ellison reached New York City in 1936 and continued his studies. Encouraged by Richard Wright and Langston Hughes, Ellison began writing short stories and essays. He became close to the Communist Party and was hired by the Federal Writers’ Project in 1938 to collect black folklore. In 1943, Ellison joined the merchant marine as a cook.

  * * *

  —

  In 1938, Ellison married Rosa Araminta Poindexter, a stage actress. The marriage ended in 1943. In 1946, he married Fanny McConnell, a strong-minded and brilliant writer and theater organizer. The marriage was very successful, though childless, and Fanny worked hard to support Ellison during the four years in which he wrote Invisible Man. Fanny survived Ralph by eleven years, dying in 2005. I remember her as being very beautiful and endlessly gracious.

  Invisible Man is structured as a series of picaresque escapades, all of them morally painful to the narrator and to the reader. The first grotesque phantasmagoria is also dreadfully realistic, as a gathering of white bourgeois monsters sets black high-school graduates to fight against one another, while a white female dances lasciviously in front of both groups. Pursued by lustful whites, she manages to escape, but the young boys hurt one another grievously. Invisible Man then has to repeat his high-school commencement address: for social responsibility. Threatened by the audience, he does not quite back down, and then the Board of Education awards him a new briefcase and a scholarship to the state college for Negroes.

  That night he suffers a dream:

  When I reached home everyone was excited. Next day the neighbors came to congratulate me. I even felt safe from grandfather, whose deathbed curse usually spoiled my triumphs. I stood beneath his photograph with my brief case in hand and smiled triumphantly into his stolid black peasant’s face. It was a face that fascinated me. The eyes seemed to follow everywhere I went.

  That night I dreamed I was at a circus with him and that he refused to laugh at the clowns no matter what they did. Then later he told me to open my brief case and read what was inside and I did, finding an official envelope stamped with the state seal; and inside the envelope I found another and another, endlessly, and I thought I would fall of weariness. “Them’s years,” he said. “Now open that one.” And I did and in it I found an engraved document containing a short message in letters of gold. “Read it,” my grandfather said. “Out loud!”

  “To Whom It May Concern,” I intoned. “Keep This Nigger-Boy Running.”

  I awoke with the old man’s laughter ringing in my ears.

  (It was a dream I was to remember and dream again for many years after. But at that time I had no insight into its meaning. First I had to attend college.)

  Like Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, Invisible Man attends a black college based on Tuskegee University, cofounded by Booker T. Washington in 1881. Its president, Dr. Bledsoe, has the principle: “The only way to please a white man is to tell him a lie!” In the second term of his junior year, Invisible Man is ordered by Dr. Bledsoe to drive an immensely rich white trustee, Mr. Norton, who is visiting the campus, out into the countryside for relaxation between meetings. With his usual picaresque bad luck, feckless Invisible Man delivers the bewildered Norton to a former slave shack, where a black sharecropper tells his tale of incest, with both his wife and daughter, each pregnant, standing nearby. Norton, who has related the early death of his own daughter, “too pure for life,” is so shocked that he begs for whiskey. Inevitably, Invisible Man drives to the nearest bar, the Golden Day, which is a bordello frequented by mentally deranged black war veterans. Seeing Norton, they proclaim him the Messiah, and a wild melee commences. Attempting to preserve Norton, Invisible Man takes him upstairs, to be greeted by a bevy of whores and an insane former medical person who revives Norton and denounces Invisible Man for his toadying to the whites. Somehow our unfortunate protagonist gets the wilting Norton back to the dreadful Bledsoe.

  I do not know whether Ralph had read Nathanael West’s superb parody novel, A Cool Million: The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin (1934), before he finished Invisible Man. He certainly read it later, with much enjoyment, after I had recommended it to him at one of our lunches. Lemuel Pitkin is a white New England version of Invisible Man. Eventually, Lemuel is literally dismantled, whereas Ellison’s protagonist suffers endless psychic dismemberment.

  Bledsoe expels our hero with a sealed letter of supposed recommendation that urges anyone to regard him as a stray and a pariah. Poor Invisible Man takes a job at a paint factory, only to lose consciousness when a valve fails and covers him with a torrent of white paint. He awakens to find he has suffered an electroshock treatment that causes him to forget his own identity. He takes refuge in Harlem with an amiable landlady, Miss Mary, and rests for some months as her guest.

  Walking out on the Harlem streets in cold weather, Invisible Man stumbles upon an ongoing eviction of an old black couple by two brutal whites. An angry crowd has gathered and is on the verge of violence when the old woman is blocked from re-entering the building. Our protagonist takes charge with a rousing oration and restores order, and then oversees the restoration of the aged couple and their furniture to their home. Cops arrive, and Invisible Man departs, but is detained by one Brother Jack, a high personage in the Brotherhood (Communist Party), who offers the narrator a job in that organization. After initially declining, our unfortunate hero joins and is proclaimed the new Booker T. Washington.

  The Brotherhood is posh and pays Invisible Man a substantial salary on condition he abandon his past life and take up a new name and dwelling. After speaking with his customary eloquence to a rally of blacks, he becomes the principal spokesman for the Harlem district. He meets Tod Clifton, a charismatic Brother, who bears the scar of a recent tangle with the followers of the remarkable Ras the Exhorter, who sees accurately that the Brotherhood is only another white instrument for exploiting blacks:

  “Mahn,” Ras blurted, “I ought to kill you. Godahm, I ought to kill you and the world be better off. But you black, mahn. Why you be
black, mahn? I swear I ought to kill you. No mahn strike the Exhorter, godahmit, no mahn!”

  I saw him raise the knife again and now as he lowered it unused he pushed Clifton into the street and stood over him, sobbing.

  “Why you with these white folks? Why? I been watching you a long time. I say to myself, ‘Soon he get smart and get tired. He get out of that t’ing.’ Why a good boy like you still with them?”

  Still moving forward, I saw his face gleam with red angry tears as he stood above Clifton with the still innocent knife and the tears red in the glow of the window sign.

  “You my brother, mahn. Brothers are the same color; how the hell you call these white men brother? Shit, mahn. That’s shit! Brothers the same color. We sons of Mama Africa, you done forgot? You black, BLACK! You—Godahm, mahn!” he said, swinging the knife for emphasis. “You got bahd hair! You got thick lips! They say you stink! They hate you, mahn. You African. AFRICAN! Why you with them? Leave that shit, mahn. They sell you out. That shit is old-fashioned. They enslave us—you forget that? How can they mean a black mahn any good? How they going to be your brother?”

  The two grand characters in Ellison’s novel are Ras the Exhorter and Rinehart the Runner, a numbers racketeer who is also a pimp as well as the Rev. B. P. Rinehart, Spiritual Technologist. Even when Ras becomes Ras the Destroyer, it is difficult not to sympathize with the deeply emotional black seer:

  “Hell, no,” Ras cried, wiping his eyes with his fists. “I talk! Bust me with the pipe but, by God, you listen to the Exhorter! Come in with us, mahn. We build a glorious movement of black people. Black People! What they do, give you money? Who wahnt the dahm stuff? Their money bleed black blood, mahn. It’s unclean! Taking their money is shit, mahn. Money without dignity— That’s bahd shit!”

  Clifton lunged toward him. I held him, shaking my head. “Come on, the man’s crazy,” I said, pulling on his arm.

  Ras struck his thighs with his fists. “Me crazy, mahn? You call me crazy? Look at you two and look at me—is this sanity? Standing here in three shades of blackness! Three black men fighting in the street because of the white enslaver? Is that sanity? Is that consciousness, scientific understahnding? Is that the modern black mahn of the twentieth century? Hell, mahn! Is it self-respect—black against black? What they give you to betray—their women? You fall for that?”

  “Let’s go,” I said, listening and remembering and suddenly alive in the dark with the horror of the battle royal, but Clifton looked at Ras with a tight, fascinated expression, pulling away from me.

  “Let’s go,” I repeated. He stood there, looking.

  “Sure, you go,” Ras said, “but not him. You contahminated but he the real black mahn. In Africa this mahn be a chief, a black king! Here they say he rape them godahm women with no blood in their veins. I bet this mahn can’t beat them off with a baseball bat—shit! What kind of foolishness is it? Kick him ass from cradle to grave then call him brother? Does it make mahthematics? Is it logic? Look at him, mahn; open your eyes,” he said to me. “I look like that I rock the blahsted world! They know about me in Japan, India—all the colored countries. Youth! Intelligence! The mahn’s [a] natural prince! Where is your eyes? Where your self-respect? Working for them dahm people? Their days is numbered, the time is almost here and you fooling ’round like this was the nineteenth century. I don’t understahnd you. Am I ignorant? Answer me, mahn!”

  “Yes,” Clifton burst out. “Hell, yes!”

  “You t’ink I’m crazy, is it c’ase I speak bahd English? Hell, it ain’t my mama tongue, mahn, I’m African! You really t’ink I’m crazy?”

  “Yes, yes!”

  “You believe that?” said Ras. “What they do to you, black mahn? Give you them stinking women?”

  Clifton lunged again, and again I grabbed him; and again Ras held his ground, his head glowing red.

  “Women? Godahm, mahn! Is that equality? Is that the black mahn’s freedom? A pat on the back and a piece of cunt without no passion? Maggots! They buy you that blahsted cheap, mahn? What they do to my people! Where is your brains? These women dregs, mahn! They bilge water! You know the high-class white mahn hates the black mahn, that’s simple. So now he use the dregs and wahnt you black young men to do his dirty work. They betray you and you betray the black people. They tricking you, mahn. Let them fight among themselves. Let ’em kill off one another. We organize—organization is good—but we organize black. BLACK! To hell with that son of a bitch! He take one them strumpets and tell the black mahn his freedom lie between her skinny legs—while that son of a gun, he take all the power and the capital and don’t leave the black mahn not’ing. The good white women he tell the black mahn is a rapist and keep them locked up and ignorant while he makes the black mahn a race of bahstards.

  “When the black mahn going to tire of this childish perfidity? He got you so you don’t trust your black intelligence? You young, don’t play you’self cheap, mahn. Don’t deny you’self! It took a billion gallons of black blood to make you. Recognize you’self inside and you wan the kings among men! A mahn knows he’s a mahn when he got not’ing, when he’s naked—nobody have to tell him that. You six foot tall, mahn. You young and intelligent. You black and beautiful—don’t let ’em tell you different! You wasn’t them t’ings you be dead, mahn. Dead! I’d have killed you, mahn. Ras the Exhorter raised up his knife and tried to do it, but he could not do it. Why don’t you do it? I ask myself. I will do it now, I say; but somet’ing tell me, ‘No, no! You might be killing your black king!’ And I say, yas, yas! So I accept your humiliating ahction. Ras recognized your black possibilities, mahn. Ras would not sahcrifice his black brother to the white enslaver. Instead he cry. Ras is a mahn—no white mahn have to tell him that—and Ras cry. So why don’t you recognize your black duty, mahn, and come jine us?”

  Tod Clifton, who tells Invisible Man that it is on the inside that Ras is dangerous, in some sense yields to this irrefutable eloquence. As a reader I cannot resist. Poor Clifton is demoralized and takes to selling little black puppets on the streets, until he is murdered by a white policeman. Only that, and the later realization that the Brotherhood wishes Harlem to explode in a vast race riot, restores the narrator to himself, whatever that self may be.

  Putting on dark glasses and a wide hat, the protagonist plays at being Rinehart the Runner, until he encounters the epiphany of the religion of Rinehart:

  Several blocks away I stopped, out of breath. And both pleased and angry. How stupid could people be? Was everyone suddenly nuts? I looked about me. It was a bright street, the walks full of people. I stood at the curb trying to breathe. Up the street a sign with a cross glowed above the walk:

  HOLY WAY STATION

  BEHOLD THE LIVING GOD

  The letters glowed dark green and I wondered if it were from the lenses or the actual color of the neon tubes. A couple of drunks stumbled past. I headed for Hambro’s, passing a man sitting on the curb with his head bent over his knees. Cars passed. I went on. Two solemn-faced children came passing out handbills which first I refused, then went back and took. After all, I had to know what was going on in the community. I took the bill and stepped close to the street light, reading.

  Behold the Invisible

  Thy will be done O Lord!

  I See all, Know all. Tell all, Cure all.

  You shall see the unknown wonders.

  —REV. B. P. RINEHART,

  SPIRITUAL TECHNOLOGIST.

  The old is ever new

  Way Stations in New Orleans, the home of mystery,

  Birmingham, New York, Chicago, Detroit and L.A.

  No Problem too Hard for God.

  Come to the Way Station.

  BEHOLD THE INVISIBLE!

  Attend our services, prayer meetings Thrice weekly

  Join us in the NEW REVELATION of the OLD TIME REL
IGION!

  BEHOLD THE SEEN UNSEEN

  BEHOLD THE INVISIBLE

  YE WHO ARE WEARY COME HOME!

  I DO WHAT YOU WANT DONE! DON’T WAIT!

  I dropped the leaflet into the gutter and moved on. I walked slowly, my breath still coming hard. Could it be? Soon I reached the sign. It hung above a store that had been converted into a church, and I stepped into the shallow lobby and wiped my face with a handkerchief. Behind me I heard the rise and fall of an old-fashioned prayer such as I hadn’t heard since leaving the campus; and then only when visiting country preachers were asked to pray. The voice rose and fell in a rhythmical, dreamlike recital—part enumeration of earthly trials undergone by the congregation, part rapt display of vocal virtuosity, part appeal to God. I was still wiping my face and squinting at crude Biblical scenes painted on the windows when two old ladies came up to me.

  “Even’, Rever’n Rinehart,” one of them said. “How’s our dear pastor this warm evening?”

  Oh, no, I thought, but perhaps agreeing will cause less trouble than denying, and I said, “Good evening, sisters,” muffling my voice with my handkerchief and catching the odor of the girl’s perfume from my hand.

  “This here’s Sister Harris, Rever’n. She come to join our little band.” “God bless you, Sister Harris,” I said, taking her extended hand.

  “You know, Rever’n, I once heard you preach years ago. You was just a lil’ ole twelve-year-old boy, back in Virginia. And here I come North and find you, praise God, still preaching the gospel, doing the Lord’s work. Still preaching the ole time religion here in this wicked city—”

  “Er, Sister Harris,” the other sister said, “we better get on in and find our seats. Besides, the pastor’s kind of got things to do. Though you are here a little early, aren’t you, Rever’n?”