Ralph Ellison - Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray

In 1959, toward the end of his decade-long correspondence with Ralph Ellison, Air Force Captain Albert Murray writes wittily of judging a drill competition put on in Los Angeles by Negro Shriners. Man, he tells Ellison, I was hard put to maintain a solemn military calm watching some of the old middle-age Moses mixing all that old flatfooted, box-ankled, bunniontoed-bellhopping-headwaitering-pullmanportering stuff in there with West Point. Not to be outdone, Ellison replies from New York, in the second to last letter he wrote Murray, that during his boyhood in Oklahoma City, no kid of a certain height was safe from [the] enthusiasm of old guys mad for drill. With his characteristic blend of comic description and analysis, Ellison remembers vividly the passion for drill and dance of the influential Negro adults back in Oklahoma. Come to think of it, I probably embraced the difficult discipline of the trumpet just so that I could escape those cats. Nevertheless, young Ellison, as a member of the band at Douglass High School, accompanies the Elks drill team as far as Denver to the Western Convention where men and women shuffled and ruffled and danced and pranced; some were tight and others were clowning and kidding the whole idea of what they were doing to a military form, discipline, pose, you name itso that the occasion had everything: comedy and satire as well as the tension of tough competition. I can still see some of those tall, Watusi-looking Moses, wearing capes and fezzes and leaning on a pivot like a stagecoach taking a sharp curve, their shoulders touching, their faces skimming across a cymbal lightly. I suppose there was the usual Negro yearning for ceremony and identification in it, and a feeling of potentiality and a threatalong with the joy in formalized, swinging movement. Whatever, Im glad I lived through that phase and you brought it all back again.

Realizing that memories come and go and much that is precious about culture and tradition is summoned in conversation, then lost, Ellison floats an idea that suggests he is aware of the richness and depth of his and Murrays correspondence: Why dont we do something along this line for publication, perhaps as an exchange of letters? Im sure it would be taken by someone, especially if we pointed out the relationship to jazz. Think about it anyway. As things turned out, nothing comes of Ellisons trial balloon; in fact, as Albert Murray tells us, letters between them cease less than a year later. But the letters they did write constitute a remarkable correspondence between two American men of letters whose importance only grows as the twentieth century passes away, and a new century brings closer and closer that millennial nation of omni-Americans whose actuality and potential was recognized and described by both Murray and Ellison more than fifty years ago.

The letters between Ellison and Murray are the bounty of a rare and spontaneous friendship in which each taps into the deepest experience of the other. Spanning the fifties, their correspondence chronicles a friendship at the same time that it reveals the increasing, active visibility of the Negro who issued one unexpected challenge after another to the often desperate conformities and complacency of postwar America. Written while each man passed from youth into middle life (Ellison was thirty-five when the correspondence begins, Murray thirty-three), the letters have something of the unselfconscious, jaunty confidence and defiant attitude of the letters of Hemingway and Fitzgerald at comparable early stages in their writing lives. And although Ellison and Murray were friends on many levels, their correspondence is first and foremost a literary one in which literary aspiration is nourished by a parallel, almost proprietary interest in jazz. Indeed, like jazzmen, Murray and Ellison find their rhythm with each other and hit their stride on the page gradually.

Two points of reference provide the initial bass line. The first is Tuskegee, where the two encountered each other in 1935, when Ellison was a junior and Murray a freshman. Because Murray is teaching at his alma mater when their correspondence begins, he whets Ellisons appetite for news with choice bits of gossip about whos in and whos out, as well as comments about the current character and direction of the place. Like many who leave their chosen college before graduation, Ellison has a love-hate relationship with Tuskegee about which he is much more honest in letters to Murray than in his more respectful public comments. The other tie that from the first binds Ellison and Murray is their literary ambition. When he begins writing to Murray, Ellison is obsessively yet good-naturedly in the last throes of work on