Ralph Ellison - Shadow and Act

Ralph Ellison
Shadow and Act

Ralph Ellison was born in Oklahoma and trained as a musician at Tuskegee Institute from 1933 to 1936, at which time a visit to New York and a meeting with Richard Wright led to his first attempts at fiction. His reviews, short stories, articles, and criticism appeared in many national magazines and anthologies. His novel, Invisible Man , won the National Book Award and the Russwurm Award. From 1955 to 1957 Ellison was a fellow of the American Academy in Rome. He subsequently taught at Bard College and in 1961 served as an Alexander White Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago. From 1962 to 1964 he was Visiting Professor of Writing at Rutgers University. During 1964 he delivered the Gertrude Clark Whittall Lecture at the Library of Congress and the Ewing Lectures at the University of California. He was appointed to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1964. From 1970 to 1980 he was Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities at New York University. He was a charter member of the National Council on the Arts and Humanities, a member of the Carnegie Commission on public television, a trustee of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and a trustee of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. He is also the author of another collection of essays, Going to the Territory . Ralph Ellison died in 1994.

Books by Ralph Ellison

Invisible Man

Shadow and Act

The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison

Flying Home and Other Stories

Juneteenth

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

FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, MARCH 1995

Copyright 1953, 1964 by The Ralph and Fanny Ellison Charitable Trust

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published by Random House, Inc., in 1964.

The author wishes to thank the following for permission to reprint material:

That Same Pain, That Same Pleasure: An Interview. Reprinted with permission from December Magazine, vol. III, no. 2, Winter 1961. Copyright 1961 by December Corporation.

Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity. Copyright 1953 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke. Partisan Review , vol. XXV, no. 2, Spring 1958.

Stephen Crane and the Mainstream of American Fiction, an Introduction to The Red Badge of Courage and Four Great Stories by Stephen Crane. Copyright 1960 by Ralph Ellison. Reprinted by permission of Dell Publishing Co., Inc.

Richard Wrights Blues. Reprinted with permission from the Antioch Review , vol. 3, no. 2. Copyright 1945 by The Antioch Press. Material from Black Boy by Richard Wright (Harper & Brothers, 1945) appears by permission of Harper & Row, Publishers, Incorporated; material quoted from Black Boys and Native Sons ( Dissent , Autumn 1963) appears by permission of the author, Irving Howe.

Beating That Boy. Reprinted by permission of The New Republic .

The World and the Jug. Reprinted by permission from The New Leader of December 9, 1963. A Rejoinder (published originally as People Are Living Under Here), by permission from The New Leader of February 3, 1964. Material from Irving Howes Black Boys and Native Sons appearing in these articles is quoted by permission of the author.

The Art of Fiction: An Interview. Paris Review , Spring 1955, and Writers At Work: The Paris Review Interviews , Second Series. Reprinted by permission of The Viking Press, Inc.

Living with Music. High Fidelity , December 1955.

The Golden Age, Time Past. First published in Esquire Magazine 1958 by Esquire, Inc.

As the Spirit Moves Mahalia, On Bird, Bird-Watching, and Jazz, The Charlie Christian Story, and Remembering Jimmy. By permission of the author and Saturday Review .

Blues People appeared originally as The Blues in The New York Review , vol. 1, no 12.

Some Questions and Some Answers. Preuves , May 1958. By permission.

The Shadow and The Act. By permission of The Reporter . Copyright 1949 by Fortnightly Publishing Company.

The Way It Is, from The Negro and Victory , vol. XLV, New Masses . By permission of Dialogue Publications.

eISBN: 978-0-307-79737-7
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 64-18928

www.vintagebooks.com

v3.1_r1

FOR

Morteza Sprague

A DEDICATED DREAMER IN A

LAND MOST STRANGE

Contents Introduction

When the first of these essays was published I regarded myselfin my most secret heart at leasta musician. This was the result, in part, of a complicated, semiconscious strategy of self-deception, a refusal by my right hand to recognize where my left hand was headed. Actually I had been devoting as much time and energy to reading and writing as to music, and was passionately engaged, night and noon, in acquiring the basic knowledge and skills of the novelist. Thus the earliest, most agonizingly written pieces presented here (none has been retouched) were the results of a crucial conflict raging deep within me, the products of an activity, dreamlike yet intense, which was waxing on the dark side of my mind and assuming even then a major importance in shaping my life. In this sense, writing was an acting-out, symbolically, of a choice which I dared not acknowledge. Indeed, I repressed it beneath my old concern with music and my current involvement in the intense social and political activity which claimed so many of us who came of age during the thirties.

One might say that with these thin essays for wings I was launched full flight into the dark.

At stake here, beyond the veil of consciousness, was the question of what seemed possible for me in terms of self-achievement, and linked to this was the question of what was the most desirable agency for defining myself. Writing provided me a growing satisfaction and required, unlike music, no formal studybut the designation writer seemed to me most unreal. Not only this, for despite the navet of my involvement with literatureand ignoring the crucial question of talentmy standards were impossibly high. Therefore, the chances of my producing anything of quality seemed nonexistent. Besides, I still believed that my real self was destined to be fulfilled in music, that art which had focused my ambitions from the age of eight and the only art, given my background, that seemed to offer some possibility for self-definition. Obviously I was still quite young and, fortunately, still given to play and adventure.

For in the beginning writing was far from a serious matter, it was playing with the secret lore of a fascinating but less glorious art to which I owed, I believed, no prior dedication. (It would be many years before I was to learn of my fathers hope that I would become a poet.) Nor had I invested in writing any long hours of practice and study. Rather it was a reflex of reading, an extension of a source of pleasure, escape and instruction. In fact, I had become curious about writing by way of seeking to understand the aesthetic nature of literary power, the devices through which literature could command my mind and emotions. It was not, then, the process of writing which initially claimed my attention, but the finished creations, the artifactspoems, plays, novels. The act of learning writing technique was, therefore, an amusing investigation of what seemed at best a secondary talent, an exploration, like dabbling in sculpture, of ones potentialities as a renaissance man. This, surely, would seem a most unlikely and even comic concept to introduce here; and yet it is precisely because I come from where I do (the Oklahoma of the years between World War I and the Great Depression) that I must introduce it, and with a straight face.

Next page