Ellison, Ralph Waldo

Hemingway and the Black Renaissance

“…His Paris Review interview (1955), "The World and the Jug," "Hidden Name and Complex Fate" (1964), and other writings praise Hemingway's work and stature; Ellison even sent Mary Hemingway a copy of Shadow and Act, perhaps as a vicarious gesture of gratitude. 50 Looking back on his early writing life after Invisible Man, Ellison acknowledges that Hemingway's style and rich experience had inflected his own work and literary thought, as had Melville, Faulkner, Joyce, and others. With Hemingway, he encourages us to "believe him" because "he's been there," both stylistically and experientially.…”

“…Ellison eventually abandoned this project in the late 1940s for Invisible Man, and only a few manuscript pages remain in the Library of Congress. 70 With For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ellison retyped an extended passage from chapter 16, in which Jordan, Pablo, and Agustín exchange very tense dialogue about the war effort, Jordan's place as an American in the Spanish Civil War, and their respective senses of their masculinity. "'Listen, Inglés,' Agustín said," this excerpt begins, going through several pages and ending with "'Say it,' Agustín said to him."…”

“…It was seemingly not enough to read Faulkner, Joyce, and other perceived models; the "musician" in him "respect[ed] imitation as a necessary step toward mastery." 76 In order to write as they wrote, Ellison may have thought, he had to literally rewrite their work in order to riff on it and experiment with his own. He had established this creative mode early in his literary life, a decade before Invisible Man, and largely followed it when working on his vast, never-completed second novel, published eventually as Although none of these collected pieces have handwritten annotations as does the retyped version of "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," that Ellison kept so many newspaper and magazine pieces indicates how dedicatedly he tried to maintain-and strengthen-the influential intellectual link he felt.…”

“…The novel eclipsed the works of two literary "veterans": Steinbeck's East of Eden and Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. 78 Ellison must have felt a sense of great accomplishment in becoming part of the American canon he so valued. Rampersad writes: "Winning the National Book Award-not the publication of Invisible Man itself-was transforming Ralph's life even as he looked on with fascination."…”

“…Because he "was now speaking with unprecedented authority for a black American" in light of the award, Ellison articulated what he (and numerous critics) saw as his viable aesthetic vision. 93 He could now provide to the literary establishment the kind of "indigenous criticism" that Alain Locke had advocated in The New Negro, called for in Opportunity in 1936, and likely spoke about when he addressed Ellison and others at Tuskegee in 1935.…”