|
John Callahan
|
Being named literary executor of any writer's estate would be quite an honor,
let alone if the writer whose works you now caretake is Ralph Ellison, author
of one of the 20th century's greatest novels, Invisible Man. For
long time Ellison friend John Callahan, "It was a challenge, and it was
intimidating, exhilirating..."
Among the work left for Callahan was editing Ellison's long awaited second
novel, released as Juneteenth in 1999. This proved to be no
small task, as it involved the editing of over 2000 pages of Ellison's
manuscripts. Because this novel was over 40 years in the making, there was
great anticipation throughout the literary community and among Ellison's
fans. "The fact is, there is this posthumous work that needs to be
out there, that's wonderful stuff, that will allow many readers a shot to
read what he wrote. You do the best you can, knowing there will be criticism,"
Callahan said.
Callahan currently lives in Portland, Oregon, where he is a humanities professor
at Lewis and Clark College. Besides Juneteenth, as literary executor
to Ellison's estate, he has edited The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison,
Flying Home and Other Stories, and Trading Twelves : The Selected
Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray. Additionally, he is
well known for his work in American and African-American literature.
Callahan offers an expert perspective on the life of Ralph Ellison in our
exclusive interview...
______________________________________
Interview Topics
John Callahan's background
Meeting Ralph Ellison
Ellison's literary mentors
Ellison and racism
On being named literary
executor
The importance of
music and ritual to Ellison
T.S. Eliot and Louis Armstrong
Ellison's second novel,
Juneteenth
Ellison's legacy
Future Ellison publications
Ellison and Albert Murray's
friendship
______________________________________
JJM
What is your background?
JC It's pretty much stone Irish. I grew up in New
Haven, Connecticut, in an ethnically diverse neighborhood and was pretty
much taken with writing.
JJM Where did you go to school?
JC I started in the public schools and then my
mother was determined to put me into the parochial schools. I went to Notre
Dame High School and then to my father's college, Holy Cross. I went to
University of Connecticut and from there to University of Illinois, where
I got my PhD. I came here to Oregon in 1970.
JJM Did you want to be a writer from the time you
were a child?
JC Yes, I thought I might become a lawyer or a
writer, which is the Irish way.
JJM Was there a book you read that made you want
to become a writer?
JC I suppose Fitzgerald's stuff had a real impact
on me when I was in college. I also was struck by Ralph Ellison's Invisible
Man. Something that was going on in that book stirred me.
JJM Who was your childhood hero?
| JC I loved Whitey Ford. I was a left-hander
and wanted to be a pitcher and identified with Ford. Also, there was a black
athlete named Levi Jackson who was the first black captain of the Yale team.
My father took me to games. Levi Jackson broke my heart twice in one year,
when I was about seven years old. It must have been 1948 or '49. There was
a football game that year, and Holy Cross was ahead 13 - 7. They had
the ball on the Yale one yard line in the fourth quarter, but they couldn't
get the ball in. Jackson played both ways, offense and defense, and made
the tackle to stop Holy Cross from scoring. They subsequently got the ball,
and Jackson carried the ball for the winning touchdown. Later that year,
during the basketball season, which was Bob Cousy's great year, Holy Cross
was ranked #1 in the country. We went to the game against Yale. Holy Cross
started out in control of the game, going ahead something like 20 - 12. Yale
called a time out and put Levi Jackson in the game. He immediately made a
couple of quick baskets, even stole the ball from Cousy once, and Yale upset
Holy Cross. I realized Jackson was very special, and I looked up to him after
that. |
Levi Jackson |
JJM
How did you get to know Ralph Ellison?
John Callahan
and
Ralph Ellison |
JC I had been interested in Invisible
Man for a long time. It had a very strong impact on me, probably even
a greater impact than the Fitzgerald stuff. Once I started to write about
literature and became a literary scholar, I always had a sense that I would
write something about Invisible Man. Ellison was important to me because
I was writing on Fitzgerald, and there was a problem I wanted to solve in
Tender is the Night. I was convinced it had something to do with race,
but I didn't know what. This friend of mine, a black poet named Michael Harper,
told me to look at some chapters in The Souls of Black Folk, by W.E.B.
DuBois. While you are at it, he said, look at these essays of Ralph
Ellison's, that were not published in his collection of essays Shadow
and Act. So, I did, and they really opened up my eyes and enabled
me to do the best that I could do with this issue in Tender is the
Night, Fitzgerald's view on the Civil War, reconstruction and the trail
of American values, including the value of equality. I thought, when I get
done with Fitzgerald, I wanted to explore Ellison deeper. |
In 1977, I wrote an essay where I argued that Ellison's essays provided a
way to read not only Invisible Man, but really to read American
literature. For me, it was an important piece. When I got done with it, I
found Ellison's address and sent it to him. I didn't expect to hear from
him, but I was wrong. About five weeks later, I got a long single-spaced
letter from Ellison, and it was a really wonderful letter. It was as if I
had known him for a very long time. The letter was written as if it were
a continuation of a conversation. He said at the end of the letter to look
him up if I were ever in New York. A couple months later, I went to New York.
He and his wife (Fanny) were very formal, very warm people. They welcomed
me into their home, at precisely four o'clock in the afternoon. You really
wanted to be on time with the Ellison's. As I said, they were very warm and
very formal. They called me Mr. Callahan and I referred to them as Mr. and
Mrs. Ellison. He ushered me into this lovely mid-town apartment that had
a stunning view of the Hudson River. There was a study through an archway.
In the middle of the living room was a glass coffee table and a couch on
either side of it. He put me on one side and he on the other. We sat there
and talked and it was always "Mr. Ellison" and "Mr. Callahan." You never
would have known that he was a vernacular guy from Oklahoma City, and I was
a vernacular character from up the line in New Haven. It was if we were from
the pages of The Wings of the Dove. It was very formal, and we talked
about this and that. Obviously it was an initiation of some sort, and I was
aware of that. At precisely five minutes before five, he slapped his hand
on the table and said, "Well, John, would you like a drink?" I said, "Yes
Mr. Ellison." He said rather loudly to me, "What?" I understood his meaning
and said, "Sure, Ralph!" He said, "That's better!" He goes out to the kitchen
and comes out with a bottle of bourbon for me, Jack Daniels for him…
JJM
Who were the people that were most inspirational to him in terms of his interest
in becoming a writer?
| JC A number of people from his past were
inspirational to him. His father was very important to him. His teacher at
Tuskeegee Institute, Hazel Harrison. If you read his essay, "Going to the
Territory," you see the people that he grew up with, in the segregated schools
of Oklahoma City. Inman Page, who was the first black graduate of Brown
University, who in his later years in the 1970's became the principal of
Frederick Douglas High School in Oklahoma City. He was a very stern task
master. His daughter was a woman named Zelia Breaux, who was the music teacher
who taught Ellison a great deal. Ellison used to cut grass for a man named
Hebestreet, who was a conductor for one of the symphonies, in exchange for
trumpet lessons. Hebestreet felt Ellison had talent and taught him some things
about orchestration. Harrison had been a pupil of Ferruccio Busoni's, and
owned an autographed manuscript of Prokofiev. The famous composer William
L. Dawson was very important to Ellison. He wrote a symphony that was very
much in vogue in the 1930's and 40's, and when Radio City Music Hall opened
he was asked to be on the program - he and his choral group from Tuskeegee.
Those were influences on Ellison in terms of music. In literature, you get
into a number of people, certainly some who exalt the left will make the
case that Richard Wright was a pivotal figure. I don't think that's true.
Wright was a good friend, and he encouraged Ellison, and Ellison was always
very warm in his feelings for Wright. As far as literary ancestors, Wright
and Ellison both tried to learn from Dostoyevsky, Conrad…Andre Malraux
was very important to him… |
Inman Page
Richard Wright |
JJM You hear about Mark Twain a lot when you read
about Ellison. How much influence did Huckleberry Finn have on him?
JC I think there was some. You think about
Huckleberry Finn and Invisible Man you have a similar use of
the vernacular in a picaresque form. Huck is of course not as naïve
as Invisible Man. Invisible Man has got to be one of the most naïve
protagonists in American literature.
JJM How so?
JC Well, he is so damn dumb. He won't get it through
his head that he is being shucked and jived at every turn. Whereas Huck was
a guy who would shuck and jive. There is a wonderful echo of Huck Finn in
Invisible Man when Huck is on the raft with Jim and he is feeling
guilty, because here he is with this slave, leading a guy to escape from
slavery. He is somebody's property, determined to help him get away. He goes
on a little skiff off the raft, and he wants to lay there and say, "Look,
there is a slave on the raft." On the way to shore his path crosses the path
of this boat, and there are three guys who are slave captors, looking for
runaways. Even though Huck wants to turn Jim in, as he gets closer and closer
to the boat with the captors, he can't do it. Not only can't he do it, when
the captors say to him ,"What about that raft? We want to search it," Huck
goes through all this feinting about how he was glad they showed up. The
captor questions Huck about whether anyone here has small-pox, and he says,
"Well, I was going to tell you that." When Invisible Man is in Bledsoe's
office after the Norton fiasco, Bledsoe says, "For God's sake, you are black
and live in the south and you have forgotten how to lie, boy?" Invisible
Man's response was, "What? Me? Lie to a trustee?" Bledsoe says, "Couldn't
you say they had small-pox?" I have to believe that's an echo of Huck
Finn…Invisible Man so much wants the Booker T. Washington gospel of
social progress to work that he blinds himself to what's around him.
JJM So
much of Ellison's work exposes and attempts to transcend the hopelessness
of racism. Did he talk to you much about his own personal experiences?
JC Yes, a good deal. That is one of the connections
that we had. He was fascinated by the Irish and saw a lot of parallels in
what he as a Negro confronted in race - namely language and politics. He
often talked about growing up. He said to me on a number of occasions, that
one of the things that really was important to him when he was growing up,
when he was 2 and 3, was that his father had a wide acquaintance in Oklahoma
City. There would be white folks - Irish and French - and Negroes and American
Indians who would all be in the house. He said that it was natural, this
is the way things were supposed to be. Later on, those early experiences
stuck to his ribs when he encountered racism. Not to say that Ellison couldn't
be a very tough customer when it came to racism, because he could if he wanted
to be…
JJM One of the essays I read was "Being the Target
of Discrimination," where he wrote about seeing a school across the field
from his house, but he had to walk to a different school…
JC Yes, he had to walk through a neighborhood where
he learned about race relations, namely the "red light district," where the
black prostitutes were servicing their white guys all hours of the day and
night.
JJM
When did you discover that you were named his literary executor?
Fanny Ellison |
JC Shortly after he passed away. His wife,
Fanny, and Random House asked me to edit the Collected Essays. Of
course, the thing everyone was asking about was the second novel. She asked
if I would help with that, based on the recommendation of some other people.
We formalized it and asked me to serve as executor. |
JJM Was that intimidating to you at all?
JC Yes. Sure. It was a challenge, and it was
intimidating, exhilirating…
JJM It seems to me that it's a "no win" thing. To
put yourself out in an environment where if you do the best job in the world,
people will say it is because Ellison was the writer. If you do a sloppy
job…it's a tough position to be in.
JC Well, Ellison had written about that, of course,
in his metaphor of invisibility. It mostly struck me as something that needed
to be done. It has been and continues to be an honor. Picasso once said,
"First you do something and then someone comes along and does it prettier."
The fact is, there is this posthumous work that needs to be out there,
that's wonderful stuff, that will allow many readers a shot to read what
he wrote. You do the best you can, knowing there will be criticism. Some
of the criticism is foolish if not outright contentious. When somebody dies,
and doesn't leave any instructions, and leaves chaos of manuscripts and papers,
there are choices that somebody has to make.
JJM You had 2,000 pages or more to go through, much
of the work written on scraps of paper, matchbook covers…
JC Yes. There was a whole set of manuscripts, I
don't want to distort the case. There were scraps of paper, yes, notes and
scribblings that were notes written to himself, such as, "Work in anti-war
demonstration in 1965 in Seattle." So, yes, it was a mess. Some of
his early work, it was clear what he was doing. In the beginning, he handled
the manuscript using the methods used for Invisible Man. Later on,
that changed.
JJM When he wrote Invisible Man he was an
unknown writer, so there wasn't a lot of pressure on him to write. But, after
Invisible Man was written, there must have been an enormous amount
of pressure on him to come up with another novel.
JC Sure, he had made a commitment to himself and
others to be a novelist. A novelist writes novels. He started writing this
book, in terms of putting things on paper, a couple years after writing
Invisible Man. He used to say he would "finish the book at the
end of this year," or "maybe next year." Year after year goes by…To
be really scrupulous about it, early on he was an essayist. He wanted to
write and did write about music, literature, the culture, politics. He wrote
autobiographically. The novel was, I think, primary in his mind.
JJM You mentioned music, and he once said, "I am not
particularly religious, but I am claimed by music." His wife, Fanny, said
"When he can't find the words in the typewriter, he goes upstairs and plays
the trumpet." How was music a model for him?
JC I think the craft of it - music as an expression
as something that is rooted in a very specific set of notations and has a
kind of inevitability about it. Then, of course, you get into the vernacular,
amazing mix of styles and techniques that pertain to the music that Ellison
loved, in the classical tradition and in opera and jazz, the American music
of improvisation, a music that is inspired and driven by the American Negro
experience. It is not African, it is not French. It's a mix, and it is
improvisatory, it's fluid, always changing.
JJM He was really intrigued by the ritual. His essays
indicate he was perturbed by bebop. When Charlie Parker was at his peak,
Ellison criticized Parker big time, seemingly because bebop took the ritual
of the dance out of jazz…
JC The swing and dance of jazz was very important
to Ellison, yes. I think he eventually mellowed a little on Parker.
JJM I came across something that Norman Mailer said
about Ellison…"That Ralph Ellison is very good is dull to say. He is
essentially a hateful writer - and when his satire is pure he writes so perfectly
that one can never forget the experience of reading him. It is like holding
an electric wire in one's hand." Was Ellison a hateful writer?
JC No I don't. I think Ellison was able to tap
into all the frequencies of human emotion, and hate is one. If you
think about Ras the Exhorter and his speech, where do they come from? Hate
and hurt. Ellison was able to represent and project hatred through his
characters, in the case of Bliss and Sunraider in Juneteenth, and
other characters. Very often that gets transcended.
| JJM
One of Ellison's great influences was T.S. Eliot. He enjoyed Eliot's poem
"The Wasteland," and made a connection between this poem and what Ellison
referred to as "the rowdy poetic flights of Louis Armstrong." He was quoted
as saying this about "The Wasteland." "Somehow its rhythms were often closer
to those of jazz than were those of the Negro poets. Even though I could
not understand them, its range of illusion was as mixed and varied as Louis
Armstrong." Maybe I am simplifying this too much, but when he says that he
"couldn't understand them," it brought me to the realization that I have
difficulty understanding Ellison at times, particularly in Juneteenth.
Is Ellison a difficult writer for the reader to connect with? |
T. S. Eliot
|
Louis Armstrong |
JC Somewhat. I think he gives a clue there,
and that is the breaks. He saw "The Wasteland" as being organized into a
succession of breaks, and in this unpublished autobiographical piece he wrote
in the 1940's he made a very explicit comparison of it to the choruses of
Armstrong's "Chinatown." Breaks and discontinuities, and all the things we
associate with modernism. The other thing he says about Eliot, and this is
true of James Joyce as well, is that "what these guys were doing with myth,
creating mythic structures, I saw similar possibilities in my own experience."
That's pretty damn new, for a black American writer to play around
as consciously, deftly, skillfully and consistently, with the relationship
between every day experience, and specifically the black folk experience
in a quest for myth. |
JJM
The book Juneteenth was written over a period of 40 years. There was
a huge setback with the fire that destroyed much of the manuscript in the
1960's. How much work did he lose?
JC He says he lost a year's worth of revisions.
I am not sure what that means. There is book one, which was written before
the fire, then there is book two, a partial version of which I suspect was
done before the fire, and there are notes beyond those. He published a piece
called "Night Talk," in 1969, which I think was Chapter 13 in
Juneteenth. I would bet my bottom dollar - I don't have absolute,
forensic proof - but my hunch is that is one of the things he wrote after
the fire. A number of questions about the book were structured ones, formal
ones, for example, was the material meant for more than one book?
JJM Did he delay the writing of the book because
he thought it was possible his views on race would be considered antique?
He started it in 1952…
JC I don't think it had anything to do with that.
I think Ellison was very conscious that what a novel needed to do was tell
a story and elicit a movement. There are so many notes I found about "movement."
"Dramatize," "action," etc., that indicated a need to have action infused
into the story. I think what he had trouble with, when you look at the
manuscripts and the stuff he was doing at the end of his life, there were
sections that he spent a month on, basically to rewrite and revise and embellish
a little bit a scene he had written in 1959. He didn't improve it. If anything,
I think the first scene was probably somewhat better. That was true of the
Lincoln scene in Juneteenth, where you have Hickman at the Senator's
bedside and he starts to think as a reverie, and in the midst of that reverie
he remembers going to the Lincoln Memorial the previous day. Later on, toward
the end of his life, when Ellison has Hickman in Washington, he is not at
the Senator's bedside anymore. He is killing some time with some members
of his congregation. They get on one of those silly tour buses that goes
around the mall in Washington. They go from the hotel, to the Lincoln Memorial,
and they get out of the bus, go up to the Memorial, they get back on the
bus, and get back to the hotel. He wrote that in 1989, and he tried it again
in 1991. It was ok, but it doesn't seem to me to have the kind of novelistic
tension or drive or splendidness that he wrote in the 1960's. Not all the
tinkering and revisions were salutory.
JJM In the notes section of Juneteenth he
wrote, "Reverend Hickman has staked a great part of his life on the idea
that by bringing up the boy with love, sacrifice and kindness he would do
something to overcome the viciousness of racial division." Did Ellison feel
that Invisible Man was too racially divisive?
JC No. Not at all.
JJM So, this theme of forgiveness in
Juneteenth, where Hickman raised Bliss - who as Senator Sunraider
then turned against him, yet Hickman forgave him - that theme wasn't as a
result of anything from Invisible Man.
JC I don't think so. He was fascinated with the
black church. I think there are a number of connections between the books.
One of the things Invisible Man has to do is forgive himself.
JJM Did Ellison put himself in the character of
Hickman? I found it interesting that Hickman was a trombone player that turned
preacher, and Ellison was a trumpet player that turned writer…
| JC I think you can play with that. I think
what is more interesting to me in a way than that parallel is a matter of
"voice." One of the things I found in going through the manuscripts is that
the older Ellison got, the more indistinguishable Hickman's thoughts, Hickman's
voice became from Ralph Ellison's. Early on in Juneteenth, it seems
to me that Hickman and Ellison were more distinct and Hickman really has
a voice of his own, with his own persona and character. Later on, I felt,
after working through all the material, it was as if, late in his life, Ellison
was trying to put every thing he knew or thought into Hickman. That's kind
of tough - it's an easy temptation, I think, for writer to get into. On the
other hand, there has got to be the kind of "hanging judge" that reminds
him that he is not Hickman. I think that became an aesthetic problem for
him. |
 |
JJM Another interesting point from the
book…Sunraider was a Senator from New England. When you think about
a racist Senator, I think about the Mason-Dixon line. Why did he put Sunraider
in New England?
JC That's the American joke, it seems to
me, that nothing is as it appears to be, and if you think about it, he was
rather prophetic if you think about George Wallace's political success in
1968 and 1972, when he carried Michigan. I think Ellison was trying to
communicate that racism is a national problem.
JJM In other words, racism lurks everywhere, don't
ever stop looking over your shoulder..
JC Yes, and what he tried to get at too that the
reviewers really missed the boat on is the allegory that Hickman is too perfect.
Hickman has his flaws. He puts his little boy, Bliss, through a lot of awful
stuff that a grown man has no right to put a little boy through. He was made
to be put into a box and petrifying him and so on…The little boy, who
kind of talked "black" and was considered to be black. But this woman who
claims to be his mother kidnaps him and he goes back and forth about who
he is, and he airbrushes out a good deal of his past and connect with what
seems to be in vogue, what seems to enable him to be successful. Yet he misses
something. At the extreme hour at which he is assassinated, and as he begins
to become delirious and lose consciousness, he remembers the words of the
old refrain, "Lord, Lord, why hast thou forsaken us?" But he doesn't say
"Lord, Lord," he says "Lord, LAWD." He dips into the black idiom that never
goes away.
JJM What
is Ralph Ellison's legacy?
 |
JC Well, he gave us his metaphor for the 20th
Century - which still continues to be crucial now - invisibility. "I am an
invisible man." Invisible Man is one of the great books, it starts
with a metaphor, and one of the reasons the metaphor works so well is because
it is so indisputably rooted in a particular tradition, particular person,
particular group and then by virtue of that specificity, it becomes universal.
I think the other legacy of Ellison is the defiant complexity of his mind,
in his views about America. Ellison was a very patriotic writer. That is,
his "love of country" in its orderliness, its concreteness, its diversity,
its ideals. At the same time, as any patriot, he was an obstinent critic
of the country when it falls short of its own values and ideals. |
JJM
Is there other work ahead for you concerning Ellison?
JC Yes. There are letters. He wrote letters over
a 60 year period, starting with letters to his mother when he was in Tuskeegee.
Marvelous letters. I published a short selection of letters a couple years
ago. So, there will be a volume of what will likely be called The Collected
Letters of Ralph Ellison. This will be a volume of major importance,
covering some 60 years in American life.
JJM Is the letter he wrote to you in there?
JC Yes, I think so. I have about five or six letters
from him and I will put something in the book from those.
JJM
I have only just begun reading the letters in Trading Twelves, the
book of letters written by Albert Murray and Ellison.
JC Yes, some of those letters will be in this book
as well.
JJM How would you characterize their friendship?
| JC They were running buddies at the time. They
would let their hair down with each other. They were both "vernacular
dudes"…Their friendship was at its height during that period, the 1950's.
Somehow, there was a need that they had to write those letters to each other.
Those letters provided the closest bond between the two of them. They grew
in their own ways beyond that point. |
Albert Murray |
JJM They shared an interesting philosophy around
music, and perhaps on the simplest terms the thing that most connected them
was their love of Duke Ellington.
JC Yes, and they both wanted to be writers. They
thought they had a point of view that was as good if not better than any
other point of view, and it was a viewpoint they thought had to be out there.
When Robert O'Meally was a student at Harvard, he meets Ellison and asks
him if he doesn't think it's a shame that we don't have any (American)
institutions? Ellison said, "What do you mean? We have the Constitution,
and we have jazz." O'Meally says to himself, "What does he mean? What are
the connections?" He figured them out, and Ellison wanted us to figure them
out as part of a process. The Constitution is always able to be amended.
It can be changed, it is a resilient, fluid document, just as jazz allows
you to keep going. The individual and the group and ceaseless kind of contention,
what Ellison called the "antagonistic cooperation."
JJM The Ken Burns documentary on jazz really followed
that theme. Burns felt there are three great institutions that document American
history, the Constitution, baseball and jazz.
JC They used Ellison quite a bit in the documentary.
You asked about his legacy, it was this wonderful vernacular. His work is
lyrical, analytical, and he masters a number of different styles…
JJM While reading Juneteenth, I found myself
reading it as I read poetry, putting the book down after passages and thinking
about what was written…
JC I knew that was the case with Juneteenth,
that this was dense stuff. It is the primary narrative in this long saga,
that is really Ellison at his best, in his prime. But, I know damn well it's
going to take awhile…It's like Faulkner. Faulkner was the guy Ellison
was most intimately conversing with in the book. There is a kind of prophetic
quality to Ellison's work. It's amazing to think that Invisible Man
was written and published when "separate but equal" was the law of the land,
before Brown vs. Board of Education, before integration. What you have, it
seems to me, is a certain kind of prophetic quality of his work, about the
60's, about the fight over integration on both sides of the color line. Black
power movement, women's movement, even identity politics, a "rainbow" in
America's future, 35 years before Jesse Jackson's "rainbow coalition." I
think the same thing is true of Juneteenth, that last scene of the
book, where Sunraider hallucinates this destructive, brilliant vision of
these black characters in the car. They are not Schofield and Dupree, throwing
a woman out of the tenement in Invisible Man. These guys have mastered
the whole thing and made it run and made it work. You have Hickman on one
side, with a lot of structure, and these guys on the other side, each with
a different accent, and that's what we got. Sunraider hallucinates the potential
future of America...
Ralph Ellison |
________________________________
Ralph
Ellison products at Amazon.com
John Callahan products at Amazon.com
_______________________________
This interview took place on July 18, 2001
*
If you enjoyed this interview, you may want to read our interview with Ralph Ellison biographer Lawrence Jackson.
*
Other
Jerry Jazz Musician interviews
The
Ralph Ellison Project
|
