Uncle Ralph

It's impossible to overstate the impact that Ralph Ellison's legacy has on African American literary writing, and African American male literary writing in particular. Even if there was a hypothetical black male writer who never read Invisible Man in his life, his writing would still be interpreted through the shadow of Ellison. Every black male who publishes a literary fiction novel deals with the promotional mantel of "The Next Ralph Ellison," and has reviews that judge it against the critics' understanding of Ellison's text. That's just the way it is.

It's not that I see Invisible Man as a perfect creation: it takes too long to get out of the south, you don't even get to see Ras's final battle firsthand, and of course there's that ending. But with Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison created the idea of the black intellectual novel. Ralph Ellison is the patriarch of black literary fiction. One of the most enjoyable conversations in my life consisted of Percival Everett and I quoting scenes and characters in Invisible Man back in forth to prove our points as if it was a biblical text.

One of the attractions of the literary life is the chance at immortality, that by creating works that endure, a writer too can endure in the minds of readers long after his or her lifetime. Admittedly, this is a pretty pathetic form of immortality: even if you become a legend you're still dead, and even Shakespeare will one day be dust when the blink of human existence is over. But it's better than just dying, right?

Maybe not. Unfortunately, living on through your work means that your life remains fair game for investigation, analysis and general use in the public discourse. No matter how unflattering or personal your issue or secret, if your a big enough author someday a dusty academic might be pulling out your dirty laundry for all to see. And the deeper and more personal they go, the more that biographer will be heralded. And now it's Ralph Ellison's turn for literary exhumation, in the first major biography of the man since his 1994 death.

Stanford's Arnold Rampersad, an extremely gifted historian best known for his two volume biography of Langston Hughes, has spent the last few years turning his attention to the equally large figure on the prose side of 20th century African American literature. The result of Rampersad's efforts are reviewed here in The New York Times, as well as dissected here in great detail by New Yorker staff writer Hilton Als. From both accounts, the image that results of Ralph Ellison the man is largely unflattering: a narcissistic, selfish, philandering snob obsessed with the white elite to the point that it tragically distanced him from his own blackness.

I'm sure the Rampersad book is amazing; I enjoyed his Hughes work. But I don't know is if I'll be able to bring myself to read it. It reminds me of that infamous diss of Martin Amis's last novel: "It's like your favourite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating."

And people wonder why writers are always writing memoirs and autobiographies. It's not lesser writers telling our stories that we fear. It's less sympathetic ones.