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“A Book One Can with Complete Confidence Call Important”: Albert Erskine, Ralph Ellison, and the Publishing of Invisible Man
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2021
Abstract
In this article I examine the editing and publishing of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man by Albert Erskine. Over the course of the piece, I deploy letters, drafts, and other material drawn from both Ellison's archive in the Library of Congress and Erskine's own archive at the University of Virginia to unpack how Erskine, as a white editor at a powerful international publishing house, conceived of his role in shepherding to market and marketing what he saw as a major literary work by an African American author.
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press in association with the British Association for American Studies
References
1 Albert Erskine, standard letter, 19 March 1952, emphasis in the original. See Box I 154, Folder 9, Novels – Invisible Man Published Editions Random House Correspondence 1949–1969, Ralph Ellison Papers. The recipients for whom I have been able to find archival evidence were the white writers Carl van Vechten, William Carlos Williams, Granville Hicks, Peter Drucker, Anton Myrer, and Max Berking; the Jewish writers Stanley Hyman and Saul Bellow; and the African American Langston Hughes. Rampersad, Arnold, Ralph Ellison, ebook (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2007), loc. 5087Google Scholar, adds Ellison's ‘brother, Herbert, as well as … Richard Wright … the Steegmullers, the Murrays, Chester Himes, and Horace Cayton … the former Tuskegee librarian Walter B. Williams [and] Ralph's most important professor of English at Tuskegee, Morteza Drexel Sprague.” In this list Erskine and Ellison draw their readers from across the racial and political spectrum, combining members of the white literary establishment with African American men of letters, Ellison's fellow ex-communists, and Jewish intellectuals in a list clearly designed to position Ellison in the literary and intellectual avant-garde and to universalize the reach of his novel.
2 Ralph Ellison, letter to Albert Murray, 6 June 1951, in Callahan, John F. and Conner, Marc C., eds., The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison (New York: Ballantine Books, 2019), 295Google Scholar.
3 These are works that include, but are by no means limited to, James F. English's Economy of Prestige (2005), John B. Thompson's Merchants of Culture (2010), Loren Glass’ Authors Inc. (2004), and Tim Groenland's The Art of Editing (2019).
4 Sutherland, John, “Publishing History: A Hole at the Centre of Literary Sociology,” Critical Enquiry, 14 (1988), 580–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 Groenland, Tim, The Art of Editing (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), xiiGoogle Scholar.
6 Ibid., 16.
7 Thompson, John B., Merchants of Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), 21Google Scholar.
8 Guillory, John, Cultural Capital (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), ixGoogle Scholar.
9 Young, John K., Black Writers, White Publishers (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006), 3; Guillory, 18Google Scholar.
10 Young, 29.
11 Jackson, Lawence P., “Ralph Ellison's Politics of Integration,” in Tracy, Steven C., ed., A Historical Guide to Ralph Ellison (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004) 171–205, 175Google Scholar.
12 Genter, Robert, Late Modernism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 300CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
13 Ibid.
14 Indeed, Floreani, Tracy, Fifties Ethnicities (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013), 3Google Scholar, hopefully sees the kind of access to cultural recognition offered to minority artists by the increasingly welcoming New York publisher of the 1950s as part of “an undeniably engaging vision of American success and national belonging,” one in which “minority writers and artists, too, were in the process of engaging … and implicitly participating in its construction.”
15 See, for example, Jackson, Lawrence P., “Bucklin Moon and Thomas Sancton in the 1940s: Crusaders for the Racial Left,” in Southern Literary Journal, 40, 1 (Fall 2007), 76–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
16 Jackson, Lawrence P., The Indignant Generation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 217Google Scholar.
17 Ibid.
18 For a much more thorough treatment of Erskine's early life and career see Blotner, Joseph, “Albert Erskine Partly Seen,” Sewanee Review, 113, 1 (Winter, 2005), pp. 139-161Google Scholar.
19 Young, 4.
20 Ellison, Ralph, Invisible Man (London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2016), xxxviiiGoogle Scholar.
21 See, in particular, Ross Posnock's examination of Ellison's “dismay” at the 1960s “reemergence of the ethnos” embodied by “blood thinking.” Posnock, Ross, “Introduction: Ellison's Joking,” in Posnock, ed., Cambridge Companion to Ralph Ellison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 13–28, 27Google Scholar. This reemergence was, for Ellison, someone who saw his duty as an author of experimental fiction as the claiming of a space in the avant-garde for art by African Americans, “a regrettable reduction of politics, [and] an abrogation of civic responsibility to participate in the ‘fluid, pluralistic turbulence of the democratic process’.” Ibid., 21. In his opposition to the ethnos, Posnock places Ellison into a tradition that favours instead the polis, an intellectual lineage that “includes [W. E. B] Du Bois, [Alain] Locke, Zora Neale Hurston … Albert Murray, and James Baldwin,” and which reads American intellectual culture “as an ‘appropriation game’.” Ibid., 24. This game tradition allows for an assertion of the freedom of the individual artist, of any race, to draw omnivorously from across American art and culture, regardless of the racial barriers that exist outside the realm of art. Ibid., 21, 24.
22 Most critical here is Adam Bradley's claim that the fact that at least the bones of the cut and “boldly cosmopolitanist” Journal of Leroy went on to underpin the epilogue of the published version of Invisible Man allows for a more radical reading of Ellison and Invisible Man to emerge from a consideration of its publishing history. Bradley, Adam, Ralph Ellison in Progress (London: Yale University Press, 2010), 196Google Scholar. Essentially, I take Bradley's work as a starting point for my approach to archival and draft sources, as it radically expands the scope of archivally informed readings of published texts, and allows for a productive reinsertion of a work's draft history into readings of its final form. Working from the assumption that analysing unpublished drafts can inform our reading of a published text, Erskine's influence over that editing process and over the text's final form becomes an urgent topic of study.
23 Of particular significance is Robert Genter's argument that “Ellison appropriated one of the central tenets of Burkean theory – that language was not a transparent medium of expression but a charged way of ordering the field of objects – and invested himself in the language and psychology of his readers.” Genter, Late Modernism, 300. There are clear parallels between Bradley and Posnock's “appropriation game” and Genter's points. Ellison, for Genter, “appropriates” a Burkean schema to structure and intellectually inform his work, putting to use forms and ideas from across the American racial divide, but united in their avant-garde ambitions and sensibilities. Moreover, Burke's understanding of the ability of language to “order a field of objects” clearly underpins Ellison's “raft of hope” of literature, meaning that Ellison's novel appears as nothing less than “an implicit attempt to enter into the language of modernism and open it onto the social field.” Ibid., 300. Ellison's Invisible Man, in its very experimentalism and modernism, therefore emerges as a radical text, one that, in its very style and language, asserts the right of its African American author to “appropriate” the avant-garde forms of his day.
24 Henry Volkening, letter to Ralph Ellison, 19 May 1944, Box I 154, Folder 7, Invisible Man Literary Agents 1943–1953, 1989–1990, n.d., Ralph Ellison Papers.
25 Henry Volkening, letter to Ralph Ellison, 1 Nov. 1943, Box I 154, Folder 7, Invisible Man Literary Agents 1943–1953, 1989–1990, n.d., Ralph Ellison Papers.
26 Jackson, Lawrence P., Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius (London, University of Georgia Press, 2007), 299Google Scholar.
27 Rampersad, Ralph Ellison, loc. 4144.
28 See Jackson, Ralph Ellison, 316 ff.
29 Rampersad, loc. 4144.
30 Albert Erskine and Frank Taylor, letter to Ralph Ellison, 4 March 1947, Box I 71, Folder 9, General Correspondence Frank Taylor, Ralph Ellison Papers.
31 Jackson, Ralph Ellison, 334.
32 Ibid.
33 Albert Erskine and Frank Taylor, letter to Ralph Ellison, 4 March 1947, Box I 71, Folder 9, General Correspondence Frank Taylor, Ralph Ellison Papers.
34 Jackson, Ralph Ellison, 357.
35 Ibid., 360.
36 Ibid. See also Marisa Anne Pagnattaro, “Carving a Literary Exception: The Obscenity Standard and ‘Ulysses’,” Twentieth Century Literature, 47, 2 (Summer, 2001), 217–40, for details of the Ulysses trial.
37 Jackson, Ralph Ellison, 357.
38 Ibid. That is to say, establishing a section's symbolic action and language – its “schema of orientation” – before going on to establish how this symbolic action would inform the ongoing plot of Invisible's journey. Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change, 3rd edn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 76. Burke's use of “schema” underpins his assumption about the way language operates as a way of ordering the world, and a way of shuttling “back and forth between intuitions and concepts” in a way that Ellison deployed to develop a similar shuttling between his symbolic and structural action. Burke, Kenneth, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 198CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Richard Y. Duerden, “Kenneth Burke's Systemless System: Using Pepper to Pigeonhole an Elusive Thinker,” Journal of Mind and Behavior, 3, 3–4, special issue (Summer 1982–Autumn 1982), 323–36.
39 Bryan Crable, Ralph Ellison and Kenneth Burke (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 87. See also Jackson, Ralph Ellison, 360 ff.
40 Ellison, letter to Stanley Hyman, 17 June 1947, in Callahan and Conner, The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison, 225–26.
41 Ralph Ellison contract, 18 July 1947, Box I 154, Folder 9, Invisible Man Published Editions Random House Correspondence, Ralph Ellison Papers.
42 Ellison, letter to Francis Steegmuller, 23 Aug. 1946, Box I 68, Folder 7, Ralph Ellison Papers.
43 Robert Linscott (RNL), note on Invisible Man, n.d., Box 24, Folder 5, Ralph W. Ellison Invisible Man Editorial Notes, Albert Erskine Papers.
44 Ibid.
45 Ibid.
46 Anonymous note to Albert Erskine, n.d., Box 24, Folder 5, Invisible Man Editorial Notes, Albert Erskine Papers.
47 See Jackson, Ralph Ellison, 357 ff.
48 Ibid., 396.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid.
51 Ibid.
52 Ellison, Invisible Man, 5–7.
53 Ibid., 5.
54 Ibid., 391.
55 Erskine, notebook, n.d., 1, Box 24, Folder 5, Invisible Man Editorial Notes, Albert Erskine Papers.
56 Ibid. See Ellison, Invisible Man, 96 ff. for the final form of this sequence, in which chapter 5 does indeed begin with the drive back from the Golden Day, as Erskine suggested.
57 Fanny Ellison, letter to Bea Steegmuller, 1 Aug. 1950, Box I 68, Folder 7, General Correspondence, Francis Steegmuller and Family, Ralph Ellison Papers.
58 Rampersad, Ralph Ellison, loc. 4982.
59 Ibid.
60 Ibid.
61 Jackson, Ralph Ellison, 426.
62 Ibid.
63 Ibid.
64 Ellison, letter to Albert Murray, 6 June 1951, in Callahan and Conner, The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison, 292.
65 Erskine, Invisible Man Notes, n.d., 2, Box 24, Folder 5, Invisible Man Editorial Notes, Albert Erskine Papers.
66 See Ellison, Invisible Man, 48 ff., especially Norton's fatal question whether Trueblood “is the father of both their children?” at which point even Invisible realizes that he has “made a mistake.” This change also obliged some rewriting of this section, including cuts to a section of Norton's drive describing Invisible's (silent) recollection of a wife retrieving the body of her lynched husband, and what seems to be an insert consisting of the paragraph beginning “It was the cabin of Jim Trueblood” at 46. See Box 144, Folder 1, Novels – Invisible Man – Drafts – Golden Day – True Blood, Ralph Ellison Papers.
67 Erskine, Invisible Man Notes, n.d., 2, Box 24, Folder 5, Invisible Man Editorial Notes, Albert Erskine Papers.
68 Ellison, Invisible Man, 109.
69 Ibid., 111–12.
70 Erskine, Invisible Man Notes, n.d., 1, Box 24, Folder 5, Invisible Man Editorial Notes, Albert Erskine Papers.
71 Ibid.
72 Ibid.
73 Blotner, “Albert Erskine Partly Seen,” 140.
74 Jackson, Ralph Ellison, 342 ff.
75 Ibid., 346.
76 Ralph Ellison, “Twentieth Century Literature and the Black Mask of Humanity,” in Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: Vintage, 1972), 24–45, 24.
77 Erskine, Invisible Man Notes, n.d., 6, Box 24, Folder 5, Invisible Man Editorial Notes, Albert Erskine Papers.
78 Ibid., 7. See Ellison, Invisible Man, 354–63, for the published version of Invisible's first, violent encounter with Ras.
79 Erskine, Invisible Man Notes, n.d., 7, Box 24, Folder 5, Invisible Man Editorial Notes, Albert Erskine Papers; Ellison, letter to Albert Murray, 6 June 1951, in Ellison, Ralph and Murray, Albert, Trading Twelves (London: Vintage, 2001), 43Google Scholar.
80 See Ellison, Invisible Man, 465 ff., for the majority of the “Rinehart business” to which Erskine objected.
81 See, in particular, Bradley, Ralph Ellison in Progress, 181 ff.
82 Ibid., 181, 184.
83 Ibid., 183.
84 Henry Ford, “Suggestions for RE from HF,” n.d., Box I 151, Folder 6, Invisible Man Editorial Notes, Albert Erskine Papers.
85 See Box 24, Folder 5, Invisible Man Editorial Notes, Albert Erskine Papers.
86 Ibid. The political ramifications of the removal of Leroy and his journal is worth exploring here too. Barbara Foley argues that Leroy “figures crucially as a barometer of Ellison's politics as he drafted Invisible Man,” and that his presence as a card-carrying union member convinced of the power of interracial cooperation within the working class and the need for violent self-defence against racism waned as Ellison became disillusioned with the established left. Foley, Barbara, Ralph Ellison: Wrestling with the Left (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 232Google Scholar. Equally, Jackson, Ralph Ellison, 415, argues that in Leroy Ellison “aimed initially to reproduce a more complicated stratum of black nationalism, to expose deliberately Ras’ inadequacy and, as he had written to Murray, to take issue with the ‘non-violence boys’ of the civil rights movement.” However, Jackson continues, by 1950 politics at home and abroad had shifted with the onset of the Korean war lessening interest in black nationalism at home and focussing instead on anticommunism abroad, “and in response Ellison shifted the emphasis of his novel,” considering “Ford's advice about Leroy's journal timely and accurate.” Ibid., 416.
87 Ellison, letter to Albert Murray, 6 June 1951, in Callahan and Conner, The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison, 295.
88 Jackson, Ralph Ellison, 426.
89 Ibid.
90 Ibid., 427.
91 See Bradley, Ralph Ellison in Progress, 145 ff.
92 See the drafts contained in Box 142, Folder 3, Invisible Man Drafts Episodes at Mary's, Ralph Ellison Papers.
93 Ellison, letter to Ellen Wright, 26 March 1952, Box I 76, Folder 6, Wright, Richard and Ellen 1946–53, n.d., Ralph Ellison Papers.
94 Ibid.
95 Rampersad, Ralph Ellison, loc. 5024.
96 Ibid.
97 See especially ibid., loc. 4569 ff. Ellison's investment in this kind of social climbing and deep interest in accessing areas of white privilege have been a source of critical fascination and condemnation. Reflecting on a particularly awkward incident during a summer stint in a Long Island beach house in which both Ellisons masqueraded as “Spanish” for the sake of a young child, Jackson, Ralph Ellison, 341, writes that Ellison's “integrity had no mechanical spring, such as a Garveyite race pride; rather, he thought out his allegiances as an individual and in terms of his own individual obligations and benefit.” Rampersad goes further, especially in his damning assessment of Ellison's election to the previously all-white Century Club in 1964. Rampersad, loc. 8123, argues that following this final social breakthrough Ellison “was atop that part of the world about which he cared the most. America was rumbling with social discord, belching fire, and his second novel was not under control. But overcoming the many handicaps and setbacks of his life, Ralph had secured a place for himself near the top of his Mount Parnassus.” For my purposes here, the positioning of Ellison's work as nationally significant, high modernist, and avant-garde and of Ellison himself as an experimental novelist of the first rank were both important components of his artistic project, and Erskine played a key role in making the necessary introductions and in putting his work in the right hands to position his author and his work in this way.
98 Jackson, “Ralph Ellison's Politics of Integration,” 175.
99 Ibid.
100 Frank Taylor, letter to Ralph Ellison, 14 Oct. 1947, Box I 65, Folder 5, General Correspondence, Random House, Inc, 1947–1972, Ralph Ellison Papers.
101 Ellison, Invisible Man, xxxviii.
102 Langston Hughes, letter to Erskine, 13 March 1952; Carl van Vechten, note to Erskine, 6 April 1952; William Carlos Williams, letter to Erskine, 30 March 1952, Box 23, Folder 7, Ralph W. Ellison Correspondence 1947–1959, Albert Erskine Papers.
103 Stanley Hyman, letter to Erskine, 7 April 1952; Saul Bellow, letter to Erskine, 12 April 1952, Box 23, Folder 7, Ralph W. Ellison Correspondence 1947–1959, Albert Erskine Papers.
104 See Box 23, Folder 7, Ralph W. Ellison Correspondence 1947–1959, Albert Erskine Papers, for collected copies of these reviews. Jean Ennis, publicity assistant at Random House, also sent Ellison his press clippings, as in one letter from 27 Aug. 1952, which included a “couple more reviews you'll want to see” from, amongst others, Carl Victor Little of the Houston Press, Orville Prescott of the New York Times, and Frank O'Neill of the Cleveland News. In this same letter, Ennis makes it clear that the positioning of Ellison's novel as being of literary significance was continuing, with “Advertising in August” including pieces in the Herald-Tribune, the New York Times Book Review, and the San Francisco Chronicle, this selection showing that Random House were focussing their efforts on publications of a clear highbrow and literary bent. See Box 154, Folder 9, Novels – Invisible Man Published Editions Random House Correspondence 1949–1969, Ralph Ellison Papers.
105 Greif, Mark, The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933–1973 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 188Google Scholar.
106 Ibid.
107 Ellison, letter to Erskine, 22 Nov. 1955, Box I 65, Folder 5, General Correspondence, Random House, Inc, 1947–1972, Ralph Ellison Papers.
108 Erskine, letter to Ellison, 6 Dec. 1955, Box I 65, Folder 5, General Correspondence Random House, Inc, 1947–1972, Ralph Ellison Papers.
109 Ibid.
110 Ibid.
111 Ibid.
112 Ellison, letter to Erskine, 14 Dec. 1955, Box I 65, Folder 5, General Correspondence Random House, Inc, 1947–1972, Ralph Ellison Papers.
113 Ibid.
114 Ellison, letter to Erskine, to Erskine from Ellison, 1 March 1956, Box I 65, Folder 5, General Correspondence, Random House, Inc, 1947–1972, Ralph Ellison Papers.
115 Ibid.
116 Such was the tax burden on Wright's Native Son in the 1940s that Hazel Rowley argues that it is “one of literary history's ironies that the U.S. government made almost as much money out of Wright's protest novel as he did.” That Erskine ultimately suggested something similar to the capped yearly payments pitched to his publishers by Wright's agent Paul Reynolds in 1940 is perhaps another historical irony. Rowley, Hazel, Richard Wright: The Life and Times (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), 229Google Scholar.
117 Erskine, letter to Ellison, 2 April 1956, Box I 65, Folder 5, General Correspondence, Random House, Inc, 1947–1972, Ralph Ellison Papers. In addition, Erskine was ultimately able to convince Random House to amend their own balance sheets to spare the Ellisons additional tax burdens, despite the reputational hit with the IRS the publisher would take as a result.
118 See, for example, James Silberman's note to Ellison of 15 May 1964, in which he says that both he and Erskine wanted to write “simply to say I think the introduction is great – the tone perfect and the approach exactly right.” Further evidence comes from a similar note to Erskine from Silberman, this one dated 11 Nov. 1963, in which Silberman asks that “[m]aybe Ralph can come up with a livelier title than SELECTED ESSAYS – I hope so.” Silberman, as one charged with much of the legwork of securing copyright for these essays, still deferred to Erskine as the primary go-between with Ellison on literary and creative matters. Both notes in Box I 105, Folder 8, Shadow and Act Correspondence, Ralph Ellison Papers.
119 Ellison, letter to John Callahan, 25 Oct. 1985, in Callahan and Conner, The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison, 884.
120 See Rampersad, Ralph Ellison, loc. 8949 ff.
121 It is also striking that in one of the few times Erskine and Ellison shared a stage – on a roundtable for the American Scholar – both men seemed to prophetically realize the difficulties on the horizon. As Rampersad, loc. 6209 ff., has it, “Albert Erskine … reflected on the ‘ballyhoo’ of the flashy first success and the ensuing absence of a second act, in F. Scott Fitzgerald's requiem for his own career. ‘I think that is a thing,’ Erskine observed somberly, ‘which frequently destroys people.’ Ralph was even more specific, and more pessimistic, arguing that by this success and the expectation that goes with it, ‘[y]our integrity is destroyed.’” See also Stephen Becker, Albert Erskine, Bessie, Simon Michael, Stafford, Jean, Ellison, Ralph, Styron, William and Haydn, Hiram, “What's Wrong with the American Novel?”, American Scholar, 24, 4 (Autumn 1955), 464–503Google Scholar.
122 Ralph Ellison, letter to Nathan A. Scott, 17 July 1989, in Callahan and Conner, 963.
123 Ellison, letter to Erskine, 22 Nov. 1955, Box I 65, Folder 5, General Correspondence, Random House, Inc, 1947–1972, Ralph Ellison Papers.
124 Groenland, The Art of Editing, 227.