The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader by Jr. Henry Louis Gates

Author:Jr., Henry Louis Gates [Jr., Henry Louis Gates]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Anthologies
ISBN: 9780465029242
Amazon: 0465029248
Goodreads: 16386682
Publisher: Civitas Book Publisher
Published: 2012-05-01T07:00:00+00:00

It’s clear that, beneath Ellison’s unfailingly courtly demeanor, his own internal struggles may have taken their toll. The fire, in the fall of 1967, is often mentioned as a watershed moment for him, one whose symbolic freight would only increase over the years. He had been busy that summer in his Massachusetts farmhouse, making extensive revisions on his novel in progress—Murray recalls seeing a manuscript thick with interlinear emendations during a visit there. At times, Ellison had called Murray to read him some of the new material. The fire occurred on the very evening that the Ellisons had decided to return to New York. Murray says, “He packed up all his stuff and got everything together, put it all in the hallway leading out, with some of his cameras and some of his shooting equipment. Then they went out to dinner with Richard Wilbur. On the way home, when they got to a certain point, they saw this fire reflection on the skyline, and, the nearer they got, the more it seemed like it was their place. And as they turned in, they saw their house going up in flames.” Ellison had a copy of the manuscript in New York, but the rewriting and rethinking that had occupied him for months were lost. “So he went into shock, really. He just closed off from everybody.” Murray didn’t hear from him until Christmas. In the months that followed, Ellison would sometimes call Murray up and read him passages—trying to jog Murray’s memory so that he would jog Ellison’s. “It took him years to recover,” Murray says. Meanwhile, Murray’s career was following an opposite trajectory. As if making up for lost time, he spent the first half of the seventies averaging a book a year; during the same period, Ellison’s block as a novelist had grown to mythic proportions. Bellow says, “Ralph was suffering very deeply from his hangup, and it was very hard to have any connection with him. He got into a very strange state, I think.”

Did Ellison feel betrayed? It seems clear that he did. (“Romie used to call it ‘Oklahoma paranoia,’” Murray says, musing on the froideur that settled between them.) Did Ellison have reason to? That’s harder to answer. The African-American poet Michael S. Harper, an Ellison stalwart, says, “The most important word I ever heard Ralph say was the word ‘honor.’ I happen to know some of the difficulties they went through when Albert was in a phase of making appearances in white literary salons, and reports came back from various people.” Theories of the estrangement abound. One writer acquainted with the two men says that Ellison had learned that Murray was bad-mouthing him; another suggests that Ellison simply felt crowded, that Murray was presenting himself as Ellison’s confidant—“as the man to see if you want to know”—in a way that Ellison found unseemly. The chill could make things awkward for acquaintances. One of them says, “I remember on one occasion Ralph and I were lunching at the Century Club, when Al saw me in the downstairs lobby.

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