The Matter of Black Lives: Writing From the New Yorker by Jelani Cobb & David Remnick

Author:Jelani Cobb & David Remnick [Cobb, Jelani & Remnick, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780008498726
Google: 00woEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
Published: 2021-09-27T23:00:00+00:00

FOR ALL THEIR SIMILARITIES IN BACKGROUND, EDUCATION, SENSIBILITY, even dress (they shared a tailor, Charlie Davidson, himself something of a legend in sartorial circles), the two men inclined toward rather contrasting styles of public presentation. A private man who in later years grew intensely aware of being a public figure, Ellison had contrived a persona designed to defeat white expectations of black brutishness. Hence the same words come up again and again when people try to write about him—words like “patrician,” “formal,” “aristocratic,” “mandarin,” “civilized,” “dignified.” James Baldwin once observed, shrewdly, that Ellison was “as angry as anybody can be and still live.” It was this banked anger that kept his back so straight in public settings, his manners so impeccable; even his spoken sentences wore spats and suspenders. Murray, who enjoyed verbal sparring as much as anybody, lacked that gift of anger, and as a conversationalist he had always taken delight in the saltier idioms of the street. (Imagine Redd Foxx with a graduate degree in literature.) The writer Reynolds Price, a friend of both Ellison and Murray, says, “Ralph had a kind of saturnine, slightly bemused quality. I thought Al always seemed the more buoyant person.”

Writing is at once a solitary and a sociable act, and literary relationships are similarly compounded of opposites. So it was with Ellison and Murray, two country cousins. Many people speak of Ellison’s eightieth-birthday party—to which Murray had been invited and at which he delivered a moving tribute to his old schoolmate—as a significant moment of reconciliation. “I think it was Ellison’s way of reaching out to Murray,” a friend of Ellison’s says.

Then, too, for all his companionability, Murray’s literary inclinations ran strongly toward the paternal. He takes deep satisfaction in that role, and there are many who can attest to his capacity for nurturance. James Alan McPherson, one of the fiction writers who have most often been likened to Ellison, recalls a time in the late seventies when he was in Rhode Island with Michael Harper, the poet, and Ernest J. Gaines, whose novels include “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.” In a moment of mad enthusiasm, they hit on the idea of going to New York and letting Ellison know how much they admired him. When they phoned him, he told them, to their unbounded joy, that they should come right down. And so, after an almost mythic trek, these young black writers arrived at Riverside Drive to pay a visit to their hero.

“Mr. Ellison can’t see you,” they were told at the door. “He’s busy working.”

They were crushed. They were also adrift: with the destination of their pilgrimage closed to them, they had no place to go. “So we called Al Murray, and he picked up the slack,” McPherson recounts. “He brought us to his apartment, where he had some apples and some bourbon and some fancy French cheese. And he said, ‘Have you ever met Duke Ellington’s sister?’ We said no, so he took us over to meet Duke Ellington’s sister.

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