Comment from the Editor

William Phillips

The selection from Ralph Ellison’s posthumous novel Juneteenth that appeared in the New Yorker (April 12, 1999) was an unfortunate example of clichés and overwriting, with a number of purple passages. Yet it reminded me of some of the encounters I had with Ellison.

One of the earlier incidents I recall happened in late 1962. We were about to go to press, and needed some more material for the magazine, so I called up Ralph and asked him if he had something we could use. He said, without any air of pomposity, that he had a selection from his new novel. Since there was no time to mail it, he read it to me over the phone. It sounded good, and I said, "O.K., send it to me." It was probably the only time that a manuscript was accepted at Partisan Review by being read over the phone. There were also instances of simple camaraderie, when I and my former wife spent many boozy evenings at the Ellisons’ apartment on the Upper West Side, with Ralph, Fanny, and their huge police dog.

Another telling incident was a lunch I had with Ellison and Richard Poirier at the faculty club at Rutgers University, where Ellison was then writer-in-residence. Poirier had just been appointed head of the English department, and he had not hired Ellison. In addition, Poirier was in principle against writers-in-residence. As tensions rose at the lunch, I tried to calm things down by asking Ellison what he thought of Lyndon Johnson, who had recently become President of the United States. Ellison stiffened in his chair, stuck his chest out, and said solemnly, "As an Oklahoman and a black, and as a writer, I would say the results are not yet in." Apparently the success of Invisible Man, the invitations to conferences, and general treatment as a celebrity had gone to Ellison’s head and he had become a bit pompous.

Another time, when we were in Rome, as were the Ellisons, we invited him to join us for a ride into the outskirts. We rented a car, and I asked Ralph, who was more accustomed than I to Italian traffic, to drive. We were on our way out of the city when, at one point, Ralph’s impatience got the better of him and he shouted through his window: "Get out of the way, you lousy wops!" It seemed that Ralph, especially in Italy, was more an American than a black—which jived with his sense of himself as a writer.

When Edith Kurzweil and I had lunch with Ellison shortly before he came to our conference at Rutgers in 1991, a number of members of the Century Club came up to say hello to him. When I asked him later on why he was so much more popular at the Club than I, he answered jauntily, "I integrated this joint."

Shortly before his death, Ralph was supposed to visit us, but instead Fanny called to say that he wasn’t feeling well, and asked if we could recommend a good doctor. We arranged for him to see our own physician, but Ellison never called him. He died only a few weeks later, from cancer of the pancreas.