SETH FORMAN
On Howe, Ellison,
and the Black Intellectuals
It
must have been hard for critics not to wince when Irving Howe con–
tended in his 1963 essay "Black Boys and N ative Sons" that black wri ters in
America had to confront their oppression in order to achieve true authen–
ticity. Insisting that a writer can work only from his own experience, Howe
asked "What, then, was the experience of a man with a black skin, what
could
it be in this country? How could a Negro put pen to paper, how could he
so much as think or breathe, without some impulsion to protest?" It would
be hard to overstate what a bold and gutsy indiscretion Howe committed in
writing such prose, particularly because the article, which appeared in
Dissent,
was written when the civil rights movement had reached its famous crescen–
do, and was exhorting Americans to judge blacks not by the color of their
skin but by the"content of their character." But even in another time, there
would have been something deeply troubling about a white, "cosmopolitan"
(and in this case, not insignificantly,Jewish) critic insisting that the racist past
prevents blacks from occupying the same literary ground on which the critic
himself stands. Predictably, Howe was taken to task for his unwillingness to
indulge the black writer the freedom to choose his own voice.
Ralph Ellison in particular took umbrage at Howe's insistence that
both he, Ellison, in his novel
Invisible Man,
and James Baldwin, in his early
novels and essays, had failed to reach the literary heights of Richard
Wright's angry and bloody
Native Son.
Both of the younger writers, Howe
felt, in their emphasis on form and universal subject matter, masqueraded
as "Native Sons" and refused to stand up to the fact that they were really
still "Black Boys." In his reply, which appeared in
The New Leader,
Ellison
wrote that Howe "seems never to have considered that American Negro
life... .is also a discipline. ...There is a fullness, even a richness here; and
here despite the reali ties of poli tics, perhaps, but nevertheless here and real.
Because it is a human life." Claiming the right to choose any voice in
which he felt comfortable communicating, the same right that Jewish
writers like Howe claimed for themselves, Ellison wondered why, if Howe
believed Richard Wright had an authentic black tone, was that the
only
authentic black tone. "He [Wright] had his memories and I have mine,just
as I suppose Irving Howe has his."
