COMMENT 7
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 con–
ferences, 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 [ 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 jaun–
tily, "1 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 physi–
cian, but Ellison never called him. He died only a few weeks later, from
cancer of the pancreas.
WP
ON THURSDAY, DECEMBER
9, '999, [
was struck by the following head–
line in the
New York Times:
"Pearl Harbor Truly a Sneak Attack, Papers
Show." Apparently, it took fifty-eight years for most of our historians to
learn what everyone then knew-that Japan had planned a sneak attack
in order to disable the U.S. Navy, while keeping open so-called
diplomatic discussions.
I was in my early teens on December 7,
194J,
and closely followed the
news about the war in Europe which I had escaped by the proverbial skin
of my teeth, and was hoping that my two sets of grandparents and other
relatives also might elude the Nazis. My information about Japan was
sketchy.
It
came from my uncle's family, who had emigrated to Shanghai.
Thus I was aware of their hardships rather than of that country's poli–
tics. Yet [ knew, as did everyone who listened to President Roosevelt's
announcement on the radio that afternoon, that "deceit rather than
bumbling caused Tokyo's failure to warn Washington that war was
imminent."
It
seems that this fact, which recently was "discovered" by
