WAYS OF WRITING ABOUT ONESELF
81
such as Homer and Shakespeare, two champions who were never
unwilling ro narrate a fight, blow by blow, nuance by nuance.
These black men do nor duck, at least from their personal perspec–
tives, the issues brought to any discussion of American experience by
the facts of color. They realize what those who have a dismissive atti–
tude toward the discussion of race miss out on, which is an additional
complexity that crosses the sweep of the nation's history, its institutions,
its laws, its classes, its religion, its conception of what constitutes an
appropriate suitor, its humor, its sports, its arts, and its entertainments.
While what Wright, Ellison, and Murray have to say is personal,
filled with childhood or memories of youth, and may also look into the
underlying things that attracted each one of them to the art of writing,
the intricacies of the all-American skin game, the conflicts and misun–
derstood troubles and dimensions of color, make their work very differ–
ent from A
Moveable Feast.
Wright, Ellison, and Murray have in
common the intention of reinterpreting the meanings of American life
beyond racial stereotypes. Hemingway was thinking about something
else altogether. He was looking back on a grand period in his early life
from the perspective of one who had fallen far short of what he had
hoped to do. His mind and health had been given terrible whippings
from dissipation and devastating accidents, the falling ceilings, colli–
sions, brawls, and plane crashes so often resulted in blows to the head
that he was somewhat punch-drunk delusional in his later years. Hem–
ingway was at an end when he wrote his book, while the others were in
the heat of a battle that never let up, though many, many victories had
been achieved against the kind of world that Wright recalled and that
Ellison and Murray either agreed with, extended upon, or argued with
through another set of ideas altogether. Yet there is always something
outside of simple categories that arrives when we are talking about tal–
ent of a certain stature. For all their individuality, the books I will dis–
cuss arc connected in ways that arc never addressed. Ellison's
Invisible
Man
comes out of Wright'S
Black Boy,
and Murray's memoir is close in
spirit to Hemingway's, for all the differences in specific reference.
There has long been that secret about
Invisible Man,
which is that it
is a profoundly sly set of variations by Ellison on Wright. Ellison decided,
it seems to me, to take the form of
American Hunger
and embroider it
with thematic extensions of every kind that would fit his own ambition.
He chose to marvelously orchestrate a memoir written by a friend whom
he admired and whose story was then the most powerful update of the
slave narrative genre that had come into being a century earlier. Ellison
