WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:02.660 Welcome back to The Deep Dive. Today we are exploring 00:00:02.660 --> 00:00:05.419 the life and work of a true titan of American 00:00:05.419 --> 00:00:08.240 literature, a man the New York Times once said 00:00:08.240 --> 00:00:12.160 was among the gods of America's literary Parnassus. 00:00:12.400 --> 00:00:15.279 We are talking about Ralph Waldo Ellison, and 00:00:15.279 --> 00:00:17.140 we're going to be tracing the path that led him 00:00:17.140 --> 00:00:19.500 to write just one novel in his lifetime, but 00:00:19.500 --> 00:00:21.760 a novel that completely changed the landscape, 00:00:22.160 --> 00:00:24.920 Invisible Man. And right there, that's the central 00:00:24.920 --> 00:00:27.719 paradox, isn't it? He's named after Ralph Waldo 00:00:27.719 --> 00:00:30.800 Emerson, the great philosopher of American individualism, 00:00:30.839 --> 00:00:33.799 of self -reliance, a man who was all about being 00:00:33.799 --> 00:00:35.880 seen. The most visible intellectual, really. 00:00:35.979 --> 00:00:38.979 And yet Ellison's entire career, his masterpiece, 00:00:39.140 --> 00:00:41.600 is about the exact opposite. It's about the experience 00:00:41.600 --> 00:00:43.740 of being unseen. So if Emerson's whole thing 00:00:43.740 --> 00:00:45.539 was, you know, forge your own path, be an individual. 00:00:46.039 --> 00:00:48.659 Ellison comes along and asks, OK, but what happens 00:00:48.659 --> 00:00:51.000 when the world you're in refuses to even acknowledge 00:00:51.000 --> 00:00:53.560 that you exist, that the identity you forged 00:00:53.560 --> 00:00:57.549 is simply ignored? And that's the tension. That's 00:00:57.549 --> 00:00:59.530 the engine of the whole thing. The promise of 00:00:59.530 --> 00:01:02.609 America, that Emersonian ideal crashing right 00:01:02.609 --> 00:01:05.840 into the reality of American prejudice. That's 00:01:05.840 --> 00:01:07.879 what fueled Invisible Man. So that's our mission 00:01:07.879 --> 00:01:10.019 for this deep dive. We've got the biographies, 00:01:10.019 --> 00:01:12.239 the critical essays, and we want to figure out 00:01:12.239 --> 00:01:15.439 how did a young man from Oklahoma who really 00:01:15.439 --> 00:01:17.579 started out as a musician. And a very serious 00:01:17.579 --> 00:01:20.299 one. How did he become the author of a book that 00:01:20.299 --> 00:01:23.840 a 1965 poll would later call the most important 00:01:23.840 --> 00:01:26.680 novel since World War II? It's a huge journey. 00:01:26.819 --> 00:01:28.700 It's a massive journey. But before we even start, 00:01:28.760 --> 00:01:30.900 we have to talk about a little biographical quote 00:01:30.900 --> 00:01:33.260 that, you know, just sets the stage perfectly. 00:01:33.540 --> 00:01:36.629 Okay. So the official record states he was born 00:01:36.629 --> 00:01:40.030 in Oklahoma City on March 1st, 1913. He died 00:01:40.030 --> 00:01:43.469 in 1994 at 81. Right. But I saw in the sources 00:01:43.469 --> 00:01:45.189 there's a discrepancy there. He didn't always 00:01:45.189 --> 00:01:47.930 say 1913, did he? No, he didn't. For most of 00:01:47.930 --> 00:01:49.609 his public life, he would give his birth year 00:01:49.609 --> 00:01:53.079 as 1914. Well, who knows for sure, but the evidence 00:01:53.079 --> 00:01:56.519 for 1913 is solid. The census records, for example. 00:01:56.780 --> 00:01:59.099 But what's really fascinating is that biographers 00:01:59.099 --> 00:02:01.980 found a note from his mother where the year 1913 00:02:01.980 --> 00:02:05.219 seems to have been erased and 1914 written over 00:02:05.219 --> 00:02:08.520 it. Wow. So the author of a book about creating 00:02:08.520 --> 00:02:11.620 your own narrative was, in a small way, creating 00:02:11.620 --> 00:02:13.939 his own narrative from day one. He was editing 00:02:13.939 --> 00:02:16.539 his own life story. It's a subtle act of self 00:02:16.539 --> 00:02:18.379 -invention, and it tells you everything about 00:02:18.379 --> 00:02:20.180 the kind of mind we're dealing with. Someone... 00:02:20.330 --> 00:02:22.870 who is deeply aware of how identity is constructed. 00:02:23.090 --> 00:02:25.590 Okay, let's unpack that journey. Part one, from 00:02:25.590 --> 00:02:28.550 Oklahoma to Alabama. This is the musician's path, 00:02:28.770 --> 00:02:31.129 but also his intellectual awakening. It starts 00:02:31.129 --> 00:02:34.669 in Oklahoma from 1913 to 1933. And you really 00:02:34.669 --> 00:02:37.150 have to start with his father, Louis Alfred Ellison. 00:02:37.469 --> 00:02:39.849 He seems like the source of that initial literary 00:02:39.849 --> 00:02:42.530 ambition. Absolutely. Lewis was a small business 00:02:42.530 --> 00:02:45.629 owner, a construction foreman, but he loved literature. 00:02:45.810 --> 00:02:47.990 He was the one who named his son after Emerson. 00:02:48.150 --> 00:02:50.289 And Ralph later found out his father had dreamed 00:02:50.289 --> 00:02:52.509 that he would grow up to be a poet. But his father's 00:02:52.509 --> 00:02:55.189 influence was cut short, tragically. Very short. 00:02:55.370 --> 00:02:58.729 He died in 1916 after a work accident. Ralph 00:02:58.729 --> 00:03:01.389 was only three years old. And that left the family 00:03:01.389 --> 00:03:03.729 in a really precarious situation. Completely. 00:03:04.030 --> 00:03:06.800 He, his mother, Ida Millsap, she remarried three 00:03:06.800 --> 00:03:09.479 times. There was no real stability. And that 00:03:09.479 --> 00:03:12.280 meant for Ralph, childhood wasn't about leisure. 00:03:12.419 --> 00:03:14.979 It was about work. He had to contribute. And 00:03:14.979 --> 00:03:17.580 the sources list the jobs he took on as a kid. 00:03:17.599 --> 00:03:20.259 It's quite a list. It is. He was a busboy, a 00:03:20.259 --> 00:03:23.419 shoeshine boy, a hotel waiter, even a dentist 00:03:23.419 --> 00:03:25.460 assistant. And you have to think about what that 00:03:25.460 --> 00:03:28.139 teaches you. The social dynamics. Exactly. You're 00:03:28.139 --> 00:03:29.699 serving, you're watching, you're often being 00:03:29.699 --> 00:03:32.039 overlooked, you're learning about class and race 00:03:32.039 --> 00:03:34.219 from the ground up. It's an education you can't 00:03:34.219 --> 00:03:36.439 get in a classroom. And running parallel to this 00:03:36.439 --> 00:03:38.699 life of hard labor was his first real passion. 00:03:39.000 --> 00:03:41.580 Music. Music. Music was his everything. It was 00:03:41.580 --> 00:03:44.240 his escape, his discipline. He got free lessons 00:03:44.240 --> 00:03:47.560 on trumpet and alto sax, and he got so good he 00:03:47.560 --> 00:03:49.620 became the school bandmaster at Douglas High 00:03:49.620 --> 00:03:51.680 School. He even worked for a full year after 00:03:51.680 --> 00:03:54.740 graduating just to buy his own trumpet. That's 00:03:54.740 --> 00:03:57.319 dedication. Total dedication. That was his path. 00:03:57.759 --> 00:04:00.539 That was his identity. Literature was his father's 00:04:00.539 --> 00:04:04.139 dream, but music was his reality. And it's that 00:04:04.139 --> 00:04:06.020 trumpet that literally gets him out of Oklahoma. 00:04:06.300 --> 00:04:08.719 It does. Which brings us to Tuskegee Institute 00:04:08.719 --> 00:04:12.659 from 1933 to 1936. This was the prestigious all 00:04:12.659 --> 00:04:15.080 -black university founded by Booker T. Washington. 00:04:15.740 --> 00:04:18.480 Ellison applies twice, and he finally gets in. 00:04:18.660 --> 00:04:20.420 But not for his grades, right? Not for his grades. 00:04:20.620 --> 00:04:23.000 He got in because the school orchestra desperately 00:04:23.000 --> 00:04:25.839 needed a trumpet player. And the story of how 00:04:25.839 --> 00:04:27.680 he got there is just amazing. He didn't have 00:04:27.680 --> 00:04:30.279 money for a ticket. No. He hopped freight trains, 00:04:30.439 --> 00:04:33.300 hoboed his way from Oklahoma to Alabama to get 00:04:33.300 --> 00:04:35.899 an education. That image just says everything 00:04:35.899 --> 00:04:38.459 about his drive. So he arrives at Tuskegee, this 00:04:38.459 --> 00:04:41.519 icon of black education and uplift. And what 00:04:41.519 --> 00:04:43.879 does he find? He finds an environment that is, 00:04:43.959 --> 00:04:46.920 in its own way, just as rigidly structured as 00:04:46.920 --> 00:04:49.600 the white society he came from. The critic Hilton 00:04:49.600 --> 00:04:51.759 Owls makes a really key point about this. What's 00:04:51.759 --> 00:04:54.399 that? Al's notes that Ellison found Tuskegee 00:04:54.399 --> 00:04:57.339 to be incredibly class conscious. It wasn't just 00:04:57.339 --> 00:04:59.379 about being black. It was about what kind of 00:04:59.379 --> 00:05:01.660 black person you were. Were you from the right 00:05:01.660 --> 00:05:03.740 family? Did you have the right connections? So 00:05:03.740 --> 00:05:06.199 he was an outsider all over again. Deplete outsider. 00:05:06.420 --> 00:05:08.800 And Al's argues that this was crucial for his 00:05:08.800 --> 00:05:12.199 development as a writer. It sharpened his satirical 00:05:12.199 --> 00:05:15.060 lens. Because he wasn't invested in playing the 00:05:15.060 --> 00:05:17.170 game. He couldn't play it, so he just watched 00:05:17.170 --> 00:05:19.730 it. And he looked back at what Owls calls the 00:05:19.730 --> 00:05:22.129 sniveling ethos of the place with, you know, 00:05:22.129 --> 00:05:25.290 both scorn and despair. That critical distance, 00:05:25.509 --> 00:05:27.629 that feeling of being an observer even among 00:05:27.629 --> 00:05:30.790 his own people. That's the voice of Invisible 00:05:30.790 --> 00:05:33.649 Man. So he's there officially to study music 00:05:33.649 --> 00:05:35.709 under some pretty serious instructors. Oh, yeah. 00:05:35.750 --> 00:05:37.889 William L. Dawson, the composer, was head of 00:05:37.889 --> 00:05:39.769 the department. He studied with Hazel Harrison, 00:05:39.970 --> 00:05:42.329 a renowned piano instructor. His musical education 00:05:42.329 --> 00:05:45.600 was top tier. But he was leading this secret 00:05:45.600 --> 00:05:48.019 second life in the library. A dual education, 00:05:48.259 --> 00:05:51.379 exactly. Music was his major, but literature 00:05:51.379 --> 00:05:53.959 became his obsession. And he said that reading 00:05:53.959 --> 00:05:56.360 T .S. Eliot's The Wasteland for the first time 00:05:56.360 --> 00:05:59.500 was just a massive transformative moment. I can 00:05:59.500 --> 00:06:02.079 imagine. The fragmentation, the different voices 00:06:02.079 --> 00:06:04.480 in that poem. It must have felt like a blueprint 00:06:04.480 --> 00:06:06.839 for describing the modern world he was experiencing. 00:06:07.019 --> 00:06:10.420 A key to unlocking it. Yeah. And then in 1934, 00:06:10.500 --> 00:06:12.699 he gets a job as a desk clerk in the library, 00:06:12.980 --> 00:06:15.079 which is like giving him the keys to the kingdom. 00:06:15.279 --> 00:06:17.579 So he's just devouring everything. Everything. 00:06:17.600 --> 00:06:21.139 James Joyce, Gertrude Stein. He's mentored by 00:06:21.139 --> 00:06:24.040 the librarian, Walter Bowie Williams. But the 00:06:24.040 --> 00:06:26.449 real guide. The person who turned this passion 00:06:26.449 --> 00:06:29.430 into a possible vocation was his English teacher, 00:06:29.649 --> 00:06:32.410 Morteza Drexel Sprague. He dedicated his first 00:06:32.410 --> 00:06:35.449 essay collection, Shadow and Act, to Sprague, 00:06:35.470 --> 00:06:37.649 didn't he? He did, because Sprague was the one 00:06:37.649 --> 00:06:40.250 who showed him, as Ellison put it, the possibilities 00:06:40.250 --> 00:06:43.149 of literature as a living art. What did that 00:06:43.149 --> 00:06:45.709 mean, a living art? It meant connecting the books 00:06:45.709 --> 00:06:49.730 to his own life. Sprague introduced him to Dostoevsky's 00:06:49.730 --> 00:06:52.310 Crime and Punishment and Thomas Hardy's Jude 00:06:52.310 --> 00:06:55.459 the Obscure. And Ellison said he identified immediately 00:06:55.459 --> 00:06:58.519 with their brilliant, tortured antiheroes. It 00:06:58.519 --> 00:07:00.860 seems like a strange connection. A young black 00:07:00.860 --> 00:07:04.319 man in 1930s Alabama identifying with a 19th 00:07:04.319 --> 00:07:07.300 century Russian intellectual murderer. But think 00:07:07.300 --> 00:07:10.259 about it. The narrator of Invisible Man is not 00:07:10.259 --> 00:07:12.660 a simple hero. He's hyper intellectual. He's 00:07:12.660 --> 00:07:15.439 paranoid. He's isolated. He's constantly in his 00:07:15.439 --> 00:07:18.939 own head. That is a Dostoevsky character. Ellis 00:07:18.939 --> 00:07:21.360 wasn't looking for simple protest figures. He 00:07:21.360 --> 00:07:23.439 was looking for psychological complexity. He 00:07:23.439 --> 00:07:25.040 was looking for a way to write from the inside 00:07:25.040 --> 00:07:27.540 out. Exactly. Not just shouting from the outside. 00:07:27.980 --> 00:07:29.800 And this connects to another one of his passions, 00:07:29.839 --> 00:07:31.899 something that seems totally separate at first. 00:07:32.379 --> 00:07:35.509 Technology. The audio equipment. Yeah. As a kid, 00:07:35.550 --> 00:07:37.230 he would take radios apart and rebuild them. 00:07:37.329 --> 00:07:39.810 Just fascinated with how they worked. As an adult, 00:07:39.850 --> 00:07:42.410 he built these incredibly elaborate, high -fidelity 00:07:42.410 --> 00:07:44.990 stereo systems. He even wrote about it for High 00:07:44.990 --> 00:07:47.949 Fidelity magazine in 1955. So he's a tinkerer, 00:07:48.110 --> 00:07:51.199 an engineer. He's an engineer of sound. And the 00:07:51.199 --> 00:07:54.040 scholar John S. Wright argues that this technical 00:07:54.040 --> 00:07:56.379 skill, this understanding of how to layer sounds, 00:07:56.560 --> 00:07:59.060 how to isolate frequencies, how to mix different 00:07:59.060 --> 00:08:01.620 inputs, directly informed how he constructed 00:08:01.620 --> 00:08:04.040 his novel. So you're saying Invisible Man is 00:08:04.040 --> 00:08:06.240 structured like a piece of music being mixed 00:08:06.240 --> 00:08:09.639 on a soundboard? In a way, yes. Think about the 00:08:09.639 --> 00:08:12.040 shifts in voice. You have the high -minded philosophical 00:08:12.040 --> 00:08:14.360 prose of the prologue. Then you have southern 00:08:14.360 --> 00:08:17.339 folk vernacular. Then the rigid ideological language 00:08:17.339 --> 00:08:20.000 of the brotherhood. Then this beautiful jazz 00:08:20.000 --> 00:08:22.240 -like stream of consciousness. He's layering 00:08:22.240 --> 00:08:24.800 all these different American voices. He's layering 00:08:24.800 --> 00:08:27.500 the blues tradition, the folk tradition, right 00:08:27.500 --> 00:08:30.199 alongside the European high modernism of Eliot 00:08:30.199 --> 00:08:32.259 Joyce that he found in the library. It's a complex 00:08:32.259 --> 00:08:35.740 composition. And then in 1936, he decides the 00:08:35.740 --> 00:08:38.340 composition needs a new venue. He leaves Tuskegee 00:08:38.340 --> 00:08:40.840 without a degree and heads for New York. Which 00:08:40.840 --> 00:08:44.179 brings us to part two. Harlem, the writers, and 00:08:44.179 --> 00:08:46.879 a profound political disillusionment. He arrives 00:08:46.879 --> 00:08:51.320 on July 5, 1936. The original plan was to study 00:08:51.320 --> 00:08:54.139 sculpture, but he lands in Harlem at the YMCA 00:08:54.139 --> 00:08:56.860 on 135th Street, and he's immediately plugged 00:08:56.860 --> 00:08:59.080 into the center of black American culture. And 00:08:59.080 --> 00:09:01.679 he gets a huge introduction right away. A game 00:09:01.679 --> 00:09:04.669 -changing introduction. He meets Langston Hughes. 00:09:05.070 --> 00:09:07.289 Harlem's unofficial diplomat. That's the perfect 00:09:07.289 --> 00:09:10.330 description. Hughes opens the door for him, introduces 00:09:10.330 --> 00:09:13.230 him to the entire black literary world, which 00:09:13.230 --> 00:09:15.909 at that time was heavily influenced by Communist 00:09:15.909 --> 00:09:18.470 Party sympathies. And that's how he meets the 00:09:18.470 --> 00:09:20.769 other major figure in his life at this point, 00:09:20.870 --> 00:09:23.690 Richard Wright. Yes. A very, very important and 00:09:23.690 --> 00:09:27.450 very complicated relationship. Wright saw Ellison's 00:09:27.450 --> 00:09:29.509 talent immediately. Ellison sent him a book review 00:09:29.509 --> 00:09:31.809 and Wright wrote back and said, you need to be 00:09:31.809 --> 00:09:34.460 writing fiction. And he did. He did. His first 00:09:34.460 --> 00:09:36.980 published story, Jaime's Bull, comes directly 00:09:36.980 --> 00:09:39.320 from that experience hobbling on the train to 00:09:39.320 --> 00:09:41.820 Tuskegee. Within a couple of years, he's publishing 00:09:41.820 --> 00:09:44.820 reviews, articles, short stories, over 20 pieces 00:09:44.820 --> 00:09:47.340 between 37 and 44. He's a professional writer. 00:09:47.460 --> 00:09:49.759 But he's still thinking visually, too. He didn't 00:09:49.759 --> 00:09:52.620 just leave that sculpture idea behind. No. His 00:09:52.620 --> 00:09:54.919 fascination with perception, with how we see 00:09:54.919 --> 00:09:57.669 things, was always there. And this comes through 00:09:57.669 --> 00:09:59.269 in his collaboration with the great photographer 00:09:59.269 --> 00:10:03.149 Gordon Parks in 1948. This was the Harlem is 00:10:03.149 --> 00:10:05.909 Nowhere photo essay. Right. It was about the 00:10:05.909 --> 00:10:08.590 Lafargue Clinic, which was the first racially 00:10:08.590 --> 00:10:11.690 integrated psychiatric clinic in Harlem, a really 00:10:11.690 --> 00:10:13.610 groundbreaking place. And Ellison wasn't just 00:10:13.610 --> 00:10:16.009 writing captions for the photos. Not at all. 00:10:16.090 --> 00:10:18.750 He wrote an essay called The Pictorial Problem, 00:10:19.009 --> 00:10:21.610 which is basically the theoretical manifesto 00:10:21.610 --> 00:10:24.330 for the project. He was thinking deeply about 00:10:24.330 --> 00:10:27.250 the psychological impact of images, about how 00:10:27.250 --> 00:10:29.990 photography could either reinforce stereotypes 00:10:29.990 --> 00:10:33.009 or break them. He was providing the intellectual 00:10:33.009 --> 00:10:35.610 framework for Parks' camera. It just shows how 00:10:35.610 --> 00:10:38.070 he was constantly working on this problem of 00:10:38.070 --> 00:10:41.389 visibility from every angle, sound, text, image. 00:10:41.629 --> 00:10:43.850 Every single angle. And that brings us to the 00:10:43.850 --> 00:10:46.429 political angle, which becomes so crucial. As 00:10:46.429 --> 00:10:48.929 we said, he was in Richard Wright's circle. publishing 00:10:48.929 --> 00:10:51.429 in left -wing magazines. Wright was very openly 00:10:51.429 --> 00:10:54.210 a member of the Communist Party. Ellison's affiliation 00:10:54.210 --> 00:10:56.389 was quieter, but it was there. It was definitely 00:10:56.389 --> 00:10:58.889 there. But then World War II happens and everything 00:10:58.889 --> 00:11:01.269 changes. The moment of disillusionment. It's 00:11:01.269 --> 00:11:04.429 a profound break. Both he and Wright completely 00:11:04.429 --> 00:11:07.509 lose faith in the party. They felt that it had 00:11:07.509 --> 00:11:09.909 fundamentally betrayed African -Americans. What 00:11:09.909 --> 00:11:12.769 was the specific nature of that betrayal? Well, 00:11:12.830 --> 00:11:15.730 the initial appeal of the party was its focus 00:11:15.730 --> 00:11:19.019 on Marxist class politics. The idea was that 00:11:19.019 --> 00:11:21.500 racial oppression was just a byproduct of capitalism 00:11:21.500 --> 00:11:24.220 and a workers' revolution would solve it. But 00:11:24.220 --> 00:11:27.519 during the war, the party line shifted. The priority 00:11:27.519 --> 00:11:30.279 became supporting the allied war effort, promoting 00:11:30.279 --> 00:11:32.799 national unity. So they replaced that revolutionary 00:11:32.799 --> 00:11:36.139 class politics with a much softer, gradual social 00:11:36.139 --> 00:11:39.100 reformism. So they were essentially telling black 00:11:39.100 --> 00:11:41.879 members to put their most urgent struggles on 00:11:41.879 --> 00:11:44.620 the back burner for the sake of the war. Exactly. 00:11:44.679 --> 00:11:46.960 And for Ellison and Wright, this was the ultimate 00:11:46.960 --> 00:11:49.580 betrayal. It was just one more institution that 00:11:49.580 --> 00:11:52.659 promised a kind of liberation, but in the end 00:11:52.659 --> 00:11:55.480 refused to truly see their reality. The blindness 00:11:55.480 --> 00:11:57.980 was everywhere. And that anger, that sense of 00:11:57.980 --> 00:12:00.500 being let down by the one ideology that promised 00:12:00.500 --> 00:12:02.419 a way out, that's what he pours into the novel. 00:12:02.720 --> 00:12:05.200 All of it. And we have this incredible quote 00:12:05.200 --> 00:12:07.779 from a letter he wrote to Richard Wright on August 00:12:07.779 --> 00:12:12.000 18, 1945. It's the moment the mission for Invisible 00:12:12.000 --> 00:12:14.379 Man becomes crystal clear. What does he say? 00:12:14.940 --> 00:12:18.120 He writes, Maybe we can't smash the atom. But 00:12:18.120 --> 00:12:20.500 we can, with a few well -chosen, well -written 00:12:20.500 --> 00:12:23.539 words, smash all that crummy filth to hell. Smash 00:12:23.539 --> 00:12:26.399 all that crummy filth to hell. That's a declaration 00:12:26.399 --> 00:12:28.940 of war. It's a declaration of literary war. He's 00:12:28.940 --> 00:12:30.340 turning all of that political disappointment 00:12:30.340 --> 00:12:33.740 into artistic energy. Invisible Man is born right 00:12:33.740 --> 00:12:35.799 in the wake of that rupture. It's his answer 00:12:35.799 --> 00:12:38.240 to the party's failure. And all this is happening 00:12:38.240 --> 00:12:40.659 while his personal life is also in flux. He had 00:12:40.659 --> 00:12:42.679 a first marriage that ended. Yes, to an actress 00:12:42.679 --> 00:12:45.860 named Rose Poindexter. They married in 1938 and 00:12:45.860 --> 00:12:48.980 divorced in 1945. The biographies suggest it 00:12:48.980 --> 00:12:51.059 was a difficult relationship. And then in 1946, 00:12:51.340 --> 00:12:54.159 he marries Fanny McConnell. And she seems to 00:12:54.159 --> 00:12:56.620 be the person who really makes the novel possible. 00:12:56.679 --> 00:12:58.480 Absolutely essential. Fanny was an incredible 00:12:58.480 --> 00:13:00.779 person in her own right. A writer, a theater 00:13:00.779 --> 00:13:04.419 founder, a brilliant intellectual. And she became 00:13:04.419 --> 00:13:06.740 his rock. She supported them financially while 00:13:06.740 --> 00:13:08.960 he wrote. She did. She took a job so he could 00:13:08.960 --> 00:13:11.100 write full time for seven years. But it was more 00:13:11.100 --> 00:13:13.679 than that. She was his first reader, his editor. 00:13:14.059 --> 00:13:17.039 She typed his longhand manuscripts. She was an 00:13:17.039 --> 00:13:19.720 active collaborator in the creation of this masterpiece. 00:13:20.080 --> 00:13:22.259 So while he was preparing to smash all that crummy 00:13:22.259 --> 00:13:24.779 filth, she was building the foundation that let 00:13:24.779 --> 00:13:28.100 him do it. A true partnership. And it's incredible 00:13:28.100 --> 00:13:30.120 to remember that even in the middle of all this. 00:13:30.539 --> 00:13:34.980 In 1946, he's still composing music. The sources 00:13:34.980 --> 00:13:37.179 say he wrote lyrics and music for at least two 00:13:37.179 --> 00:13:40.559 songs. The musician was always there right alongside 00:13:40.559 --> 00:13:43.600 the writer. And in 1952, those two voices, along 00:13:43.600 --> 00:13:46.059 with the voice of the political disillusioned, 00:13:46.059 --> 00:13:48.820 all come together. Which brings us to part three, 00:13:49.019 --> 00:13:52.200 the achievement of invisibility. Yes. The book 00:13:52.200 --> 00:13:54.360 is finally published. It's a novel told by an 00:13:54.360 --> 00:13:56.860 unnamed African -American narrator charting his 00:13:56.860 --> 00:13:59.059 journey from the South to Harlem and ultimately 00:13:59.059 --> 00:14:01.700 underground. And the central concept, that idea 00:14:01.700 --> 00:14:03.779 of invisibility, he defines it right up front. 00:14:03.919 --> 00:14:06.360 He does. The narrator explains he's not a ghost 00:14:06.360 --> 00:14:09.019 or a spirit. He's invisible in a figurative sense 00:14:09.019 --> 00:14:12.059 because people refuse to see him. So it's a condition 00:14:12.059 --> 00:14:14.759 imposed on him by society. It's a social and 00:14:14.759 --> 00:14:17.759 moral failure of the world around him. And that 00:14:17.759 --> 00:14:20.759 refusal to see him forces him into this state 00:14:20.759 --> 00:14:23.789 of... deep dissociation, this search for an identity 00:14:23.789 --> 00:14:25.970 that the world won't grant him. And he's exploring 00:14:25.970 --> 00:14:28.250 all the different flavors of American racism, 00:14:28.370 --> 00:14:30.389 the kind in the South versus the kind in the 00:14:30.389 --> 00:14:32.409 North. They're very different. The Southern racism 00:14:32.409 --> 00:14:35.529 is paternalistic. It's overt. The Northern racism 00:14:35.529 --> 00:14:39.049 is more ideological, more organizational. But 00:14:39.049 --> 00:14:41.730 the result is the same invisibility. And the 00:14:41.730 --> 00:14:44.350 novel ends with him literally living underground. 00:14:45.240 --> 00:14:47.460 In a forgotten basement room in New York City. 00:14:47.580 --> 00:14:49.720 Right, and this is where that passion for technology 00:14:49.720 --> 00:14:52.659 comes back in a huge way. The light bulbs. The 00:14:52.659 --> 00:14:56.080 1 ,369 light bulbs that he has rigged up to illuminate 00:14:56.080 --> 00:14:58.659 his hole, stealing power from the electric company. 00:14:58.820 --> 00:15:00.940 And he's got his custom -built hi -fi stereo 00:15:00.940 --> 00:15:02.820 system down there. So he's surrounded himself 00:15:02.820 --> 00:15:05.740 with light, with technology, in order to be seen, 00:15:05.879 --> 00:15:08.159 but he's in a place where no one can see him. 00:15:08.340 --> 00:15:11.179 It's a perfect metaphor. He's trying to achieve 00:15:11.179 --> 00:15:14.039 total clarity. to understand the chaos of the 00:15:14.039 --> 00:15:17.240 world by listening to it on his stereo, by illuminating 00:15:17.240 --> 00:15:19.360 it with all this light. But he has to withdraw 00:15:19.360 --> 00:15:22.019 from that world completely to do it. He's taking 00:15:22.019 --> 00:15:24.200 it all apart to see how it works, just like those 00:15:24.200 --> 00:15:26.500 radios he built as a kid. And the narrator himself 00:15:26.500 --> 00:15:28.919 was such a different kind of character for that 00:15:28.919 --> 00:15:31.879 time. A radical departure. This was not the kind 00:15:31.879 --> 00:15:34.179 of protagonist you saw in a lot of protest novels. 00:15:34.539 --> 00:15:37.559 Yeah. He's educated. He's articulate. He's deeply 00:15:37.559 --> 00:15:40.620 self -aware, almost dispassionate at times. His 00:15:40.620 --> 00:15:42.639 anger is indelible. intellectual. It's filtered 00:15:42.639 --> 00:15:44.639 through all that modernism he read at Tuskegee. 00:15:44.759 --> 00:15:46.820 The book also didn't pull any punches on controversial 00:15:46.820 --> 00:15:50.139 topics. Not at all. It deals with incest. And 00:15:50.139 --> 00:15:53.240 most daringly for 1952, it gives an insider's 00:15:53.240 --> 00:15:55.220 critique of the Communist Party, which she calls 00:15:55.220 --> 00:15:57.980 the Brotherhood, in a novel. To do that at the 00:15:57.980 --> 00:16:00.500 height of the McCarthy era was incredibly brave. 00:16:00.759 --> 00:16:03.039 And the reception was just immediate. It was 00:16:03.039 --> 00:16:05.860 explosive. In 1953, it wins the U .S. National 00:16:05.860 --> 00:16:08.850 Book Award for fiction. And that was it. That 00:16:08.850 --> 00:16:10.450 was his ticket. He was no longer an outsider. 00:16:10.710 --> 00:16:12.669 He was now part of the literary establishment. 00:16:13.129 --> 00:16:16.110 But true to form, he was still his own harshest 00:16:16.110 --> 00:16:18.669 critic. Oh, absolutely. He was a perfectionist 00:16:18.669 --> 00:16:21.269 to the core. And even when he's accepting this 00:16:21.269 --> 00:16:23.690 huge honor, he says he felt he had only made 00:16:23.690 --> 00:16:26.750 an attempt at a major novel and that he was still 00:16:26.750 --> 00:16:28.990 unsatisfied with it. An attempt? That's mind 00:16:28.990 --> 00:16:30.750 -boggling. For him, the artistic standard was 00:16:30.750 --> 00:16:33.529 just impossibly high. But the world disagreed. 00:16:33.649 --> 00:16:35.610 And the biggest confirmation of its importance 00:16:35.610 --> 00:16:40.149 came later. The 1965 Book Week poll. Yes. 200 00:16:40.149 --> 00:16:43.409 critics, authors, and editors were asked to name 00:16:43.409 --> 00:16:45.190 the most important novel written since World 00:16:45.190 --> 00:16:48.769 War II. And they chose Invisible Man. Over everything 00:16:48.769 --> 00:16:51.669 else. Over Mailer, over Salinger, over Bellow. 00:16:51.730 --> 00:16:54.669 What made it resonate so profoundly, especially 00:16:54.669 --> 00:16:57.450 in the context of 1965 and the Civil Rights Movement? 00:16:57.690 --> 00:16:59.470 I think it's because it offered complexity in 00:16:59.470 --> 00:17:02.789 a time of slogans. It refused easy answers. It 00:17:02.789 --> 00:17:05.069 argued that the black experience wasn't one single 00:17:05.069 --> 00:17:07.710 thing. It was a multitude of things. It challenged 00:17:07.710 --> 00:17:10.349 the simple narrative of progress by showing the 00:17:10.349 --> 00:17:13.170 deep psychological cost of the struggle. It was 00:17:13.170 --> 00:17:15.369 a novel about the failure of all ideologies. 00:17:15.509 --> 00:17:17.529 And that spoke to a country that was grappling 00:17:17.529 --> 00:17:19.789 with its own identity. So it became more than 00:17:19.789 --> 00:17:21.410 just a great novel about the black experience. 00:17:21.569 --> 00:17:25.029 It became a great American novel, period. A foundational 00:17:25.029 --> 00:17:28.470 American novel. And Ellison used the visibility 00:17:28.470 --> 00:17:31.369 that came with that fame. After his bad experience 00:17:31.369 --> 00:17:33.789 with the Communist Party, he became a fierce 00:17:33.789 --> 00:17:36.930 advocate for art as a moral instrument, as the 00:17:36.930 --> 00:17:39.490 only thing that could truly cut through the blindness 00:17:39.490 --> 00:17:42.789 of society. And that new role as a public intellectual 00:17:42.789 --> 00:17:46.230 defines the next phase of his life, which takes 00:17:46.230 --> 00:17:49.589 us to part four, scholar, teacher, and the immense 00:17:49.589 --> 00:17:51.910 weight of the second novel. After the success, 00:17:52.150 --> 00:17:54.329 he moves into the world of academia. He teaches 00:17:54.329 --> 00:17:57.450 at Bard, at Rutgers, at Yale. He publishes his 00:17:57.450 --> 00:17:59.950 first collection of essays, Shadow and Act. in 00:17:59.950 --> 00:18:02.910 1964. And he dedicates it to Morteza Sprugg, 00:18:03.009 --> 00:18:05.269 his old English teacher from Tuskegee. Bringing 00:18:05.269 --> 00:18:08.289 it full circle. And by 1970, he has a permanent 00:18:08.289 --> 00:18:11.410 prestigious post at NYU as the Albert Schweitzer 00:18:11.410 --> 00:18:13.009 Professor of Humanities, where he stayed for 00:18:13.009 --> 00:18:15.289 a decade. He was a major intellectual figure. 00:18:15.470 --> 00:18:17.210 And he was being consulted in some really unexpected 00:18:17.210 --> 00:18:19.650 places. I was fascinated by the detail about 00:18:19.650 --> 00:18:21.430 the Hudson Institute. Isn't that incredible? 00:18:21.630 --> 00:18:25.329 In 1962, Herman Kahn, the futurist, recruits 00:18:25.329 --> 00:18:27.910 him as a consultant for a defense research think 00:18:27.910 --> 00:18:30.599 tank. What on earth did a defense think tank 00:18:30.599 --> 00:18:32.880 want with Ralph Ellison? They were trying to 00:18:32.880 --> 00:18:35.460 think bigger. They realized that to understand 00:18:35.460 --> 00:18:37.839 national security and strategy, you couldn't 00:18:37.839 --> 00:18:40.140 just look at weapon systems. You had to understand 00:18:40.140 --> 00:18:42.220 the national character, the culture, the history. 00:18:42.440 --> 00:18:45.059 And they believed the author of Invisible Man 00:18:45.059 --> 00:18:48.200 had unique insights into the soul of America. 00:18:48.599 --> 00:18:50.819 That's a level of respect for a novelist that 00:18:50.819 --> 00:18:53.349 you just don't see anymore. Almost never. At 00:18:53.349 --> 00:18:55.769 the same time, he's traveling, he's lecturing 00:18:55.769 --> 00:18:58.269 in Europe, he settles in Rome for a while and 00:18:58.269 --> 00:19:00.130 becomes good friends with the writer Robert Penn 00:19:00.130 --> 00:19:02.309 Warren. He was always in conversation with the 00:19:02.309 --> 00:19:04.789 great minds of his time. And his writing continued 00:19:04.789 --> 00:19:07.670 to focus on his two great loves. The black experience 00:19:07.670 --> 00:19:11.650 and jazz music. His essays on jazz are just brilliant. 00:19:12.250 --> 00:19:14.990 But the real window into his thinking during 00:19:14.990 --> 00:19:16.890 these years comes from his correspondence with 00:19:16.890 --> 00:19:19.009 the writer Albert Murray. Which was published 00:19:19.009 --> 00:19:22.880 as Trading Twelves. Yes. And reading those letters, 00:19:22.960 --> 00:19:25.160 it's like listening in on one of the great conversations 00:19:25.160 --> 00:19:27.220 of the 20th century. They're debating the civil 00:19:27.220 --> 00:19:29.200 rights movement. They're analyzing Duke Ellington. 00:19:29.299 --> 00:19:32.000 They are arguing about the very language we should 00:19:32.000 --> 00:19:34.720 use to describe the American experience. It's 00:19:34.720 --> 00:19:37.460 an intellectual feast. But hanging over all of 00:19:37.460 --> 00:19:40.740 this, the teaching, the essays, the awards, is 00:19:40.740 --> 00:19:44.160 this giant question mark. The second novel. The 00:19:44.160 --> 00:19:46.500 second novel and the terrible event that happened 00:19:46.500 --> 00:19:50.299 in 1967. It's a true literary tragedy. He had 00:19:50.299 --> 00:19:52.420 a summer home in Plainfield, Massachusetts, and 00:19:52.420 --> 00:19:55.140 there was a massive house fire. And in that fire, 00:19:55.319 --> 00:19:58.819 Ellison said, more than 300 pages of his manuscript 00:19:58.819 --> 00:20:00.819 for the second novel were destroyed. I can't 00:20:00.819 --> 00:20:03.200 even imagine for a perfectionist like him, someone 00:20:03.200 --> 00:20:05.440 who was already unsatisfied with his masterpiece, 00:20:05.819 --> 00:20:08.819 to lose that much work. It had to have been paralyzing, 00:20:08.880 --> 00:20:11.000 devastating. It wasn't just the pages. It was 00:20:11.000 --> 00:20:13.480 the momentum, the confidence. And yet he kept 00:20:13.480 --> 00:20:15.920 working on it. For the rest of his life. For 00:20:15.920 --> 00:20:18.640 nearly three more decades, he ended up writing 00:20:18.640 --> 00:20:21.559 over 2 ,000 pages for this book. 2 ,000 pages. 00:20:21.940 --> 00:20:24.359 But he never finished it. He never got it to 00:20:24.359 --> 00:20:26.319 a place where he felt it was ready for the world. 00:20:26.759 --> 00:20:29.819 He died of pancreatic cancer in 1994 with the 00:20:29.819 --> 00:20:32.720 novel still incomplete. It was the great unfinished 00:20:32.720 --> 00:20:36.119 project of his life. So for 42 years after Invisible 00:20:36.119 --> 00:20:38.380 Man was published, he was wrestling with its 00:20:38.380 --> 00:20:41.480 shadow. He was. And thankfully, we did eventually 00:20:41.480 --> 00:20:43.799 get to see the results of that struggle. His 00:20:43.799 --> 00:20:46.279 literary executor, John F. Callahan, began to 00:20:46.279 --> 00:20:48.279 piece it all together. So he got some posthumous 00:20:48.279 --> 00:20:50.519 collections? Yes. A book of short stories called 00:20:50.519 --> 00:20:55.200 Flying Home came out in 1996. Then in 1999, Callahan 00:20:55.200 --> 00:20:59.960 published Juneteenth, which was a 368 -page condensation 00:20:59.960 --> 00:21:03.349 of that massive 2 ,000 -page manuscript. A sort 00:21:03.349 --> 00:21:05.869 of edited, curated version of the unfinished 00:21:05.869 --> 00:21:09.150 work. Exactly. But then, in 2010, the full thing 00:21:09.150 --> 00:21:10.930 was published as three days before the shooting. 00:21:11.049 --> 00:21:13.349 And that includes all the pages, all the drafts, 00:21:13.349 --> 00:21:15.109 all the fragments. It lets you see the scale 00:21:15.109 --> 00:21:17.269 of his ambition, but also the scale of his struggle. 00:21:17.470 --> 00:21:19.650 Even with that struggle, his place in history 00:21:19.650 --> 00:21:22.349 was secure. The awards he received are just staggering. 00:21:22.630 --> 00:21:26.029 Oh, the recognition was immense. He got the Presidential 00:21:26.029 --> 00:21:28.970 Medal of Freedom in 1969, the National Medal 00:21:28.970 --> 00:21:32.069 of Arts in 1985. He was leader chevalier of the 00:21:32.069 --> 00:21:34.710 Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France. He got 00:21:34.710 --> 00:21:36.849 an honorary doctorate from Harvard. He was the 00:21:36.849 --> 00:21:39.230 first African -American admitted to the Century 00:21:39.230 --> 00:21:41.609 Association. It's an incredible list. And he's 00:21:41.609 --> 00:21:43.829 been memorialized in the places that shaped him. 00:21:44.170 --> 00:21:46.930 There's the Ralph Waldo Ellison Library in his 00:21:46.930 --> 00:21:49.049 hometown of Oklahoma City. And a beautiful memorial 00:21:49.049 --> 00:21:51.990 in Harlem, near where he lived for decades. Yes, 00:21:52.069 --> 00:21:55.619 on 150th and Riverside Drive. It's a park dedicated 00:21:55.619 --> 00:21:59.500 to him. And it has this huge 15 -foot bronze 00:21:59.500 --> 00:22:02.880 slab with a cutout of a human figure, a literal 00:22:02.880 --> 00:22:05.460 invisible man etched into the landscape of Harlem. 00:22:05.599 --> 00:22:07.220 So to bring this all together, it feels like 00:22:07.220 --> 00:22:09.180 his entire life was a funnel. All these early 00:22:09.180 --> 00:22:12.039 experiences, the hard labor as a kid, the outsider 00:22:12.039 --> 00:22:14.660 status at Tuskegee, the discovery of modernism, 00:22:14.680 --> 00:22:17.279 the betrayal by the communists. And you have 00:22:17.279 --> 00:22:18.839 to include the partnership with Fannie McConnell, 00:22:19.039 --> 00:22:21.150 who... gave him the stability to even write the 00:22:21.150 --> 00:22:23.509 book. All of those things, all those different 00:22:23.509 --> 00:22:25.529 layers of sound, as we said, had to be there 00:22:25.529 --> 00:22:28.170 to create the one singular voice of Invisible 00:22:28.170 --> 00:22:31.130 Man. And the central tension of his life seems 00:22:31.130 --> 00:22:33.990 to be right there in his most famous idea, the 00:22:33.990 --> 00:22:36.250 tension between visibility and invisibility. 00:22:36.549 --> 00:22:39.250 Absolutely. Here's a man who receives the highest 00:22:39.250 --> 00:22:41.950 honors a country can bestow, presidential medals, 00:22:42.230 --> 00:22:45.730 academic chairs, think tank consultancies. He 00:22:45.730 --> 00:22:48.349 is an incredibly visible public figure. And his 00:22:48.349 --> 00:22:50.450 entire life's work, the thing that made him famous, 00:22:50.549 --> 00:22:53.329 is about the pain of being unseen. And his own 00:22:53.329 --> 00:22:56.369 private life was dominated by this immense, invisible 00:22:56.369 --> 00:22:59.130 struggle to finish that second. He was the most 00:22:59.130 --> 00:23:01.569 famous chronicler of invisibility in the world. 00:23:01.710 --> 00:23:05.289 His whole life embodied that paradox. A man of 00:23:05.289 --> 00:23:08.829 so many talents, musician, technician, sculptor, 00:23:08.829 --> 00:23:12.809 writer, who became famous for one single towering 00:23:12.809 --> 00:23:14.750 achievement. Which leaves us with a final thought 00:23:14.750 --> 00:23:16.930 for you, our listeners. Ellison wrestled his 00:23:16.930 --> 00:23:18.730 whole life with the impossibility of having his 00:23:18.730 --> 00:23:21.529 full, complex self seen by the public. He was 00:23:21.529 --> 00:23:23.390 always more than just the author of Invisible 00:23:23.390 --> 00:23:26.009 Man. So in our world today, a world that's just 00:23:26.009 --> 00:23:28.490 saturated with information, where we are constantly 00:23:28.490 --> 00:23:30.890 performing our identities on social media, does 00:23:30.890 --> 00:23:33.109 that concept of invisibility still resonate? 00:23:33.289 --> 00:23:35.609 The idea of being known for one thing but having 00:23:35.609 --> 00:23:39.289 your true, complicated self overlooked. And maybe 00:23:39.289 --> 00:23:42.069 to add to that, if Ellison's life shows us that 00:23:42.069 --> 00:23:45.390 achieving real depth requires decades of labor, 00:23:45.869 --> 00:23:48.450 of struggle, and even a kind of retreat from 00:23:48.450 --> 00:23:51.109 the world. How does that challenge how we think 00:23:51.109 --> 00:23:53.569 about our own lives today, when we're always 00:23:53.569 --> 00:23:55.710 expected to be visible, to be projecting, to 00:23:55.710 --> 00:23:58.549 be online? Is it possible that true self -knowledge, 00:23:58.630 --> 00:24:01.069 the kind Ellison was searching for, can only 00:24:01.069 --> 00:24:02.910 really happen when we allow parts of ourselves 00:24:02.910 --> 00:24:05.250 to remain invisible? That's the question he leaves 00:24:05.250 --> 00:24:07.390 us with. A perfect place to end. Thank you for 00:24:07.390 --> 00:24:09.490 joining us for this deep dive into the life of 00:24:09.490 --> 00:24:10.589 Ralph Ellison. My pleasure.