Ralph Ellison in a letter to a friend: “A reporter’s truth for the novelist is simply unrefined ore.”
Ellison wrote one of the great American novels, “Invisible Man.” He was also a journalist. And a letter writer – a prolific one: “The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison” runs to 982 pages.
John F. Callahan and Marc C. Connor, who edited the collection, say Ellison took care with his letters, editing and interrogating and rewriting. A theme or topic he explores in a letter to one correspondent might be repeated and refined when he wrote someone else. Some luminous writing resulted.
Reading the letters, I felt Ellison was in the room, talking to me. In fact he was talking to his mother, writing home to her from Tuskegee Institute. He wrote other letters to friends, lovers, colleagues.
Here he is in May of 1954, writing to a colleague who was also an old friend:
“Actually, my lecture fee is (as it was in March) $175.00 plus expenses, at which rate the lectures would come to $875.00 for the five days -- excluding expenses – and I think the $500 figure plus the round trip flight fare, food, laundry, room and board and minor incidentals (I itemize because Flood left me holding the tabs for quite a number of small matters). I‘d expect to work like hell. Reid will find that this total will (come) to something around $635.00, but if he wants a nice round figure to request $600 is a good one. The flight fare from here to Montgomery and back is $129.03, so he can see where the bulk of the expenses lie.
“Well so now the Court has found in our favor and recognized our human psychological complexity and citizenship and another battle of the Civil War has been won. The rest is up to us and I'm very glad. The (Brown v Board of Education) decision came while I was reading "A Stillness at Appomattox," and a study of the Negro Freedman and it made a heightening of emotion and a telescoping of perspective, yes and a sense of the problems that lie ahead that left me wet-eyed. I could see the whole road stretched out and it got all mixed up with this book I'm trying to write and it left me twisted with joy and a sense of inadequacy. Why did I have to be a writer during a time when events sneer openly at your efforts defying consciousness and form? Well, so now the judges have found and Negroes must be individuals and that is hopeful and good. What a wonderful world of possibilities are unfolded for the children! For me there is still the problem of making meaning out of the past and I guess I'm lucky I described Bledsoe before he was checked out. Now I'm writing about the evasion of identity that is another characteristically American problem that must be about to change. I hope so, it's giving me enough trouble. Anyway, here's to integration, the only integration that counts: that of the personality."
I’m fascinated by the way Ellison goes from the mundane to the momentous – much the way we move through life.
Ellison’s letters feel immediate, authoritative, precise.
My late grandmother was in the habit reading her local paper after everyone else in the house had gone to bed. When I’m writing an article, I often imagine her at her kitchen table in the intimate circle of light from the overhead fixture. She’s taking a moment to catch up on her neighbors in northern Florida and of people who, while far away and living different lives, she could see as neighbors.
A reader’s attention and empathy are gifts. I want to be respectful of my grandmother’s time, so I strive as I write to be exact, clear and engaging. It takes work, as Ellison knew. Knowing your audience makes it a little easier.