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The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison ed. by John F. Callahan and Marc C. Conner (review)
African American Review Pub Date : 2020-12-12 , DOI: 10.1353/afa.2020.0040
Ross Posnock

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Reviewed by:

  • The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison ed. by John F. Callahan and Marc C. Conner
  • Ross Posnock
John F. Callahan and Marc C. Conner, eds. The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison. New York: Random House, 2019. 1,072 pp. $50.00.

“Editions of letters and diaries say that a writer has arrived, or is still with us, much more than biographies do,” Darryl Pinckney remarked in his review of Trading Twelves (2000), the Ellison/Albert Murray letters. The warmly celebratory response in major media to The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison upon its publication in the fall of 2019 ratifies Pinckney’s point. Expertly introduced decade by decade by the incomparable John Callahan, The Letters arrive as a great gift to American literature, an intellectual feast of over a thousand pages, a volume that easily takes its place among the most important collections by any American author. The letters above all allow us to bear intimate witness to the birth of Ellison’s ideas (highlights include the 1941 and 1945 letters to Richard Wright, the 1945 letter to Kenneth Burke, and the 1970 letter to Stanley Edgar Hyman) expressed with remarkable force and pungency. Yet intellectual ferment is only one strand in this tapestry; another reveals the private Ellison. His early letters to his mother Ida are often preoccupied with requests for money—he hangs with a fast crowd at Tuskegee—but eventually come to express anguished empathy for her isolation (deserted by her second husband and “toiling from morning to night”), some reassurance that he is special even if unemployed (“every one thinks I’m a little odd and a bit gifted”) and outrage at a world so indifferent to poor people (“I find myself wishing that the whole thing would explode”). These feelings culminate in an August 30, 1937 letter to Ida, the last one she reads before dying unexpectedly two months later. His romantic pain is vivid in two 1941 letters to Sanora Babb, herself a fledgling (white) novelist with whom Ellison was in love; in letters in the 1950s, he confesses to his wife Fanny his guilt and confusion in the wake of an extramarital affair while at the American Academy in Rome. A third strand are the exchanges with his literary circle—Murray, of course, but also during the 1950s, Saul Bellow, and more enduring if less intense friendships with Robert Penn Warren and Richard Wilbur. A fourth thread are the long, nostalgic letters to family and friends recalling the world of his fatherless childhood in Oklahoma City. “I have been returning on the average at least once over the last seven years,” he writes in 1971. “And when I get there, I’m like a ghost—or a Rip Van Winkle” who awakes to discover his world has changed. Each of these strands—I have summarized only the major ones—has its own particular cadence and voice, which makes The Selected Letters a virtuoso display of American prose.

The Fall 2019 reviews and events (including a reading of letters at the Schomburg Library) reaffirmed Ellison’s cultural stature. And two of the major reviews (in The New Yorker by Kevin Young and on the front page of the New York Times Book Review by Saidiya Hartman) suggest that a younger generation of critics still find Ellison of considerable value even when some of their political and cultural views are at odds with his (I am thinking of Hartman’s feminism and Afropessimism). Hartman (December 19, 2019) subtly balances judgments: “ ‘Complexity,’ ” she begins, “was the term that Ralph Ellison deployed most often to describe black life and culture. And it is the term best suited to convey the character of this brilliant, often [End Page 241] disapproving and unsparing man.” Although “complexity” has long been a piety of literary humanism associated both with Ellison and with his fellow New York intellectual (and occasional antagonist) Lionel Trilling—suggesting their reverence for literature in the face of political and sociological reductionism—Hartman means something else by the word. This is clear from what soon follows upon “unsparing”: that Ellison’s “cult of the masculine hero” sought to restore “to the native son truth and...



中文翻译:

拉尔夫·埃里森选集选集。约翰·卡拉汉(John F.Callahan)和马克·康纳(Marc C.Conner)撰写(评论)

代替摘要,这里是内容的简要摘录:

审核人:

  • 拉尔夫·埃里森选集选集。约翰·卡拉汉(John F. Callahan)和马克·康纳(Marc C. Conner)
  • 罗斯·波斯诺克
约翰·卡拉汉(John F. Callahan)和马克·康纳(Marc C. Conner)编辑。拉尔夫埃里森选集。纽约:兰登书屋(Random House),2019. 1,072 pp。$ 50.00。

“E的信件和日记扬长避短说,一个作家已经到来,或者是仍然和我们在一起,远远超过传记做,”达里尔平克尼说在他的评论中贸易Twelves(2000年),埃里森/阿尔伯特·默里字母。主要媒体对《拉尔夫·埃里森精选信》于2019年秋季出版后的热烈庆祝反映了平克尼的观点。通过十年所无法比拟的约翰·卡拉汉,熟练地介绍了十年来的信件它是对美国文学的巨大礼物,一千多页的学术盛宴,很容易成为美国作家最重要的收藏之一。最重要的是,这些信件使我们能够亲眼目睹埃里森的思想的诞生(主要内容包括1941年和1945年致理查德·赖特的信,1945年致肯尼思·伯克的信以及1970年致斯坦利·埃德加·海曼的信),它们表现出了非凡的力量和刺激性。然而,智力发酵只是这一挂毯中的一环。另一个揭示了私人埃里森。他给母亲艾达(Ida)的早期信件常常忙于索要钱财-他在塔斯基吉(Tuskegee)拥挤不堪,但最终却表达了对她的孤独的同情心(对第二任丈夫怀有深情,“从早到晚都在劳碌”),保证他即使失业也很特别(“每个人都认为我有点古怪,有点天赋”),并且对这个对穷人无动于衷的世界感到愤怒(“我发现自己希望整个事情都会爆发”) 。在1937年8月30日写给Ida的信中,这些情绪达到了顶点,这是她读到的最后一封信,两个月后意外去世。1941年写给萨诺拉·巴布(Sanora Babb)的两封信生动地表达了他的浪漫之痛。在1950年代的信件中,他在罗马美国学院时因婚外恋向妻子范妮坦白了自己的内and和困惑。第三条是与他的文学界的交流-当然,默里(Murray)也是1950年代的索尔·贝娄(Saul Bellow),与罗伯特·佩恩·沃伦(Robert Penn Warren)和理查德·威尔伯(Richard Wilbur)的友谊即使不那么紧张,也更加持久。第四个主题是写给家人和朋友的长而怀旧的信件,回顾了他在俄克拉荷马城的无父童年的世界。他在1971年写道:“过去七年来,我平均至少回国一次。当我到达那里时,我就像一个幽灵-或瑞普·范·温克尔(Rip Van Winkle)”,他醒来发现自己的世界改变了。每条线(我仅总结了主要的线)都有自己独特的节奏和声音,这使得精选信是美国散文的艺术展示。

2019年秋季的评论和活动(包括在Schomburg图书馆读书)重申了埃里森的文化地位。有两项主要评论(凯文·杨(Kevin Young)的《纽约客》和赛义迪亚·哈特曼(Saidiya Hartman)的《纽约时报》书评的头版)表明,即使他们的一些政治和政治观点受到批评,年轻一代的批评家仍然认为埃里森具有相当大的价值。文化观点与他的观点不一致(我在思考哈特曼的女权主义和农神主义)。哈特曼(Hartman,2019年12月19日)巧妙地平衡了判断:“'复杂性',”她开始说,“是拉尔夫·埃里森(Ralph Ellison)最常使用的术语来描述黑人的生活和文化。这个词最适合传达这个杰出人物的性格,通常[End Page 241]不赞成和不尊重的人。” 尽管“复杂性”长期以来一直是与埃里森及其纽约知识分子(有时是反对派)莱昂内尔·特里林(Lionel Trilling)相关联的文学人文主义的虔诚–表示他们在面对政治和社会学还原主义时对文学的崇敬之举–哈特曼通过这个单词。这很明显地从“无保留”之后很快得出:埃里森的“男性英雄崇拜”力图将“恢复为儿子的真相并...

更新日期:2020-12-12
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