edited by John F. Callahan
Hamish Hamilton, 368pp, £16.99
There are three monoliths of American fiction, by writers whose subsequent works proved to be a mere fall of pebbles: Call It Sleep, by Henry Roth; The Catcher in the Rye, by J D Salinger; and Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison. Of those three distinguished first novels, Ellison's had generated, over the years, the greatest expectations for any second novel, in part because Ellison had done the least to dissipate them: since the publication of Invisible Man in 1952, there have been two fine books of essays, a book of short stories, and several teasing extracts from a novel that Ellison had been working on since the mid-50s. (Whereas, by contrast, Roth simply retreated into silence for decades, and Salinger published his trivial and whimsical tales of the Glass family.)
Ellison died in 1994, before his second novel was finished, leaving more than 2,000 pages in various stages of completion. John Callahan, his responsible and painstakingly scholarly executor, has boldly decided not to make available the entire rough torso but to mount a polished head. He has taken what he sees as the most coherent and central episode from Ellison's manuscripts, and presented it as a single work. The subtitle that Ellison's American publishers gave Juneteenth - "a novel" - has been borrowed by their British counterparts; they call it "the most keenly awaited novel in American literary history". But this is simple misrepresentation, and several critics in America have rightly complained about it. Juneteenth is decidedly not a novel: it lacks a novel's shape, rationale, and self-justifying propulsion. Further, even if Juneteenth possessed these qualities, it would not be Ralph Ellison's second novel, a book we will never read because Ellison never finished it.
But judged even as an extract - as only a piece of writing - Juneteenth is still a disappointment. It is too often sentimental, rhetorical, and homiletic, and it rests on what seem false premises. It is possible that Ellison's project, which was vast - a many-eyed attempt to see the entirety of post-war American society - had become unrealisable, and that Ellison, always an exquisitely sensitive craftsman, knew this. It seems the best explanation for Ellison's 40-year inability to publish a complete second novel.
Invisible Man, one of the canonical postwar American novels, is a rhapsodic investigation of what Ellison called "the beautiful absurdity" of American identity. Its narrator is a kind of Underground Man, a nameless black American who tells us about his life-journey, from his adolescence in the South to his turbulent adulthood and adventures in New York. This man passes through, and in turn rejects, the mythical possibilities of black citizenship as they are presented to him during his odyssey: meek assimilation and religious consolation in the South, militant Africanism and radical Communism in the North. He emerges at the end of the book as Ellison once described Mark Twain's Jim, "like all men, ambiguous, limited in circumstance but not in possibility".
The beauty of Invisible Man is that it is a kind of Bildungsroman in reverse, in which the hero instructs himself in the great truth that he will not be instructed in. Each lesson ends in a failed test. The novel offers a lesson in freedom, one arrived at negatively. Thus the book is a story of education that confounds its own educative pattern. At the end of the novel, the narrator seems to wobble on a pregnable pivot; he has gone underground and has become invisible to his fellow-men, and he could go either way, we feel. He may break out of society's race-shackles, or his spirits may curdle into the deepest pessimism. But the novel, ambiguously poised, remains free, an enactment of freedom.
Juneteenth, by contrast, is something of a sermon, and somewhat imprisoning. Consider, to begin with, the book's plot-foundations, which seem both incredible and sentimentally rigged. A racist, bigoted senator, Adam Sunraider, is shot while giving a speech. The Reverend Alonzo Hickman, a gentle, noble preacher from the South, is in the audience, and rushes to Sunraider's hospital deathbed.
Over the course of the book, the two men conduct an impassioned conversation, in which the true story of the senator's life is disclosed. For the senator, though racist, is in fact a light-skinned black man (or half-black) who has been "passing" as white; in fact, the senator was raised by Hickman, who was his guardian. Hickman called him Bliss, because so little was known about his origins (ignorance is bliss). Hickman had great hopes for Bliss, whom he used as a child-preacher: the two, adult and child, would do revival-meeting routines together. But Bliss betrayed that hope when he ran away to the North and buried his name and his blackness.
The disappointment at this scenario lies not just in its high improbability, but in the uneasy sense we get that Ellison has produced an ideologically convenient narrative, whose business is to swell noble and affirmative thoughts from its two protagonists. Is there not more than a quality of political wish-fulfilment about the very premise of the racist senator who is actually black? Is there not a feeling that the novel wants to teach Bliss - and us - a ponderous lesson in the importance of remembering one's own?
The book, for all the considerable beauties of its prose, never quite relinquishes an air of instruction, as Hickman sets about the task of reminding the senator who he really is. As Hickman sermonises to Bliss: "Time turns, Bliss, and remembering helps us to save ourselves. Somewhere through all the falsehood and the forgetting is something solid and good." Admirers of Invisible Man can only turn in embarrassment from such preachy lines, and conclude, sadly, that Ellison had only the one great novel in him.
That air of instruction is made especially windy by the creation of Hickman, who is an impossibly noble, fine, idealised Southern gentleman. He lacks true personality. He is an educator, too often given to fine generalisations: he is, as it were, Rasselas in a dark suit. It is hard to like him, or to feel anything much about him, because he is starved of individuality. His function seems to be to remind Bliss of how fine things were in the South, and to embody the noblest qualities of the African-American, rather as Mary Rambo did in Invisible Man. (Ellison's notes, which John Calahan has very help fully provided at the back of the book, suggest that this is exactly how Ellison saw Hickman's narrative role.)
Late in the book, Hickman reminds himself that he hasn't "asked anything except that he [Bliss] remember and honor the days of his youth". But just this narrowness of function is his terrible lack as a character. He delivers folksy homilies: "To a woman a baby is a baby. She ain't rational about it, way down deep she ain't." Or: "The first thing you have to understand is that this is a strange country." Near the end of the book, he rises to a peroration: "Because this American cloth, the human cloth, is woven too fine for that... Because you know that you were born of sacrifice, and that we have had to live by a different truth and that that truth is good and the vision of manhood it stands for is more human, more desirable, more real."
But this kind of thing is a refuge from the novelistic, and a descent into an allegory of "affirmation". As Hickman leans on the narrative, so an earnest cloud floats over the book, and the weather becomes monochrome. A noble allegory rains down. There are individual scenes of great force, of course. Bliss's memories of working for Hickman as a child-preacher are nothing like as rosy as Hickman's. Bliss recalls a routine in which he had to climb into a coffin, which frightened him. These memories are powerfully rendered. In this way, Bliss offers some antiphonal resistance to Hickman's sunny nobility.
But it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Ellison's feelings are with Hickman, and that he wanted this piece of writing to be a species of lyrical allegory in which readers were to be reminded that the noblest black Americans, represented by Hickman, had been the noblest of all Americans, because they had shouldered great hardship with dignity and discipline. Ellison admitted as much when he wrote, in a note, that Hickman "thinks of Negroes as the embodiment of American democratic promise, as the last who are fated to become the first". This is a decent politics, and it was embodied by Ralph Ellison, who elaborated it with great lucidity and elegance in his essays. John Callahan and Ellison's publishers here and in America should be congratulated for offering us what amounts to Ellison's longest and most lyrical summary of that politics. But this is not necessarily a novelistic or dramatic vision. Invisible Man was a quest for American identity, but Juneteenth, alas, is only a lesson in it.
The difference between those two pieces of writing is the difference of a novel.