Albert Murray is a teacher by temperament, and as he explains a point he’ll often say that he wants to be sure to “work it into your consciousness.” The twentieth century has worked a great deal into Murray’s consciousness. He was fifteen when the Scottsboro trial began, twenty-two when Marian Anderson sang at the Lincoln Memorial. He joined the Air Force when it was segregated and rejoined shortly after it had been desegregated. He was in his late thirties when Brown v. Board of Education was decided, when the conflict in Korea was concluded, when Rosa Parks was arrested. He was in his forties when the Civil Rights Act was passed, when SNCC was founded, when John F. Kennedy was killed. And he was in his fifties when the Black Panther Party was formed, when King was shot, when Black Power was proclaimed. Such are the lineaments of public history—the sort of grainy national drama that newsreels used to record. For him, though, the figures of history are as vivid as drinking companions, and, on the whole, no more sacrosanct.
He is equally unabashed about taking on contemporary figures of veneration, even in the presence of a venerator. Thus, about the novelist Toni Morrison, we agree to disagree. “I do think it’s tainted with do-goodism,” he says of her Nobel Prize, rejecting what he considers the special pleading of contemporary feminism. “I think it’s redressing wrongs. You don’t have to condescend to no goddam Jane Austen. Or the Brontës, or George Eliot and George Sand. These chicks are tough. You think you’ll get your fastball by Jane Austen? So we don’t need special pleading for anything. And the same goes for blackness.” He bridles at the phenomenon of Terry McMillan, the best-selling author of “Waiting to Exhale”—or, more precisely, at the nature of the attention she has received. “I think it’s a mistake to try to read some profound political significance into everything, like as soon as a Negro writes it’s got to be some civil-rights thing,” he says. “It’s just Jackie Collins stuff.”
At times, his pans somehow edge into panegyrics, the result being what might be called a backhanded insult. About Maya Angelou’s much discussed Inaugural poem he says, “It’s like the reaction to ‘Porgy and Bess.’ Man, you put a bunch of brown-skinned people onstage, with footlights and curtains, and they make anything work. White people have no resistance to Negro performers: they charm the pants off anything. Black people make you listen up. They’re singing ‘Old Man River’—‘Tote that barge, lift that bale’? What the fuck is that? Everybody responded like ‘This is great.’ That type of fantastic charm means that black performers can redeem almost any type of pop fare.”
Since discipline and craft are his by-words, however, he distrusts staged spontaneity. “He plays the same note that he perfected twenty-five years ago, and he acts like he’s got to sweat to get the note out of the goddam guitar,” Murray says of the contemporary blues musician B. B. King. “He’s got to shake his head and frown, and it’s just going to be the same goddam note he already played twenty-five years ago.” Murray himself doesn’t mind returning to notes he played twenty-five years ago—his nonfiction books explore the same set of issues, and can be read as chapters of a single ongoing opus. Indeed, from all accounts the fashioning of this particular cultural hero began long before the start of his writing career.
In Murray’s case, heroism was a matter both of circumstance and of will. Certainly he has long been an avid student of the subject. Lord Raglan’s classic “The Hero: A Study in Tradition, Myth, and Drama” (1936) is among the books most frequently cited in his writing, and it remains a part of his personal canon. Moreover, the mythic patterns that Lord Raglan parsed turn out to have had resonances for Murray beyond the strictly literary. According to Raglan’s exhaustively researched generalizations, the hero is highborn, but “the circumstances of his conception are unusual,” and he is “spirited away” to be “reared by foster-parents in a far country.” Then, “on reaching manhood,” he “returns or goes to his future kingdom,” confronts and defeats the king, or a dragon, or some such, and starts being heroic in earnest. So it was, more or less, with Oedipus, Theseus, Romulus, Joseph, Moses, Siegfried, Arthur, Robin Hood, and—oh, yes—Albert Murray.
Murray was born in 1916 and grew up in Magazine Point, a hamlet not far from Mobile, Alabama. His mother was a housewife, and his father, Murray says, was a “common laborer,” who sometimes helped lay railroad tracks as a cross-tie cutter and at other times harvested timber in the Turpentine woods. “As far as the Murrays were concerned, it was a fantastic thing that I finished the ninth grade,” he recalls, “or that I could read the newspaper.” But he had already decided that he was bound for college. Everyone in the village knew that there was something special about him. And he knew it, too.
He had known it ever since an all-night wake—he was around eleven at the time—when he had fallen asleep in the living room, his head cradled in his mother’s lap. At one point, he surfaced to hear himself being discussed, but, with a child’s cunning, he pretended he was still asleep.
“Tell me something,” a relative was saying. “Is it true that Miss Graham is really his mama?”
“She’s the one brought him into the world,” Mrs. Murray replied. “But I’m his mama. She gave him to me when he was no bigger than a minute, and he was so little I had to put him on a pillow to take him home. I didn’t think he was going to make it. I laid him out for God to take him two or three times. And I said, ‘Lord this child is here for something, so I’m going to feed this child and he’s going to make it.’” It was a moment that Al Murray likens to finding out the truth about Santa Claus.
Murray’s birth parents were, as he slowly learned, well educated and securely middle class—people who belonged to an entirely different social stratum from that of his adoptive parents. His natural father, John Young, came from a well-established family in town. His natural mother had been attending Tuskegee as a boarding student and working part time for John Young’s aunt and uncle, who were in the real-estate business. When she learned that a close encounter with John Young had left her pregnant, she had to leave town—“because of the disgrace,” Murray explains. As luck would have it, a cousin of hers knew a married woman who, unable to bear a child of her own, was interested in adopting one. Murray doesn’t have to be prodded to make the fairy-tale connection. “It’s just like the prince left among the paupers,” he says cheerfully. (In “The Omni-Americans” he wrote, apropos of the 1965 Moynihan report on the breakdown of the black-family structure, “How many epic heroes issue from conventional families?”)
As a freshman at the Tuskegee Institute—the ancestral kingdom he was fated to enter—Murray became aware of a junior whose reading habits were alarmingly similar to his. He was a music major from Oklahoma named Ralph Waldo Ellison, and what first impressed Murray about him was his wardrobe. “Joe College, right out of Esquire—he had fine contrasting slacks, gray tweed jacket. He would be wearing bow ties and two-tone shoes,” Murray recalls. “In those days, when you checked out a book from the library you had a little slip in the back where you would write your name, and then they would stamp the due date.” Consequently, when Murray took out a book by, say, T. S. Eliot or Robinson Jeffers, he could see who had previously borrowed the book. Time and again, it was that music major with the two-tone shoes.
Ellison left Tuskegee for New York before completing his senior year: his absence was meant to be temporary, a means of saving some money, but he never went back. Murray earned his B.A. at Tuskegee in 1939, and stayed on to teach. In 1941, he married Mozelle Menefee, who was a student there. He spent the last two years of the Second World War on active duty in the Air Force. “I was just hoping I’d live long enough for Thomas Mann to finish the last volume of ‘Joseph and His Brothers,’” he says. Two years after his discharge, he moved to New York, where, on the G.I. bill, he got a master’s degree in literature from New York University. It was also in New York that the friendship between him and Ellison took off. Ellison read passages to Murray from a manuscript that would turn into “Invisible Man.” The two men explored the street
s and the sounds of Harlem together; over meals and over drinks, they hashed out ideas about improvisation, the blues, and literary modernism. Even then, Murray had a reputation as a “great explainer.”
The prominent black religious and literary scholar Nathan A. Scott, who was a graduate student in New York in the forties and had become a friend of Ellison’s, tells about being in the Gotham Book Mart one day and noticing another black man there. “I was somewhat surprised to find this slight, dark man there, because I’d never bumped into a Negro there,” Scott recounts. “And some young white chap came in, and they knew each other and immediately plunged into a spirited conversation, and at a certain point I overheard this chap say to the black man, ‘Well, what are you working on these days?’ To which the black chap replied, ‘Oh, I am doing an essay in self-definition.’” (And Scott laughs loudly.) Later, at a dinner at Ellison’s apartment, Ellison introduced Scott to his friend Albert Murray: “Immediately, I thought, By God, here is the chap who was doing that essay in self-definition! Inwardly, I laughed all over again.”
If it was clear that the young man was interested in trying to write, it wasn’t so clear what the results were. In the early fifties, Saul Bellow and Ralph Ellison shared a house in Dutchess County, and Bellow recalls seeing Murray from time to time down in the city. “I think he agreed with Ralph, in simply assuming that they were deeply installed in the whole American picture,” Bellow says. He adds that Ellison talked about Murray’s writing in those days, but that he himself never saw any of it. In 1952, Ellison published “Invisible Man.” The book was a best-seller for several months, and garnered some of the most enthusiastic critical responses anyone could remember. It was soon a classroom staple, the subject of books and dissertations. It was read and reread. Ellison, in short, had become an immortal. And Murray? With a wife and a daughter to support, he was pursuing a more conventional career—in the Air Force, which he rejoined in 1951.
As a military officer, Murray taught courses in geopolitics in the Air Force R.O.T.C. program at Tuskegee, where he was based for much of the fifties, and he oversaw the administration of large-scale technical operations both in North Africa and in the United States. While his military career has remained oddly isolated from his creative work—a matter of regret, in the opinion of some of his friends—the experience would leave him impatient with the pretensions of the by-any-means-necessary brigade. He says, in that distinctively Murrayesque tone of zestful exasperation, “Let’s talk about ‘the fire next time.’ You know damn well they can put out the fire by Wednesday.”
When Murray retired from the military, in 1962, he moved to New York, and soon his articles began to appear in periodicals (Life, The New Leader) and collections (“Anger, and Beyond”). In 1964, Ellison wrote a letter about his old friend to one Jacob Cohen, who was planning to start a magazine. “Actually I find it very difficult to write about him,” the letter began. “I suppose because I have known him since our days at Tuskegee, and because our contacts since that time have been so constant and our assumptions about so many matters in such close agreement that I really don’t have the proper sense of perspective.” Ellison went on to say of Murray, “He has the imagination which allows him to project himself into the centers of power, and he uses his imagination to deal with serious problems seriously and as though he were a responsible participant in the affairs of our nation and our time.” The following year, a panel of book critics, authors, and editors found “Invisible Man” to be the most widely admired novel published since the Second World War. Meanwhile, Albert Murray, then two years out of the Air Force, was scarcely known outside the circle of his acquaintances.
However asymmetric the public stature of the pair, people who spent time with Murray and Ellison in those days were impressed by the ease and intimacy of their friendship. In the late sixties, Willie Morris, then the editor of Harper’s, eagerly sought their company: they provided him with a refreshing contrast to what he found a suffocating literary climate. He recalls, “In every way, they were like brothers—you know, soul brothers and fellow-writers—but Ellison’s star was so bright, and Al was just really getting started.” Soul brothers they may have been; they were also brothers-in-arms. When Murray rose to do battle with the rising ranks of black nationalism, he knew he shared a foxhole with Ralph Ellison, and there must have been comfort in that.
It may seem ironic that the person who first urged “The Omni-Americans” on me was Larry Neal, one of the Black Arts founders. But Neal was a man of far greater subtlety than the movement he spawned, and he understood Albert Murray’s larger enterprise—the one that he shared with Ellison—better than most. People who may not read Murray but like the idea of him reflexively label him an “integrationist”; seldom do they take in the term’s full complexity. In Murray’s hands, integration wasn’t an act of accommodation but an act of introjections. Indeed, at the heart of Murray and Ellison’s joint enterprise was perhaps the most breathtaking act of cultural chutzpah this land had witnessed since Columbus blithely claimed it all for Isabella.
In its bluntest form, their assertion was that the truest Americans were black Americans. For much of what was truly distinctive about America’s “national character” was rooted in the improvisatory prehistory of the blues. The very sound of American English “is derived from the timbre of the African voice and the listening habits of the African ear,” Ellison maintained. “If there is such a thing as a Yale accent, there is a Negro wail in it.” This is the lesson that the protagonist of Ellison’s novel learns while working at a paint factory: the whitest white is made by adding a drop of black. For generations, the word “American” had tacitly connoted “white.” Murray inverted the cultural assumptions and the verbal conventions: in his discourse, “American,” roughly speaking, means “black.” So, even as the clenched-fist crowd was scrambling for cultural crumbs, Murray was declaring the entire harvest board of American civilization to be his birthright. In a sense, Murray was the ultimate black nationalist. And the fact that people so easily mistook his vision for its opposite proved how radical it was.
But why stop with matters American? What did the European savants of Existentialism understand about la condition humaine that Ma Rainey did not? In later works, most notably “Stomping the Blues” (1976), Murray took the blues to places undreamed-of by its originators. It has long been a commonplace that the achievements of black music have far outstripped those of black literature—that no black writer has produced work of an aesthetic complexity comparable to Duke Ellington’s, Count Basie’s, or Charlie Parker’s. This much, for Murray, was a point of departure: he sought to process the blues into a self-conscious aesthetic, to translate the deep structure of the black vernacular into prose. Arguably, LeRoi Jones attempted something similar in his celebrated “Blues People” (1963), but there sociology gained the upper hand over art. (Ellison, writing in The New York Review of Books, complained that Jones’s approach was enough to “give even the blues the blues.”) To Murray, the blues stood in opposition to all such reductionism. “What it all represents is an attitude toward the nature of human experience (and the alternatives of human adjustment) that is both elemental and comprehensive,” he wrote in “Stomping the Blues,” and he continued:
It is a statement about confronting the complexities inherent in the human situation and about improvising or experimenting or riffing or otherwise playing with (or even gambling with) such possibilities as are also inherent in the obstacles, the disjunctures, and the jeopardy. It is also a statement about perseverance and about resilience and thus also about the maintenance of equilibrium despite precarious circumstances and about achieving elegance in the very process of coping with the rudiments of subsistence.
Though Murray’s salvific conception of the blues may seem fantastical, it represented precisely the alternative that Larry Neal and others were searching for. In truth, you could no more capture the sublimity of music in earthbound prose than you could trap the moon’s silve
ry reflection in a barrel of rainwater, but there was heroism, surely, in the effort.
Nor was it only literature that could be revivified by jazz and the blues. That was where Bearden came in, and that was why his friendship with Murray had to be understood also as an artistic alliance. Bearden’s mixed-media works could serve as a cultural paradigm for the kind of bricolage and hybridity that Murray favored.
In recent stanzas entitled “Omni-Albert Murray” the young African-American poet Elizabeth Alexander writes, “In my mind and in his I think a painting is a poem/A tambourine’s a hip shake and train whistle a guitar.” Certainly Murray proved an authoritative exponent of Bearden’s works, the titles of which were frequently of his devising. The literary scholar Robert O’Meally remembers being with Bearden and Murray in Books & Company when the two were trying to decide on a name for whatever picture Bearden had brought along that day. O’Meally recalls, “It might be that Al Murray’s eye was caught by the figure of a woman in one corner of the image. And he’d say, ‘Who’s that?’ And Bearden would be looking embarrassed, because the woman in question had been an old girlfriend of his. Maybe Bearden would say, ‘Oh, she’s just a woman I once knew from North Carolina.’ And then Murray would say, ‘I’ve got it. Let’s call it “Red-Headed Woman from North Carolina.”’ Or, ‘I know, call it “Red-Headed Woman from North Carolina with Rooster.”’ And Bearden would go and write that on the back of his painting.”
Murray stood ready to assist in other ways, too. When, in 1978, I asked Bearden if he would conduct a seminar on Afro-American art at Yale, where I was teaching, his immediate response was “Why don’t you ask Al?” But this particular appointment called for an artist, and Bearden finally did accept, though with genuine reluctance and vehement protestations of pedagogic incompetence. So reluctant was he that I was astonished by the remarkably well-organized and cogent weekly lectures he had prepared—always neatly double-spaced and fifty minutes in duration, the precise length of the academic lecturer’s hour. Comprehension soon dawned. Bearden, taking matters into his own hands, had found a way to bring Murray along to New Haven: the critic had ghostwritten Professor Bearden’s erudite lectures.
The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader Page 43