But did Murray have debts of his own to acknowledge—in particular, to his Tuskegee schoolmate? The very similarity of their preoccupations proved a source of friction. Now it was Murray—here, there, and everywhere—spreading the glad word about the literary theorist Kenneth Burke, about Lord Raglan, about the luminous blending of craft and meta-physics represented by André Malraux and by Thomas Mann. Ellison’s claim, at least to Kenneth Burke and Lord Raglan, seems clear: they were part of the swirl of ideas at Bennington College in the early fifties, when Ellison was living nearby and socializing with the faculty. One writer who had been friendly with both Murray and Ellison since the forties assures me that he has no doubt as to who was the exegete and who the originator: “This is not to say that Al was simply some sort of epigone. But all the fundamental ideas that are part of ‘The Omni-Americans’ came from Ellison. Al made his own music out of those ideas, but I know where they came from. The course of thought that Murray began to follow in the sixties was a result of Ralph’s influence, I think there is no doubt about this at all.”
That has become something of a consensus view. In a recent appreciation of Murray, the jazz critic Gene Seymour writes that on such subjects as improvisation, discipline, and tradition Murray (and, by extension, disciples of his like Stanley Crouch and Wynton Marsalis) sounds “like an echo.” He maintains that the recently published volume of Ellison’s collected essays “makes clear [that] Ellison was the wellspring for the ideals advanced by Murray, Crouch, and Marsalis.”
It’s a thorny subject. At one point, Murray tells me about V. S. Naipaul’s visit with him in the late eighties—a visit that was recorded in Naipaul’s “A Turn in the South.” Naipaul wrote, “He was a man of enthusiasms, easy to be with, easy to listen to. His life seemed to have been a series of happy discoveries.” At the same time, Naipaul identified Murray as a writer who “was, or had been, a protégé of Ralph Ellison’s.” Murray makes it clear that this gloss does not sit well with him. He counters by quoting something that Robert Bone, a pioneering scholar of African-American literature, told him: “I’ve been trying to figure out who is the protégé of whom.”
Bone, an acquaintance of both principals, suggests beginning with a different set of premises. “On Murray’s part, it must have been a terribly difficult thing for him to have been overshadowed by Ralph in terms of the timing of their two careers,” he says. “In a way, they started out together at Tuskegee, and then they cemented that friendship in New York, but Murray got such a later start in his career as a writer. So when he came on the scene Ralph was, of course, a celebrity.” What escapes us, Bone says, is that many of the positions with which Ellison was associated were ones the two had mulled over together and corresponded about—especially “the link between Afro-American writing and Afro-American music.” Reverse all your assumptions, though, and one thing remains constant: “Murray, I think, naturally must have felt a good deal of envy and resentment.” Where others see Darwin and Huxley, Bone sees Watson and Crick. Of Ellison and Murray he says, “There was a time when they were both young and aspiring writers, and they shared these ideas and they worked on them together, but Ralph got into print with them first, by a kind of accident.” Speaking like a true literary historian, he adds, “I think these matters will be resolved when Murray leaves his papers—he has a box full of correspondence with Ellison. I think that that correspondence is going to bring out the mutuality of these explorations and discoveries.”
It’s clear that, beneath Ellison’s unfailingly courtly demeanor, his own internal struggles may have taken their toll. The fire, in the fall of 1967, is often mentioned as a watershed moment for him, one whose symbolic freight would only increase over the years. He had been busy that summer in his Massachusetts farmhouse, making extensive revisions on his novel in progress—Murray recalls seeing a manuscript thick with interlinear emendations during a visit there. At times, Ellison had called Murray to read him some of the new material. The fire occurred on the very evening that the Ellisons had decided to return to New York. Murray says, “He packed up all his stuff and got everything together, put it all in the hallway leading out, with some of his cameras and some of his shooting equipment. Then they went out to dinner with Richard Wilbur. On the way home, when they got to a certain point, they saw this fire reflection on the skyline, and, the nearer they got, the more it seemed like it was their place. And as they turned in, they saw their house going up in flames.” Ellison had a copy of the manuscript in New York, but the rewriting and rethinking that had occupied him for months were lost. “So he went into shock, really. He just closed off from everybody.” Murray didn’t hear from him until Christmas. In the months that followed, Ellison would sometimes call Murray up and read him passages—trying to jog Murray’s memory so that he would jog Ellison’s. “It took him years to recover,” Murray says. Meanwhile, Murray’s career was following an opposite trajectory. As if making up for lost time, he spent the first half of the seventies averaging a book a year; during the same period, Ellison’s block as a novelist had grown to mythic proportions. Bellow says, “Ralph was suffering very deeply from his hangup, and it was very hard to have any connection with him. He got into a very strange state, I think.”
Did Ellison feel betrayed? It seems clear that he did. (“Romie used to call it ‘Oklahoma paranoia,’” Murray says, musing on the froideur that settled between them.) Did Ellison have reason to? That’s harder to answer. The African-American poet Michael S. Harper, an Ellison stalwart, says, “The most important word I ever heard Ralph say was the word ‘honor.’ I happen to know some of the difficulties they went through when Albert was in a phase of making appearances in white literary salons, and reports came back from various people.” Theories of the estrangement abound. One writer acquainted with the two men says that Ellison had learned that Murray was bad-mouthing him; another suggests that Ellison simply felt crowded, that Murray was presenting himself as Ellison’s confidant—“as the man to see if you want to know”—in a way that Ellison found unseemly. The chill could make things awkward for acquaintances. One of them says, “I remember on one occasion Ralph and I were lunching at the Century Club, when Al saw me in the downstairs lobby. He came up immediately and we chatted briefly, and as we were talking to each other Ralph walked away and would have nothing to do with Al. Theirs had become a difficult relationship.”
Murray, for his part, is inclined to see the matter in almost anthropological terms, as falling into the behavior patterns of out-group representatives amid an in-group: “Here’s a guy who figures that he’s got his white folks over here, and he got them all hoodwinked, so he don’t want anybody coming in messing things up.” In anthropological terms, the native informant never relishes competition. “Hell, it was probably inevitable,” Willie Morris says of the estrangement.
For all their similarities in background, education, sensibility, even dress (they shared a tailor, Charlie Davidson, himself something of a legend in sartorial circles), the two men inclined toward rather contrasting styles of public presentation. A private man who in later years grew intensely aware of being a public figure, Ellison had contrived a persona designed to defeat white expectations of black brutishness. Hence the same words come up again and again when people try to write about him—words like “patrician,” “formal,” “aristocratic,” “mandarin,” “civilized,” “dignified.” James Baldwin once observed, shrewdly, that Ellison was “as angry as anybody can be and still live.” It was this banked anger that kept his back so straight in public settings, his manners so impeccable; even his spoken sentences wore spats and suspenders. Murray, who enjoyed verbal sparring as much as anybody, lacked that gift of anger, and as a conversationalist he had always taken delight in the saltier idioms of the street. (Imagine Redd Foxx with a graduate degree in literature.) The writer Reynolds Price, a friend of both Ellison and Murray, says, “Ralph had a kind of saturnine, slightly bemused quality. I thought Al always seemed the more buoyant person.”
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Writing is at once a solitary and a sociable act, and literary relationships are similarly compounded of opposites. So it was with Ellison and Murray, two country cousins. Many people speak of Ellison’s eightieth-birthday party—to which Murray had been invited and at which he delivered a moving tribute to his old schoolmate—as a significant moment of reconciliation. “I think it was Ellison’s way of reaching out to Murray,” a friend of Ellison’s says.
Then, too, for all his companionability, Murray’s literary inclinations ran strongly toward the paternal. He takes deep satisfaction in that role, and there are many who can attest to his capacity for nurturance. James Alan McPherson, one of the fiction writers who have most often been likened to Ellison, recalls a time in the late seventies when he was in Rhode Island with Michael Harper, the poet, and Ernest J. Gaines, whose novels include “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.” In a moment of mad enthusiasm, they hit on the idea of going to New York and letting Ellison know how much they admired him. When they phoned him, he told them, to their unbounded joy, that they should come right down. And so, after an almost mythic trek, these young black writers arrived at Riverside Drive to pay a visit to their hero.
“Mr. Ellison can’t see you,” they were told at the door. “He’s busy working.”
They were crushed. They were also adrift: with the destination of their pilgrimage closed to them, they had no place to go. “So we called Al Murray, and he picked up the slack,” McPherson recounts. “He brought us to his apartment, where he had some apples and some bourbon and some fancy French cheese. And he said, ‘Have you ever met Duke Ellington’s sister?’ We said no, so he took us over to meet Duke Ellington’s sister. And he said, ‘Do you want to see the Bearden retrospective?’” He took them to the Brooklyn Museum and on to the Cordier and Ekstrom gallery, where Bearden was then showing his work. “And I’ll always remember Al for that,” McPherson says. (Murray tells me, “Most guys forget that I’m just two years younger than Ralph, but they feel closer to me because I’m more accessible. They kid with me all the time.”) Perhaps, in the end, Ellison was the better student of Lord Raglan: he knew that patricide, or some variant of it, was a staple of heroic literature. McPherson says, quietly, “Ellison didn’t want any sons.”
For McPherson, what crystallized things was a ceremony that City College held in 1984 to honor Ellison. McPherson and Harper were both there to give tributes. At the luncheon, Harper tapped on his glass and handed Ellison a wrapped box, saying, “Ralph, here’s a gift from your sons.”
“Then you’d better open it yourself,” Ellison replied dryly. “I’m afraid it might explode.”
Albert Murray has now reached the age where his progeny have progeny, two of the most prominent in his line being, of course, Stanley Crouch and Wynton Marsalis. Both are frequent guests at Lenox Terrace, and Marsalis tells me of dinner-table conversations that roam from Homer to Galileo, from the commedia dell’arte to Faulkner and Neruda. “Murray has given me a first-class education,” he says. And he speaks eloquently about the impact that “Stomping the Blues,” and Murray’s very notion of jazz as an art form, had on him; he speaks about tradition, blues idioms, a poetics of inclusion. As he puts it, “I’m a Murrayite.” Crouch, whose writing has brilliantly championed Murray’s difficult aesthetic and emulated his pugnacious style of critique, says, “I think he’s one of the foremost thinkers to appear in American letters over the last twenty-five years.” (He also suggests that Murray would have been a far worthier candidate for a Nobel Prize than Toni Morrison.) “The last of the giants,” McPherson calls him.
There is much to be said for having descendants. They spread the insights you have given them. They worry about why you are not better known. (Crouch has a simple explanation for Murray’s relative obscurity: “It’s because he spent all that time on the Basie book—there was that very long silence. I think what happened was that his career lost momentum.”) They remind you, fetchingly, of your own callow youth. And they take inspiration from your fearless style of analysis and critique, and apply it to your own work—though this can be a mixed blessing.
No doubt it’s the ultimate tribute to Murray’s legacy of combative candor that his most fervid admirers are quite free in expressing their critical reservations—notably with regard to the new novel. “The Seven League Boots” has the distinction of being the least autobiographical of Murray’s three novels: its protagonist leaves Alabama with his bass and joins up with a legendary jazz band—one not unlike Ellington’s. The band is blissfully free of quarrels and petty jealousies, and Murray’s alter ego, Scooter, inspires only affection in those he encounters. Indeed, this is, in no small part, a novel about friendships, about literary and intellectual conversations and correspondences, including those between Scooter and his old college roommate. On a trip across the Mississippi River Bridge, Scooter finds himself thinking about
my old roommate again. But this time the writer he brought to mind was not Rilke but Walt Whitman, about whom he had said in response to my letter about joining the band for a while. . . . According to my old roommate, old Walt Whitman, barnstorming troubadour par excellence that he was, could only have been completely delighted with the interplay of aesthetic and pragmatic considerations evidenced in the maps and mileage charts and always tentative itineraries. . . . It was Ralph Waldo Emerson who spoke of “melodies that ascend and leap and pierce into the deeps of infinite time,” my roommate also wrote, which, by the way, would make a very fine blurb for a Louis Armstrong solo such as the one on “Potato Head Blues.”
In the next few pages, there are allusions to, among others, Melville, James Joyce, Van Wyck Brooks, Lewis Mumford, Constance Rourke, Frederick Douglass, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Antonin Dvorák. Perhaps the critic’s library overstocks his novelistic imagination. In the Times Book Review, the novelist and critic Charles Johnson—who must be counted among Murray’s heirs, and is certainly among his most heartfelt admirers—described it as “a novel without tension.” It may well be that the pleasures this novel affords are more discursive than dramatic, more essayistic than narrative. Murray tells me, “I write hoping that the most sophisticated readers of my time will think that I’m worth reading.” They do, and he is.
The poet Elizabeth Alexander writes:
Albert Murray do they call you Al
or Bert or Murray or “Tuskegee Boy”?
Who are the Omni-Ones who help me feel?
I’m born after so much. Nostalgia hurts.
You could say of him what he said of Gordon Parks: “Sometimes it is as if he himself doesn’t quite know what to make of what he has in fact already made of himself.” Sometimes I don’t quite, either. On the one hand, I cherish the vernacular; on the other, I’ve always distrusted the notion of “myth” as something deliberately added to literature, like the prize in a box of Cracker Jack. And though my first two books can be read as footnotes to “The Omni-Americans,” I, like most in the demoralized profession of literary studies, have less faith in the cultural power of criticism than he has. All the same, I find his company immensely cheering.
We live in an age of irony—an age when passionate intensity is hard to find outside a freshman dining hall, and when even the mediocre lack all conviction. But Murray was produced by another age, in which intelligence expressed itself in ardor. He has spent a career believing in things, like the gospel according to Ma Rainey and Jimmy Rushing and Duke Ellington. More broadly, he believes in the sublimity of art, and he has never been afraid of risking bathos to get to it. (I think the reason he took so long to write Basie’s life story is that he wanted to step inside a great black artist, to see for himself how improvisation and formal complexity could produce high art.)
The last time I visited him at his apartment, I sat in the chair next to his writing desk as he talked me through the years of his life and his formation, and made clear much that had been unclear to me about cultural modernity. “Let me begin by saying that Romie frequently got
me into trouble,” Ralph Ellison told mourners at a 1988 memorial service for Bearden. “Nothing physical, mind you, but difficulties arising out of our attempts to make some practical sense of the relationship between art and living, between ideas and the complex details of consciousness and experience.” In this sense, Murray, too, has always spelled trouble—for critics and artists of every description, for icon-breakers and icon-makers, for friends and foes. You learn a great many things when you sit with him in his apartment, but, summed up, they amount to a larger vision: this is Albert Murray’s century; we just live in it.
SOURCE: The New Yorker, April 8, 1996, pp. 70–81.
WHITE LIKE ME
Anatole Broyard
IN 1982, AN investment banker named Richard Grand-Jean took a summer’s lease on an eighteenth-century farmhouse in Fairfield, Connecticut; its owner, Anatole Broyard, spent his summers in Martha’s Vineyard. The house was handsomely furnished with period antiques, and the surrounding acreage included a swimming pool and a pond. But the property had another attraction, too. Grand-Jean, a managing director of Salomon Brothers, was an avid reader, and he took satisfaction in renting from so illustrious a figure. Anatole Broyard had by then been a daily book reviewer for the Times for more than a decade, and that meant that he was one of literary America’s foremost gate-keepers. Grand-Jean might turn to the business pages of the Times first, out of professional obligation, but he turned to the book page next, out of a sense of self. In his Walter Mittyish moments, he sometimes imagined what it might be like to be someone who read and wrote about books for a living—someone to whom millions of readers looked for guidance.
The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader Page 44