Ralph Ellison and Kenneth Burke

At the Roots of the Racial Divide

Bryan Crable

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780813932170
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria nordamericana

Ralph Ellison and Kenneth Burke focuses on the little-known but important friendship between two canonical American writers. The story of this fifty-year friendship, however, is more than literary biography; Bryan Crable argues that the Burke-Ellison relationship can be interpreted as a microcosm of the American "racial divide." Through examination of published writings and unpublished correspondence, he reconstructs the dialogue between Burke and Ellison about race that shaped some of their most important works, including Burke's A Rhetoric of Motives and Ellison's Invisible Man. In addition, the book connects this dialogue to changes in American discourse about race. Crable shows that these two men were deeply connected, intellectually and personally, but the social division between white and black Americans produced hesitation, embarrassment, mystery, and estrangement where Ellison and Burke might otherwise have found unity. By using Ellison's nonfiction and Burke's rhetorical theory to articulate a new vocabulary of race, the author concludes not with a simplistic "healing" of the divide but with a challenge to embrace the responsibility inherent to our social order.

American Literatures Initiative

1 / Birth of an Ancestor

But perhaps you will understand when I say … that while one can do nothing about choosing one’s relatives, one can, as artist, choose one’s “ancestors.”

—RALPH ELLISON, COLLECTED ESSAYS

In one famous episode in the history of American letters, during the summer of 1945 an aspiring writer with an unlikely name holed up in a barn in Vermont—to escape New York, improve his health, and gain inspiration. Though Ralph Waldo Ellison had planned to continue writing about a fictional Tuskegee airman-turned-POW, he found himself unable to ignore a nagging inner voice. This strange voice interrupted his novel-in-progress, diverting Ellison’s attention with the provocative assertion, “I am an invisible man.”¹ Six decades later, the line has become inseparable from Ellison’s achievement as a novelist, and his incisive commentary on the American “racial divide.”

Thanks to the success of Invisible Man, many readers are familiar with its origins and plotline, and with the arc of Ellison’s entire career as a novelist: Ellison’s wrestling with the manuscript over the course of several years, until its publication in 1952; the book’s immediate critical and popular success, including its selection for a National Book Award; and Ellison’s unsuccessful struggle to produce a sequel.² At the same time, the attention given this landmark novel has eclipsed another aspect of Ellison’s career: his essays on race in/and America.³ By ignoring the impulse to reduce Ellison to Invisible Man—and examining his entire body of work, both fiction and nonfiction—we can begin to recognize the power of this work for the theorizing of race and identity in contemporary America. However, any study of Ellison’s critical perspective remains incomplete without the inclusion of another oft-overlooked dimension of Ellison’s life: his intellectual and personal relationship with fellow American author Kenneth Burke.

Burke is an unlikely figure to link with Ellison—and not simply because his origins (geographic, generational, and racial) contrasted sharply with Ellison’s own. Biography aside, Burke is simply not known for his writings on issues of race.⁴ Despite this seeming divergence of interests, Ellison found much in Burke’s work that spoke to the significance of race in American culture; thus, although Ellison did not place the label on Burke, it is clear that the latter served as one of Ellison’s most important “ancestors.”⁵ This term, borrowed from Ellison’s essay “The World and the Jug,” indicates a specific type of relationship for a young artist. Unlike “relatives,” who populate an artist’s environment or whose connection is cemented by the fact of birth, “ancestors” are persons an artist seeks out—those whose achievements represent a standard the artist strives to reach.⁶ It is clear from Ellison’s writings that Burke played a key ancestral role for Ellison; their relationship arose not from a common background, but from an overlap of sensibilities, a shared perspective on the nature of language, identity, and social reality. As I argue over the next three chapters, it is this perspective, originally derived from Burke’s work, that Ellison playfully altered and embodied in the now-famous voice of Invisible Man’s narrator.

In November 1945, three months after this voice announced itself to Ellison, he sat with pen and paper, filling eleven legal-sized pages with a letter to Burke—even sketching a rough caricature of Burke in the left margin. Ellison’s intention had been to craft a letter of thanks; his summer retreat had been made possible by a grant from the Julius Rosenwald Fund, which Ellison had received at Burke’s recommendation.⁷ However, the letter grew beyond its intended task, toward a broader consideration of Ellison’s relationship to Burke: “I started once before right after I received the Rosenwald Fellowship with the intention of thanking you for having recommended me. But when I had begun it occurred to me that the whole business was a little bit ridiculous; I was about to thank you for a minor favor while leaving the major debt unmentioned. For I realized then that my real debt to you lies in the many things I’ve learned (and continue to learn) from your work.” This debt, Ellison continued, could never be fully repaid, but charged his writing with a special responsibility: to match, in quality, the work that inspired it. Perhaps, Ellison mused, the nascent Invisible Man would express the gratitude his letter could not: “I am writing a novel now and perhaps if it is worthwhile it will be my most effective means of saying thanks. Anything else seems to me inadequate and unimaginative.”⁸

Indicating Ellison’s regard for Burke’s opinion, the letter also sought Burke’s advice. Ellison outlined, in broad strokes, the nature and tone of the novel-in-progress: “I’ve deliberately written in the first person, couched much of it in highly intellectualized concepts, and proceeded across a tight rope stretched between the comic and the tragic; but withal I don’t know where I’m going.” The central obstacle to the book’s success, Ellison wrote, lay well beyond its pages: “In our culture the blacks have learned to laugh at what brings tears to white eyes and vice versa, and that makes it hard as hell for a Negro writer to call his shots.” Since Burke represented a source of artistic inspiration—and had written extensively on problems of meaning and perspective—Ellison hoped Burke would have an answer to a vital question: “How will a Negro writer who writes out of his full awareness of the complexity of western personality, and who presents the violence of American culture in psychological terms rather than physical ones—how will such a writer be able to break through the stereotype-armored minds of white Americans so that they can receive his message?”⁹

With this question, Ellison invited Burke to join him in a dialogue on issues of race in America—to focus their shared perspective upon the American racial hierarchy. Instead, Ellison’s question hung in the air between them; although Burke would later reply to some of the points raised by Ellison, the opportunity represented by this letter was, tragically, missed.

Yet, it is my contention that this episode marks not the end of the story, but its beginning. If we interrogate this strained exchange more closely, we discover a vital link between the Burke-Ellison friendship and the changing conception of race in American culture. The relationship between these two men sheds new light not only upon these central figures’ lives and thought, but also—more crucially—upon the American racial drama that contextualized and shaped their lives and thought.

Race matters have always played a decisive role in American society; as Matthew Jacobson persuasively argues, “Race and races are American history.”¹⁰ Yet, Ellison’s question to Burke was posed at an important moment in the history of the American conception of race. The early to mid-1940s represent not only the pre–civil rights era, but the solidification of the binaristic view of race: race as a question of black and white.¹¹ In their struggles to connect, Burke and Ellison reflect the consequences of this Manichean division between black and white Americans. Though their friendship was marked by the mystery of race, there remain unexplored possibilities in their relationship—resources that could have allowed them to jointly grapple with this division. By attending to the Burke-Ellison friendship, we can thus reflect upon the construction of the American “racial divide”—and help combat its malign magic. Read in this way, the story of the Burke-Ellison friendship is as relevant now as when Ellison crafted his letter to Burke.

To do justice to the complex story of this relationship, however, we cannot begin in 1945, with Ellison’s missive to Burke. Instead, we must trace the trajectories that brought both men to this point, reembedding their biographies, their perspectives, and their relationship within the curve (or boomerang) of American history—and, most especially, American attitudes toward and discourse surrounding race.

Burke’s Pittsburghian Origins

On 5 May, 1897, the “smoky inferno” of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, welcomed the arrival of Kenneth Duva Burke, the son of James Burke and Lillyan May Duva Burke.¹² The “steel city” of Kenneth’s birth was hailed as the nation’s foremost producer of steel and iron, though this achievement was not without detrimental effect. The steel industry spurred automation and corporate expansion, but undermined other types of economic activity; it produced many new jobs for unskilled workers, but devalued the abilities of skilled craftsmen.¹³ These economic developments further exacerbated the tensions rising in the city (and the nation) around issues of race.

However, these tensions, like their causes, were complex. In the America of Burke’s birth, anxieties over race were not solely centered upon black Americans. In the waning years of the nineteenth century, for example, not only had Congress acted to curtail the rights of Native Americans, it had also created a law banning Chinese immigration into the country.¹⁴ Yet, indicating widespread antiblack sentiment, the end of the nineteenth century marked a significant shift in the social and legal status of black Americans.

In 1896, less than a year before Burke was born, the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson had affirmed the constitutionality of race-based segregation. By establishing the “separate but equal” standard for public accommodation—arguing that animosity toward black Americans was natural, and immune to legislative action—the decision sanctioned the “Jim Crow” laws adopted by legislatures across the South.¹⁵ Although these states had passed segregationist laws prior to the decision, afterward they institutionalized Plessy v. Ferguson with a decided thoroughness. Jim Crow laws decreed that black Americans had to attend separate schools, ride in separate railway cars, eat in separate sections of restaurants, swear on separate Bibles, convalesce in separate hospitals, and rest in separate cemeteries. There was, in essence, no part of public life left untouched by these laws.¹⁶

In response to Jim Crow and the bleak economic and agricultural conditions in the South, the dawn of the twentieth century found an increasing number of black Americans seeking better lives in the North. The “Great Migration” resulted in the relocation of 5 million black Americans from the South—with the heaviest migration occurring just after World War I.¹⁷ Because of the rapid expansion of Pittsburgh’s heavy industry, however, steady migration to the city began at an earlier date.¹⁸ “Between 1870 and 1900 the rate of population growth for black Pittsburgh was greater than during any other period … making the Pittsburgh black community the sixth largest in the nation”¹⁹—with its population doubling between 1890 and 1900.²⁰

However, reflecting the complexities of race during this period, tensions in Pittsburgh were not simply a result of black Americans’ quest to seek new opportunities in the North. Between the last decades of the nineteenth century and World War I, millions of immigrants, largely from eastern and southern Europe, swelled the population of the United States but—unlike previous immigrants from England, Germany, and Ireland—settled in the urban, industrialized areas of the Northeast.²¹ The “steel city” proved as attractive to these immigrants as to black Americans fleeing the South: by 1900, Pittsburgh contained the sixth-largest Polish and Italian communities in the nation.²²

Upon their arrival, Poles, Italians, and black migrants all sought jobs calling for unskilled or semiskilled labor—yet, given the antiblack sentiment common in Pittsburgh’s steel industry and building trades, they rarely vied for the same jobs. As open positions were overwhelmingly awarded to immigrants, black Americans were forced to work as laborers, or in service and transportation.²³ Though southern and eastern Europeans thus benefited from antiblack racism, in Pittsburgh relations between black Americans and immigrants bore little resemblance to the segregated ideal of Jim Crow.

Complete segregation was made impossible in 1875, when Pittsburgh closed its black schools—making it “one of the few large cities with a desegregated [educational] system.”²⁴ Further, the black community was n...