Emilie’s Reviews > The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison > Status Update

I know Bard is something of a special case but the picture I get of what the American whites
who matured during the thirties are doing to their children is frightening. We were, and are, penalized out of the irrationalities of race, but these poor kids are suffering from the excesses of their parents' sentimentality and utter lack of any grasp of the tragic sense.

Doubtlessly, we're moving toward an emancipation of our fiction from the clichés of recent styles and limitations of conception. Just keep plunging ahead because there's no turning back and if only a few readers appreciate what you're doing it's only because they're trying to read the book they read ten years ago.

Mythomania compels me to seek extreme relationships as a means of affirming our reality.
Thus we fight and argue and produce wild fictions inhabited by wild men. But perhaps we're really hopelessly sane, and our wives with or without lesions, can only take a bit of us without blowing their tops.

the "white Negro" as the new culture hero-he thinks all hipsters are cocksmen possessed of great euphoric orgasms and are out to fuck the world into peace, prosperity and creativity. The same old primitivism crap in a new package. It makes you hesitant to say more than the slightest greetings to their wives lest they think you're out to give them a hot fat injection.

Actually he isn't at all interested in novels but in neat demonstrations that archetypical figures turn up in various places.[…] Hyman can’t see that the novel devours archetypes as ruthlessly as Nature devours a vacuum.
[from separate letters but Hyman hate doesn’t just go away]

Hell, Hyman don't know that Ulysses is both Jack the rabbit (when that cyclops gets after his ass) and Jack the Bear, Big Smith the Chef, John Henry and everybody else when he starts pumping arrows into those cats who've been after his old lady. Or if he does recognize this, it's only with his mind, not his heart.

I like your listing of blues themes but I hope you'll extend it, and get in all the irony of blues fantasy, all the laughing at the self, all the negative reassurance which, because it's sung, becomes positive, a transcendence.

I will never tire of reading how little Stanley Edgar Hyman gets invisible man

“As for my narrator, he comes out of Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground, not Wright's Man Who Lived Underground, who is incapable of simple thought much less of philosophical articulation.”

Genuinely makes me sad for Shirley Jackson for having to put up with this dumbass

Those Latin Americans are wild and even the writers had nothing better to talk about than blame the U.S. for everything negative in the world and to mouth worn out Marxist slogans as the latest wisdom, there in one of the cities most given over to modern architecture and in a country in which there's an ocean's width between the rich and the poor, those bastards are fighting the machine!

Read your Freud piece in PR and found it so good that I'm amazed that they took it.