Why I Read Ellison's "Invisible Man"

Joseph Epstein wrote a piece for Commentary that pointed me in Ralph Ellison's direction. This excerpt from his book, entitled Friendship Among the Intellectuals, drew me in quietly. Before reading it, I hadn't been thinking about Invisible Man, invisible men, coming-of-age stories, and the like. Nor had I known of Norman Podhoretz's book entitled "Ex-Friends." Certainly I hadn't been thinking so much about friendship in general as I had been thinking about intellectual friendships in particular when I came across the article. Yes, I maintain that there's a difference. That's how the title grabbed me. But it was Samuel Johnson's quote in the opening sentence that drew me in...quietly:

"'It is painful to consider,' wrote Samuel Johnson about friendship, 'that there is no human possession of which the duration is less certain.'"

Epstein agrees. The published excerpt, insofar as it concerns Norman Podhoretz's Ex-Friends, specifically addresses the breakdown of friendships when one friend "finds himself violently disputing the other on matters of profoundest principle." States Epstein, "Here is the question Ex-Friends raises in high relief: for what ideas would one be willing to give up one's friends?"

That's an interesting question, more so when asked in light of Johnson's quote: it seems that the duration of a friendship becomes at least as certain as life itself if two friends can agree on the answer to this question. Or does it?

This brings me to Ellison. Epstein recounts a meeting he'd enjoyed with Ellison, his first introduction to the novelist, as editor of a magazine for which Ellison had written an essay:

"In Ralph Ellison I had met a man I long admired and found him not in the least disappointing. I felt I had made a new friend." Their meeting lasted for four hours, a time that Epstein describes as "magical." That was the first and last time that Epstein would correspond with Ellison. Subsequent written attempts on behalf of the former to contact and foster friendship with the latter would fail, landing in a great, empty, unresponsive silence.

Epstein found another person who had a similar experience with Ralph Ellison, and concluded with this gracious thought:

"A naturally gregarious man, he [Ralph Ellison] was someone whom many people, I among them, would have been pleased to think of as a friend. He was also a man who, having published a fine novel, Invisible Man, in 1954, had not written another in all the decades since - a man, in other words, haunted by work undone. He did not need more friends filling up his days with correspondence, lunches, and the other time-consuming niceties that would follow from his natural sociability."

It struck me then that I would like to read this "fine novel," that I may appreciate a little of the finished work of a man "haunted by work undone." There are many such men, especially in the literary world. But in the context of Epstein's rich excerpt, the knowledge that Ellison, while perhaps haunted by unfinished work, actually did succeed in finishing something of literary and cultural significance, lent something of the "magic" that Epstein described in his one personal encounter, and this was enough to pique my interest.

I was not disappointed in Invisible Man. And I found after reading it that the protagonist, while coming of age as a young man in an America beset by a heritage of guilt and grave injustice, found in disillusionment the same uncertainty of friendship that we're all bound to know if ever we should enjoy a true one. For what ideas would one be willing to give up one's friends? The question surrounds and penetrates Invisible Man, and the novel has it's way of stating it ever so differently throughout. By the end of his painful and at times pathetic journey, I found myself in disagreement with the answers, or lack thereof, discovered along the way.

I should conclude with one last quote from the poet Paul Valery, included in Epstein's essay, that encouraged a reflection on the nature of evil in relation to friendship:

"No true hatred is possible except toward those one has loved."

Yet I believe we should risk love all the same. I couldn't be a Christian otherwise. That it precedes hatred does not implicate love as the cause. Rather, it is the fundamental, life-giving foundation that is hatred's only cure.

"If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you." (John 15:18-19)

Relevant Reading:

Friendship Among the Intellectuals