The Man Made Visible

Atop the literary heap, Ellison had earned what he considered the ultimate prize: "genuine world fame -- not the kind of condescending, provisional compliments that major critics had accorded even the best of African-American writers, including Wright."

But the hard-won acclaim -- and Ellison's own attitude -- distanced him from many of the people who had helped him rise. According to Rampersad, "Even before he became famous, Ralph was not inclined to admit any personal debts," and nowhere is this more evident -- and damning -- than in his relationship with Fanny. She was his second wife (an earlier marriage to actress Rose Poindexter had been doomed by Ellison's "aversion to feelings of obligation or gratitude"), a loving and long-suffering breadwinner whose labors made her husband's literary career possible.

It was a union "seldom free of tension," Rampersad writes, and by 1956 Ellison had added infidelity to his list of cruelties. Ralph confessed to an affair with a woman 20 years his junior. The woman, whom Rampersad declined to identify, told him that the Ellisons' marriage was "really one-way. It was not a sharing marriage. Fanny did everything, and everything was for Ralph."

In response to Ralph's admission, Fanny opened up to her mother: "I stuck it out all these years because in moments when he isn't in the throes of something he is a wonderful companion and I know that I love him and he loves me." But not much later she wrote to a psychiatrist, "Had our marriage been a successful one, or rather had it not been harassed by the particular kind of anxieties that it has, I could have been the calm, objective person. But since I have always doubted that my husband really and truly loved me, naturally I could not believe that he loves me now in this situation. Thus the panic, the hysteria, the despair." Ellison's lover believes that Fanny's infertility -- a source of deep despair for her -- prompted his dallying. "He wanted children. He knew that he could have children, and that Fanny couldn't. I think that's how we got together," she said. Even after the affair ended, Ellison's letters show that he was anything but contrite. "Your butt must be screaming like a child's for a good spanking," he wrote to Fanny. "It's shocking but I guess you'll always be my child-wife -- and what, beyond all the recent trouble, a headstrong, willful, little bitch you are!"

Rampersad's chronicle of the Ellisons' long, turbulent and finally peaceful marriage (it lasted from 1946 until Ralph's death in 1994) ) -- is the most compelling and troubling part of this consistently intriguing, thoroughly researched book. While Rampersad seldom falls into the worshipful tone he occasionally indulged in his fine two-volume biography of Hughes, he appears to struggle with his subject's marital misdeeds. They did "not make Ralph a monster, only a necessarily self-absorbed master artist who would rather lose a wife or lover than surrender his identity as an artist," he writes. "He cherished far more the actual life of the artist, the agony of composition, the promise of eternal fame from the progeny of his craft."

That's nicely expressed but not entirely persuasive. Still, Rampersad wrestles here with the same conundrum we often face when forced to reckon with the sinister sides of great achievers we admire. Do we give them too much leeway when forgiving their sins? If we held these geniuses to the same strict standards as we do ordinary mortals, how many of them could we continue to love?

Considered alone, Ellison's artistic legacy remains unsullied. But his record of insults, feuds and personality clashes continued even as he enjoyed a life of prosperity, snubbed younger black artists and failed to complete a second novel -- and knowing all this complicates our appreciation.

Such complexities probably would not have dismayed Ellison, for whom "true criticism . . . disdains being 'safe.' " On the other hand, he may have come out swinging.

In Rampersad's words, Ellison "could be funny, charming, even loving, but he also could not help inflicting pain." The writer Albert Murray, Ellison's longtime friend and sometime rival, described him as "potentially violent, very violent. He was ready to take on people and to use whatever street corner language they understood. He was ready to fight, to come to blows. You really didn't want to mess with Ralph Ellison."

But Ellison's friend Charlie Davidson, a haberdasher and fellow jazz fan, provides the most illuminating and haunting description of the enigmatic genius: "Ralph was like a drop of mercury under your thumb. Just when you thought you knew him, he showed you something else, something more." *

Jabari Asim is deputy editor of Book World. His most recent book is "The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn't and Why."