In November 1964 Ralph Ellison wrote a revealing letter of thanks to his friend Nathan A. Scott Jr. for sending a copy of his most recent volume, The Climate of Faith in Modern Literature (1964). According to Ellison, “Sometime ago, I became concerned with the relationship of modern theology to literature but really had no way of approaching it systematically, and I find that your book is providing the necessary orientation, and between it and the ‘New Orpheus’ [Scott’s New Orpheus from the same year] I am getting quite an education. . . . Altogether I am being forced to think in different channels and I find it to my advantage.”1 Ellison’s letter proves remarkable for a number of reasons. First, it offers a kind of “smoking gun,” linking him specifically with certain intellectual correspondences between “modern theology and literature” that we have, thus far, dealt with in a largely interpretive, even speculative fashion. The letter brings to light a version of the novelist that has remained invisible to scholars: namely, Ellison as religious thinker. Second, this passage introduces a new wrinkle concerning the way, and the terms by which, Ellison sought to manage the discourse surrounding his career as he ceased to be a “new” novelist and confronted head-on his difficulties in completing the long-awaited second novel. “Theology”—taken for our purposes here as a category of “religiosity”—would provide not only a way forward for Ellison via his second novel, but also a retrospective way back as he assessed and curated the terms of his literary legacy in the midst of turbulent times.
Seven years later, in 1971, Ellison thanked Scott again—this time for dedicating his most recent book, The Wild Prayer of Longing, to Ralph and Fanny Ellison. Here he doubles down on his earlier expressed interests regarding literature and modern theology, paraphrasing Kenneth Burke to claim that contemporary fiction writers have “lost a sense of a Word lying beyond their words,” before allowing that “I sense more than I can say, perceive more than I’ve been able to reduce to form. Yet I reject any sense of easy [religious] alienation. . . . I read your book . . . and I felt most poignantly the loss of depth and resonance that occurred when a concern with the sacred went underground (if not completely out of the window) of modern literature. How our efforts to depict the grandeur, [and] moral breath of human assertion are muted.”2 Seven years on, Ellison sounds more at ease, even as he defers modestly, or politely, to Scott’s expertise (sensing more than he can say). He wields Burke’s argument about words and the Word—taken from The Rhetoric of Religion (1960)—effectively, aligning his own literary ventures with Scott’s theological program (“our efforts . . . are muted”; emphasis mine) over and against a literary declension narrative caused, in part, by the enforced invisibility of “the sacred” as it moves underground.3 Ellison may sense more than he can say, but he also implies a great deal more than he fesses up to.
In 1979 Nathan Scott took up Ellison’s mantle in print, writing glowingly of Invisible Man in a long article on African American literature in the Harvard Guide to Contemporary Writing: “The book is packed full of the acutest observations of the manners and idioms and human styles that constitute the ethos of Black life in America, and it gives us such a sense of social fact as can be come by nowhere in the manuals of academic sociology—all this being done with the ease that comes from enormous expertness of craft, from deep intimacy of knowledge, and from love.”4 Such love emerges from “subtle alternations between outrage and hilarity,” “minglings of comic and tragic modalities” that, in the words of Cleanth Brooks, “step out into the universal only by first going through the narrow door of the particular.”5 Scott transforms Ellison’s existential irony, at odds with “sociological”—and thus scientific—interpretations of humanity, through the unacknowledged New Critical terms of Schleiermacher’s religious dialectic of universal and particular, which he also identifies with Christian agape.6 At the core of Invisible Man, then, for Scott, resides a theological quality that—inflected against the sociological determinations that (especially as Ellison and Scott saw things) too frequently, and insufficiently, qualify African American literature of this era—conspires to offer what Scott feels is a more nuanced and insightful representation of “Black life in America” predicated on the terms of Schleiermacher’s “religion.” In this way Scott also anticipates the premise, if not the thesis, of this book.
Who is Nathan Scott? What was the nature of his more than thirty-year friendship with Ellison? How might his legacy—as a largely overlooked element of Ellison’s biography and cultural lexicon—transform the way we read Ellison and understand his work, and even contribute to a sense of invisible theology?7 This chapter addresses such questions in three ways, narrating, first, an account of Ellison and Scott’s friendship as gleaned from their correspondence in Ellison’s papers in the Library of Congress and amplified by those who, perhaps, knew Scott best. What did they share as intellectuals—indeed prominent African American intellectuals who moved among elite institutions and colleagues at a time of changing, challenging racial dynamics in political, cultural, and academic arenas? What theological or religious influence might we detect rubbing off on Ellison, or reforming literary and cultural principles that were already at play in his imagination? Second, and at the same time, how did Scott and Ellison’s racial sensibilities contribute to their relationship and work? Both men stood outside of the predominant racial orthodoxies of their day and suffered for it, having their racial bonafides and political commitments called into question. What insight do Scott’s outlooks and his experiences shed on Ellison’s as both men brought African American sensibilities to classically canonical conceptions of culture? Does Scott’s theological vocation and “instruction” of Ellison deepen the novelist’s understanding of race as an invisible theology?
Third, building on such evidence of religion and race, this chapter closes by arguing that, just as many people draw on Ellison’s friendship with Richard Wright as an organizing principle for understanding the first half of Ellison’s career, Scott provides a similar organizational figure for the second half. Scott’s influence reframed Ellison’s past, present, and future “in the middest,” informing the way Ellison interpreted his own career and the lexicon he developed to reimagine the changing terms of his own legacy. Through Scott, a turn to certain religiously—and theologically—inflected discourses of race and nation contributed to a vital center that (as chapters 4 and 5 bear out) would characterize Ellison’s writing, teaching, public activities, and reassessments of his literary legacies for the remainder of his life. Religion became a viable shorthand for the “depth and resonance” that Ellison believed to be absent from his contemporary literature, casting new light on his decision, for instance, to write a second novel about the centrality of black preachers and preaching to an American prospect amid the annihilation of classic American civil religious models, and his decision to teach university courses concerned—even if obliquely—with post-Calvinist conceptions of sin in American literature of the nineteenth century—amid an era that believed itself ensconced in rapid secularization.
An article in the December 22, 1967, issue of Time magazine considers what is for us a familiar problem: “Is William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury a religious novel? Faulkner himself was a somewhat cynical agnostic, and few readers would find much spiritual comfort in his dour chronicle of the Compson family. But to Professor Nathan Scott of the University of Chicago Divinity School, the answer is clearly yes. Behind the novel’s secular façade, he argues, lies a poetic expression of what theology calls kairos—the divine gift of time span in which man exists on earth.” Whatever incredulity this lede may register (and if nothing else it offers evidence that middlebrow media have long butchered religion reportage), it provides a cogent account of Scott’s governing paradigm: a classic Tillichian correspondence between cultural forms and theological language and ideas.8 As Giles Gunn notes, even as Western modernity severed ties with Victorian spirituality, moving simultaneously away from overt expressions of belief in and belonging to religious institutions and their ordinances, its literary output as Scott saw it drew on forms and structures of reality that words succeed in sacramentalizing, even incarnating, as a sign of modernity’s struggle against meaninglessness.9 From the 1950s to the 1990s, Scott—not without controversy—consolidated earlier excursions of theological “dialectics” into a formidable, if marginal, subfield of theological studies and its emerging counterpart, religious studies.10
Scott was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1925, making him more than a decade Ellison’s junior.11 With “immediate roots . . . not quite a generation removed from chattel slavery” (like Ellison, his grandparents were enslaved), Scott finished public school in Detroit, graduated from the University of Michigan in 1944, and earned the BD and PhD from Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University in New York, where he studied under Tillich, Niebuhr, and Lionel Trilling, among others.12 Early ministerial and academic appointments included stints at Virginia Union and Howard University. His first book, Rehearsals of Discomposure, appeared in 1952—in the midst of Invisible Man’s theological occasion highlighted (through Scott’s teachers Tillich and Niebuhr) in chapter 2, occasioning the first of many convergences between Ellison and the scholar who “echoed Ellison’s comparatist and anti-chauvinist speculative concerns perhaps more than any of Ellison’s other intellectual peers,” drawing on “easy communion between classical and vernacular influences” that remained so at odds in the intellectual culture of the day.13 Scott was called to the faculty of the Divinity School at the University of Chicago in 1955 where he remained until his final move to the University of Virginia in 1976. Not long after arriving in Chicago, Scott pursued ordination in the Episcopal Church, leaving his native Presbyterianism only after his father’s death. Named canon theologian at St. James Cathedral in Chicago during the late 1960s, he served nearly a decade in this capacity, regularly preaching, presiding, and performing other duties such as conducting a continuing education literary group for what he called “the reading clergy.”14 Scott remained active in church affairs at St. Paul’s in Charlottesville, Virginia, though never in the official capacity he served in Chicago.15 He retired from teaching in 1994 and died in 2006.
While Ellison first met Scott briefly in 1959, their friendship blossomed in the autumn of 1961 when Ellison spent the quarter as Alexander C. White Visiting Professor of Humanities at the University of Chicago, forging an intimate friendship that would endure for the rest of their lives. This friendship extended as well to their wives, Fanny Ellison and Charlotte Scott (a Federal Reserve banker in Chicago who later held a prestigious chair in economics at Virginia), whose correspondence continued after Ellison’s death.16 While Scott was a priest, and took seriously this clerical office, his friendship with Ellison developed primarily from their mutual literary interests and a shared (if uniquely embattled) racial sensibility in what Scott called a “late, bad time.”17 Scott also clearly recognized and sought to cultivate from the beginning a religious sensibility in Ellison’s writing and thought. Archival materials reflect Scott as a tireless advocate in theological circles, promoting Ellison and his writing to colleagues and relevant organizations alike, while working at the same time to maximize Ellison’s opportunities for reflection upon these dynamics of his own fiction and criticism.
Such efforts were never overt or pointed. No record survives of any specific arrangement or acknowledgment between them, yet Scott’s agenda begins to emerge through venues both official and personal in Chicago and beyond. A few weeks into the fall quarter of 1961, the Scotts hosted a dinner in Ellison’s honor at their Greenwood Avenue home on “Professor’s Row” in Hyde Park, where Ellison, Richard Stern, and a number of Scott’s Divinity School colleagues argued late into the night about the relationship between “Christianity and tragedy.”18 By the end of Ellison’s quarter at Chicago that autumn he had discussed his work at a Divinity School Wednesday lunch gathering and found himself nominated to the governing board of the Society of Arts, Religion, and Contemporary Culture, a board on which Scott also served.19 By the summer of 1962, Ellison and Scott were busy soliciting manuscripts for a volume they intended to coedit, a never-completed project with the working title The Dark Tower: Perspectives on the American Experience—a volume of essays by prominent African Americans (James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Vincent Harding, Charles Long, William Ming, and Benjamin Quarles were among those invited to submit articles) that sought to circumvent what Scott called “the bitter exigencies of racial politics”—sponsored jointly by the Foundation for the Arts, Religion, and Culture and the American Missionary Association.20
Over the next three decades (until Ellison’s death in 1994), Ellison and Scott’s correspondence reflects a continued and concerted effort by Scott to foster Ellison’s theological orientation and to promote him as a viable literary religionist. When Robert C. Johnson, dean of Yale Divinity School, asked Scott for the names of potential Phelps Lecturers in religion and literature, Scott suggested Ellison. Yale issued an invitation through R. W. B. Lewis, but Ellison declined.21 Ellison’s files and bookshelves were filled with offprints of Scott’s articles and pamphlets, typescripts of his sermons and public lectures, copies of his monographs, almost all of them sent by Scott and personally inscribed to Ellison.22 Scott also urged the search committee for the Reinhold Niebuhr Award to consider Ellison in 1973, citing mutual regard between his friend and his late teacher, as well as Ellison’s “lively sense” of Niebuhr’s “greatness” as a public theologian.23
Beyond these professional documents, one also finds in Ellison’s files the Scotts’ annual Christmas letters and family photographs, the odd note between Fanny Ellison and Charlotte Scott, Ellison’s brokering of the Scotts’ purchase of at least two works by artist Romare Bearden, and evidence of friendly visits with one another when passing through New York, Chicago, and Charlottesville. While Scott appears to have been the more prolific and enthusiastic correspondent, this was no one-sided relationship. Particularly moving is the Ellisons’ appreciation for the Scotts’ children (the Ellisons had no children of their own, but proved to be warm parental and grandparental figures to a number of young friends), with Fanny Ellison writing about the Scotts’ daughter Leslie at one point, “Ever[y] now and then I meet a little girl whom I would have liked for my own. Forgive me if this is coveting.”24 Charlotte Scott—the Federal Reserve banker and distinguished professor of economics—offered the Ellisons occasional investment advice, sending articles from the Wall Street Journal accompanied by pamphlets and financial strategies.25 In 1994 the Scotts flew to New York to comfort Fanny Ellison upon her husband’s death, and Nathan Scott himself officiated from The Book of Common Prayer at Ralph Ellison’s memorial service in the chapel of Trinity Church Cemetery.26
Ellison’s drafts and letters also reveal fascinating nuggets unparsed by earlier biographers and commentators that hint at deeper than expected theological engagement, historical study, and general knowledge about matters religious. For instance, the draft of his letter of thanks to Scott for The Wild Prayer of Longing rehearses across its mutations Ellison’s recognition of the Georgia Sea Island (Ossabow Island), where he first read the book on vacation, as among the islands “where the Wesleys preached,” lending a special “resonance to [Scott’s] argument” and his concern for the sacred.27 Elsewhere in the same November 1964 letter in which he acknowledges his interest in “literature and modern theology,” Ellison also mentions renewing his studies—or at least his reading—in the work of Teilhard de Chardin and “his phenomenon of man” that he had abandoned “while living up at Tivoli” (rooming with Saul Bellow while teaching at Bard College) several years before. “I don’t know what’s happening to me,” he concludes.28 Again, and also as with Ellison’s intersections with Reinhold Niebuhr, a popular theological figure in a period when such figures appeared on the cover of Time magazine (as Scott appears in its pages), Ellison registers that such intellectual points of religious and theological interest matter even among middlebrow culture in ways that prove difficult to imagine now.
In some ways Scott and Ellison remained an odd pairing. Scott was exquisitely credentialed, Ellison a college dropout. While both men published first books in 1952, Ellison would never finish a second novel and released just two collections of essays (in addition to his occasional writing) over the next four decades. In that same period of time the prolific Scott would author or edit twenty-five books and, according to one estimate, “a couple hundred substantive essays and articles in numerous books and journals.”29 Their admiration was mutual, yet precisely what they saw in and gained from one another proves illuminating. Scott recognized in Ellison’s fiction and thought an outstanding, living exemplar of his own intellectual vision of Paul Tillich’s “form” and “substance” in Theology of Culture: a religious unconscious, an artistic worldview ineluctably charged with the intellectual intuition of culture as inherently religious, and its artistic expression as a theological reflection of such a religious orientation.30 Ellison, in Scott, found a kind of academic validation of his work and persona that not only carried the prestige that he coveted but also (and especially) found a black intellectual who “got” Ellison’s racial perspective (and vice versa). John S. Wright compares the relationship between Scott and Ellison to Ellison’s friendship with Albert Murray, and one can observe in the latter pair’s correspondence in Trading Twelves (2000), for instance, a kind of iconoclastic political and aesthetic kinship as black literary men working outside of the materialist vanguard.31 While the tone and language of the Ellison/Scott correspondence differs—it is decidedly less vernacular on both sides, for instance—a similar level of frankness and mutually implicit understanding emerges from the political and literary aesthetics that they discuss, and the confidences surrounding the colleagues, friends, and enemies that they share.
Thus, as Scott’s efforts bring to light a number of religious antecedents and problems that characterize Ellison’s fiction—even as a thoroughly secularized artist and intellectual, it remains instructive to observe precisely how Ellison couches Scott and his contributions to an interested public. As he wrote in a 1972 letter of reference on Scott’s behalf,
[Scott’s] has been an effort to make us aware of the many ways in which current literature is locked in an agonizing struggle to give new formal structuring to insights and intuitions which have long been regarded as the sole province of religious thinkers. In this it is my interpretation that he views the artist as moving toward reassuming under a new guise a role long ago rejected: . . . a role in which worldly secular manipulators of artistic forms struggle painfully toward creating a new vision of the sacramental dimension of human existence.32
While he may have lacked the formal capacity of a religious commentator or theologian, Ellison clearly possessed no small measure of insight into Scott’s thought, and into the deeper implications of the craft that he, himself, wrought. Ellison’s Scott struggled mightily to convey, to obviate, what remained for many as invisibly theological dimensions of secular cultural properties that people no longer recognized as religious in any capacity. In other words, Ellison recommends in Scott something of the religious dimensions that we have traced thus far in Ellison’s own conception of race.
Such tremendous empathy stems from a shared racial sensibility that thrust both Scott and Ellison outside of the prevailing attitudes of their time (and much of the interim, for that matter). We have already considered in earlier chapters Ellison’s difficulty as “not a black writer” or an “Uncle Tom.” Scott, too, proved ambivalent toward materialist interpretations of racial identity. He was harshly criticized for daring, as a black scholar, to write primarily about European writers and, as we have observed with Ellison, he confronted vicious, scarring antipathy from a racial vanguard patrolling such borders of identity. As with Ellison in other ways, however, one should neither overlook nor minimize the serious racism that Scott did, in fact, endure. Anthony Yu writes that Scott’s “childhood was haunted by terrifying tales of the Detroit lynching,” that he suffered the indignities of segregated dormitories “far from campus” at the University of Michigan, and was “mistaken for a janitor when he walked into John Herman Randall’s class at Columbia,” to name but a few experiences.33 Others who only knew Scott’s published work registered “astonishment,” as Ralph Wood puts it, upon learning that Scott was black.34 Despite the gentler tenor of Wood’s suggestion (significantly, Wood confesses himself to have numbered among those surprised), such astonishment often carried a much more sinister quality. Charles Long recounts a colleague who dismissed Scott simply because, this unnamed friend claimed, Scott “was not his kind of black man.”35 These troubles stemmed primarily from Scott’s impatience with emerging racial sensibilities and the sense that he was unwelcoming or unhelpful to other black academics.36 They only escalated in the second half of his career. In a 1993 speech to the Conference on Christianity and Literature at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association (MLA), Scott noted that “within my own ancestral community there are those who think of me as a kind of trahaison . . . . I have not specialized in what is spoken of as ‘the Black Experience,’ and thus some of my black confreres are eager to declare that . . . I am, so far as they are concerned, beyond the pale.”37 This was, in Scott’s words, an era of “hermeneutical terrorism” in critical theory. A black theologian who was no Black Theologian, he became an attractive target for his racial apostasy. As he wrote to Ellison two months earlier, in what must have been his last, or one of his last letters to his old friend who died five months later, “Nobody, I sometimes think, handles black folks with such cruelty as that with which they handle one another.”38
By sympathetic contrast, Kimberly Rae Connor suggests that Scott’s aims as an African American scholar might more appropriately be paraphrased by Scott’s own description of Melvin Tolson: “[A] Negro writer who asks to be considered as something other than merely a special case of ethnic ferment.”39 Stubbornly and determinedly, Scott refused to waver, and he paid bitterly for his defiance. In 1986 his presidency of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) raised ire among critics of his scholarly and political positions, and more than two decades later the pronounced lack of distinction accorded a posthumous celebration of Scott’s life at the 2008 AAR annual meeting in Chicago infuriated at least one participant.40 Scott’s “treason” has, it would seem, become his most abiding characteristic. His remarkable, if now somewhat dated, intellectual program has been overshadowed by the many difficulties surrounding the political orientation and performance of his racial identity.
In no small way the divide that Scott occupied reflects a more contemporary version of the “just representations” problem of racial epistemology as discussed along with the Negro novel in chapter 1. Need he be a “Negro scholar,” or does it suffice to be a scholar who “happens to be a Negro”? Is one more legitimate than the other, and who decides? In March 1969, upon reading a report that Lake Forest College, north of Chicago, intended to “grant . . . ‘black students an effective veto power over the hiring of black professors,’” Scott fired off an angry screed to the college’s president (and Scott’s erstwhile friend), William G. Cole. After claiming bafflement that any administration would “transfer its custodianship of the academic enterprise to some other group,” Scott arrives at the crux of the matter:
For what you and your colleagues are saying, when you declare that you’ll not accept a black scholar as a colleague who hasn’t been approved by the black students, is that a Negro scholar who is not a “good” Negro doesn’t deserve enfranchisement in the academic community at large. (He must prove, in other words, just how “black” he really is.) And I wonder if this isn’t the last condescension that the American white man can practice upon me (and the pronoun, I trust you to understand, is collective and not personal). For a long time, though I was practicing the disciplines of scholarship in my field of inquiry as assiduously as any of my other contemporaries, I was told that I simply couldn’t “come in”—period; and now I’m being told that I can come in only if I’m approved by my ancestral community. Which is simply the last refinement of disesteem!41
Here we glimpse Scott the racial Anglo-Catholic. The problem is epistemological, of course, reflected by notions of the “good Negro”—remember Long’s unnamed colleague who claimed Scott was “not his kind of black man.” At the root of Scott’s critique, however, is hierarchy. No Congregationalist (indeed, he elected to leave Presbyterianism in the 1950s), Scott favored canons of authority which, establishing order, work their way down to the laity. Matters of such importance cannot be left to those not ordained a certain authority. No matter how ridiculous it might be, the proposed Lake Forest policy disturbs Scott first as a position of governance (and few could argue sensibly that Scott is wrong in the abstract—the plan smacks of weak leadership). The personal sting of “disesteem” that follows stems from Scott’s disappointment with institutions that abandon authority to those less prepared to wield it. After all, for what other purpose does hierarchy exist? His bitter disappointment is palpable. “It’s a bad time,” he writes to Ellison in a cover letter that accompanies a copy of his remarks to Cole.42
Though it remains, perhaps, difficult to imagine Ellison quite so concerned with hierarchies, a shared position emerges if we consider the relative relationships that both men bore to canons of authority and their vernacular others. Ellison recognized elements of the vernacular in high culture and so conflated them—reading “Ulysses in black” (to borrow the title of Patrice Rankine’s book about Ellison and classicism) as a way of spanning what David Chinitz, writing about T. S. Eliot, calls “the cultural divide.”43 Scott also recognized this divide. We know he was highly conversant in jazz and other forms of black vernacular expression.44 Rather than (like Ellison) honoring high culture by rendering it in the vernacular, Scott—much like Eliot (and the Anglo-Catholic connection here proves apposite)—worked in the opposite way. Like pub talk or dance hall music in Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), Scott wanted to elevate worthy vernacular figures to the realm of high culture. Furthermore, this elevation depicts his own emergence as a prominent Anglican, a black intellectual who rose from the ranks of Negro colleges to a post at the University of Chicago, and later became, with his wife, Charlotte, the first African Americans hired as tenured professors at the University of Virginia. Scott took tremendous pride in these accomplishments and sincerely believed that he achieved them on his own merit, an attitude that many find problematic in its individualistic orientation. Nevertheless, Scott’s singular abilities and tenacity as an inconvenient trailblazer remains undeniable. It also clarifies why the Lake Forest affair angered him so profoundly: for true integration of elites to take place, utterly exceptional individuals must rise according to the terms of authority to which they aspire. Part of doing so requires a letting go of “vulgar” material and communitarian concerns in the interest of more profound and singular ambitions, a point where Scott and Ellison reunite in their respective positions across the cultural divide.
Consider the contents of a letter Scott sent Benjamin Quarles in June 1962, inviting a submission to The Dark Tower, the volume he planned to coedit with Ellison in commemoration of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation. Working against the notion that “American society and culture have never been informed by any really profound historical consciousness,” which he wants Quarles to assess in his contributed essay, Scott notes,
It is our intention that this book shall have a character somewhat different from similar efforts that have been undertaken in the past. For they have tended to be almost exclusively concerned with racial experience and with all the bitter exigencies of racial politics. And though it is by no means our purpose rigidly to extrude this whole dimension of things from our canvas, it is a part of our intention to provide a kind of evidence of how deeply Negro intellectuals have come to be concerned with the whole gamut of thought and experience that claims the interest of the intellectual community at large on the American scene in our time.45
This larger claim, in boilerplate prose sent to all prospective contributors, establishes tension between the politics of racial experience and a broader range of intellectual concerns. On the one hand, such a division makes little sense taken in the abstract—especially to contemporary readers. Politics simply cannot be extruded from African American intellectual concerns. This was historically true at the moment Scott wrote and today represents a point further vindicated by more than a half-century of empirical historical evidence in the interim (never mind matters of current events), which give it an even more troubling register, rating the political as inferior to or lesser than intellectual pursuits. Certainly we see where Scott’s detractors might have derived their displeasure.
To deal with Scott’s work, however, requires a different set of assumptions. An honest appraisal, without apologetics or apology, must acknowledge and even insist that while he approached his experience of being African American in ways that simply did not align with contemporary (or current) accounts and attitudes does not mean that such an approach lacks depth, conviction, or even fidelity to his “ancestral community.” Here we locate Scott’s shared racial sensibility with Ellison: certain terms of metaphor, interpretation, and experience exist and function outside of the conceptual shorthand that developed roughly midcentury and that we inherit from this age of Scott and Ellison’s friendship. Like invisibility, the metaphysical trope that has become a materialist paradigm, Scott is due for reappraisal as a brilliant and pugnacious critic who in many ways invented and codified precursors to our present “religious turn” in the study of culture and texts. Toward such ends Scott does not separate the political from broader cultural concerns; rather, the diminishment of political action and rhetoric that Scott recognizes oversimplifies and proves inadequate to the scope of human endeavor that Scott recognizes more broadly to be in play. Such actions and rhetoric could not find elevation to Scott’s high critical position.
A year after his letter to Quarles and less than one week before Medgar Evers’s assassination, Scott wrote to Ellison, “Events in the South are keeping an incredibly swift and unpredictable pace these days, and one wonders toward what conclusion they’re moving.”46 He expresses surprise at the organization and vehemence of the movement, with a caveat:
As I talk to Negro students on campuses in the region, though I am sometimes thrilled by their courage and resoluteness, I cannot help but be occasionally saddened a little by how coarsening of sensibility much of this agitation seems to be. And this may be a new dimension of the racial tragedy in this country—that not only are evil men coarsened by the intransigence of their evil, but so too is there a coarsening in the act of what Camus spoke of as “rebellion,” coarsening in the slogans and the epithets that furnish the rebel with his armory of rhetoric, and most especially when that rhetoric insists, with a furious self-righteousness, upon its humility and its “Christ-cum-Ghandi” non-violence. The stupid, cruel violence of the white segregationist naturally makes any real “sweetness and light” on the other side a most difficult achievement indeed—but, even so, I could be far more hopeful than I am about the possibility of a genuinely prophetic movement arising out of the Negro community in this country, a movement capable of projecting a truly radical critique of the whole gamut of American culture. I could be far more hopeful about the possibility of this, if I could see any indication that this new leadership in the “freedom movement” was not only concerned with immediate tactical maneuvers but was also attempting, through these bitter experiences in the South today, in some really deep and authentic way to face the full truth about the human City, in the special way that it’s disclosed by the whole American experiment. But all we hear is the dreary, Sunday-School moralisms of Luther King. . . . And, as I say, in all the mutations which this has undergone by the time it’s mouthed by the Negro college students whom I meet, one’s final impression is of a coarsening of mental sensibility and a blunting of political perception.47
This letter proves a remarkable statement for a number of reasons. A first reading registers displeasure with King, which certainly sounds odd in our hagiographic age but actually presents a fairly common critique of Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)—explored more deeply in conjunction with Ellison in the next chapter. Reading it in tandem with The Dark Tower letter, however, as a precursor to the Lake Forest letter, and with a sense of Scott’s broader corpus, opens up a sophisticated and lucid appeal to a common mission for aesthetic, intellectual, pedagogical, and even political arenas of African American life.
Scott was not apolitical, of course, nor was he allergic to protest (as some have deemed Ellison). Two years later, in 1965, he would answer King’s call to march at Selma and, whatever his earlier assessment, also compared King and Ellison favorably in 1973, writing of Ellison, “In quite the same large sort of way represented by the career of Martin Luther King, he has been . . . one of the great directeurs de conscience in the life of American culture over these past troubled years.”48 Furthermore, a number of his public addresses not only tackle head-on various problems of his “late, bad time,” but also take a rather unflinching prophetic stance against systematic racial oppression in American and Western colonialism (also the intellectual sources of Scott’s métier) and the evil it inflicts upon the world. On June 9, 1968, the Sunday after Robert Kennedy’s assassination, Scott preached a Trinity Sunday sermon at the Cathedral of St. James in Chicago. Beginning with an invocation of lines by Yeats—“We had fed the heart on fantasies, / The Heart’s grown brutal from the fare”—he launches into legacies of war and violence that cause “the civilized world”—“in Europe and in Asia and in Africa”—to deem Americans “a monstrous people.” Contrary to Independence Day fictions of “fundamental decency,” “the inordinate faith . . . that we have traditionally kept in our innocence” and that (as in Vietnam) sends the United States “in search of monsters to destroy,” Scott arrives at an ironic Niebuhrian conclusion: “In the process of playing God to the rest of mankind we become ourselves a kind of monster.”49
Such tragedy also bears a racial component rooted in sin: “Ours is a nation which . . . is very nearly marked by a kind of primal curse which may have become effective on the day when men began to be enslaved and lynched and deemed inferior because the color of their skin was dark rather than white.” Slavery and racial violence become “the central evil in our national history,” yet “so invincible is our . . . self-righteousness and . . . so sluggish is the moral imagination controlling the seats of social and political power that the black ghettos . . . have become a terrible wasteland of the human spirit where faith and hope are murdered and where men . . . turn to the last resort—of holocaust.” “I do not like the invective that black militants now fling out at the country,” he continues, “but I know the anxiety and despair from which it comes.”50 Such invective was not an isolated incident for Scott. In a 1972 “oration” delivered to a crowd of three thousand at the Chicago Historical Society’s “Old Fashioned Fourth of July Celebration” in Lincoln Park, Scott rehearsed this same jeremiad (indeed, he clearly revised portions of the 1968 text): American shortcomings pervade “this late, bad time.” Presumptions of innocence mask “the central [racial] evil in our national history from which spring many of the dark, intolerable tensions that today tear so violently at the fabric of our common life.” Only the acknowledgment and confession of these shortcomings (through “relentless” self-criticism) “may permit us to begin the work of renovation which so desperately needs to begin in America today.” “At least I wasn’t lynched,” he jokes blackly to Ellison in his cover letter.51
Interestingly, whatever Scott’s private misgivings with King in 1963, his public pronouncements on these occasions resound with a kind of prophetic mode that King, himself well versed in Niebuhr’s irony and the jeremiad form, would certainly recognize and, in fact, utilized himself. The larger problem seemed to stem from two sources: the “immediate tactical maneuvers” mentioned in the letter to Ellison that obscure prophetic response with recourse to “the full truth about the human City, in the special way that it’s disclosed by the whole American experiment,” and from sloganeering rooted in frustration that Scott understands—even as he does not endorse it—“coarsening” the sensibilities of those who engage in it.
As for sloganeering, Scott returned to Camus at least three times in the 1960s—twice in his own books and again in an edited volume.52 Camus was of particular interest to Scott because “the literature that he produced is a literature drenched in ideas.”53 The Rebel (1951—another qualifier for Invisible Man’s occasion), sought “some principle by means of which the absolute ethical relativism of an ‘absurd’ metaphysic might be modified toward a more genuinely humane end.” Accordingly (and note the sacramental language), “Camus appears as the celebrant of the human communion, and a communion that is itself established by and in ‘rebellion.’”54 This occurs by refusing to obey, thus revealing “some essential respect in which the human individual is involved in the family of mankind. ‘I rebel, therefore we are,’” Scott claims in a striking revision of the Cogito that balances pluribus and unum.55
Significantly, Camus’s rebellion also requires “moderation,” “balance”—mésure in the French; “rebellion can never be in behalf of total freedom.”56 This deficiency of mésure appears to be what strikes Scott as the “coarsening” among the protests in 1963. There are many ways in which Scott stands entirely outside of conventional wisdom surrounding protest movements and political action. Indeed, King mentions several examples of “Godly” extremism in his Birmingham jail epistle—Amos, Paul, Jesus, and so forth.57 While certainly one may likely disagree with Scott, the more interesting aspect of his appeal to Camus throughout the 1960s, illuminated by his remarks to Ellison about King, is the attempt he makes to work through tensions between certain tactical and intellectual or aesthetic aspects—we might say “media,” echoing mésure—of protest. Scott remains fundamentally concerned with political issues of identity. Unlike the usual ways of addressing these issues—whether as a matter of taste, method, or nonconformity (remember that T. S. Eliot’s Tory sensibility created stringent rules for Eliot the modernist poet to break)—his approach proved oblique. Certainly it is a pity that he refused to make this aspect of his work more obvious, but it is also perhaps especially shameful that few have bothered to read below the surface to encounter, ironically, these things not seen.
The trouble with “immediate tactical maneuvers”—which, again, were always contentious—derives most likely from an interesting source of frustration, yielding a fascinating and incisive allusion. The clue resides in the oddly rendered phrase “human City” in the 1963 letter. Scott laments that no one “confronts” the human city “in the way it’s disclosed by the whole American experiment.” Scott almost certainly derives the idea of a human city, sometimes translated as “earthly city,” from Augustine’s The City of God—which holds the human city in a kind of friction with a “divine city,” sometimes translated as the invisible city.58 Indeed, in Craters of the Spirit Scott invokes it again, if obliquely, during his discussion of Camus’s The Rebel: “The ultimate exigency which man faces in our time is an exigency arising out of a great abdication, a terrible collapse, a tragic death, in the City of God himself.”59 While it proves difficult to know precisely how Scott’s point of view works and changes over the several years between the private letter and the public intellectual statement, it does remain clear that a coarsening of sensibility restricts the ability to aspire and achieve beyond materiality. Symbolically, and ironically, Scott invokes Ellisonian invisibility in his critique of civil rights strategies through reference to an African bishop—Augustine of Hippo—who holds foundational significance as a preconditional figure for the intellectual and cultural development of the West. He does so by reading Camus—an Algerian. Whatever may prove disagreeable in the details, such moves qualify as exquisitely Ellisonian. Furthermore, he does so ultimately in the sermon and Independence Day address through recourse to a prophetic mode. Prophets, of course, work on the margins, but a prophetic mode, ironically, derives from canons of biblical literature. By speaking prophetically, Scott elevates marginal, material concerns to the stature of canonical authority—“Thus sayeth the Lord!” Material concerns of “the human City” take on more stridently ambitious, metaphysical urgency as it confronts the invisible city.
Like Ellison, Scott understood social history and its critical cultural dimensions as participant in and inflected by the grander narratives to which he attended. Consider Carolyn Medine’s observation that “Scott sought to articulate the contribution of the African American to the American and human experience. How, he asks . . . do they illuminate their age and its ‘big questions?’ Their capacity to do so is a contribution to culture, not just a sociological analysis of the ‘black condition.’ . . . Scott . . . continually exercised his right and championed the right of others to speak not just to culture but of culture.”60 What is more, he insisted upon the political imperative to inhabit culture—not to prophesy but to stand as a witness to prophecy as an authoritative genre and phenomenon.
Such a demand registers especially well through Schleiermacher’s definition of religion as the negotiation of particulars and universals that function cooperatively, yet in tension, as specifics of identity navigate broader corporations or traditions from which they draw meaning and to which they contribute. Recall that Scott himself deploys these terms to discuss Invisible Man. These are individual/group dynamics, faction and nation; we might even think in terms of unum and pluribus. Ellison’s critical and creative notion of racially articulated literary statement deals in similar navigations. As noted in earlier chapters, when asked by the Paris Review about Invisible Man’s status as a protest novel, he argued that all of literature protests particular injustices—invoking Sophocles, Cervantes, and Dostoevsky before situating his own work in that broader continuum of Western literary tradition.61 The grievances and traumas remain particular—culturally and historically conditioned—yet the tradition these particularities contribute to also informs certain more universal customs and formal expectations for negotiating diverse particularities. Such common fealty between rootedness in a particular vernacular identity and a broader tradition must have appealed to Scott as an African American Anglican writing primarily out of European theological and modernist literary traditions, and who suffered daily racial indignities not only despite but also because of his relatively privileged position. Ellison helped to ground Scott in a black vernacular that he did not so easily access or reference at first, yet which he sought to transform across a cultural divide. Similarly, Scott’s influence reinforced in Ellison’s particular vernacular what Schleiermacher calls “a taste for the infinite.”62
A common trope—made famous but by no means invented by Irving Howe—holds Richard Wright as a benchmark, even an interpretive key for understanding Ellison as he variably aligns with or revolts away from Wright as a Howean “ancestor” (Ellison argued that he was a “relative”). It remains a reasonable view. Wright encouraged Ellison as a young writer, commissioning his first book review, introducing him to other writers in 1930s Harlem, and offering him a political platform in the Marxist journal New Masses. They were, for a time, outstanding friends, with Ellison serving as best man at Wright’s wedding. Later, as they drifted apart, Ellison still relied on Wright as a sounding board against which he articulated what he saw as his own unique positions.63 A key way to be Ralph Ellison became emphatically not to be Richard Wright—or at least Ellison’s construct of “Richard Wright.” Both deliberately and in Ellison’s own mind, “Wright” pushed him in new directions as a writer, critic, and persona. Such claims also characterize Ellison’s relationship with Nathan Scott and a kind of theological apprenticeship that Scott, most likely unconsciously, devised even amid a mutually beneficial relationship between ostensible equals.
I want to close this chapter with a thought experiment: What if, much as the early parts of Ellison’s career find articulation through a Wrightean lens, we turn to Scott as an organizing principle for understanding the second half of Ellison’s career? Put differently, Ellison met Scott and they became friends within months on either side of Wright’s death. If Ellison’s career through the 1950s consists of just representations, epistemologies of race, and the attempt to problematize certain cultural materialities, what changes in our understanding of Ellison in the 1960s and beyond when we amplify Ellison through Scott as Wright’s foil?64 Too much can be made of the chronological coincidence, of course, but the milestones remain serendipitous. Furthermore, like Wright, Scott provided Ellison with writing opportunities and ideological guidance. He made important introductions and cultivated a new theological sensibility derived from notions of particulars, universals, and their antagonistic cooperation in the midst of a rising tide of identity politics that also flummoxed Ellison. Finally, we should not forget that it was during this period that Ellison’s most substantial work on his second novel—a novel about a bluesman-cum-preacher and his preacher-cum-politician protégé—took shape. In this way, like Wright, Scott too influenced Ellison to articulate and redefine fundamental cultural assumptions in a specific way at a critical moment in his career, adjusting to his role as an authoritative literary voice and trying desperately to manage a second novel spiraling out of control, all while confronting attacks and accusations of Uncle Tomism from an ascendant Black Arts faction and realizing that his first novel might well become his only novel. Scott affirmed in Ellison a different mode for conceiving of race in Western contexts—as an invisible theology amid otherwise overtly secular concerns that colored the excitement and terror of such cultural and personal dynamism.
How then do these circulating preconditions shape the contours of Ellison’s work after the 1950s? Primarily through a newly urgent concern for “depth” in literature—a recessive moral component that avoids overt proclamations of virtue but serves, rather, as a grounding precondition that particulars of plot and narrative might work with or even ironize through textual play. Recall Ellison’s 1971 letter, which claims specifically that Scott’s work in The Wild Prayer of Longing obviates “the loss of depth and resonance” in modern literature, a loss he attributes to “concern for the sacred” going “underground (if not completely out of the window).” Such a loss of depth characterizes the cultural view that Ellison witnesses in his present tense. In the same letter draft he rhapsodizes about “a tragic sense . . . sorely needed if for no other reason than to allow us to view our petty, media-inflated rebels in a truer scale.” He registers “a sense of incompleteness and an agony manifest in the form of the novel itself as a reduction in scale and as a timidity before the complexity of lived life.” “Literary banality” rules the day, and “novelists have lost that ambition to create forms commensurate with . . . increasing complexity,” a “fashion[able]” trend “concern[ed] with the picknosed and smartalecky.”65 Here Ellison rehearses, in a draft and thus for his eyes only (we do not know what he eventually sent), frustrations not only with the literary scene of the early 1970s but also, no doubt, with his own place in it, and his ongoing struggle to complete the long-awaited second novel. On this reading Ellison’s wrangling with the unfinished novel (which posits preachers and preaching as central dynamics of American political identity) gains a sacramental dimension (as he calls Scott’s critical vision) that attempts to rectify such banality through a statement of religious “depth.” No doubt such “complexity” soothed his difficulties—if only briefly.
Depth, of course, is not a new property for Ellison. Invisibility offers a kind of depth in the first novel (though certainly a less determined one) through recourse to various conceptual antecedents—the Bible, Luther, Kongo spirituality, and so forth. In the second novel preachers and preaching take on this role, providing depth through conceptual grounding in performances of words as Burkean “Word.” In a book about nation, identity, politics, and culture, the one point of unity, of grounding, remains Hickman and the voice he imparts to Bliss (who himself wields it as betrayal)—for the performance of words as Word.66 Religious depth remains immaterial, intangible. It is rhetorical, semiotic, and even embodied (if literarily so) through homiletical performance, yet this immateriality amplifies material economies of race, nation, and identity in the second novel. Trouble remains on the horizon, however, and the next chapter tells that story—even if not with continual reference to Nathan Scott.
A second view of “depth” stems from a common appeal to race as original sin found in both Scott (as we have observed) and Ellison (as we shall explore in much greater depth in chapter 5). Scott, amid the turbulent late 1960s and in their aftermath (his “late, bad time”), wrote of American racism as “a kind of primal curse” and, by extension, “the central evil in our national history” that compromises any cause for optimism. Drawing on a sense of what I call Ellison’s theological “apprenticeship” to mark a pivot in his career, chapter 5 reflects on and enlarges what we might consider to be the cross-pollination of Ellison and Scott. This early sensibility is cultivated over time and grows into a fuller racial schematic in Ellison’s fiction and criticism. It becomes perfected perhaps in his teaching, where we observe through his syllabi and lecture notes a more stringent appeal to a kind of depth that amplifies the themes and concerns of nineteenth-century American literature in the guise of post-Calvinist conceptions of American sin and its correlations with racism. Such an appeal marks an exception to American exceptionalism in an age, just before the Civil War, when novelists—or at least the good ones—put away childish things, stopped picking their noses, and became theologians.