Albert Murray’s voice emerged fully formed. It is learned and didactic, yet playful and nuanced—and above all, highly attuned to multiplicity
sins of American race relations are as stark as they were horrific. For over two centuries, black people were enslaved. For decades afterwards they endured legal and de facto segregation, and, in the South—where Albert Murray grew up—forced labour and peonage imposed through convict-leasing and sharecropping. These brute facts bequeathed pain and injustice. But they also left a complex cultural legacy. Murray probed that complexity as deeply, seriously and joyously as any American writer.
At the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama he met Ralph Ellison, who, Murray noticed, had taken out many of the same books that he had. They were intellectual comrades for much of their lives, both preoccupied with the range of the American experience and the central role of black people in it. As Ellison put it, “Whatever else the true American is, he is also somehow black.” But they took inverse paths as writers.
Murray had an aversion to social scientists who portrayed black Americans as uniformly downtrodden. In his view, “the background experience ofNegroes includes all of the negative things that go with racism and segregation; but it also includes all of the challenging circumstances that make for ambition, integrity and transcendent achievement.
He seemed to esteem Thomas Mann and James Joyce highest among novelists, and, like some of theirs, his four novels are in essence coming-of-age tales—beautifully written, replete with memory and detail, but lacking his essays’ spark and thrust. Like his poems, in their richness they make an implicit argument against what he called “the folklore of white supremacy and the fakelore of black pathology”.
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