The Bright Book of Life by Harold Bloom

MY FRIEND Ralph Waldo Ellison was born in Oklahoma City in 1914. To my grief he died in New York City in 1994 at the age of eighty. We had known each other a long time, having been introduced by R. W. B. Lewis and Kenneth Burke in the middle 1960s. During his final years, we lunched together once a week at the Century Club in New York and talked about literature and jazz. Sometimes Albert Murray made a third. Ellison was fierce on the issue of aesthetic merit. He chided me for having praised Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, though there we went on disagreeing. The major African American achievements in the arts certainly include Ellison's Invisible Man, the poetry of Jay Wright, born in 1935, and the music essentially inaugurated by Louis Armstrong and then carried on by so many grand figures, including Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Max Roach, and others.

Though Ellison declined to join my expeditions to the Blue Note in the Village and Minton's in Harlem, he loved Louis Armstrong, Ellington, and Jimmy Rushing, and was captivated almost against his will by Charlie Parker and Charles Mingus. He could not abide John Coltrane, which mystified me. As Ellison aged into the author of a single great book, he sometimes seemed defensive in his vision of jazz as the African American outlaw protest against white America.