Ralph Ellison, Joseph Mitchell, and ghosts in Brooklyn

Updates from the Shirley Jackson Files

I spent some time this week on another Augean-stables-type task: going through about 15,000 unprocessed photographs in Ralph Ellison’s files at the Library of Congress. Ellison was a good friend of Shirley and her husband, the literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman. They met in 1942, when Ellison was managing editor of the Negro Quarterly and Stanley wrote to offer his services as a book reviewer—which made him one of the only white writers willing to appear in the magazine. The two men had completely different writing styles: Stanley was brash and a little hasty, especially when he was younger, while Ellison’s creative process was slow and torturous. In 1943, Stanley prodded Ellison to finish “Flying Home,” the story that would be his breakthrough, before shipping out to the merchant marine. He pounded it out in the Hymans’ Greenwich Village living room and headed off; by the time he returned, Stanley had managed to get it published. Stanley was also deeply involved in helping Ellison shape Invisible Man. In fact, it’s been said that the reason Ellison never finished his second novel was that Stanley (who died in 1970) was no longer around to edit it.

And yes, I did find a few photographs, but I don’t yet have permission to reproduce them. With any luck, they’ll appear in the book.

In other literary biography news, my review of Thomas Kunkel’s Man in Profile, his biography of the New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell, is in this month's Atlantic. Mitchell was one of the great magazine writers of the twentieth century, but his reputation has faded a little with revelations of how much of some of his profiles he invented. I ask whether the problem is his literary techniques or our changing journalism world, in which data and fact-checkability are prized over storytelling and character. In the NYTBR, Blake Bailey focuses on the question of Mitchell’s writer’s block: for 30 years he came to his office with “Kantian regularity” and typed away, but he never published another piece during his lifetime. Scary stuff for us working writers.

Speaking of scary, Shirley—who collected newspaper stories about poltergeists and other supernatural phenomena—would have loved this one. Ghosts are supposedly haunting a new luxury apartment building in Brooklyn that was formerly a hospital. According to the New York Post—admittedly, not my usual news source—a doorman who still works there (other staff have quit) had the feeling that “a presence was following him” in the basement. It’s at 123 Parkside Avenue, and studios and one-bedrooms are still available. The website advertises “luxe living on Prospect Park,” with a “gaming lounge,” fitness center, and yoga room. Personally, I would steer clear of the roof deck.

All best,

Ruth

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.” – Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House