The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Flying Home and Other Stories by Ralph Ellison
Greg Garrett

Ralph Ellison. Flying Home and Other Stories, Ed. John F. Callahan. Random House, 1996. 179 pp. $23.00.

This collection of stories shows Ellison becoming the masterful writer of Invisible Man; its stories reveal Ellison’s great gift for communicating not only the African-American experience but also the twentieth-century experience. (Many later published works of short fiction—those appearing after Invisible Man—were actually parts of the novel-in-progress that readers have been awaiting for forty-five years, and so editor John F. Callahan—in hopes of that novel’s eventual publication—has chosen not to include them here.) It’s true that some of these pieces of early fiction feel more like scenes (and perhaps are simply scenes) than full-blown stories; two were untitled until Callahan attached titles to them. But even in short works like “Hymie’s Bull” and “I Did Not Learn Their Names” which have little narrative arc, we see Ellison’s growing mastery of the simplicity and directness of the American language as well as the more lyrical—perhaps musical—language that characterized his best work.
But among the other stories, we find such gems as “A Party Down at the Square,” an account of a Southern lynching from the perspective of a white boy from Cincinnati that feels its way obliquely toward its powerful conclusion; “A Coupla Scalped Indians,” the best of four stories featuring the boys Buster and Riley, and an initiation story worthy of inclusion alongside Hemingway’s “Indian Camp” or “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife”; and, of course, the justly celebrated “King of the Bingo Game,” one of the most powerful and moving short stories written by any American author. The music is still there. Although writing about music as to render the feeling of it is supremely difficult, Ellison makes it look easy. The collection boasts a masterful use of call and response in “Mister Toussan” and of jazz in “A Coupla Scalped Indians.” And the music is there, soaring and tender and tough in lyrical descriptions interspersed throughout the stories. [Greg Garrett]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Flying Home and Other Stories by Ralph Ellison Greg Garrett Ralph Ellison. Flying Home and Other Stories, Ed. John F. Callahan. Random House, 1996. 179 pp. $23.00. This collection of stories shows Ellison becoming the masterful writer of Invisible Man; its stories reveal Ellison’s great gift for communicating not only the African-American experience but also the twentieth-century experience. (Many later published works of short fiction—those appearing after Invisible Man—were actually parts of the novel-in-progress that readers have been awaiting for forty-five years, and so editor John F. Callahan—in hopes of that novel’s eventual publication—has chosen not to include them here.) It’s true that some of these pieces of early fiction feel more like scenes (and perhaps are simply scenes) than full-blown stories; two were untitled until Callahan attached titles to them. But even in short works like “Hymie’s Bull” and “I Did Not Learn Their Names” which have little narrative arc, we see Ellison’s growing mastery of the simplicity and directness of the American language as well as the more lyrical—perhaps musical—language that characterized his best work. But among the other stories, we find such gems as “A Party Down at the Square,” an account of a Southern lynching from the perspective of a white boy from Cincinnati that feels its way obliquely toward its powerful conclusion; “A Coupla Scalped Indians,” the best of four stories featuring the boys Buster and Riley, and an initiation story worthy of inclusion alongside Hemingway’s “Indian Camp” or “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife”; and, of course, the justly celebrated “King of the Bingo Game,” one of the most powerful and moving short stories written by any American author. The music is still there. Although writing about music as to render the feeling of it is supremely difficult, Ellison makes it look easy. The collection boasts a masterful use of call and response in “Mister Toussan” and of jazz in “A Coupla Scalped Indians.” And the music is there, soaring and tender and tough in lyrical descriptions interspersed throughout the stories. [Greg Garrett]

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