“Albert Murray: Collected Essays & Memoirs”
Author: Albert Murray
Edited by Henry Louis Gates & Paul Devlin
Publisher: The Library of America, 2016
Pages: 1049
Price: $45.00 (Hardback)
Alabamian’s Work Honored With Library of America Volume
It is important to understand what an honor it is to be published by the Library of America.
This nonprofit institution began publishing what is widely regarded as the canon of American literature in 1982. Edmund Wilson, among others, feared that our nation’s best, most important, literature would be lost if not properly edited and made available.
The volumes are beautiful, with sewn binding, readable type and paper that will last for centuries.
The first five volumes were books by Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman, Stowe and Twain.
There are over 300 volumes now, and Albert Murray is, in my opinion, the only Alabamian to have his own volume. Even Pulitzer Prize winners Stribling, Lee and Grau are not yet included.
Zora Neale Hurston, born in Alabama but who moved to Florida at three years old and self-identified as a Floridian, and Ralph Ellison, who attended Tuskegee Institute for three years and later pilloried the school in “Invisible Man,” are published in the LOA. Alabama has claimed them as our own, yes, but Albert Murray is the genuine article.
A recent volume, “WWII Memoirs: The Pacific Theatre,” includes Eugene Sledge’s powerful memoir “With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa.”
An extensive chronology is provided by the editors. It practically constitutes a biography.
Albert Murray was born in Nokomis, Alabama in 1916, and raised in Magazine Point, adjacent to Africatown, the very place recently examined by Ben Raines in his book on the slave ship “Clotilda.” As a youngster Murray would play around Chickasawbogue, a short distance from the sunken wreck.
After Mobile County Training School, Murray took a B.A. at Tuskegee. There he was in residence with Ralph Ellison, and a mythology has grown up that they were buddies. In fact, Murray was a freshman, Ellison a junior and they met a few times by chance in the library.
In the late forties in New York City, they would become fast friends, a relationship that lasted the rest of their lives and has been commemorated in a volume of letters they exchanged.
Murray in 1943 became an officer in the Army Air Corps (later Air Force), rising to the permanent rank of major before his retirement in 1962. He was a training officer during WWII for the fabled Tuskegee Airmen.
Later he would earn an M.A. from NYU with a thesis on T. S. Eliot and Hemingway. He read widely, eagerly, all his life, making a special study of French philosophy and Thomas Mann, among many other serious writers.
Murray’s volume is, like most LOA volumes, 1,000 pages long and contains all his nonfiction, in this case six full-length books and some additional fugitive pieces. (There is a second volume coming which will contain Murray's novels.)
Obviously I cannot review six volumes of essays but one may give the flavor. “The Omni-Americans” is a collection of essays on race, based on events, personalities, and sometimes on books on race.
The subtitle starts the reader off: “Some Alternatives to the Folklore of White Supremacy.”
Murray was famous for his dictum “I am not a hyphenated American” and writes fiercely of equality and inclusion. Separate facilities being demanded for black student unions, or black studies centers, for example, were anathema.
Black intellectuals as well as white got his scrutiny. Of Richard Wright and James Baldwin, he says their work “seems to be designed to make those toward whom it is directed—i.e., white racists – feel guilty and fearful…believe me you’re going to get what you deserve!”
Murray thinks “Producing guilt may or may not be fine but stimulating intelligent action is better.”
Of sociological studies, Murray is especially scornful.
He has no use for the Moynihan Report on The Negro Family or Kenneth Clark’s “Dark Ghetto” or Gunnar Myrdal’s landmark study of race, “American Dilemma.” To Murray, these pseudo-scientific manifestos, even if well-meant, depict African-Americans as pitiful, depraved, degraded, neurotic, criminals and victims and might even inadvertently promote the idea of white supremacy.
Murray refuses this conclusion.
As it often would, music provides his metaphor.
The blues, for him the quintessential African-American musical language, is not a denial of the ugly dimensions of human nature but “a full, sharp and inescapable awareness of them.”
An omnivorous reader, of continental as well as American literature, Murray is comfortable with learned allusions. The blues musician, he says, is “making an affirmative and hence exemplary and heroic response to that which Andre Malraux describes as ‘La Condition Humaine.’”
Murray, who lived in Harlem from 1962 until his death in 2013, more than half a century, rejects the idea of “ghetto.” The people there he, says, “do not act like the culturally deprived people of the statistical surveys, but like cosmopolites....” They are “elegance- oriented.” “Many may be indigent but few are square.”
The list of his honors is awe-inspiring. Here in Alabama, he received the first Harper Lee Award and the Clarence Cason Award. He received several honorary doctorates, the W.E.B. Dubois Medal from Harvard and was admitted to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Murray was an extraordinary man and truly independent thinker. Career military officer, public intellectual, music critic and biographer, his work deserves to live forever, and now it will.
Don Noble’s newest book is Alabama Noir, a collection of original stories by Winston Groom, Ace Atkins, Carolyn Haines, Brad Watson, and eleven other Alabama authors.
