[...] In the face of this he decided to abandon writing novels. In 1934 he began writing for The New Yorker, mainly “casuals” and Talk of the Town pieces. Soon this undemanding writing also palled; he felt it did not provide him with the opportunity for “accomplishment” that fiction had offered. He later reflected that he “missed the struggle that had accompanied [novel writing]—the hope, as long as I had it—the possibility—that the accomplishment might be large. In my New Yorker work I saw no such possibility. Others in the offices around me, were writing masterpieces—Thurber and Perelman were comic geniuses. I knew that my writing for the magazine was not up to theirs,” and he added disarmingly that “easily though it came it didn’t improve when I tried harder.”

The following spring, when the Steegmullers left for Paris, Francis gave Ralph the keys to the office he kept in a building at 608 Fifth Avenue so he would have a quiet place to work. The office was on the eighth floor in a suite of rooms belonging to the jewellers Samuel and Augusta Mann, who guarded Ralph’s privacy, took him to lunch, and encouraged him to write. It was his until the Steegmullers returned in mid-October. Ralph wrote Francis in late June, “Until today, which is doing its best to smother me, my work has moved ahead with a kind of magic. I have been putting in a fairly full day of writing here at the office then leaving my ms until the next day and if I can continue this way I won’t mind how hot it gets and by October I can present the boys with a big thick headache of a novel.” Fanny too was pleased with the arrangement, writing in August, “Can I tell you what the use of the office has meant to Ralph? No better thing could have happened for him. Last week he had written 50 new pages since he went there the Monday after you’d gone, new pages, not rewritten ones. All of which makes me know that the book might have been finished by now had he had all along a suitable place to work.” Rampersad notes that Ellison’s presence there was unexpected in that white neighbourhood: “To catch the sunlight, Steegmuller had set up his typewriter next to a window that looked across to the roof of Radio City Music Hall. When white people there saw a black man sitting at a typewriter, they sometimes could not hide their curiosity or their alarm.” This might have proved to be a problem, Ellison observed, “had I not been consciously concerned with a fictional character who was bent upon finding his way in areas of society whose manners, motives and rituals were baffling.”

Bill Maxwell also wrote with enthusiasm:

Dear Francis, it’s absolutely marvelous … The effect is of a layer of callous peeled off, leaving something luminous and alive. You can, for the first time, eat the food and touch the people and smell and see everything. And reading it, I am continually reminded that Flaubert was an aesthete, and continually driven to reflect, as Mrs. Woolf was in her novels, “Human life, human life!” It goes on like a refrain behind whatever is happening. It is not like a translation but like a redoing of it in English. The cadences, the diction, the shifting naturalness of the style are all incomparable. And all those glittering effects, as when M. Rouault remembering how his bride rode pillion behind him, looks back and sees that there is nothing on the road. I don’t know why I think Flaubert meant this to mean the total emptying of the past, any more than I know why I think he meant to convey, when Emma is making conversation with Charles and says that she doesn’t enjoy country life, that her destiny is already final and that it is only a matter of a little while and she will have the taste of poison in her mouth. At every point there are these effects, these double-takes, which are new to me, and ravishing. [Harold] Brodkey was so excited he kept groaning for pleasure, and he had read the book twice before and never cared for it. I could paper a room with my favorite passages.

Francis’s other projects did not always proceed on the same basis of familiarity. Some would take time to reveal themselves to him. He recorded his thoughts on this in the notes he made of an interview made during lunch at the Café d’Orsay in late 1957 with the poet Pierre Reverdy, whom he had approached in relation to his planned next project on Apollinaire:

I told him how I regard my writing. Like all writers I have things to say, and sometimes these things take the form of a novel, sometimes the form of a biography, or what people call a biography. But I don’t consider myself a biographer de métier. For some reason I find it hard to speak directly, as do writers of novels; perhaps it’s timidy [sic]—I hide behind other people and speak through their mouths. These have to be people capable of expressing my thoughts, preferences, ideals, etc. they are people I come across in my reading—usually by chance. (During this he kept nodding sympathetically, patting my arm—he interrupted only to object to my statement that I “hid” behind other people: “No, he said, you simply express yourself through them.”) At present I don’t know whether Apollinaire is one of those people or not. If I don’t know that he is, I will write nothing about him.

He said, “You are capable of knowing who and what you are—most people are not capable of this—so your decision will be the right one. Your book will probably take a form that you have no idea of in advance, and you will not understand what is happening or why it is happening. That is the only true artistic creation.”

Never in the world, he said, would he have spoken with me this way—“as if we had been friends for twenty years”—if he hadn’t felt about me in a certain way …

I thanked him, told him he’d given me courage, his talk had been precious to me, and had been utterly different from anything I’d imagined in advance. He told me that was the greatest compliment I could pay him.