Monk writes My Pafology under the name Stagg R. Leigh

Thelonious Ellison’s writing of My Pafology is a decisive turn in his career: faced with repeated rejection and demands for a more commercially legible kind of Black fiction, he begins a novel he believes he cannot publish under his own name. Composed as Stagg R. Leigh, it gives its central voice to Van Go Jenkins and becomes both a work of fiction and a mask through which Ellison confronts the expectations shaping his literary prospects.

Background: rejection and racial expectations

Ellison is an accomplished novelist whose education, family background, and literary interests do not fit the narrow picture of Black life that some readers and editors expect. He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard, grew up near Annapolis, and writes work that can draw on classical literature and European critical theory. Yet a reviewer of one of his novels questions what its reworking of Aeschylus’ The Persians has to do with the African American experience. The objection turns literary subject matter into a test of racial authenticity: the work is praised as carefully made, but its relation to Black life is treated as uncertain.

That pressure takes a practical form in the publishing market. At Border’s, Ellison finds four of his books filed under African American Studies rather than in Literature or Contemporary Fiction. He sees the classification as a mismatch that could frustrate readers seeking either Black studies or his particular literary work, and could cost him sales. The problem is not simply that his novels are rejected; even when stocked, they are placed within a category that can prescribe how they should be read.

The immediate setback comes when Ellison checks with his agent about a novel already in progress. Three more editors have turned it down, with responses ranging from objections to its density to the judgment that there is no market for it. His agent, Yul, suggests that he write something like Second Failure again. That earlier novel sold reasonably well and was received favorably, but Ellison hated writing, reading, and thinking about it. Its plot follows a young Black man whose white-looking mother is ostracized by the Black community; after she dies by suicide, he becomes a terrorist who attacks people he considers racist. The commercial suggestion therefore points back to a kind of work Ellison has already found alienating to make.

The turn to Stagg R. Leigh

In his father’s former study, now the room where he works, Ellison sits with an image of Juanita Mae Jenkins on the cover of Time magazine in front of him. The image and the publishing conversation prompt an intense imaginative response. He recalls Native Son, The Color Purple, and Amos and Andy, and imagines a voice sharply unlike his own or his family’s. The passage presents the voice not as a discovery about how Ellison himself speaks, but as the result of pressure: he objects inwardly to the assumption that this is how he, his mother, or his father sounds, even as he begins to use that imagined register for a novel.

Ellison puts a page into his father’s old manual typewriter and writes the title and byline: My Pafology, by Stagg R. Leigh. He knows he cannot put his own name on the book. The pseudonym makes the division explicit: Thelonious Ellison, the writer whose existing work has met resistance, gives way on the page to a constructed author whose book can be presented through a different set of expectations. Ellison later describes the role as a mask and acknowledges that playing it is becoming enjoyable, as well as bringing him a check.

Van Go’s voice and story

The novel opens in a first-person voice belonging to Van Go Jenkins. Its opening scene is framed as a dream: Van Go wakes after imagining violence toward his mother, Sadie Jenkins, and carries the dream’s fear and confusion into his account of the day. The narrative then establishes his self-image through his indifference to other people and his insistence that he will visit Rexall because he considers himself the boy’s father and says he takes care of his children. The contrast between that claim and the circumstances he describes makes the voice more complicated than a simple assertion of responsibility.

Van Go is nineteen. He intends to avoid work at a warehouse and waits outside a high school for Rexall’s mother, Cleona. He describes her ambitions to graduate, attend community college, and become a nurse, while treating their relationship in dismissive terms. The novel’s opening also introduces the children Van Go has with different mothers and the uneven, self-serving way he speaks about his obligations to them. These details establish a narrator who is at once a father, a son, and a young man resisting education and work; the account does not present his boasts as reliable evidence of care.

The opening pages thus build a deliberately concentrated fictional persona rather than reproduce Ellison’s own background or speech. Van Go’s first-person narration gives readers direct access to his explanations and attitudes, while the gap between what he claims and what he recounts invites scrutiny. Ellison’s act of writing is also an act of construction: he creates a voice recognizable to a market accustomed to demanding a particular kind of supposedly authentic Black story, without presenting that voice as a transparent account of his own life.

The mask and the book’s reception

Ellison later names the irony of his position. He had not written to testify on behalf of a group, to liberate anyone, or to produce what he considered the true picture of his people. Yet he had been marginalized for refusing to make his art an exercise in racial self-expression. Now he can earn money by writing a book that seems to comply with the very expectations he had resisted, while taking on the persona audiences anticipate from a writer named Stagg R. Leigh. The pseudonym offers an opening in the market, but it also makes the cost of that opening visible: success is tied to performing an identity Ellison regards as imposed.

The later reception of My Pafology underscores the contradiction. A review presents the novel as raw, honest, and real, and treats Van Go’s lack of a father, resistance to education, and life as a young Black man as broadly recognizable. It frames him as a character readers should fear and pity, while interpreting his conduct as natural to his circumstances. That response shows how readily the book’s adopted voice can be mistaken for a definitive portrait of Black life. The writing event therefore produces more than a pseudonymous novel: it exposes the distance between Ellison’s deliberately fabricated literary voice and the critical appetite to treat that voice as racial truth.