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'That same pain, that same pleasure': editing Ralph Ellison's 'Juneteenth'
John Callahan, Morgan S. Odell Professor of the Humanities, addresses opening convocation, Aug. 25
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The beginning of my story goes back almost 40 years, to a spring evening in 1960 about the time the sit-ins by black students in the South began to stir my generation's roots. I was a sophomore in college&emdash;the College of the Holy Cross, a liberal arts college somewhat like this one, though there were no girls in the student body and more Jesuits than we wanted on the faculty. A friend had loaned me a beat-up paperback copy of Ellison's novel&emdash;one of the battered books passed from hand to hand in those days. That evening, I sat by a dormer window in Fenwick Hall, with only the light from an antiquated gooseneck lamp between me and the deep New England dark, and read Invisible Man till dawn; in fact, till mid-morning, cutting a class in Tacitus, in which I was holding on for dear life to a passing grade. I had grown up in New Haven on the Irish Catholic side of the tracks from Yale. At Holy Cross, my father's college where I was supposed to feel at home, I found Ellison's character a kinsman, for he was an outsider at his Southern black college where he, too, was supposed to feel at home. More than I identified with the Irish Catholic young men of Joyce and Fitzgerald, I identified with Invisible Man, particularly with his resolve at the end of the novel to emerge from his underground hibernation and to engage the world, even though he had "been hurt to the point of abysmal pain." And I can wish you no better, no more exhilarating experience than one like the one I had with Invisible Man, an experience mingling what Ellison called "that same pain, that same pleasure." He was speaking of that intense encounter with self and the world which compels a writer or an artist to the creative act, and he also referred to the sense of intense consciousness and experience of which Hemingway said could not be told "[b]ut if you have had it you know."
'He was speaking of that intense encounter with self and the world which compels a writer or an artists to the creative act....' To you I would say, embrace "that same pain, that same pleasure" in whatever guise it comes. Savor it. Roll with its punches. You can, and you won't regret the fear and trembling with which you risk the bold, though often quiet, rendezvous that Ellison had in mind. |
John Callahan, Morgan S. Odell Professor of Humanities at Lewis & Clark College, talks about the "pain and pleasure" of editing Ralph Ellison's posthumous novel, Juneteenth, at Opening Convocation, Aug. 25.
Ralph Ellison, author of Juneteenth (Random House, 1999); $25. Photo by Bob Adelman |
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From that evening, night and morning in 1960, Invisible Man had a profound impact on me as a person and as a student. I'm sure that "on the lower frequencies" it had something to do with my decision to pursue a Ph.D. and become a literary scholar. Nonetheless, if a fortune-teller had told me that 35 years later I would end up as Ralph Ellison's literary executor, I would have called the Better Business Bureau, the bunco squad or, if no response was forthcoming, 911. In any case in 1977, while I was at this college, I wrote an essay called "The Historical Frequencies of Ralph Waldo Ellison." In the chutzpah of youth, I sent the essay to Mr. Ellison with a note on Lewis and Clark stationery. Five weeks later, I was astounded to receive a long and warm and thoughtful letter from Ellison, which he closed by telling me that if I were ever in New York "and have the time," he and Mrs. Ellison would be glad to see me. "And have the time": Can you imagine that? Ellison's unexpected response led to a long and close friendship that had about it a distinctly American venue of fraternity. In the note I sent along with my essay, I had mentioned Ellison's reference to Fitzgerald in "Study and Experience," an interview he had done with my friends, Michael Harper and Robert Stepto. Picking up on that toward the end of his letter because of my book on Fitzgerald, which I discovered he had read, he offered to send me a copy of "The Little Man from Chehaw Station." Sure enough, The American Scholar promptly arrived with an inscription that I think captures how deeply Ralph valued democratic kinship. "For John Callahan," it began, "and to that vision of fraternity expressed by Frederick D and Danny O'C."
'Tucked away in Ellison's sprawling manuscripts was the central narrative....' About our friendship, the inscription was, of course, hypothetical, or perhaps like his character Invisible Man, Ellison was experiencing one of "those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead." We didn't know each other. Yet, he was willing to test his premise of fraternity with an unconditional invitation, and I think like many African Americans, Ellison was fascinated by the Irish, by their apparent gift for language and politics, and their willingness to use the stereotypes employed against them for their own ends. "Fanny's Irish," he said proudly after we had relaxed in each other's company the first evening we spent together. "And some say that there might have been an Irishman somewhere back in the Ellison woodpile," he chuckled as he dared to change the old joke. From our first meeting in 1978 to his last days in April 1994, my friendship with Ralph Ellison was as much filial and paternal as it was literary. Certainly, I felt this way toward him, and years later, my mother told me that he had said something similar about me when they met at the Ralph Ellison Festival at Brown University in 1979. Over the next 15 years, we became close and easeful friends; so close that when Ralph passed away, Mrs. Ellison asked me if I would try to make sense of the second novel and, shortly afterward, if I would serve as literary executor of his estate.
'...it is Ellison's prophecy, hallucinated by the dying senator, of what could be the fate in this country if we don't embrace the complexity of our identity as Americans and choose true reconciliation.' The task I confronted was one that, like the task you are accepting for the next four years, I was both prepared for and unprepared for. Part of me "dreamed lucky," as Ellison once wrote, and anticipated "that same pleasure" of finding a manuscript that was all but complete. After all, hadn't Ellison told David Remnick of The New Yorker shortly before his 80th birthday and not two months before his death that "there will be something very soon"? But instead of experiencing "that same pleasure," I encountered "that same pain." Ellison's novel was not finished, not even close. I encountered a mess. A jumble, a chaos and confusion some 40 years in the making. Don't get me wrong, there was much magnificent stuff and some fine clues about what he was aiming at, but despite his comment to Remnick and despite other comments he had made, I found he was not near to finishing the novel. At least, he was nowhere near finishing what he had aimed at over the years. And for a long time, for more than two years, I tried and tried and tried to put together a complete version of what Ellison had aimed at&emdash;some 2,000 pages of overlapping manuscript. Since the publication of Juneteenth, some have asked why I didn't do that, why I didn't just stitch together and publish all 2,000 pages. Because it was not that easy, because many of the pages weren't numbered in an overall sequence, because Ellison had not made up his mind about how he wanted to organize and order his material. Still, I tried to arrange all of the manuscripts into one single, coherent, complete book, but I found certain glaring gaps. That's when I felt procrustean. Earlier, I had thought about stringing the fragments together and inserting editor's notes in brackets between sections. But there would have had to have been a lot of them. And the se-quence and organization would have been mine. Even so, I did stretch out the manuscripts end to end and read them straight through&emdash;twice. I had to face "that same pain" and acknowledge that each and every section did not work together, that they did not form a true book but rather a compilation, a compendium, an archive. At that point, I was discouraged and depressed, and my wife, Christine, who is here, said, "Why don't you go back and have a look at that long section you love so much?" So I did, and I found that what Ellison had called Book II told the essential story of Alonzo Hickman&emdash;the jazzman turned Daddy Hickman, as he is called by little Bliss, and then shortly afterward, Rev. Hickman&emdash;and of Bliss, whom Hickman midwifes into this world and who runs away and turns into the arch-racist Sen. Sun-raider. Tucked away in Ellison's sprawling manuscripts was the central narrative&emdash;not the only narrative, the central narrative, the most finished and complete narrative&emdash;of Ellison's saga. I found that the heart of the novel, in the words of one reviewer, "[e]ven in its incomplete form, editor-assembled form," was "an extraordinary book." So, with Mrs. Ellison's full cooperation, I undertook to edit this narrative. The result is Juneteenth, a book that would serve Ellison's large readership, to be followed by a scholarly edition to include the successive manuscripts with a generous sampling of Ellison's notes and comments on the overall work. For a start, the word Juneteenth is a lovely African American vernacular term coined by the slaves in Texas, who didn't know they were free or that the Civil War was over until June 19, 1865, when a Union ship sailed into Galveston Harbor and the commander told the weeping, cheering slaves that they were free. In the midst of the singing, someone made up the word Juneteenth. It's the title Ellison gave to a key episode in the novel when he excerpted it for publication in 1965 on the centennial of Juneteenth Day. It goes to one of Ellison's favorite themes&emdash;identity and what he considered a characteristic American tendency to evade our identity and the tragic consequences that come about when we evade responsibility for what the country has been and who it and we truly are. In particular, Ellison explores the tragic consequences that come about when every last American one of us fails to realize or accept that whatever else we are, we also, as he put it, are "somehow black" by culture if not by blood. This was Ralph Ellison's profound belief, and Juneteenth is very much written to that theme. And if you consider Invisible Man's bold concluding question: "Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?" you will hear him return to that question in a frightening way at the end of Juneteenth. In the new book, he ventures inside his two principal characters, one who looks white but who is raised black and talks black before he flees the black folks who love him, renames himself Adam Sunraider and becomes a racist senator; the other black, the Rev. Hickman who teaches little Bliss to be a minister. Hickman is an eloquent example of the black ministry who is complex enough to be also something of a confidence man. And Juneteenth ends with a terrifying scene. From the point of view of language and narrative, the scene is beautiful, but thematically it is Ellison's prophecy, hallucinated by the dying senator, of what could be the fate in this country if we don't embrace the complexity of our identity as Americans and choose true reconciliation. Though conceived and written decades ago, Ellison's scene, through his voice and the senator's and the voices of three black men, each speaking in a subtly varied idiom, imagines the possibilities and perils open to race and identity in America. Will the senator at last accept Hickman as the "true father," the "dark daddy of flesh and Word"? Or, is it too late for Hickman's way? Is it the senator's fate to be ferried across an American river of forgetfulness, perhaps the Potomac, by three cold, cunning black men who, in their mastery of technology are emblems of nemesis determined to exact revenge for all the injustice and invisibility visited upon them and their tribe by the Sunraiders of America? |
