The Invisible Manuscript

Now it was Callahan's mountain to move. But how to begin? He looked at the notes, at the scribblings; he talked to Fanny. She, too, was daunted by the mounds and mounds of paper. But she made it clear she believed the second novel was publishable.

Ellison was sometimes compared to Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner or Saul Bellow, great writers of his generation. (He befriended Bellow.) But they had all produced much more. The public came to expect the arrival of their books at regular intervals. Callahan was keenly aware that Ellison's public, who had already waited through Vietnam and Watergate, the black power movement and the women's movement, would have limited patience with his own delays.

So, Callahan quickly edited The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, which was published in 1995. A year later, another volume from Ellison's manuscripts, Flying Home and Other Stories, was published. Both collections were met with fine reviews. Yet they hardly sated the appetite for the second novel.

Callahan zeroed in on one section of manuscript -- about one-quarter of the pages relating to the second novel -- that had been most refined by Ellison. Callahan was flat-out charmed by the tone and texture of the work, of the back-and-forth dialogue between Adam Sunraider, the pass-for-white, race-baiting senator, and Alonzo Hickman, the black preacher who, unknown to the world at large, had raised Sunraider as a son.

Callahan used some of the notes about that section to bring order to those pages, and then a few pieces from the rest of the huge pile of the embryonic book to give the resulting story some context. In 1999, he published that portion as Ellison's Juneteenth. Readers clamored for the book, and just as quickly, many started voicing disenchantment. They wanted more; they couldn't imagine that 40 years of labor could result in only one 348-page novel. There were criticisms about disjointedness.

Condemnation of Juneteenth was far from universal. It reached the top 20 on the New York Times bestseller list and continued to sell respectably for a long time. There was high praise from various corners as well. Said critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. of Juneteenth: "Ellison sought no less than to create a book of Blackness, a literary representation of the tradition at its most sublime and fundamental." The Los Angeles Times expressed ecstasy, claiming that the novel "threatens to come as close as any since Huckleberry Finn to grabbing the ring of the great American novel."

But, perhaps inevitably, it's the sting of critics that Callahan recalls most vividly. The New York Times had this to say: "The book provides the reader with intimations of the grand vision animating Ellison's 40-year project, but it also feels disappointingly provisional and incomplete . . .

Instead of the symphonic work Ellison envisioned, Callahan has given us a single, tentatively rendered melodic line. Instead of a vast modernist epic about the black experience in America, he has given us a flawed linear novel, focused around one man's emotional and political evolution."

Posthumous works from literary giants often have a difficult terrain to traverse. Ernest Hemingway's The Garden of Eden was published in 1986. Because of the Hemingway cachet, sales were brisk. But the ridicule was swift. Library Journal, the trade publication, said the novel was full of "unfleshed caricatures." A piece in the New Republic about the book opined that Hemingway's publisher "has committed a literary crime."

In Callahan's case, some of the most cutting critics -- and the public at large -- seemed to have missed the point that Callahan had every intention of producing a fuller Ellison work, the entire symphony Ellison had conceived: a novel about race, miscegenation, America, love, pain. The novel would have jazz; it would have picaresque characters traveling in flight. Ellison aimed for the operatic and the Faulknerian. In doodlings beside some of his notes, he would draw American flags. He wanted the novel to be visionary.

Callahan had gone to lengths to explain his intentions in the book's afterword: The full work, as it stood in all its perplexing glory, would follow. "It was as if they didn't read it," he says now. "Book reviewers, as well. People came after me after Juneteenth was published, saying I should have just left the work alone, saying Callahan did Ellison a disservice. Well, in that regard it was Ralph who taught me how to deal with it. He taught me how to be a man. He taught me you have to have a tough skin to be in this business."

He also taught Callahan not to let go of something prematurely. Callahan remembers Bellow talking about 200 pages of manuscript Ellison had shown him. Bellow loved it, gushed over it, told Ellison it was as good -- "if not better," says Callahan -- than Invisible Man. "He told Ralph it was marvelous stuff," says Callahan.