The Invisible Manuscript

"She taught me reading and writing," says Adam. "She taught me how to read poetry by introducing me to the Romantic poets and Shakespeare. She'd have me go outside and look at airplanes in the sky and write about the clouds of smoke up there."

His skin, nearly yellow, wasn't white. At a distance, his color didn't stand out. But up close, on the streets of Salt Lake City, it did.

Jane Louise wanted her son to realize he had black blood. They joined the NAACP. She turned her son on to jazz, gave him books written by black authors and by whites who understood racial America. "I gave him Soul on Ice," she says, referring to Eldridge Cleaver's book -- considered incendiary by many -- about black-white relations.

In ninth grade, Adam entered an almost all-white public high school. "Adam kept to himself," his mother says. "He'd wake up at 5 in the morning and type out his school notes. He probably doesn't want me saying this, but he really didn't have a social life. At least not until he went to college."

Somewhere out there lurked black America for Adam Bradley; lurked Ellison's Negro America. Somewhere out there, a famous writer was working hard and righteously in New York City against his own impossibly high standards on his new novel.

Jane Louise's boy got himself admitted to Lewis & Clark in 1992. You have to be able to read pretty well to get admitted to Lewis & Clark. There would, however, be no mother-dad weekends for Bradley on the Lewis & Clark campus. He had no memory of meeting his father and no idea of his whereabouts. And sometimes curiosity about the man came rolling in on him. Like fog.

IN THE BEGINNING, THE ELLISON PAPERS WERE MERE DRUDGE WORK, ADAM BRADLEY SAYS. That blizzard of manuscript pages, copying and collating. Everything had to be read, reread, filed. Bradley felt that he and Callahan -- as they looked around the large table on campus where materials were laid out -- were staring at a literary jigsaw puzzle.

Callahan noticed Bradley's discipline. On Friday evenings, as Callahan watched other students galloping off campus to party, Bradley would be hunched over Ellison. Callahan gained confidence in the student. Bradley's responsibilities grew. Now he reemptied boxes, this time looking through what he had first taken to be irrelevant -- backs of envelopes, telephone bills. He realized that Ellison had jotted notes everywhere, so he gathered them all up and studied them like an archaeologist.

That kind of deductive mind-set led to another realization. From the beginning, Callahan and Bradley had been staring at three main forms of Ellison material: the handwritten pages, the pages produced on a typewriter and more than 80 floppy disks. The computer material struck Callahan as bewildering. Bradley, then 19, raised in a computer era, was fascinated by it. Immediately he wanted to find the make of Ellison's first computer. It was something called an Osborne 1. Ellison bought it in 1982. It weighed about 25 pounds. Bradley searched throughout the country for someone who might still have one, the better to understand how using it may have effected Ellison's writing. Finally, he found a science fiction writer in Canada who still used that model. "He said it was the closest thing to actual writing by hand," explains Bradley.

Callahan had long been mystified by something they discovered going through the endless files of Ellison's work. Scenes written to near perfection in the '50s and '60s would be revisited, and rewritten, 25 years later. If only Ellison had just gone forward instead of obsessing about sections that had already been polished, Callahan reasoned, "I believe he could have finished the novel in the 1970s. It's really sad."

But Bradley began to think he knew the answer: Ellison -- who had a lifelong fascination with technology and compulsively took apart radios and put them back together -- became seduced by the new machine, by the way he could move paragraphs up and down the screen, insert new words and delete old ones instantaneously. As he transferred his earlier work to the new medium, the words exploded. The shifting and shaping of his second novel became a new kind of mania.

Bradley went back over disks containing certain scenes, spreading out the printouts again and even painstakingly color-coding them in comparison with scenes that had been written on a manual typewriter.