The Invisible Manuscript

In 1960, Ellison wrote: "Three days before the shooting a chartered planeload of Southern Negroes swooped down upon the District of Columbia and attempted to see the Senator."

In 1972, Ellison revisited that sentence and wrote: "Two days before the shooting a chartered planeload of Southern Negroes swooped down upon the District of Columbia and attempted to see the Senator."

In 1993 -- a year before his death -- Ellison, still not content with the texture and shape of the sentence, revisited it again, this time on his computer. The result was considerably more expansive: "Two days before the bewildering incident a chartered plane-load of those who at that time were politely identified as Southern 'Negroes' swooped down upon Washington's National Airport and disembarked in a confusion of paper bags, suitcases, and picnic baskets."

As Ellison's computer use progressed, nearly every paragraph and page underwent a similar inflation. At one point, Ellison was working with three computers. He seemed a man dizzied by technology, a NASA operator in the control room thrilled by the machinery who has lost sight of the mission, of the rockets aloft.

In Ellison's case, of course, it wasn't a rocket's trajectory he lost track of, but his book's.

Bradley says the character of Alonzo Hickman, the jazzman turned preacher, is much fuller on the computer than in the typed manuscript. "He emerges as the governing conscience of the book on the computer," says Bradley. "Hickman really takes over when Ellison is writing in the '80s and '90s."

Callahan was stunned and delighted with Bradley's discoveries. "It's clear," says Callahan, "that the computer changed Ellison's habits. It may have contributed to his difficulties to finish the book. You can play that [rewriting] game on the computer, but not the typewriter."

It could go on forever, but Ellison could not. That was the crucial and grave mystery: how Ellison viewed time. It seemed not to bother him that his novel was taking so long. The historical touchstones of a century -- civil rights, Vietnam, Watergate -- zipped by in a flash compared with the eternal drift of his accumulating manuscript.

"Ellison," says Bradley, "was building a house, and there was rain falling through the roof. He didn't want to fix the roof in a normal way. He wanted to attend to a lot of other smaller details," such as the rewriting of scenes, the fuller shaping of characters. Bradley goes on: "By attending to those smaller details, it stopped him from making the novel whole."

He was a man drowning in his own words.

Another mystery for Bradley involved the pre-computer chronology. Absent any directions from Ellison, Bradley and Callahan had to decide which versions, and which notes, were the most recent and superseded the others. "There were hundreds, thousands, of pages not dated," says Bradley. "The only thing we had to go on was the color of paper he wrote on at a certain time and the typeface he used at a certain time."

If he found a letter that had been written in 1957 with a certain typeface, Bradley would pull out stacks of paper with that typeface and conclude Ellison was at least working during the period of ownership of that particular typewriter. It was not an exact science, but, he says, it was the best proposition he could work from.

Bradley says that Ellison wrote enough words "for 10 novels." But Ellison hardly seemed to be measuring volume. The sword that he lay against was one of exactitude, flawlessness, grandness. The man in the apartment on Riverside Drive in Manhattan wrote as the leaves were falling, the snow was piling up, the wind was blowing, inflation was rising, night was falling, friends were dying. "We're not talking a Walter Mosley book, where it wraps up nice and pretty at the end," says Bradley of Three Days. "But readers will find something here that will blow their minds."

And soon, they'll have a chance to see for themselves. The complete work, co-edited by Callahan and Bradley, will be published early next year by Modern Library. The page count has not been finalized.

It is an eagerly anticipated work. Ellison scholars who have gotten word of the publication are excited. "We rarely get to see all of the practice that leads to the game-winning shot. What we see is the outcome, and that robs us of all that went into it," says Lucas Morel, associate professor of politics at Washington and Lee University, who has taught about Ellison and befriended Bradley. "I'm fascinated about the work that goes into that which produces genius."

RALPH ELLISON WAS A WRITER, WHO WAS A NEGRO, WHO WAS A BLACK MAN, WHOSE FATHER DIED IN HIS YOUTH. Which haunted him.

Adam Bradley was a student, who became a scholar, a half-white and half-black man, whose father abandoned him in his youth. Which haunted him.

Bradley, now 33, completed graduate school at Harvard, earning a doctorate in literature in 2003. He continued to carry his Ellison research with him on his laptop. He studied the Ellison materials while traveling around Rome and London, while vacationing in Rio de Janeiro. He has walked the streets of Washington, envisioning where Ellison's "Negroes" and his U.S. senator might have walked. For years, in a real sense, he lived inside Ellison's grand unfinished novel, an experience all the more engulfing because the novel wasn't just a story about race and paternity to him, but because race and paternity could not have been more personal. The more he read into the pages -- about Bliss, a man of "indeterminate race" who never knew his father -- the more Bradley thought of his own father.

It was his pain being rubbed by Ellison's pain.

At Lewis & Clark, Bradley wrote a paper about his father, Jimmy Lee Terry, and Ralph Ellison -- or at least the ghost of Jimmy Lee and how that ghost tugged at him as the leaves were falling and snow was piling high through the years. He is shy about showing the paper all these years later, belittling it even. But it is a heartbreakingly revealing piece of work for anyone to have written, much less a college undergraduate. The young Bradley wrote: "For my father did not die, but willed to leave. And because he is black, my mother white, and I am somewhere in between, I have guarded his image as a complex source of my identity. As the years went by, he lost his flesh and blood, and became an incongruous combination of devilish thief and godlike creator of my race, my face. Are you my God? Yet, somewhere in the images of my father, and in Ellison's search for identity that began with his father, there is something invaluable for my own search for identity. I imagine my father is Hickman and I am Bliss . . ."

The following exchange takes place in Ellison's second novel, and when Bradley came across it, it stopped him cold:

Bliss: "So are you my father?"

Hickman: "What?"

Bliss: "Are you my father?"

Hickman: "That's what I thought you said. But Bliss how could I be, black as I am?"

Bradley couldn't stop thinking of his attempt, a few years earlier, to contact his father. He had gotten hold of a California phone number. The conversation was stilted and awkward. Jimmy Lee Terry even uttered something about doubting paternity.

"It was very painful for Adam," Callahan says.

In 2003, Bradley was interviewing for a position with Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, Calif. He carried his Ellison research with him. (In recent years, he has spent long bouts at the Library of Congress, where a trove of Ellison papers are stored.) Not long after Bradley arrived in Claremont, he got into his car. He had an address in hand, which he had tracked down. He drove in the direction of Encino, in search of Jimmy Lee Terry.

As he rolled down the street, he started squinting at house numbers, slowing. His chest tightened when he came upon the house. It was quiet, he remembers. He parked and got out of his car. He walked up to the house. Then the quiet was broken. "I just heard a German shepherd, barking and barking." He twisted on his heels; the barking continued. "So I left."

He was driving, he didn't know where, very slowly. It was as if a gator were around his ankle, pulling him back to that street, that house. He turned the car around.

He found himself at the front door, again. "I looked into the house," he says. "And I saw a man standing there. A shadow. I waited. I heard a side door outside. So I go around the side of the house. I saw a man. I said, 'Are you Jim Terry?' He said, 'Yes.' I said, 'I'm Adam Bradley.'"

It was awkward, he says, standing there, a couple yards between them.

Terry invited him inside. The dog stopped barking.

And for hours, two men talked. Two men, father and son. Then they went out to get something to eat. Terry had a lot of questions: about Bradley's wife, Anna, about Harvard, about his career. And he had some answers, too: He had worked many years in an administrative capacity with the Screen Actors Guild and was married. Also, he had cancer.

He asked Bradley to come back. And Bradley did, many times, over a period of two years. There they'd be, at some nice California restaurant, chowing down, across the divide, across the years.

At Terry's funeral in 2005, Jimmy Lee's sisters hugged Bradley. They wouldn't let him go. They told him he had family in California; they told him their home was his home; their eyes welled up. During the funeral, dozens told Bradley that his father had been one of the most generous people they'd ever met. He loved hearing those words. People whom Bradley -- now an assistant professor of literature at Claremont -- had never laid eyes on saying such beautiful and sweet things about his father.

Sitting there, alongside the man in the coffin, he thought of Ellison. "Ellison helped me to see that all of us are flawed," he says.

ANY GREAT WRITER FACES DEMONS: ARTISTIC ROADBLOCKS, PERFORMANCE ANXIETIES, the jazz vibrations suddenly pitching so low that silence seems to be taking the place of music. Judged by production, Ellison faced them more than most: one novel during his lifetime, then the light recedes.

But what of the cache of manuscripts? So much of it was beautiful, but Ellison was that creature who didn't depend on the judgment of others. He kept his own time clock. He wrote and wrote and listened to Louis Armstrong blowing "Stardust."

"This is where Ellison will triumph," Bradley says of the forthcoming Ellison work.

He is standing in the Washington sunshine. He has just finished lunch. Earlier, he was inside the Library of Congress, wrapping up some final touches on the Ellison work. He is the boy who became the man who found the ghost.

Who found Jimmy Lee Terry.

Who found Ralph Waldo Ellison.

Bradley says he hopes he and Anna have children soon. He wants to shoot basketball with them and listen to music with them. He wants to tell them about Iver, his grandfather, who shot hoops with those Negro basketball players a long time ago and learned so much from them. He wants to tell them about the afternoon when a man came around the side of a house in Encino, how his lost father was lost no longer. And he wants to tell them about Ralph Ellison, who fought like a hero to get his battle of a second novel finished.

The great writer -- who loved words, who loved his nation -- had passed away listening to Louis Armstrong in that Manhattan apartment. Fanny, exhausted, red-eyed, was right there, caressing him. Ellison died with willpower still, as his unpublished words were destined to be borne aloft -- as if by his own stardust.

Wil Haygood is a staff writer for The Post's Style section. He can be reached at haygoodw@washpost.com. He and book editor Adam Bradley will be online to discuss this article Monday at noon.