Three Days Before the Shooting ... (4 page)

It would be easy to brush off such a statement if made by Ellison at the beginning or midpoint in the composition of
Invisible Man
. Made by the novelist whose revisions tightened and telescoped his first novel into a classic, the words suggest something going on deep down “on the lower frequencies” of form and composition. In “Society, Morality and the Novel,” written in Rome when Ellison was hatching the plot of the second novel, he declared critics “more ‘adult’ types” than novelists, whom he associated with playfulness and play. Here Ellison is embracing with a touch of defiance the improvisatory quality of African American culture. Whatever the tendrils, at the root Ellison seems to have resisted bringing order to bear on a reality he saw as “mainly one damned thing after another sheerly happening.” Yet it should be noted that
Invisible Man
, in narration and story, was perfectly positioned to allow Ellison to enact both form and chaos. Whenever he found the going uncertain or far-fetched, he could retreat to his protagonist-narrator’s voice and let him tell his story, write his memoir. In the second novel the form is mixed. It begins with a prologue told in a biblically accented third person, very much the voice of a chronicle. From there, Ellison turns over all fifteen chapters of Book I to the first-person voice of Welborn McIntyre, the Kentucky-born and - bred reporter, whose
former ambition to be a novelist shows in his self-conscious style and urge to make stories out of anecdotes.

For all that, McIntyre’s sign-off at the end of Book I prepares the way for the eclectic narration Ellison had in mind. It seems one of the sharpest transitions in all of what Ellison left behind. “But at least the Senator was still alive” is both definitive and mysterious, ominous and optimistic. After the break signaled by ellipses, the first words of Book II take off from the last of Book I: “Suddenly, through the sonorous lilt and tear of his projecting voice, the Senator was distracted.” From McIntyre’s first-person voice, Ellison deftly shifts into the third person, which allows him to move by turns in and out of the voice and consciousness of Reverend Hickman and Bliss/ Sunraider. He is able to render Bliss the little boy; the young man (“Mister Movie-man”) in the interstices between boy and man; and the grown-up, now grievously wounded Senator. It would seem, then, that Books I and II could have worked together well formally, technically, and stylistically had Ellison comes to grips with his plot.

However, the issue of plot was not an inconsiderable matter, as Ellison came to know and tried to address in the long computer-generated segment “Hickman in Washington, D.C.” There he begins to fill in the gaps about Hickman and the brothers and sisters of his congregation between the time they are turned away by Senator Sunraider’s secretary until two days later, when they witness the assassination from the Senate gallery. Yet in another instance of his commitment to “one damned thing after another sheerly happening,” the more than three hundred pages of computer printouts do not really drive the plot. Rather, the narrative meanders along, with seventy-year-old Alonzo Hickman sometimes the aging jazzman, sometimes the minister, sometimes the essayist, orchestrating in a tone and style uncomfortably close to Ellison’s. And not the vernacular Ellison of bold, risky, brilliant works like “Tell It Like It Is, Baby” or “The World and the Jug” or “The Little Man at Chehaw Station.” Instead, some of Hickman’s ruminations remind one of Ellison’s later, seemingly carefully studied and revised, sometimes ponderous pronouncements. It is as if Ellison uses Hickman as the mouthpiece for all of what he came to know and think and feel about being African American in America. Indeed, this succession of episodes contains an essayistic, less dramatic repeat of the scene at the Lincoln Memorial formerly told in a gripping interior monologue of Reverend Hickman’s late in the unfinished manuscript of Book II (Chapter 14 of
Juneteenth)
.

III

A
LTHOUGH IT IS POSSIBLE
to trace the trajectory of the novel’s composition through Ellison’s correspondence, it is much more difficult to reconstruct
that same compositional history in the manuscripts themselves. Ellison composed by episode and filed his drafts episodically as well, an organizational method continued by the Library of Congress’s archivists when organizing the Ralph Ellison Papers in the years after his death. A given file may include a host of drafts, both fragmentary and complete, of a particular scene, filed together irrespective of date. Some are dozens of pages in length, others, a single page or even a single paragraph. Many of the drafts are unnumbered, or if numbered, done so with no clear relation to what comes before or after the scene. What results is a certain leveling effect, one that often renders it difficult to discern with even relative certainty the date of a given draft.

However, at least a rough estimation of compositional chronology can be gleaned from simple physical observation of Ellison’s materials. One can make reasoned conjectures as to provenance based upon physical details like typeface and font (he uses different point sizes and sometimes employs italics or boldface print); paper stock (he writes on blue, aqua, and green pages in addition to white, and he writes on every thickness of paper from onionskin to cardboard); reused paper (sometimes he prints or types on letterhead from various organizations, or even on dated drafts of letters printed from his computer); and quality of preservation. Comparing a draft composed on onionskin paper in fading pica typeface and a dot-matrix printout on paper with circular guideholes running up and down both sides suggests their respective eras without specifying a precise date. These details are instructive to a point, but they do little to clarify the larger question of how—and whether—Ellison was revising his manuscript toward completion.

In addition to the numerous undated and fragmentary drafts, Ellison’s archive includes sequential fragments that bear evidence of an author mastering his material. Two in particular resulted in long continuous sequences of episodes: the Book I and II typescripts dating from the 1960s and 1970s and the computer files dating from the 1980s and early 1990s. These two large narratives constitute the bulk of what is included in
Three Days Before the Shooting …
This volume presents the latest continuous sequences of these drafts in their entirety. When read together, they reveal both striking similarities and marked differences in how Ellison was conceiving his novel across the decades. Many of the characters and many of the key scenes remain the same. To cite one example, the last material Ellison seems to have worked on in the months before his death was a revision of a scene narrated by McIntyre from
Chapter 12
of Book I—a raucous episode in which McIntyre investigates an apparent homicide at the Washington, D.C., townhouse of Jessie Rockmore, an old black man, a dealer in antiques, found dead sitting upright, dressed in his Sunday best in a termite-ridden coffin.

More striking, however, is the difference in style and form of narration between the typescripts and the computer drafts. Book I, and more especially
Book II, reveal the influence William Faulkner had on Ellison in the texture of his prose and his preoccupation with the interiority of his subjects. This mode of psychological fiction marked a decided shift from
Invisible Man
, which had employed with great success a mode of narration bracketed by a prologue and an epilogue. More surprisingly, the later work on Books I and II differed substantially from early drafts of the second novel in which Ellison places much more emphasis on action. Indeed, the drafts composed in the years immediately after the publication of
Invisible Man
show a striking affinity with his classic novel, even down to the continuation of characters. (Ellison’s notes suggest that Bliss/Sunraider emerged directly out of
Invisible Man’s
Bliss Proteus Rinehart.) As Ellison continued to compose, he found himself compelled to explore the psychological valences of his material. “Remember,” he admonishes himself in a note, “that ‘the essence of the story is what goes into the minds of the characters on a given occasion.’ The mind becomes the real scene of the action. And in the mind scene and motive are joined.” Although the Book I and II typescripts retain several vividly drawn episodes—most notably the car-burning scene that Ellison published in 1973 as “Cadillac Flambé” and the aforementioned episode at Jessie Rockmore’s—they are dominated by Ellison’s forays into the minds, both waking and dreaming, of his characters.

Given the form of narration that accounted for so much of the success of his first novel and seems to have initially shaped his second, what happens in the 1980s is entirely unexpected, even inexplicable. Seeming to put aside much of the work he had done in the preceding decades, especially the sometimes brilliant if also uneven material from Books I and II, Ellison shifts the mode of narration back to the episodic style in which it began. In the computer files, action moves decidedly outward. The dramatic consequences of this can be summed up in a single transformation: the seven pages that comprise the prologue from the typescripts, in which Hickman and his parishioners arrive in D.C. and attempt to see the Senator, only to be rebuffed, expand to
over three hundred pages
of narrative in the computer files. Hickman and his group land in D.C., walk through the airport, go to the taxi stand, drive to the Senator’s offices, speak with his secretary, get searched by Capitol security, check into a hotel, go sightseeing, and eat barbecue.

Stranger still, very little of this episodic material is wholly new to the computer files. In a striking move that only adds to the mystery of the second novel’s composition, Ellison appears to have returned in the 1980s and 1990s to the very earliest episodic fragments he ever composed, likely dating from the 1950s and perhaps the early 1960s. Scenes of Hickman in Oklahoma City visiting the shaman Love New, Hickman walking the streets of Washington, D.C., and being accosted by a “red, white, and blue-black” man named Leroy who mistakes him for “Chief Sam the Fucking Liberator,” all
of these episodes exist both in undated versions from the early period of the novel’s composition and in computer files from its final period.

This is not to suggest that Ellison’s episodic drafts from the early years and his computer files from the later years are identical. Quite the contrary. Ellison was doing new things with this old material as he revised it over the last decade of his life. He was attempting to draw the fragments together into narrative wholes, stitching together scenes with transitions, the very facet of composition that most dogged him throughout his career. Some of these transitions are seamless, others are still very much unfixed. But what is clearly discernible from the dates upon which he saved the latest versions of his files is that he was gradually putting the pieces together. The three long fragments included in this volume—which we’ve labeled “Hickman in Washington, D.C.,” “Hickman in Georgia & Oklahoma,” and “McIntyre at Jessie Rockmore’s”—represent Ellison’s last efforts to finish his novel. Even finished, however, these important narratives would cry out for transitions, connective verbal tissue that would have made them definitively part of the novel’s whole and, therefore, clarified the whole.

Another significant difference between the episodes as conceived in the early years of the novel’s composition and as revised in the later years is in their respective tones. Some of the early drafts read almost like extensions of
Invisible Man
, and perhaps to some extent they were in Ellison’s mind. They embody his blues-toned sensibility of the tragicomic, the play-it-by-eye-and-by-ear sense of improvisation. Even in their often unpolished state, they crackle with narrative tension. By contrast, when revisited on the computer in the 1980s and 1990s, the scenes take on a ruminative quality, a kind of narrative repose that forestalls action—at least necessary action—in the name of contemplation. Interspersed with the sequence of dramatic incidents, Ellison has woven a thread of near-essayistic reflection through his favorite themes of American complexity and the black vernacular tradition.

At times, Hickman becomes less a character than a mouthpiece for Ellison as he endeavors to get it all down, to achieve what he refers to in his 1974 interview with John Hersey as that “aura of summing up” by which he could describe America to itself and the world. In one passage, for instance, a weary Hickman has retired to the lounge at the Hotel Longview to engage in a moment of reflection only to have his attention captivated by a large tapestry displayed on the wall before him. As Hickman describes it in minute detail, it becomes clear to the reader (though never to Hickman) that it is a rendering of Brueghel’s
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
. Through this act of ekphrasis, Ellison seeks to extend his core themes of fathers and sons, of the mystery that hides before us in plain sight, of falls from grace—both literal and metaphorical. While the episode itself seems to have been conceived decades before, Ellison has turned it into an occasion for an essayistic
reflection that, although bearing an intrinsic interest, comes at the cost of his fiction’s momentum.

When one considers Ellison’s fundamental shifts in the narrative conception of his novel—from the episodic to the psychological back to the episodic, often inflected with certain essayistic qualities—it is possible to describe at least in general terms three phases of composition: the first phase comprising the undated, unsequenced drafts of episodes composed during the first years of the novel’s composition; the second phase comprising the Book I and II typescripts from late 1950s and 1960s, which Ellison revised throughout the 1970s; and the third phase comprising his work on the computer from 1982 until the last dated file, on December 30, 1993. The first of these phases is the most difficult to pin down, both because the vast majority of the material is undated and because Ellison does not seem to have gathered the fragments together into continuous narratives of sustained length. The other two phases culminate in what appear to be Ellison’s two most advanced efforts to bring his manuscript to completion, with Books I and II in the 1960s and 1970s and the three computer sequences in the 1990s.