Three Days Before the Shooting . . . Read online

  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

  ALTHOUGH 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.

  Because so much of the material from the earliest phase of Ellison’s composition found its way into the drafts he revised in the two periods that followed—the Book I and II typescripts, followed much later by the three computer fragments—we have elected not to include these drafts. It would be impracticable to publish such fragmented drafts in a volume such as this, though they will surely be of interest to those scholars of Ellison’s fiction concerned with his habits of composition.

  IV

  THREE DAYS BEFORE THE SHOOTING … is not the novel readers were waiting for at the time of Ralph Ellison’s passing. It is at once much less, and perhaps something more. It is less in that it offers no clear resolution to the story it tells; it doesn’t end so much as stop. It bears the marks of its incompletion in a variety of ways, from the unpolished nature of some of the prose to Ellison’s failure to settle certain basic matters of craft. An author of Ellison’s exacting standards would likely not have published much of this material in its present state. Yet it is precisely the incompletion of the manuscripts that makes them such a compelling and fascinating contribution to American literature. In Ellison’s numerous drafts we see a literary master at work as he confronts the challenges presented by his novelistic form as well as those presented by the nation whose abiding and shifting identity he was so intent upon rendering in fiction.

  This volume draws its title from the opening line of the novel: “Three days before the shooting, a chartered planeload of Southern Negroes swooped down upon the District of Columbia and attempted to see the Senator.” Among the things Ellison left unfinished was the task of settling on a title for the book. In a way, ours is not a title at all but a means of calling the reader’s attention to the fact of these manuscripts’ incompletion. We believe that Three Days Before the Shooting … is fitting, not only because it gestures toward the central incident of the novel—the shooting of Senator Adam Sunraider—but also because the numerous changes Ellison would make to the opening sentence over the years reflect the novel’s dogged incompletion. As Ellison revised the manuscript, the three days became two—a small change, but one that suggests a significant adjustments to the architecture of the plot, telescoping action and underscoring the narrative tension that charges this central incident. We have kept “three days” in the title as a gesture to the many other small changes across the manuscripts that, in their sum, embody so much of what Ellison’s second novel is—and is not.

  The present edition has been in the works since 1999, when Juneteenth was published. In the judgment of its editor, Juneteenth represented “the most ambitious and latest, freestanding, compelling, extended fiction in the saga.” He promised then an edition would be published that would “enable scholars and readers alike to follow Ellison’s some forty years of work on his novel-in-progress.” This edition makes good on that promise, reproducing Ellison’s words precisely as he wrote them, save for the occasional silent correction to typographical or spelling errors. We have made a special effort to preserve rather than obscure the provisional character of some of Ellison’s writing—including tics and quirks that might well have been edited out of the manuscript had Ellison been alive to oversee its publication. These are important to the intrinsic value of these drafts for what they reveal about Ellison as a stylist and his idiosyncratic process of composition and revision.

  In every case, the text selected represents the latest continuous sequence of narrative from the particular period of Ellison’s composition. For the Book I and II typescripts, we’ve reproduced the manuscripts clearly marked with the latest date in Fanny Ellison’s hand. With the computer drafts, we have reproduced those files marked with the most recent dates. (This process is described in detail in the essay that introduces the computer sequences.) We carefully reviewed all earlier v
ariants with an eye toward noting textual differences and understanding Ellison’s compositional process and have included a sample of these variants in Part III. All of these materials will now be made available to scholars in the Ralph Ellison Papers at the Library of Congress.

  The Library of Congress holdings include twenty-seven boxes (115 to 141) containing files related to the second novel, compared with only eleven boxes related to Invisible Man. Two boxes (132 and 133) include the typescripts for Books I and II that Ellison composed in 1972 and continued revising until at least 1986. Another four boxes (138 to 141) include Ellison’s notes relating to the novel during the entire span of its composition. Four others (134 to 137 and a single file in 138) comprise sequential fragments Ellison printed out from his computer and often amended by hand. The remainder of the collection includes episodic drafts filed by scene or character containing material from throughout the novel’s composition, much of it with ample revisions.