Harvard Book Store; WGBH Forum Network; John Callahan and Adam Bradley on Ralph Ellison

And I'd like to welcome tonight's moderator going to Carpio to introduce Professor Callahan and Bradley a professor of African and African-American studies and English at Harvard. Professor Carpio is the author of laughing fit to kill black humor in the fictions of slavery. So please join me in welcoming here. Thank you. Well thank you all for coming. Especially are our authors to say that this mammoth thing has been highly anticipated is completely the more than biggest understatement I think I could make. So I you know but I won't go into that right now but I will say is that one of the people who wasn't dissipating this event wrote a very thoughtful. PS In the Washington Post in 2007 will Haywood who introduced the start of an article saying when Ralph Ellison Ralph Ellison died in 1994 he left four decades worth of scribbled notes thousands of typed pages and 80 computer

disks filled with work on an ambitious second novel. Right that's the plot that we have here. Right. For 14 years a pair of literary detectives to my right and my left Labor to fit the pieces together and now they're ready to share it with the world. Right. So I'm here to introduce both of them and then just some brief remarks is introducing the project from my perspective. So to my right I have Professor John Callahan who's Ellison's literary executor and the Morgan S. O'Dell professor of humanities at Lewis and Clark College. He's the author of among many other titles in the American grain the pursuit of voice in 20th century black fiction which came out in 1908 and. And Juneteenth which was a portion of the novel that you have. We are here gathered to talk about it which was published in 1999. Obviously I'm leaving out a whole host of other things he's published in the interest of time. To my left I have Adam

Bradley who was Professor Callahan's former student at Lewis and Clark. He's a graduate of Harvard University's English department where he finished his Ph.D. in 2003. Soso friend and now an associate professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He's the author of Book of rhymes the poetics of Hip-Hop which came out in 2009 in the forthcoming Ralph Ellison and progress from this one man to three days before the shooting of this year. Right. So one of the things that I very much liked about The Washington Post piece that with which it started is that it highlights some of the interlocking stories that this novel brings to to the foreground. Right first Ellison's quest to write a second novel after the smashing success of its you know masterpiece in the civil man and which came out and did too and how an author lives with the second. Almost a curse right. How do you how do you come up with a second act. Then the other story is a

story of our literary detectives who sift through the 27 archival boxes worth of pages from where the second novel including handwritten notes typewritten pages over 460 computer files on 84 disks right. How do you how do you look at that right in a cohesive sense out of it. Then the story of fathers and sons who are strange from each other Callahan's relationship to Ellison a sort of father son relationship in many ways. Then we have Adam and his and his own father and the ways in which these stories of fathers and sons who are strange from each other find each other actually really connects with the content of the novel which has to do with two characters that the characters name most if Ellison you knew somehow I'm some writer who passes for white becomes a race baiting senator sort of like a white black white supremacist

in the black no more tradition or the Dave Chapelle tradition right. And a lot of black preacher who unknown to the world has race Sun reader as a son right. The novel centers upon the connection estrangement and reconciliation of these two characters. Right and then for me the other relationship that comes into interacting relationship is sort of the relationship between Professor had how he and Professor broke right by a teacher or a student. Now collaborators in you know coffers in many ways. So these four major strands are very interesting for me. Happy to talk about that later. OK. So briefly the background I'm sure you are authors will talk about the stew and 1999 Professor Callaghan published portions of this novel and it's that I bring it up again at this portion again because the reception of the novel was very mixed right some people were very happy to finally have this long awaited piece of this

long awaited novel right. Not that Professor Calhoun but also published some of Ellison's short stories and some of his essays in the mean time right after his death in 1994 1995 some of the stories and essays come out. But when he published a Juneteenth in 1909 he got mixed reviews by some people in the New York Times for instance and you know the this is like also evaluations from students don't matter if you get like 10000 great about relations the one that's bought sticks with you. So the New York Times the I think the most pungent one was that the New York Times you know. The book provides the reader with with intimations of the grand vision animating Ellison's 40 year project. But it also feels disappointingly provisional and incomplete. Right. So instead the quote goes on instead of the symphonic work Ellison Invision Calhoun has given us a single tentatively render 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 massive emotional and political evolution. So now many years later we have the work of you know this co-author work in which we are actually we actually do get the symphony for a scout who in many ways learn from what happened in Juneteenth. And I'm eager to hear how they feel about the fact that this book is finally out. And some of the challenges that the work presented the book is includes many not you know an editorial note that are not intrusive that kept to a minimum. And I wonder for me I'm very curious to know how they struck the balance between. Wanting to edit percent guiding editorial work and letting Ellison finally have his say. Any second now so please help me in welcoming our authors

in hearing what they have to say about this incredible work. So you good. OK. Well this is my old stomping grounds. Ellison is going to just mention spent some 40 years working on this book but the the other story is the years that John and I have spent some 15. But just like Alison didn't write every single day of those 40 years. We didn't work every single day those 15. We did a lot of things in between some of which kind alluded to for me one of the things I did was to come here and get my Ph.D. in English to become a professor myself to join John Callahan in the ranks of literary scholars and two to come together on this project. I also got to witness the. Kind of display in 1999 of the response to

Juneteenth and it was it was a striking thing for me. Particularly given the fact that Juneteenth by its own admission and description was intended to be simply one line of a broader symphony. This was this was explicitly what John put out in Juneteenth is the idea for the book and there was always the plan for what we have here the symphony that that is. So I always thought those critiques were just so so short sighted in the vision and one thing that I can say and will have a lot more to say I'm sure as the evening goes on but one thing I can say about three days and its effect is that it to me at least it puts Juneteenth in another kind of light that is actually quite valuable because it shows that for whatever else other thousands of pages that Ellison wrote the Juneteenth still has a central place in this in this this symphony of Ellison's composition in the literary symphony that he was he was working on for these 40 years and to me it bears out the judgment that John made in

those years. So it's we can have them both and that's the wonderful thing about a work of unfinished. You know literary vision like this is that we can we can live with both of them and we don't have to make the decisions this provisional nature of the work actually invites us to have an occasion for participation in the creation of the fiction as readers to get into the mind of this author such as a rare opportunity certainly with an author of this stature to be able to see the sorts of decisions that he made. The source of roads that he took and then turned around and came back on all of these sorts of things are present within this volume and are really the I think the greatest gift that three days offers for Allison's readers. So I just want to say that maybe pass it over to John. Well thank you Adam. It's so it's so much better to have someone else who's intimately acquainted with what we're talking about. Make the case

then. I have to make I would say one. One thing parenthetically because my my my friends sometimes sparring partner well time colleague in chief we friend Henry Louis Gates Jr. is in your I didn't see Officer Crowe you know I kind of hope that we might have him if Glenn didn't show up I'm going to call him and we thought it was a we got a serious emergency over here we need Crowley to come in and we may need him yet I don't know how how how things will go as the evening to go is done but in any case I would much Skip Gates wrote it really. I really I think a wonderful piece it's an essay for Time magazine. In 1999 when when Juneteenth came out and I would I would commend that to you. I mean I don't want to you know pretend that I'm Barack Obama and have to deal with the New York Times I don't really have to do that I hope he doesn't have to do it and just ignore it in him.

Self in some of it is so so uninformed but Adam is right is right on I mean the the what we have here and it was always kind of well intentions grow along the way and what we really are trying to do is as Adam is Adam outlined it and it's something that that I think he's so Adam we was very he had he had the right and you had the right instincts and the right intuitions and he had the capacity to carry them out. I think we both we both tried to do that in this book and that is to give the readers or listeners readers are a special breed you know pretty intelligent folks pretty stubborn to find folks in their own right so we say here's here's Juneteenth and and this is what it is. It's a fragment. It's a narrative and it's a narrative that it did undergo some editing. In the full sense of the

word. Now every word is Ellison's but the sequences I had. I made some decisions and judgments about the sequences that as sharp readers of this volume would see the sequences in which the episodes of are presented in book 2 sometimes differ from the sequences of Juneteenth and that's because I gave more. I guess I gave I gave more weight and heft to certain of Ellison's notes in outlines which Adam had seen no else has and I'm seen about the action of the story and how the action would would go but our intention here is as as Glenda said is well is to offer what Allison did to his readers so that's why you will you will you know we had it won. Interesting. Poor poor Adam and poor me we got the copy edited manuscript of the novel back from from Random House from the modern library and out of and I you know wasn't it we sat down in a couple of weeks and say Here it is

we worked on this for years on and off and in very very intensely in the last year and a half or so two years really. So we sent it off to to the modern library and and they edited I don't know how intensely the our editor worked on it was fairly quickly it was farmed out to a copy editor who who sent it back to us and every page I mean you know ma'am you know unbelievable numbers of Corrections you couldn't count them all. And I you know I never I never thought I'd write Stet. Let it stand in other words as many times as I did in this manuscript in an hour and I conferred about it and there were a number of things that if it was if the copy editor had took the position whether and whether consciously or not that this was maybe Adam and reading the book. All right written a book we've never written any fiction in and here it isn't. And it promising stuff and so I deserve the toughest most rigorous copy editing that could exist and there is Charles de within our age.

Good to see and Anyway so so that you know if there was no sense of the context this is a posthumous novel and so Adam and I had to go through and maybe we made that we made the judgment that. That finally we were not going to edit this. I mean if there was some something missing something the Greek Asli ungrammatical. We would we would attend to it errors of spelling we would tend to. But Ellison like to start sentences with. At times enormously effectively. But sometimes in particular in the computer print outs I think there's one case Adam where he started five sentences in a row with a hand at least. Yeah that's right. And the copy editor you know wanted to change everyone except the first one what we had to go through in stat step no I mean this is this the way Ralph wrote it. And what we're trying to do really is is to take the in these narratives both the type

scripts and the computer printout to say what are the chief narratives that Ralph was right here were really four books one and two in typescript. The first book one narrated by the white reporter well-born MacIntyre book two is kind of antiphonal multi voiced. It's a book that a great deal to to that to the modernist tradition and a great deal simultaneously is was Allison's want to the black church to the black oral tradition and that is basically that that that book. And so I need to wonder what one is all it seems finished in plot and structure. But it's stylistically rough and less polished in book 2 which clearly isn't finished Ellison breaks it off in at the end. He hadn't quite found a way to knit these together and then we have the computer and then is another

crucial episode called a 40 page manuscript called blitzes birth which I wasn't always intended to put into Book 2 but we presented here. He hadn't quite decided finally where to put it as he quite hadn't quite funny decided many many things. OK cut to the part to the computer. The narratives that Ellison created on the on the computer from 1900 to and of the last date we have it's absolutely and solidly reliable is December 30th one thousand ninety three. When and when curiously he writes that he takes chapter to chapter 12 of book one where McIntyre the white reporter goes to the town house of his 95 year old black guy named Jesse Rockmore has been found dead. Start of it is dead and he's in a coffin in his townhouse. Sit in foul play is suspected. The reporter goes over there and take them and we'll go over there as well anyway and listen in on December

30th 1993 the last date we have with any sort of tude. ELLISON We revise as I should say rewrites it in a way it's clear that most of the changes are word here a phrase there an emphasis there and it was clear that he had he must have had before Chapter 12 of book 1 because that's where MacIntyre goes to jesses and you have a whole lot of that. OK so what you have then is is a provisional quality to this to this manuscript to these these fragments there are interrelated interlocking interconnected but but that the locks aren't really tied down of the interlocking isn't isn't complete. Ellison didn't make certain crucial structural decisions about how this material was going to going to work together. He what he did instead on what I would say instead but what he didn't do that what he did do instead what perhaps was to take off to create new characters new episodes or to pick up old characters and take them to a different place. He was very

much involved as you said suggest that he didn't have writer's block if anything he wrote. You might argue that he wrote too much he wrote so much. That it guys as you continue to write it got more and more difficult for him to for him to do the absolute rigorous weave vision and structural changes that he had. He had to do and I'm going to stop there in lest I go on too much. Go back to Adam you may want to comment on some of these particulars of the novel would go back and forth. Well one one thing to think about in kind of coming to terms with what he left behind. I think of it in terms of a musical analogy. I take a great album from Miles Davis Seven Steps to Heaven. Take kind of blue whatever you want and imagine knowing that album so well you know backwards and forwards you know every single turn of phrase every single orchestration. And then imagine hearing the Complete Columbia boxset of all the studio versions where you have

outtakes and you know riffs and so on and so forth. Hearing him play the same songs over and over years. The jazz standard reinterpreted for a different setting. Whether it's played live or in the studio whether it's played with a quartet or a quintet or a septet or whatever it may be. These are this is maybe some one way of getting a handle on what Alison was up to. The modulations of voice across these 40 years are tremendous and in many ways it echoed the equipment he was using. I mean it may sound like a silly point but he began working on this novel around the time that invisible man was was coming to publication in the 50s early 50s. And he started jotting down ideas for this. The second novel. Based upon a character in the first space upon a character that some of you may remember from miserable man named NAME Rinehart and Reinhart you see had as a character with a hidden name BP Reinhard its only the full name is only mentioned once bliss Proteus Reinhard.

Well bliss would take on a new life in the second novel Bliss is the name that that Hickman gives to the child of indeterminate race whom he becomes a surrogate father for over the years is that it's the child that becomes son rater the senator that Glenda was talking about so central to the plot. He's doing this in a in a small notebook one of those modeled black and white composition books. From there he moves to a typewriter electric typewriter and finally in 1981 a laptop computer the very early left of this NG was a 20 25 pound laptop four inch green screen green screen monitor. I mean can you imagine trying to. Right. A literary masterpiece on a piece of equipment like that is intractable is that. And yet he bent it to his will. One of the great joys of my life was as a 19 year old student and John I still marvel at this that he let me do this. But John when he got all these boxes of materials he said you know Adam I'm working on a lot of

things we have the collected essays of Ralph Ellison coming out from the modern library. But if you have a little time you want to go through these boxes of Ellison's second novel. Go ahead and get started. So as a 19 year old kid I sat there looking at these pages that you know maybe three people had seen Ellison himself Fanny Allison his wife perhaps John maybe not even John sometime. And and reading these things in and of course I was astounded and I was I was humbled but I felt an unexpected response that that really snuck up on me and that that actually ended up being more important than any of those. And it was this it was the kind of shock at a particular moment and what it was I was reading one of these drafts and I saw something I never thought I would see in the work of a literary master. I saw a typo. And I kept reading I saw more typos. I saw sentences that were rough that needed some tailoring the needed honing and working. I saw sentences that just didn't seem even from my young standards up to the

up to the standards that he should be. And yet for all of that I saw the subsequent drafts I saw him honing the sentence working it to perfection and moving it toward the kind of prose that we're familiar with from this literary giant that was such a profound moment of realization I mean there's only so much that great teachers can do in the classroom they can do a lot but there was something about actually seeing that that that really changed the course of my own career personally. And I think also made me have a perspective as to why this particular edition can be so valuable as a reader's edition not just for scholars as we initially thought but really for readers in the most general possible way. And is this a reader can pick up this book and read for 300 400 pages uninterrupted in the flow of Alison's narrative sometimes you know some of his finest prose finer

than anything on the level of the sentence that he ever wrote Invisible Man. And yet you can also go into the book and find those sentences that we took care of the typos but but some of the sentences that show him still working on the level of the line still playing with possibilities in a language. Take for instance the opening. Of the prologue you know three days before the shooting a planeload of Southern negroes on and on and on. In the 1990s he runs that through nearly a dozen different iterations moving from Southern Negroes to blacks to African-Americans to Afro Americans to every possible iteration of that term. And in working that not only speaking about revision but also speaking about a broader understanding of where black Americans are. Over the years in which he's composing this book this began around the time of Brown v. Board of Education. And he wrote it

through the civil rights movement he wrote it through the black power movement through Vietnam through the women's liberation movement through the birth of the digital age. He wrote it through all of that and you saw the transformations of America and tried to reflect and reflect them in his novel even as he kept to the same putative time period of 1955. This is a wild idea to write a novel so squarely set in the civil rights movement. Yet also expanding to encompass really the entirety of the second half of the 20th century. And so for that reason. Yes a big feet and it's for a reason even though it's in a lot of ways he failed of this grand ambition. In the attempt. There's so much there's so much even in the attempts to do this kind of work that I think this novel and we can call it a novel even though it is a series of manuscripts

this novel consistent in its vision over all of these years really has I think an important place in the 21st century as we come to terms still with these these dogged questions about race and nation and the promise of a multiracial American democracy. These were what Alison was dedicated to these things and these themes are what are embodied in this book at its best. Well I think for a second that you know if you call Alison. Post-modernism I wince and look at you like you're a weirdo right. But I think one of the things said in or virtually happens is that the biz novel race is really central postmodern questions like What is an author what is a text what what do you what do you call a novel. Right it's it a series of you know when you take off if you see behind the scenes to see the seams you see the author working not the finished product product but the process too. So I think in races that you set 21st century questions not only in terms of content but also in

terms of form even and it's love. It looks like Underworld it looks like Gravity's Rainbow It looks like Infinite Jest. It reads like that too in many ways. So I just wanted to put that out there too. And looking forward to some question I think you just said Yeah I think that's such a good a good jumping off point. Glenda from what what I'd like to say is actually mention of the of the 20th century I guess I might as well add my. Two cents to that context but I'm going to do it in particular in relation to Invisible Man. I mean I came to believe that in still do that a stroke of genius to write that first sentence I am an invisible man and to carry that out that metaphor out of the whole of the novel and I came to believe as I still do it that this was an amazing metaphor for the human self for absolutely rooted with the kind of utterly necessary specificity in the

African-American connect and in the American and the African-American context. And because of that incredible specificity it radiates out to everybody every human being living in the 20th century particularly the second half of the 20th century. It seems that you know a wonderful metaphor for contingency in terror and possibility all those things it did every individual human being has to come to terms with him. And I thought but I realize lately for a particular reason why that that that that perception of mine fell short. Because I said the 20th century and it seems to me that metaphor invisibility is one it would dealing with right now in the 20 in the 21st century I want to give it will example of how I think one of the ways I think we're doing with it as a country as a nation and for Ralph Ellison perhaps more profoundly than any other 20th century American

novel is the novel as a form is bound up with nationhood specifically the nationhood of the United States of America. Here we are we had a presidential election in 2008 and I think there was a sense on the part of some people to get all these funny terms bandied around post racial whatever that means I don't quite know what it means but the sense that an African American election of an African-American president was going to put really certain ghost. To rest. Well it seems to me I would say Barack Obama is an invisible man in this country because think about it's a way it's a question people raise question about whether he was born. What is the birth certificate. What happened was it a space ship or where I mean where do you come from. And then all kinds of other things about this man the man you're the new senator I heard a clip of your newly elected senator from the state of Massachusetts. You know sneered that the woman who interviewed him. That is Senator Brown. And when they were talking about

the problems of unwed mothers problems of young women and children and and she the interviewer said well Barack Obama's mother was 18 and he kind of laughed meanly. And she said as if to suggest that that she was an unwed mother and woman then said that she was married he said well maybe maybe that and then again sneer again that is a guy who is one of a hundred I guess we'd say these days. So it seems to me that the and the way that the way that the vitriol in not talking about political disagreements on that talking about you know some one's disappointment in a leader whatever side of the spectrum I'm talking about the way in which this individual's humanity seems to me to be at stake seems to me to be called into question. And I go back to that marvelous. Pros in the beginning of an invisible man when went when Ellison threw Invisible Man muses broods on invisibility. What the hell has it come from. It's a matter of the

construction. Gee that's an interesting academic term never become an academic term they'll be using it in 1952 except Ralph Ellison we're used to social construction when Ellison said it's in visit. The whole question of invisibility is a matter of the construction of the you know why of those who fail to see another person. So in short this invisible Ellison's work invisible man incredibly. It's timely and time less it encompasses time and time stretching stretching out. I wanted to say that I wanted to say one other thing that I think has much to do with what Glenda and Adam have been talking about with respect to the second novel because we got to ask it we at some point we have to say no matter how much we love Ralph Ellison love is going to die. We have to say well he didn't finish the book. 40 years and he didn't finish the book. And unfortunately they though again there was no one suggested

the biography of Ralph Ellison has much in common with Scott Brown I wouldn't never want to say that. But nevertheless there are certain kinds of influences in that biography of on Ron for size you know well maybe he spent too much time. Well it's not as if the Century Club you know and maybe he was he was too much a kind of the white man servant on various commissions and all of this kind of stuff in a one and you say Well Adam I want to buy this is a good God man it is blocks upon blocks upon blocks of the evidence in the Library of Congress. Go look at it. Another was to my sense is that so much of the difficulty of the of the second novel and its infant on Finnish condition and I'm by no means I would by no means want to suggest to you that if well had another had had another year or two or three or four good years he would have finished the book I think it became it really became a fish bone in his

throat. You say well why. They were right or we issues involved that I think Adam and I are privy to and Glenda was talking and referring to them. And I hope we can talk about the writerly issues and to some extent issues that had to do with his material. And I want to read something to you it's a letter that he wrote. He heard Adam talked about Brown v. Board Ellison heard Ellison was reading what he talks about it. So I just read his his words here. This was the theme of his novel The Invisible Man is the Jim Crow novel the novel of segregated America Perak salons. And here the second novel is to be a novel of the new evolving America post Brown v. Board think about that kind of complexity involved in that well this is what Alison Ellison wrote in a day or so after the Supreme Court decision came down and he hears it on the radio. Well now the court has found in our favor

and recognize our human psychological complexity and citizenship. And another battle of the civil war has been won. The rest is up to us. And I'm very glad the decision came while I was reading a stillness that Apple matics in a study of the negro free man. And it made a heightening of emotion in a telescoping of perspective. Yes in a sense of the problems that lie ahead. That left me when I could see the whole road stretched out and it got all mixed up with this book. I am trying to write and it left me twisted with joy in his sense of inadequacy. Why did I have to be a writer during a time when events sneer openly at your efforts define consciousness and form. Well so now the judges have found and negroes must be individuals

and that is hopeful and good. What a wonderful world of possibilities are unfolded for the children. For me there is still the problem of making meaning out of the past. And I guess I'm lucky I describe Bledsoe before he was checked out. Now I'm writing about the evasion of identity which is another characteristically American problem which must be about to change. Anyway here's to integration. The only integration that counts. That of personality. Now I want to follow that by reading it a cut to two sentences two sentences from. Then we have the second novel. Yeah OK. For enough because again it seems to me one of the things going on here for 40 years with Ralph is every year it went by invisible man grew in stature and Ralph was if anything farther away from finishing this book. But what was he up to doing all that time well I'm going to

just read a couple sentences and I think they will give you a sense of how he imagined the complexities that he knew were coming. In that letter you wrote in 1054 what I'm going to read you I think written sometime probably in the late 1960s. So he's writing this in the late 1960s mid to late 1960s. And yet it's the senator who loosened ates this in 1054 and here and here to senses. Soon a senator thought it will come. They're beginning to stir. So is the old trainer said washing hands in his own fighters. He warned. Watch hands feet and head. Yes they're moving into the open and things are beginning to he in the backwash is beginning but Hickman here unlikely though who knows who it was who came.

Listen to this. Nine o have squawked out the rules and the hawks will talk so soon they'll come marching out of the wood pile in the woodwork. Sore head sore foot right up close one but shuffling into history but demanding praise and kind treatment for deeds undone for lessons on learned but studying war once more. Yeah. Yeah. Going to was I think very kind I was I was very happy that you you mentioned that you brought up the issue of fathers and sons in the many ways they seem to work in relation to this now and people say you know what did Routh think about this or that or the other in his work and I just shake my head because you know I say you know I wasn't what our relationship was like. And Ralph Ellison didn't think about what he was going to happen he didn't appoint me literary

executor. Mrs. Ellison wanted some help asked me to help her in beginning I helped her and she asked me to be his literary executor. But but anyway. You know we did. We didn't talk a hell of a lot about about his his work. But to answer your question You bet. And Adam and I have also talked about this it greatly. Ellison has a wonderful phrase about writing. He describes writing and the afaik the degree of writing produces in the writer that same pain that same pleasure. He got a lot of pleasure even as he aged and wasn't close close because it finished and not finishing the novel but still writing still writing new episodes he got pleasure that. Out of that love to play with words and language and question he was also very painful even possibly excruciating that he wasn't finishing it. But he was private about it quite private. Yeah I mean this yes yes there's a architecture to Ellison's novel that

has with it a sense of the chronology of his composition. Particularly we know that he gathered material together revising it and shaping it into form at certain key moments one time as it was in the 1970s in the type scripts that are here represented in book one a book too. And we know because there are handwritten dates in which he says I took it to the playing field and worked on it at this particular moment. We also know in the work that I particularly focused on in the you know editing this book with the computer material we actually have a date that says I composed it here early site last saved here and we also see a certain pattern which is bringing the material together. Also within within the narrative itself we see we see the reflection of time. Often in kind of funny moments of anachronism for instance.

There's a scene in which Hickman the jazz man turned preacher is walking through Washington D.C. and he sees a bunch of young sporting afro. It's 1955 I mean I don't know I'd probably not a lot Afros back then or there's a reference of the lunar landing as well as well so you know this is amazing. Less to City of the temporal frame of the book that was all in the purpose of doing what Ellison called a chief in the art of summing up in one of his interviews the idea of trying to capture America for itself and for the world. Yeah. Just one point again he says one of the things that Adam and plant have been talking about is the provisional quality of the book. And then you throw Jean Juneteenth somewhere in them into the mix as you as you want if you will. And there's a lot on your on your plate on the reader's plate to say all right how could this novel had been achieved now it was talked about he talked about the

or of of something up and I guess I get kind of where I at that one because I don't think it's possible. I don't think the thing can be done has to be provisional because the country's provisional Ellison's Ellison's theme is so provisional. So it seems to me that's both a wonderful comment that he let slip in a very considered way in 1054 and I'm sorry 1084 what we during the interview with John Hersey at the same time it seems to me possibly akin to says this is your way. Well maybe we actually have to consider to one of the things implicit questions novel races is a myth of the great author writing the myth of the great novel and how much that's as powerful an artist as I said he was and you know that compares to Miles Davis was very apt you know how much are we actually limited as readers if we approach this whole project with thinking. The second

masterpiece by the great American writer in the great democracy of the world what all the superlatives you know it's like OK what if we try to focus on some of the current set of categories right. How much are we being imprisoned by our own sense of what is high art. What is a great achievement. I think Allison would agree with you in fact I came across a note in which he talked about he said I always remember that the sound of your machine inspires you to work. He said some like us will turn it on sometimes in just hit some key and hear it. So I think he was very much in the tradition there. And one quick thing in response in which I think I think it complements what you were saying going to so many of the know so many of Ralph's notes to compose while I was writing these are not.

No just some big puffed up character at all the same god how the hell am I going to solve this problem. He'll say well listen you got a movie he talked himself. He said listen you got to move this thing. Action plot. Move it. So he's a very self-critical guy I think to a fault sometimes. Yeah and even a scholarship you know there are Ellison men and there are maybe three significant women critics right. Well no question Spillers right but I you know I'm fascinated by that actually. You know I wish somebody would write a book that looked at the way I did write a book. I have a book coming out in May called Ralph Ellison in progress that really I think ties into a lot of what you're saying and I have a chapter in particular where I talk about these invisible women and I'm speaking not only about the women the female characters who are cut out of Invisible Man. We don't have time to talk

about that today. But also about the characters that he crafts in the second novel The characters and the play set Ellison. Gives too to love in all of its forms in particular and one of the forms is romantic love. That's something that you know Invisible Man is a pretty loveless book by design I think it was supposed to be the rugged individual that the single push for identity and that was in a lot of space for those sorts of relationships and yet in this novel I think that's precisely what we see him exploring. This is a richness of connection between male and female characters a richer rendering of female characters as well. Now I don't know if that was in response so much to any sorts of developments in the literary around I think there was more in response to his own expanding vision his his own life in which he had at least one very important woman in his life that constantly challenge him and.

Really offered a fun you know fantastic model for a complex multi-dimensional character and his own expanding vision I mean invisible man for all of its greatness was a first novel. It was it was a novel that even though it's a literary masterpiece it was also in some ways you know a first attempt at finding a form and he found a different form for the second novel one that I think would embrace so much more along the lines of difference race gender age. The whole the whole thing. Two points. And I'd like to have Ralph Welsh words speak for him here in 54 1954 the editors of The Paris Review had a long interview with Alison and much of it was taken up with invisible man. And one of the interviewees said something about well you know him. And his his love affairs or I mean well of whatever you know Ellison said

you know he said I'm glad you're qualified but you went back on your statement is don't you see a guy like this isn't capable of a love affair. Now you had women characters in earlier drafts of invisible men are what I want to emphasize is that he deliberately for reasons of upmost craft in theme made the changes he made because he was saying invisible man he is not yet a guy I don't think it was said yet he would be hopeful. He's not yet a guide it's really evil to love. Secondly just to illustrate what Adam was talking about from the second novel Here's a passage that is in book two and Hickman and old man has received a letter from a woman named Janie and he hasn't seen her in decades maybe 30 years 40 years. I don't know. But and she writes him a letter trying to help the whole plot along. If Senators are

not blue little bliss now Adamson raters has some trouble brewing on the horizon. But what I want to I want to read just Allisons. This is Hickman's. It's written by Alison and it's Hickman's memory of this woman 40 years ago and I think it will answer your question is who I want to Ralph's answer to your question I think what Adam has in mind. Somebody has a lot of other things in mind too. I remember Jeannie from way back there in my heathen days long before bliss came riding out of the bottoms during that springtime float on a dripping horse with five little children rode behind her you know holding onto a nice ground nightgown into each other while she swam that horse out of the swift water in her bare heels against his belly Barrow. He came up to higher ground talking comfort to those children would read in her hair saved all of them to Walnut

Grove. That was a woman. Oh yes she rouses me then too. Up there lookin standin on the bank of mud and silt. Oh yes in that wet nightgown she roused me. And we've thought of that. Thank you.