How to Make a Rhyme of a Mystery?

Juneteenth
by Ralph Ellison, edited by John F. Callahan
Random House, 1999, 384 pp., $25

Ralph Ellison’s posthumous novel, Juneteenth, has become a book mired in charges of betrayal, and its editor, John Callahan, has been hounded for overseeing the desecration and counterfeit resurrection of a literary corpse. Greg Tate, writing in the Village Voice in July, is typical of the novel’s many detractors. “Suffice it to say, all claims that the version of Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth cobbled together by literary executor John Callahan is Ellison’s last novel or even an Ellison novel at all, are monstrously fraudulent. More than a sham, the posthumous Juneteenth is a mockery of the sacred and once considered inviolable bond between the artist and his work. . . Merely reading this Juneteenth. . . makes one feel complicit in a literary crime, each turn of the page an aiding and abetting of Callahan’s callow butchery.”

Shame on Callahan, in other words. As if Callahan, who has edited well-received collections of Ellison’s short stories and essays, and is working on an edition of the novelist’s letters, doesn’t know the first thing about textual editing, let alone the proportions of Ellison’s art. As if Callahan and Fanny Ellison, the novelist’s widow, haven’t managed the editing and publishing of Juneteenth with dignity and caution. Callahan spent three years quarrying a coherent, 350-page narrative from a 1,500-page manuscript that Ellison started in 1952 and left unfinished when he died in 1994. “I came to believe and discern this narrative, Juneteenth, was the part [Ellison] returned to most often and came back to with the greatest care,” Callahan told the Washington Post in June. “It was a question of discerning sequence, sorting out the occasional differences between his pagination and his notes of intention. . . There are some loose ends in the book. And where Ellison didn’t work it out, I thought it was better to let it be suggested.” Callahan has rolled a big boulder up a steep hill. But never mind. Most critics want to roll it right back down.