. . . for as long as I did, dropping that fat book in and out of my Amazon shopping cart for weeks, before I succumbed to the inevitable and proceeded to checkout. Three Days Before the Shooting . . . the unfinished second novel, the mountain of pages finally printed, the bewildering fragment of forty-two years’ work, seen at last. Ralph Ellison lived plenty long after he published Invisible Man, but apparently not long enough. Some sixteen years after he died, we can finally take a look at the unkempt vastness, thanks to John Callahan and Adam Bradley’s joint editorship of the extant manuscripts.

As a prelude to diving into the 1100-plus page book, I am reading Bradley’s Ralph Ellison in Progress, his riveting analysis of its composition, while working through Juneteenth, the Callahan-edited fragment published in 1999, side by side with it. What strikes me so far, and I think this is important, is that Ellison never relinquished his faith in this particular story. Not once in his letters and interviews is there a hint of giving it up. How many writers, when months and years go by without seeing that second book come together, would continue with it? Let alone almost half a century? What sort of willpower did he have to not set the thing aside? Or on fire? Or give up writing altogether? But no. Ellison never quit, nor came up with another novel idea. This story was it. He had to tell it, no matter how long it took; there was no question but that he would see it through. Finally, forty-two years wasn’t enough time.

Part of the problem, as Bradley details, is the method of composition. After years of handwritten manuscripts and typescripts, Ellison adopted, in the early 1980s, the computer. The ease of endless revision — so seductive as an alternative to forward motion — proved to be insurmountable. But that wasn’t his only brick wall. Being one of the few — very few — black authors to achieve the level of recognition he did, when he did, meant that winning the National Book Award was a life-changer. Hereafter, Ellison was the man and simply had to be part of every event, every conference, every public conversation involving race. There were few others on his level of publication: Langston Hughes, certainly, though he was considered a lightweight in certain quarters. Richard Wright had abandoned the United States. James Baldwin was coming along, but was apt, it seems from this distance, to rub folks the wrong way. Ellison was Olympian; not a small part of this was that by his own admission his novel was written with the white literary hierarchy in view. He disdained any criticism that limited his achievement — as some reviewers did — as something pretty good for a Negro writer. The outcome of his focused attempt to publish with white readers in mind — and his more-than-brilliant result — was that he was more eagerly accepted by the white literary world and all its ganglia. This meant that Ralph became one very busy man.

The point I keep coming back to and that I find utterly compelling is that Ellison did not draw away from this single plot, nor sketch out any other story that did not find its place in this massive work. And even those thousands of pages of manuscript are deceiving, for somewhere Bradley states that the base narrative of Three Days . . . is not much longer than Invisible Man. How many hundreds of thousands of words were later computer reworkings of the same 600 pages of story?

All this puts me in mind of the sequence of books, one to the next. You have written one book. Fine. It has a certain . . . character, let’s say. How does your next book angle off from it? There are some writers, and you know who they are, who will write the same kind of story with each book. Publishers certainly like this. Librarians do, too. “Oh, for that kind of story, you go here.” All that is practical and fine. But there are other writers and other kinds of stories, and the psychology of a progress, no matter how hidden or bent — why this book after that book? — is intimate and compelling.

Having just returned from Rochester, that island of lovely lawns in the thumb knuckle of Michigan (as described by natives), I’m beginning to “unpack” the mind — stuffed from a week of school visits, lunches, dinners, a banquet, and thousand-book signings, all hosted by the town’s extraordinary Authors in April program, a feat of organization made possible by hundreds of volunteers, a fleet of cars, a bizarre delivery truck, a slobbering St. Bernard, a pen-protector’s worth of Sharpies, multiple participating restaurants, and over ten thousand students from Kindergarten to 8th grade. Whew!

It was Anne and Robin, hilarious co-drivers on Thursday, who provided one of the most memorable moments, when they pulled away from the AiA parking slot (at, I think, Meadow Brook Elementary) so handily outlined by those orange rubber cones, by trying to pull one with us.

“What’s that sound?”
“Oh, we didn’t?”
“Oh, yeah, we did.”

So, leaving Anne laughing at the wheel, Robin and I hopped out to restore order to the parking slot for the next author.

Good times.

Meanwhile, we’re still unpacking here, chuckling over the memories.

. . . in Chattanooga on an errand or two, I saw a crumpled dollar bill, so barely touching the ground it must have just fallen there, though there was no one directly ahead of or behind me. You know how your heart thrills to see that particular green in an untypical place; mine did, and instinctively I scooped it up. Feeling vaguely as if I’d been seen, I offered it to the first people I saw, a couple paused on the walk ahead, one of them shaking something out of her shoe. They thanked me, but no, it wasn’t theirs. Well, okay. I held it loosely in my fingers for another half block or so, still proving I was ready to give it up, but after a while it was just me pinching a dollar weirdly in my fingers, so I pocketed it. Later, can you believe it, one dollar turned out to be exactly the price of three postcards, and picking up postcards was one of the reasons I was walking down Broad Street to begin with. I chose two of Lookout Mountain and one of the Choo Choo. The whole business formed a nice, round episode — beginning, middle, and end — and how often does that happen?

O, the beckoning road! Day Two of our journey dawned and ended in sunlight, as we packed up, set our sights south, and drove out of Cleveland. Eventually.

There was a bit of trouble finding the exact route out of the city, as the Triptik didn’t start exactly from the old house in South Euclid. We zigged and zagged for a bit before finding Warrensville Center Road, then crawled along until we were out, passing lots of “City of . . . ” signs along the way before reaching what you’d call the Cleveland limits. Then south.

Farmlands. The scene was repeated hundreds of times: a house on a rise over the old road, outbuildings, silos, fences, and open scrubby fields. rolling and stretching away for acres.

Our first real stop was in the lovely Mt. Gilead, and you’ll know why when you read the book. After that it was to Delaware (our original first night’s stop, but not this time), for a (late) lunch at Bun’s restaurant with Floyd and Stella Dickman and Tami Furlong, whose gem of a children’s only bookstore, Fundamentals, is right across the street. Signed some books. If you’re anywhere in mid-Ohio, you already know what we discovered yesterday: that Fundamentals is a must for anyone interested in children’s literature. Tami also stocks toys there, which we hear children also like.

After lunch we went off the old route for a personal homage. Since Delaware is only a half hour from north Columbus, we had to stop. You know where.

O, the beckoning Thurber!

The James Thurber’s house sits on the greatest little square there. The house wasn’t open, but the door unlocked, and when we pulled it open we found the staff in a meeting in one of the rooms. “I’m sorry, we’re closed.” Time to be a little forward. Explained that we came from forever and were only passing through and since the Thurber house has a pretty awesome Children’s Writer in Residence program, we just wanted to introduce ourselves. Pat Shannon scuttled away for a moment and came back to say that we could walk around for a few minutes. O! And also O! Into the rooms, up the narrow stairs. His room! The door to grandpa’s attic. Where the bed fell!

Lisa Yee, you know what I’m talking about!

South again, thinking to end the evening in Ripley on the border. Didn’t last that long. Got to Hillsboro. And into Kentucky!

Day One of the trip started with an early rising to get to LaGuardia for an 8:40 flight. Without a hitch, even driving in the remaining drizzle from our latest rainstorm. Arrived a bit early in Cleveland, that mecca by the lake, picked up rental car. First stop: my old house, which I haven’t seen since 1961.

It turns out to have been altered superficially from my long-ago time in it, some owners having closed in the carport and changed the window arrangement on the front. More on emotional upheavals at a later time and place. From there, straight to Joseph-Beth Booksellers, whom we had previously contacted to say wouldn’t it be nice if we stopped in. They agreed. Signed some books. Met Katie, Children’s manager. Cool.

On the second day, we planned to drive south toward Delaware and our first little stop, this time, fifty-one years later, to lunch with our friend Floyd Dickman, and stop in at Fundamentals, a bookstore right across the street from Bun’s restaurant.

More to come.

. . . I wore as a young man in a foreign city was not making eye contact. Because, I suppose, I had the sort of eyes that impressed others as belonging to a lost soul (I have tried to change this, with middling results), meeting someone’s glance could lead to uncomfortable contretemps, like that time in Cambridge when a stray look around the cafe called forth an eerie guy from the shadows.

But I digress. The point is that there used to be in the seventies a bookshop in London with a life-size wax manikin of Freud standing in its front room. My recollection is that the shop specialized in poetry and was out a bit from the center of town. Although I found a handful of Heaney paperbacks I’d been looking for, I had a question. Not making eye contact, I sidled up to the gentleman standing next to the register. “Do you have such-and-such a volume by Ted Hughes?” No answer. I glanced up.

Like the girl from Ipanema, the bearded man looked straight ahead not at me. It took a few seconds, the longest few seconds I can remember, while a sequence of fright and confusion and embarrassment bounced across my brain. Feeling I’d been the seventies version of “punked,” I looked around to see the reaction. No eye contact? Good. I paid a real person and left the shop.

. . . let’s mark a birthday. James Agee was born a hundred years ago today in Knoxville and died forty-five years later in a New York City cab, by which time he had written two novels, a couple of stories, scripts, lots of journalism, poetry, and that thing that still can’t quite be categorized, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, early on in which he writes:

While we were wondering whether to force a window, a young negro couple came past up the road. Without appearing to look either longer or less long, or with more or less interest, than a white man might care for, and without altering their pace, they made thorough observation of us, of the car, and of the tripod and camera.

The chaos doesn’t really seem to abate, or the noise to soften, or the dripping mess of stuff I dragged downstairs to organize itself, even in these dark mornings at the table, but it was Agee who best showed me exactly what you could do with words.

Laurence Bergreen’s 1984 biography is pretty good. Robert Fitzgerald’s memoir is intimate and moving. There is apparently a new biography being written by Dwight Garner (I forget where I noticed that), and we could use it. It would be splendid if Blake Bailey did Agee but you can’t have everything you want.

After wondering, when he heard of his death, why they were not better friends, John Cheever wrote in his journal:

I think, niggardly perhaps, that there may have been some imbalance between the relationship of Agee’s work to the people who appreciated it and the relationship of this work to everybody else’s work. I am sad to think that he is dead.

Am not sure this is entirely clear to me, but maybe Cheever is trying to get at that troubling sense that Agee was not as directed a novelist as he might have been, and that the “writer’s writer” aspect Agee’s work gets a bit tangled when you introduce the reading and buying public. Maybe he’s saying that while you might have loved the work, it’s ultimate importance may not have been as deep as, say, Cheever’s own. Cheever, of course, waffled between exaltation and denigration of his talent and self, and reputations waffle too, so let’s not choose. Besides, this was before A Death in the Family was published.

So, fine . . . Happy Birthday, Jim.

In the middle distance of the backyard stands an apple tree. For years it blossomed and bore fruit, a surprisingly decent harvest of small apples in the late summer and fall. It was sturdy, with two main trunks splitting away from each other about two feet up from the ground. When our oldest daughter was young, we had a swing tied onto one thick outreaching limb that grew horizontally toward the house. The swing came down one day when its rope snapped and our daughter fell; she was likely too old for it anyway.

The tree is old now and dying; dying more quickly these past few seasons, having lost most of its larger limbs, culminating in the removal of the farthest of its two trunks several years ago. It was sawed off in chunks, but we decided to keep the lowest five foot section attached as a post to string up one end of a hammock. When the strap broke some seasons ago, we forgot the hammock and just let the stump be. It gradually lost its bark and was shot full of woodpecker holes. Ants gnawed at the stump and mushrooms blossomed suspiciously at its base. Placing my hand against the post some weeks ago, I realized I could push it over without much pressure. I let it be.

Well, the tree took the expected big hit the other morning. It was a calm day, good for raking leaves, which a couple of workers were doing. At one point, I peeked out my shades to note their progress and saw one worker’s coat hanging on the topped off trunk. It gave me a strange pleasure to see the tree used that way. Later, after they’d gone, I toured the yard. A job well done. I didn’t pay any particular attention to the tree, but in the pile of hedge cuttings in the corner, I saw the trunk laying on its side. It had collapsed. Not, I’m sure, because of the weight of the jacket, but just because it was time.

One fall back when the children were young and the tree was healthy and blooming, I remember my wife’s cousin Rob, who was hearty then, too, climbing a ladder and culling the top fruit, while the girls, my wife and his and I, caught them and laughed. It was a memory that as a family we all associate with Rob, who died a young man six Octobers ago. The horizontal limb reaching toward the house is still there, the last one blooming, and blooming so well that each spring this less-than-half tree appears full and alive. But there are holes in its trunk, too, and ants and shelf mushrooms on it and on the ground around it. Each year we say that someday we’ll have to take the whole thing down. It will fall on someone, on one of the dogs, at night in silence, sometime. But not yet.

Well, with all the other things going on (and on and on), we take refuge in quiet voices from the past. A car ride was in the offing and I found that Capote had recorded an hour’s worth of In Cold Blood, which may have been available before, but was recently combined with pieces of the score by Mychael Danna from the film Capote. Well it’s a real treat. Not only do we hear the poetry of the writing as it was meant to be heard, read here in snippets from the bold first paragraph to the whispering last, but Truman’s hilarious and ghoulish mimicking of the local players in the tragedy. A look into The New New Journalism edited by Robert S. Boynton shows us how that book and that writer continue to be a cornerstone of much that we have come to appreciate about good reportage.

A hunger for more has revealed Essential Welty, an hour plus of Eudora reading three stories Caedmon recorded in 1956. A hoot of a different kind. Blasting into Why I Live at the P.O., Eudora reads like she’s been told to hurry up and finish, the next stop is ours. It is a tour de force as Faulkner used to say, whose own reading style was as quick if nowhere as colored. The other two, Powerhouse and Petrified Man, are more tempered and downbeat, but are told, voice to ear, as if you’re in the parlor with her, which is by gosh something to have.

From Anne Sexton to W. D. Snodgrass, February 24, 1959:

. . . I read “Heart’s Needle” and I changed. It made me see myself new. In seeing you, in feeling your marvelous restrained sense of immediate loss, I saw my own loss in a new color. And I changed. I said to Fred [Morgan], “A poem isn’t supposed to do that! It isn’t supposed to be that vital!” . . . meaning, of course, how unusual, how much genius and the fine grip of talent, is in such a poem that reaches down and touches the inmost part of the reader. A writer, showing himself, in his true light, and doing it so well, has indeed done something so great that one might be afraid. Afraid of the writer’s truth and their own truth. . . That’s what I think you did. That’s the great thing you did. And who would expect it from ‘just a poem’ . . .

. . . What I’m trying to say is that, I think a poem that can do that to people, make them see themselves through yourself, is valid . . . not unseemly, not too personal . . . but worth it!

Christ. I’m off again. Talking in circles. My darling, the peanut butter calls.