"Some cord of kinship stronger and deeper than blood": An Interview with John F. Callahan, Editor of Ralph Ellison's Juneteenth - Interview

You simply couldn't fool Ralph with any silly stuff about categories of race or ethnicity; that isn't where he lived. He lived on deeper human frequencies, frequencies of individual personality.

We were close friends on many levels. And our friendship had as much of a father-son quotient as it did a literary one. We talked of literature, of course, especially what makes novels tick, but I didn't walk in to see him with a scholar's cap on.

De Santis: How did you come to accept the daunting task of editing the novel that scholars, critics, and fans of Invisible Man have been gossiping about and eagerly anticipating for nearly forty-seven years? Was the project of editing Juneteenth a labor of love, a tribute to your long friendship with Ralph and Fanny Ellison, a natural culmination of your scholarly interest in call-and-response patterns in black narrative, or some combination of the three?

Callahan: I suppose it was all of the above. I sometimes imagine somebody thirty years ago when I first started in this profession handing me a list of the things I might wind up doing in thirty years. The choices might have included U.S. Senator--I took a brief detour from academic work in 1970 and ran for Congress--or a member of the senior tennis tour (another Walter Mitty fantasy), or a perpetual adjunct professor--at that point tenure was a pretty shaky prospect for me--or Ralph Ellison's literary executor. That last possibility would have been the most improbable and the last box I would have checked.

"One never know, do one?" is a Fats Waller line Ellison was fond of quoting when he talked about the "sheer unpredictability of life in these United States." And my task of editing this posthumous work, this labor of love as you called it--an immensely challenging and difficult labor, I might add--was one that was unexpected, though by no means serendipitous. The caretaker of Ellison's work, when he was alive, was Mrs. Ellison. Clearly, after Ralph passed on, she was expected to take care of things for him and, just as clearly, she didn't ask me to become literary executor on a whim.

De Santis: But being named literary executor does not necessarily prepare one for the task of editing the long-awaited second novel of one of America's finest writers.

Callahan: That's right. The best preparation for trying to discern some order and sense out of all of the fragments and notes and manuscripts of Ellison's second novel was editing his essays, and then editing the short stories. Now we might be talking about arithmetic, then algebra, and finally calculus, and that's fine. But editing the essays and stories, I began to get a sense of how Ellison worked.

Joe Fox, who had been assigned to be Ralph's editor at Random House after Albert Erskine died in the early 1990s, had his own ideas about how to do the essays. He wanted to lay them out in different stacks: essays on literature, on music, on politics, on autobiographical matters. And I remember telling Joe, "That'll be tough, because so many of them overlap." He said he would discuss his idea with Mrs. Ellison. I was out in Oregon teaching at the time, but I said, "Fine, why don't you talk with Fanny, and we'll go from there." Joe called me up a couple days later and said, "Well, I talked to Mrs. Ellison, and she was adamant." She said, "Ralph worked too hard on the form and sequence of the essays in Shadow and Act and Going to the Territory; those books must not be touched. They should be part of the Collected Essays, but don't touch the form and sequence." Fox was crestfallen, but I said, "Well, that's good, Joe!" He asked me what I meant, and I told him, "Now we've got clarity. Henry James talked about th e donnee, the given of literary works. Fanny's word is the donnee."