The posthumous publications this summer of Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth, an unfinished novel by the country’s premier African-American writer edited by John Callahan, a white English professor from Oregon, and Ernest Hemingway’s True at First Light, an unfinished novel by America’s most celebrated modernist writer, edited by the author’s son Patrick, have rekindled recurring arguments about editing and publishing works left unfinished at a writer’s death. Since the announcement of these publications, several commentators have revisited the issues, particularly Gregory Feeley in The New York Times Magazine on Ellison, and Joan Didion in The New Yorker on Hemingway. Didion has charged that Patrick Hemingway’s editing does a disservice to his father’s career. “This was a man to whom words mattered,” Ms. Didion wrote. “He worked at them, he understood them, he got inside them. … His wish to be survived by only the words he determined fit for publication would have seemed clear enough.” She charged that the resulting book is “the systematic creation of a marketable product, a discrete body of work different in kind from, and in fact tending to obscure, the body of work published by Hemingway in his lifetime.” Patrick Hemingway responded that his father wrote the work, had not destroyed it, and that he was in a unique position to provide insight into his father’s intentions as he cut the 850 pages to 320.
Similar concerns have surfaced about John Callahan’s editing of Ellison. Ellison had not selected a literary executor before he died; his wife Fanny asked Callahan, who wrote a well-respected book on African-American literature, In the African-American Grain: Call and Response in 20th Century Black Fiction, and a friend of Ellison’s since the late 1970s. Callahan had no special connection to Ellison’s past nor to the African-American experience that is central to Ellison’s work. African-American author Stanley Crouch, often called the clear heir to Ellison’s intellectual legacy, calls the book “John Callahan’s Juneteenth,” not Ellison’s. Callahan is sensitive to these concerns and in an introduction and afterword to Juneteenth has tried to anticipate the issues. He explains that he took Ellison’s massive, 2,000-word manuscript written over 40 years and pared the “multifarious, multifaceted, multifocused, multivoiced, multitoned” work into a single, coherent, chronological story. He claims that every word is Ellison’s and that he merely arranged sections, cut off extraneous parts, and selected what might have been a title Ellison would use. To silence critics further, Callahan will subsequently publish a “scholar’s edition” that “will document my corrections and include sufficient manuscripts and drafts of the second novel to enable scholars and readers alike to follow Ellison’s some 40 years of work on his novel-in-progress,” and he points out that the raw materials are in the Library of Congress.
Still, the issues will not go away and will resurface every time a new workappears after an artist’s death, particularly if they are from writers like Ellison and Hemingway, from whom readers continue to yearn for more. — M. B.
This article appears in June 18 • 1999 and June 18 • 1999 (Cover).