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character than a mouthpiece for Ellison as he endeavors to get it all down, to achieve what he refers to in his 1974 interview with John Hersey as that “aura of summing up” by which he could describe America to itself and the world. In one passage, for instance, a weary Hickman has retired to the lounge at the Hotel Longview to engage in a moment of reflection only to have his attention captivated by a large tapestry displayed on the wall before him. As Hickman describes it in minute detail, it becomes clear to the reader (though never to Hickman) that it is a rendering of Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus . Through this act of ekphrasis, Ellison seeks to extend his core themes of fathers and sons, of the mystery that hides before us in plain sight, of falls from grace—both literal and metaphorical. While the episode itself seems to have been conceived decades before, Ellison has turned it into an occasion for an essayisticreflection that, although bearing an intrinsic interest, comes at the cost of his fiction’s momentum.
When one considers Ellison’s fundamental shifts in the narrative conception of his novel—from the episodic to the psychological back to the episodic, often inflected with certain essayistic qualities—it is possible to describe at least in general terms three phases of composition: the first phase comprising the undated, unsequenced drafts of episodes composed during the first years of the novel’s composition; the second phase comprising the Book I and II typescripts from late 1950s and 1960s, which Ellison revised throughout the 1970s; and the third phase comprising his work on the computer from 1982 until the last dated file, on December 30, 1993. The first of these phases is the most difficult to pin down, both because the vast majority of the material is undated and because Ellison does not seem to have gathered the fragments together into continuous narratives of sustained length. The other two phases culminate in what appear to be Ellison’s two most advanced efforts to bring his manuscript to completion, with Books I and II in the 1960s and 1970s and the three computer sequences in the 1990s.
Because so much of the material from the earliest phase of Ellison’s composition found its way into the drafts he revised in the two periods that followed—the Book I and II typescripts, followed much later by the three computer fragments—we have elected not to include these drafts. It would be impracticable to publish such fragmented drafts in a volume such as this, though they will surely be of interest to those scholars of Ellison’s fiction concerned with his habits of composition.
IV
T HREE D AYS B EFORE THE S HOOTING … is not the novel readers were waiting for at the time of Ralph Ellison’s passing. It is at once much less, and perhaps something more. It is less in that it offers no clear resolution to the story it tells; it doesn’t end so much as stop. It bears the marks of its incompletion in a variety of ways, from the unpolished nature of some of the prose to Ellison’s failure to settle certain basic matters of craft. An author of Ellison’s exacting standards would likely not have published much of this material in its present state. Yet it is precisely the incompletion of the manuscripts that makes them such a compelling and fascinating contribution to American literature. In Ellison’s numerous drafts we see a literary master at work as he confronts the challenges presented by his novelistic form as well as those presented by the nation whose abiding and shifting identity he was so intent upon rendering in fiction.
This volume draws its title from the opening line of the novel: “Threedays before the shooting, a chartered planeload of Southern Negroes swooped down upon the District of Columbia and attempted to see the Senator.” Among the things Ellison left unfinished was the task of settling on a title for the book. In a way, ours is not a title at all