When I read Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Juneteenth as a sophomore in high school, I imagined I could relate with the author’s struggle to produce a second novel (Juneteenth was edited together in 1999, five years after his death). I myself was terrified of losing any words I had written, so difficult did I find it to choose them well, and so I was filled with sympathy to learn that much of the Juneteenth manuscript had been consumed by a fire in 1967. I knew nothing of how a novelist starts to work, yet I became obsessed with the question of how one recovers from such a loss.
According to Ellison’s latest biographer, Stanford professor Arnold Rampersad (by way of the Times), my curiosity gave Ellison too much credit:
Tantalizing bits and pieces of the work in progress appeared from time to time, but Ellison was stuck. At parties he drank too much. He became a ponderous bore. He began telling inquiring reporters and friends that he had lost 365 pages of his manuscript in a house fire in Connecticut, a claim that Mr. Rampersad debunks.
It is this which frightens me: who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, Rampersad speaks for me?
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