E. L. Doctorow Dies at 84; Literary Time Traveler Stirred
Past Into Fiction
The New York Times
By Bruce Weber
July 21, 2015
E. L. Doctorow, a leading figure in contemporary American
letters whose popular, critically admired and award-winning novels — including
“Ragtime,” “Billy Bathgate” and “The March” — situated fictional characters in
recognizable historical contexts, among identifiable historical figures and
often within unconventional narrative forms, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He
was 84 and lived in Manhattan and Sag Harbor, N.Y.
The cause was complications from lung cancer, his son,
Richard, said.
The author of a dozen novels, three volumes of short
fiction and a stage drama, as well as essays and commentary on literature and
politics, Mr. Doctorow was widely lauded for the originality, versatility and
audacity of his imagination.
Subtly subversive in his fiction — less so in his
left-wing political writing — he consistently upended expectations with a
cocktail of fiction and fact, remixed in book after book; with clever and
substantive manipulations of popular genres like the Western and the detective
story; and with his myriad storytelling strategies. Deploying, in different
books, the unreliable narrator, the stream-of-consciousness narrator, the
omniscient narrator and multiple narrators, Mr. Doctorow was one of
contemporary fiction’s most restless experimenters.
In “World’s Fair” (1985), for example, a book that hews
closely to Mr. Doctorow’s autobiography and that he once described as “a
portrait of the artist as a very young boy” (but also as “the illusion of a
memoir”), he depicts the experience of a Depression-era child of the Bronx and
his awakening to the ideas of America and of a complicated world. Ending at the
1939 World’s Fair in New York, the book tilts irresistibly toward the
technological future of the country and the artistic future of the man.
The narrator is looking back on his childhood, but the
conventionality of the narration is undermined in two ways. For one thing, the
man’s relatives get their own first-person chapters and inject their own
memories, a strategy that adds depth and luster to the portrait of the time and
place. For another, his own narration is offered in the present tense, as if
the preadolescent character were telling an unfolding tale, though with the
perspective and vocabulary of an adult. His opening recollection — or is it a
contemporaneous report? — is of wetting the bed:
“Startled awake by the ammoniated mists, I am roused in
one instant from glutinous sleep to grieving awareness; I have done it again.
My soaked thighs sting. I cry. I call Mama, knowing I must endure her harsh
reaction, get through that, to be rescued. My crib is on the east wall of their
room. Their bed is on the south wall. ‘Mama!’ From her bed she hushes me.”
Beginning with his third novel, “The Book of Daniel”
(1971), an ostensible memoir by the son of infamous accused traitors — their
story mirrors that of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed as Russian
spies in 1953 — Mr. Doctorow turned out a stream of literary inventions. His
protagonists lived in the seeming thrall of history but their tales, for the
convenience — or, better, the purpose — of fiction, depicted alterations in
accepted versions of the past. Not that he undermined the grand scheme of
things; his interest was not of the what-if-things-had-gone-differently
variety. Rather, a good part of Mr. Doctorow’s achievement was in illustrating
how the past informs the present, and how the present has evolved from the
past.
Works With a ‘Double Vision’
In the book that made him famous, “Ragtime” (1975), set
in and around New York as America hurtled toward involvement in World War I,
the war arrives on schedule, but the actions of the many characters, both
fictional and nonfictional (including the escape artist Harry Houdini, the
anarchist philosopher Emma Goldman and the novelist Theodore Dreiser) were
largely invented. Sometimes this was for droll effect — at one point Freud and
Jung, visiting New York at the same time, take an amusement park boat ride
together through the tunnel of love — and sometimes for the sake of narrative
drama and thematic impact. Written in a declarative, confident voice with an
often dryly arch tone mocking its presumed omniscience, the novel seemed to
both lay claim to authoritative historical perspective and undermine it with
winking commentary.
Houdini, Mr. Doctorow writes, “was passionately in love
with his ancient mother whom he had installed in his brownstone home on West
113th Street.”
“In fact,” he continues, “Sigmund Freud had just arrived
in America to give a series of lectures at Clark University in Worcester,
Massachusetts, and so Houdini was destined to be, with Al Jolson, the last of
the great shameless mother lovers, a 19th-century movement that included such
men as Poe, John Brown, Lincoln and James McNeill Whistler. Of course Freud’s
immediate reception in America was not auspicious. A few professional alienists
understood his importance, but to most of the public he appeared as some kind
of German sexologist, an exponent of free love who used big words to talk about
dirty things. At least a decade would have to pass before Freud would have his
revenge and see his ideas begin to destroy sex in America forever.”
Woven into the rollicking narrative of “Ragtime” are the
dawn of the movies and the roots of the American labor movement, tabloid
journalism and women’s rights. The central plot involves the violent
retribution taken by a black musician against a society that has left him
without redress for his heinous victimization. The events described never took
place (Mr. Doctorow borrowed the plot from a 19th-century novel by the German
writer Heinrich von Kleist, who based his tale on a 16th-century news event),
but they contribute to Mr. Doctorow’s foreshadowing of racial conflict as one
of the great cultural themes of 20th-century American life.
In “Billy Bathgate,” a Depression-era Bronx teenager is
seduced by the pleasures of lawlessness when he is engaged as an errand boy by
the gangster Dutch Schultz, who is about to go on trial for tax evasion. The
novel is not an allegory but, published in 1989, as the “greed is good” decade
of the 1980s came to a close, it makes plain that Schultz’s corrupt
entrepreneurism is of a piece with the avaricious manipulations of white-collar
financiers, forerunners of a Wall Street run amok.
“The distinguished characteristic of E. L. Doctorow’s
work is its double vision,” the critic Peter S. Prescott wrote in Newsweek in
1984. “In each of his books he experiments with the forms of fiction, working
for effects that others haven’t already achieved; in each he develops a tone, a
structure and a texture that he hasn’t used before. At the same time, he’s a
deeply traditional writer, reworking American history, American literary
archetypes, even exhausted subliterary genres. It’s an astonishing performance,
really.”
Most of Mr. Doctorow’s historical explorations involved
New York and its environs, including “Loon Lake” (1980), the tale of a 1930s
drifter who comes upon a kind of otherworldly kingdom, a private retreat in the
Adirondacks; “Lives of the Poets” (1984), a novella and six stories that
collectively depict the mind of a writer who has, during the 1970s, succumbed
to midlife ennui; and “The Waterworks” (1994), a dark mystery set in Manhattan
in the 1870s, involving a journalist who vanishes and an evil scientist.
More recently, in “City of God” (2000), Mr. Doctorow
wrote about three characters — a writer, a rabbi and a priest — and the search
for faith in a cacophonous and especially hazardous age, using contemporary
Manhattan as a backdrop. And in “Homer and Langley” (2009), he created a tour
of 20th-century history from the perspective of a blind man, Homer Collyer, a
highly fictionalized rendering of one of two eccentric brothers living on upper
Fifth Avenue who became notorious after their deaths for their obsessive
hoarding.
Indeed, much of his oeuvre describes a fictional history,
more or less, of 20th-century America in general and New York in particular.
“Someone said to me once that my books can be arranged in
rough chronological order to indicate one man’s sense of 120 years of American
life,” Mr. Doctorow said on the publication of “City of God.” “In this book, it
seems I’ve finally caught up to the present.”
“The March” (2005) was Mr. Doctorow’s farthest reach back
into history, and it also expanded his geographical reach, populating the
destructive and decisive Civil War campaign of General William T. Sherman — the
capture of Atlanta and the so-called march to the sea — with a plethora of
characters. Black and white, wealthy and wanting, military and civilian,
sympathetic and repugnant, they are a veritable representation of the American
people.
Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction (also won by
“Billy Bathgate”) and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction (also
won by “Ragtime” and “Billy Bathgate”), a finalist for the National Book Award
(won by “World’s Fair”) and the Pulitzer Prize, “The March” was widely
recognized as a signature book, treated by critics as the climactic work of a
career.
Perhaps the most telling review came from John Updike,
who was prominent among a noisy minority of critics who generally found Mr.
Doctorow’s tinkering with history misleading if not an outright violation of
the tenets of narrative literature. Updike held “Ragtime” in especial disdain.
“It smacked of playing with helpless dead puppets, and
turned the historical novel into a gravity-free, faintly sadistic game,” he
wrote in The New Yorker, going on to dismiss several other Doctorow books
before granting their author a reprieve.
“His splendid new novel, ‘The March,’ pretty well cures
my Doctorow problem,” Updike wrote, adding, “The novel shares with ‘Ragtime’ a
texture of terse episodes and dialogue shorn, in avant-garde fashion, of
quotation marks, but has little of the older book’s distancing jazz, its
impudent, mocking shuffle of facts; it celebrates its epic war with the
stirring music of a brass marching band heard from afar, then loud and up
close, and finally receding over the horizon.
“Reading historical fiction,” Updike went on, “we often
itch, our curiosity piqued, to consult a book of straight history, to get to
the facts without the fiction. But ‘The March’ stimulates little such itch; it
offers an illumination, fitful and flickering, of a historic upheaval that only
fiction could provide. Doctorow here appears not so much a reconstructor of
history as a visionary who seeks in time past occasions for poetry.”
DOCTOROW, E.L. (Edgar
Lawrence Doctorow)
Born:
1/6/1931, New York City, New York, U.S.A.
Died:
7/21/2015, Manhattan, New York, U.S.A.
E.L. Doctorow’s
western – screenwriter, actor:
Welcome to Hard Times – 1967 [screenwriter]
Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History
Lesson – 1976 (Adviser to President Grover Cleveland)
