I was very sorry to hear of the passing of E. L. Doctorow, a truly great American artist whose work and career have long inspired in me a tremendous sense of gratitude. Three years ago, Don DeLillo, Jennifer Egan, and I worked together to choose a recipient for the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, which is meant to honor a lifetime of intense, sustained, and escalating achievement. With a real sense of awe, we selected E. L. Doctorow.
Doctorow’s great topic was, in Don DeLillo’s words, “the reach of American possibility, in which plain lives take on the cadences of history.” Each book created and sustained its own unique and necessary language. Because Doctorow was, first and foremost, a master stylist. “His sensitivity to language is perfectly balanced,” Jennifer Egan wrote, “and complemented by a gigantic vision, so that, on every level, the work is powerful.”
Doctorow was an incredibly brave writer. He articulated our American darkness as well as any writer ever has—our hubris, our greed, our stupidity around race and class—but this awareness of darkness vibrated alongside a deep optimism, a fascination with the beauty and genius of the American experiment. The reader felt the books as great technical accomplishments, yes, but more so as accomplishments of spirit—of artistic generosity—as acts of love, even: love of nation, love of actual phenomenon, of mankind, of a human being’s constant and renewing freedom, even in the face of history. His “prose tends to create its own landscape,” is how Don put it, “and to become a force that works in opposition to the power of social reality.”
What I found particularly inspiring about Doctorow was the way he would tweak form to produce moral-ethical effect—the way that he seemed not to see these two things as separate. Reading his great “Ragtime,” for example, I can feel that all of that technical verve is there necessarily—to serve and escalate meaning and emotion. But as important—the verve serves and escalates the fun, the riveting sense that a particular and wonderful human mind is having a great time riffing on the things of this world, trying to make sense of them. The work exudes fascination with the human, and a wry confidence in it, and inspires these feelings in us as we read. Doctorow, we might say, role-models a hopeful stance toward what can be a terrifying world.
E. L. Doctorow’s work is a national treasure, and I mean this in a very specific sense: he rewarded us, over his many decades of productivity, with a vision of ourselves, as a people, a vision possessed of what I might call “aspirational verve”: he saw us clearly and tenderly, just as we are, but also was able to see past that—to what we might, at our best, become.
I feel so grateful for his courage, his playfulness, his fire; for reminding us with every book that language is infinite, and essential; for providing a great role model for any artist, by continuing to grow and search, to the very end. What an inspiration and an astonishment: to see how much beauty can be made by one artist.
This piece builds on remarks made at the 2012 PEN Literary Awards ceremony.
