Edgar Lawrence Doctorow was a man of rare tolerance and forbearance, as I can attest: I had the opportunity to interview him when City of God was published in 2000. It was his first crack at a contemporary novel since Big As Life, an early, experimental work, and I spoke to him about both books in a piece for the late, lamented Talk magazine.
I approached Doctorow with considerable trepidation. He was, after all, a giant in our field, and in American letters in general. He had pioneered the historical novel as a serious genre in this country, rescuing it from the domain of bodice-rippers and boys’ adventure tales. He did serious work instead on the grand canvas of the American past, inexplicably neglected by so many of our writers. This included taking on many of the less savory aspects of our history, racism and slavery, machine politics and racketeering, the sheer desolation of so much of the Western experience, the execution of the Rosenbergs—yet never as a simple listing of evils, but always in the context of a great nation, shaped by imperfect men.
Those of us who tried to follow in his footsteps were in awe, but despite his stern, even flinty manner over the phone, he answered my stammered questions that day politely and with real consideration.
Relieved, I labored mightily over the essay—only to discover, when it was printed, that my editor had changed every single word I’d written, save for the direct quotes. Even worse, what he’d replaced it with was awful. Incomprehensible twaddle, highlighted—the words remain emblazoned on my brain—by a description of City of God as “a neo-Barthelmesian fantasia.” I apologized abjectly to Doctorow, but he proved just as gracious as he had been during our interview. It may have been that he was no more able to fathom what a neo-Barthelmesian fantasia was than the next man, or, more likely, he had never bothered to read the piece in the first place.
E.L. Doctorow always struck me as someone intensely focused on his work, and that concentration showed in his books. He was a flawless and masterful stylist, unafraid to explore any new territory. Hence his intertwining of Gothic horror and science fiction right out of Poe (his namesake), with the antics of Boss Tweed’s gang, in The Waterworks. Or his telling of the short story, “A House on the Plains,” from the perspective of one-half of a pair of murderous, mother-and-son grifters at the turn-of-the-century; or his invention of a wholly fictitious takeover of the Morgan Library by black revolutionaries in Ragtime.
At a conference about historical fiction a few years ago, some of us were asked the inevitable question of how closely we thought our novels should cling to the historical record. We hemmed and hawed about what the limits should be, save for Doctorow, who rejected the whole premise. Historical fiction, he asserted, should be no more or less true than any other sort of fiction. That is, it needed to be just as unhindered in imagination, and just as accurate about the human condition.
“Do as little research as you can get away with,” Doctorow once told a friend of mine during his years of teaching writing (years that continued long after he could possibly have needed the money). It’s good advice for any writer: Never lose track of the human story you’re telling, the flesh-and-blood characters, amid the wonders of some past age.
Those characters who survived to the end of his novels were often a gaggle of unlikely companions and makeshift families: the children of almost every ethnicity and color, in Ragtime, who will become the model for a Little Rascals-like series of films; an escaped slave, a newly minted photographer and a Union soldier at the finish of The March; the teen gangster, his infant child, his mad mother and his garbage-sorting, orphaned pal, in Billy Bathgate.
Their survival reflected an essentially liberal sensibility of America as a great improvisation, a collection of sometimes ruthless, often damaged, but marvelously resilient and resourceful characters, who will make a go of it because they have no other choice. There is something deeply optimistic in all this, in the truest sense of optimism, as a faith that abides even after looking all the worst things squarely in the face. Even his sunniest—and what I consider to be his greatest, and most moving—work, the semi-autobiographical World’s Fair, is not without considerable shadows. It comes off less as some Pollyannaish view of America than as an acknowledgement of just how lucky Doctorow himself was to be able to spend the shivery years of the Depression and World War II as a middle-class kid in the Bronx.
Doctorow was not one to let more specific politics interfere with his work. I had the privilege to interview him again, a few months before his death in July—this time sans editor and before an audience at New York’s 92nd Street Y—about his last novel, Andrew’s Brain, an excoriating critique of George W. Bush’s war on terror. Nonetheless, Doctorow, by then in his 80s, resolutely refused to say if his own views reflected those of his main character. The story had to stand on its own (which it does).
What shines through all his work, acknowledged or not, is an indignation at those who would tarnish the American experiment for the sake of their own greed, or lusts, or from sheer deviltry. His very first novel, Welcome to Hard Times, published in 1960, was intended as a satire of the westerns then clogging American television channels and movie screens, but ended up as a brutal meditation on the frontier West, and the complexities of building a civilization. The novel begins with a bump of a town in the Dakota Territory being wrecked by a single character known as the “Bad Man from Bodie,” most of its residents killed or driven off, nearly all its buildings burned to the ground. One of the few survivors, the aging, ad hoc mayor, hangs on in the hopes that a gold strike and the railroad will create “a settled town” that is invulnerable to such savagery; that “When the business is good and the life is working,” the Bad Men like the one from Bodie “can’t do a thing, they’re destroyed.”
In the end, though, the Bad Man returns, and the town is destroyed by the madness of its own citizens, worked into a mob. A veneer of civility is not enough; somewhere along the line, a stand must be taken. It seems an apt lesson for this moment, just as E.L. Doctorow always intended “historical” fiction to be.
