Writers often feel they have to choose: fiction or fact.
E.L. Doctorow, the Pulitzer-winning author, who died this week of lung cancer at age 84, proved you could do both, masterfully. His prolific career was marked by the novels The Book of Daniel, Billy Bathgate, and The March.
It was Ragtime, his 1975 novel, that I picked up as I was working on my graduate class for Warren Wilson College’s M.F.A. program for writers. Upstairs in my little room in a communal house in Boston, I was researching how authors use real-life figures as fictional characters. I was a skeptic of Ragtime. Brimming with familiar names, from Harry Houdini to Henry Ford, I figured that it would be little more than a reheated history dressed up with trivia and fanciful prose. Not coincidentally, I had never before read a Doctorow novel.
In Ragtime, those famous names are juxtaposed with the flattened names of wholly fictional characters: Mother, Father, Tateh, the Little Girl. As these characters interact, Doctorow riffs on our twin ways of remembering the past: history, scored with boldface names, and nostalgia, peopled by idyllic archetypes. There are echoes of Doctorow’s own upbringing in a Jewish family in the Bronx, where his father ran a music shop and his mother played piano. This wasn’t a writer who leaned on novelty guest stars to bolster his stories. This was a writer who poked at the fissure between truth and imagination, finding the place where they lived together.
From radicals to President Taft, these characters stand against the fervor of turn-of-the-century New York. But Doctorow stamps out the usual markers of how we engage with the past: dates are nearly invisible, pushing readers out of the metronomic first-this, then-that chronology of history. The novel has no quotation marks, those little anchors for attributable facts. Instead, Ragtime is propelled by the connective tissue between the characters, and especially their selective memory. This is imagined history, not recorded history; a novel pivoting on our individual and collective mythologies.
One of the most touching elements of the book is in the characters’ doomed search for a place in history. Father lands a spot on Robert Peary’s legendary 1909 North Pole expedition, but he isn’t on the final leg that actually makes the mark. Then Mother’s Younger Brother, in search of his life’s purpose, runs into the revolutionary Zapatistas in Mexico, but dies soon after. The famous characters shed light on the humble ones, making the story of those in search of a name for themselves especially vivid. Five years before Howard Zinn published A People’s History of the United States, Ragtime spotlighted history’s outsiders, especially immigrants and African Americans, destabilizing the stories our nation likes to tell itself about itself.
I paged through Ragtime for hours, underlining sentences in pencil, readying the class I was to teach before finishing my graduate degree, leaving my intentional community and going on to—I didn’t know what yet. I couldn’t choose. But here in my hands was a novel that underscored a belief that both true stories and imagined ones matter. And their greatest depth is revealed when they are set alongside each other. Writing is an act of love for the world, in all of its possibilities, Doctorow seemed to say. I wanted to be part of it—all of it.
Eight years later, I live in Detroit, a city of unbounded dissonance and creativity. I write true stories as a journalist, talking to both famous people and people who aren’t given due attention. I also write about literary culture and try to help grow it in this city. I hope I contribute to a more clear-eyed public understanding of what is real in this world.
As Doctorow showed me, the choice between fiction and fact is a false one. The richest life is one that has room for both.
Anna Clark is a writer who lives in Detroit. She’s also the applications director at Write A House, which renovates vacant homes and gives them away to writers. She edited A Detroit Anthology. @annaleighclark
