The American writer EL Doctorow, who died on Tuesday in New York at the age of 84, represented a series of paradoxes. He was a committed literary modernist who almost never depicted his own times. Despite being a longtime academic whose photograph would perfectly have illustrated a dictionary entry for “professor”, his sure populist touch resulted in his novels becoming bestsellers and being adapted into Hollywood movies and a Broadway musical. Yet, although these works brought him unusually broad audiences for a serious novelist, Doctorow never quite achieved the fame of his contemporaries such as Philip Roth and John Updike.
Doctorow also published far fewer books than Norman Mailer, Updike and Roth, his relatively short shelf partly due to a slow, meticulous composition not restricted to professional texts. One of the best anecdotes about the drawbacks of living with a writer is Doctorow’s account of being asked one morning by his wife, Helen, to scribble a note to the school explaining why one of their three children had missed lessons the previous day. As the author began and then abandoned various opening sentences – rejecting, “On Monday morning, my daughter …” because it sounded like a legal deposition and “Following a bout of …” for being pseudo-forensic – the child’s exasperated mother grabbed the pen and notebook and wrote a short sentence explaining that the child had been absent due to a brief cold.
Nobody complained at his laborious redrafting of novels (a previous career as a publishing editor intensified his attention to literary craft). This embodied the central Doctorow paradox of being regarded largely as a historical novelist, even though he freely and deliberately played loose with any concept of the truth of the past.
While American literature classes should certainly study Ragtime, Billy Bathgate and The March, students of American history should carefully consult other sources before using Doctorow’s novels as the basis for essays on the early 20th century, and the prohibition and civil war periods that they seem to describe so authoritatively. Doctorow always took pleasure in fictional characters doing factual things and factual characters behaving fictionally.
Some reviewers – led, to the author’s irritation, by his revered fellow practitioner, Updike – fretted about how to know which bits of his books were history and which were just his story. Doctorow was unrepentant about this. As a modernist, he believed that all written accounts – contemporary documents, memoirs, newspapers, novels – are different varieties of invention. Even a diary entry made at night, he pointed out, is already describing history, and, given human nature and memory, probably doing so falsely.
One of his favourite tactics was to apply the storytelling tricks of postmodernism to a form – the historical novel – which, especially when he began writing, was often premodernist in its solemnity and claimed accuracy.
Although movingly informed in some sections by the personal history of his Russian-Jewish immigrant family, Ragtime applies to past events a modern, sardonic voice that acknowledges what we know now – however, in the sort of complication that Doctorow enjoyed, later readers are, by now, experiencing one “then” viewed from the perspective of another. The March daringly omits a major protagonist, reconstructing the war between the states through a vast mosaic of individual tales. Billy Bathgate, though set in the 1930s, contrives a pay off that subtly indicts what the writer saw as the fiscal gangsterism of the Reagan era in which it was written. The Book of Daniel, loosely dramatising the lives of the Rosenberg atomic spies, was an early contribution to the now-industrialised genre of recent historical “faction”.
Yet, though their author was dismissive of the idea of realism, the books – unlike more openly experimental fiction – felt real to their readers, and were framed around mainstream elements (romances, crimes, family tensions, wars) that explain why Ragtime became both a film and a stage musical. Billy Bathgate, with its compelling relationship between a young boy and a gangster, was the most successful of several movies made from his work.
I was fortunate enough to interview Doctorow, for radio and print, several times across a period of more than quarter of a century, from the publication of Billy Bathgate in 1989 to Andrew’s Brain, his final novel, last year. His respect for language led him to challenge ambiguity and loose phrasing in my questions, but he was courteous and drily funny and, above all, radiated a curiosity and intelligence, of which his readers and students were lucky beneficiaries.
When it was pointed out that his novels - from The March to Andrew’s Brain, a rare story – chronicled more than 150 years of American history, from the civil war to the Obama presidency, he was quick to make clear that this had been completely accidental. How a story was told always mattered most. For instance, Andrew’s Brain, a dark comedy about cognitive science, was an exercise in making the relatively common literary device of unreliable narration even more complex and untrustworthy.
The nature and meaning of consciousness are the main themes of Andrew’s Brain. As an octogenarian who was spending more time with doctors than he wished, the novelist was clearly contemplating the end, with one sentence in that final novel hard not to take as a valedictory, autobiographical nod: “I’ve always responded to the history of my times,” says the narrator to a listener called ‘Doc’, which, surely deliberately, is a nickname that must have been attached to the author at times in his life. In his best work - Ragtime, Billy Bathgate, The March, The Waterworks – EL Doctorow showed how a great literary imagination can illuminate the present through the prism of the past.
