THE LAST TIME I introduced E. L. Doctorow at the Y, on maybe this very same stage, was twenty or so years ago. What we did every month was show a movie, after which I would interview whoever wrote the novel that the movie messed up. If I remember correctly, Timothy Hutton, one of the stars of Daniel, joined us on stage. If I’d known then what I do now about Doctorow and film, about the screenplay he wrote for a ten-hour Robert Altman Ragtime television series, I’d have asked more interesting questions. Now I know everything, but I’ve decided not to tell you because life is short.
But let me mention a couple of things about this great novelist. He is also simultaneously a radical historian, a cultural anthropologist, a troubadour, a cost-benefit analyst of assimilation and upward mobility in the great American multiculture, a chronicler of the death of fathers, of the romance of money, and of the higher “latitudes and longitudes of gangsterdom.” He is a skinwalker, shape-shifter, stormbird, sherlock, magus, Ancient Mariner, Joe Hill, and Sam Spade. He has put on every imaginable variety of narrative glad rag and jet-propelled pulp-fiction sneaker, and spoken in every syllable of inspired tongue, from western, sci-fi, gothic, and ghost story to fairy tale, fable, and philosophical romance. He is the public intellectual who insists on social justice, and the pilgrim artist who is heartsick, awestruck, ecstatic, scornful, and possessed.
From a nonobservant father he inherited a humanism “that has no patience for a religious imagination that asks me to abandon my intellect.” But from his mother’s side he received “a spontaneously felt sense of the sacred” that “engages the whole human being as the intellect alone cannot.” To which add the Yiddish accent of his Bronx boyhood with Tolstoy, jazz, and L. Frank Baum, the Bronx High School of Science where Kafka encouraged him to write a story called “The Beetle,” the big surprise of Kenyon College in Ohio, where he read Matthew Arnold, and mastered the New Criticism at the neat feet of John Crowe Ransom, Randall Jarrell, and Robert Lowell; his stint in the Army, occupying Germany, and his stretch as a reader for a film company where he parsed far too many westerns, resulting at last in that first novel, after which we could count on his sonar readings for dark signs, frigid depths, evil devices, raven droppings, tiny golems, counterterrorists, cuneiform, and hieroglyphs.
In The Book of Daniel, Daniel and Susan are attacked by a “giant eye machine” with insect legs, and dive with open arms into shock therapy and revolutionary space, as if to die “on a parabolic curve.” In Ragtime, in Sarajevo, Houdini fails to warn the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and so the green feathers of his plumed helmet turn black with blood. Whereas in Egypt, on a camel, J. P. Morgan is surprised to find the pennant-winning New York Giants swarming “like vermin” over the Great Sphinx, sitting “in the holes of the face.” While in Mexico, in the great desert “of barrel cactus and Spanish bayonet,” the bomb-making Younger Brother will find Zapata. In Loon Lake, a carny worker contemplates the plutocrat he intends to become: “he was a killer of poets and explorers, a killer of boys and girls and he killed with as little thought as he gave to breathing, he killed by breathing he killed by existing he was an emperor, a maniac force in pantaloons and silk slippers and lacquered headdress dispensing like treasure pieces of his stool, making us throw ourselves on our faces to be beheaded one by one with gratitude.” In Billy Bathgate, Dutch Schultz “lived as a gangster and spoke as a gangster and when he died bleeding from the sutured holes in his chest he died of the gangsterdom of his mind as it flowed from him, he died dispensing himself in utterance, as if death is chattered-out being, or as if all we are made of is words and when we die the soul of speech decants itself into the universe.” In Lives of the Poets, “a dire desolation will erupt from the sky, drift like a fire-filled fog over the World Trade Center, glut the streets of SoHo with its sulfurous effulgence, shriek through every cracked window, stop the ringing voice of every living soul, and make of your diversified investment portfolio a useless thing.”
The Waterworks is both a Gothic and a detective story, about science, religion, and capitalism, but also journalism, politics, and New York. We are reminded of Melville, Poe, Crane, and Edith Wharton, but also Joseph Conrad. In 1871, as today, the spendthrift city, with its temples raised to savage cults, its gaudy display and blind selection, its humming wires and orphaned children, is a Darwinian jungle, a heart of darkness, and a necropolis. In this new industrial park, after a bloody Civil War, imagine a white stagecoach full of old men in black top hats. A freelance book reviewer for one of the city’s many newspapers thinks he sees his dead father in this coach. When this critic disappears, his editor and the only honest cop in Boss Tweed’s corrupt New York will seek him from Printing House Square to Buffalo Tavern to the Black Horse. Meanwhile children who have vanished from the streets or drowned in the reservoir turn up in coffins not their own. We move through the mosaics of daily journalism and routine police procedure toward what Doctorow calls “the limbo of science and money.” There, in an orphanage and a conservatory, in a laboratory and a ballroom, we will be asked questions about sanity and virtue, vampire capitalism and the morality of medicine, historical truth and natural selection—as, from the blood, bone marrow, and spinal fluid of nameless missing children, the Very Rich and Living Dead are rendered “biomotive” and seen to waltz, with deaf-mute caretaker women, under the shameless water, vaulted heavens, and God-stunned stars.
City of God is about, well… everything: both World Wars, the Holocaust, and Vietnam. But also, again, science and religion, reason and faith, prophecy and sacrifice, tellers of stories and watchers of birds. Einstein, Wittgenstein, and Frank Sinatra are characters. And a novelist, looking for his next book in the bare ruined choirs of modern Manhattan. And an Episcopal priest, Thomas Pemberton, who will fall in love with a reform rabbi, Sarah Blumenthal, when the cross that has been stolen from the altar of his Lower East Side church mysteriously reappears on the roof of her Upper West Side synagogue. Popular music and Hollywood movies are characters, too, glorious and ominous. Except one can’t imagine City of God on any big screen. How do you adapt a book as messy as the Bible itself, a hodgepodge of chronicles, verses, songs, and sins, a brilliant scissors-and-pasting of Hebrew gospel, Greek myth, Yiddish diaries, quantum physics, surreal screenplays, prose poems about trench warfare and aerial bombing, and an archive of every scrap of witness to the Nazi occupation of Lithuania? Or film the Midrash Jazz Quartet, a rap group of Talmudic interpreters of such pop standard secular hymns as “Me and My Shadow,” “Dancing in the Dark,” and “Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me”? What does gravity look like? Or “unmediated awe”? Or “moral consequence”? Or what Einstein calls the “first sacrament, the bending of starlight”? How, finally, do we picture an Episcopal priest who is so fed up with Christianity, and so in love with Sarah, that converting to Judaism is the only way he can think of to redeem himself from knowledge of the death camps?
In The March, that’s what General Sherman does, humming “The Ride of the Valkyries,” from Milledgeville to Savannah to Columbia with sixty thousand Union cavalry and infantry, surgeons and drummer boys, drovers and mules, cattle and cooks, not even counting twenty-five thousand freed slaves following behind, nor the Confederate prisoners needed to troll for landmines, nor the genteel Southern ladies, refugees from ruined plantations, with their buggies, their servants, their needlepoint—everything needed for an “infestation” or a plague, except maybe locusts and a frog. And in this train of go-carts, tumbrels, memory, and death, “as if the sky was being pushed in on itself,” “as if the armies were strung from the floating clouds,” an uprooted civilization is on the hoof. Think not only of the all-devouring armies of Alexander and Genghis Khan, but also of Exodus.
Doctorow has dreamed himself backward from Daniel to Ragtime to Waterworks to Civil War, into the creation myth of the Republic itself, as if to assume the prophetic role of the nineteenth-century writers he admires so much, for whom the Constitution was our sacred text and secular humanism our civil religion. In The March, the American identity of a dozen characters is as fluid as the blood they spill. We spend enough time in the ambulances and medical wards, among army nurses and severed heads, to be reminded of Whitman. And enough in the trenches and swamps to think of Stephen Crane. Matthew Brady comes to mind, stilling life with photographs. And so does William Faulkner, when a corpse needs a hole. And Flannery O’Connor, whose papers and bones are buried in Milledgeville, under peacock feathers. Toni Morrison might have imagined the white-chocolate Pearl child herself, Emancipation’s natural aristocrat. How pomo/meta to meet Coalhouse Walker, Sr., whose son will show up in Ragtime to disquiet J. P. Morgan. And for foreign flavor, see Arly and Will, the cross-dressing Confederates who are waiting for Godot or Stoppard. After such a scrub of blood, this bone-scan and immersion therapy, what’s left in our heads of Gone With the Wind looks more like Edmund Wilson’s Patriotic Gore.
So many avatars! He is channeling our history and literature, even as he creates it. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Citizen Doctorow and the Prophet Edgar.