The Novel as History
On the literary magic and deep mischief of E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime.
1. Magic
E. L. Doctorow’s shelf of twelve novels is well worth reading end to end — not in a binge-reading rush, but at a measured pace, say one every year or two. For the reader doing so, the true dimensions of the author’s imagination will take on a proper sense of majesty. From The Book of Daniel (1971), his immersive fictional foray into the public and private aftershocks of the trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, to his powerful portrayal of the hypnotic force and violent trauma of battle in The March (2005), his novel about General William Tecumseh Sherman and the end of the Civil War, each individual work has its own distinctive artifice and literary poise. Together, they reveal a nuanced, profound apprehension of history, memory, and mortality, and of the lives we live in their midst and at their mercies.
The most famous work on that shelf, of course, is Ragtime, which won enormous popularity and critical acclaim well before the success of the film and Broadway adaptations. The book is first and foremost a good read, animated with complex characters, real and invented, and several absorbing plot lines that intersect in the narrative’s ingenious design. The overarching story is about a well-to-do family in New Rochelle, a suburban satellite of Manhattan, as the twentieth century begins.
A second family, immigrant and Jewish, enters the action from Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where the father, a street vendor of his own artful paper-and-scissor creations, and his young daughter (especially) catch the eye of the notorious Evelyn Nesbit, one of America’s first cover girls. Nesbit’s husband, Harry K. Thaw, is on trial for murdering Nesbit’s seducer, the architect Stanford White. In addition to the triangle of lovers, whose escapades are lifted more or less directly from the tabloids of the time, many other historical figures occupy places on Doctorow’s pages (albeit often engaged in nonhistorical acts), from the anarchist Emma Goldman and the reformer Jacob Riis to the escape artist Harry Houdini, the financier J. P. Morgan, the industrialist Henry Ford, and, lest we make an unintended slip, Sigmund Freud, who amusingly visits Niagara Falls.
A third family is introduced in the shape of a newborn infant abandoned in the garden of the first family’s house in New Rochelle. The baby is the child of a black maid and a ragtime pianist, Coalhouse Walker, whose forays into radical politics — or, depending on your point of view, quest for social justice — will drive the story to its explosive conclusion.
The layering of fiction and fact, ephemera and history, headline news and private heartache is alluring, giving the book a surface glamour that is at once entertaining and compelling. Equally captivating are the juxtapositions of poverty and wealth, leisure and labor, sex and politics, idea and emotion. And although it is lucidly declarative, it is peculiarly told: There is a matter-of-factness to Doctorow’s prose, no matter how outlandish its content, that keeps the telling — appropriately enough given the book’s title — a little offbeat. The narrative itself is syncopated, playing off our expectations of history to present an entirely new music, one that holds us in thrall and creates no little sense of wonder.
2. Mischief
That there is a mischievous intelligence near the core of E. L. Doctorow’s imagination is perhaps nowhere better illustrated than in Ragtime’s closing sentences, in which he suggests, off-handedly, that the entirety of what has transpired on the three hundred previous pages — filled with history, complications, losses, loves, inventions, ideas, emotions, and many fateful festivities from the beginning of the American Century — might well be seen as an elaborate setup for the delivery of an unexpected punch line: Everything that’s happened has conspired to create the inspiration for the Our Gang comedies:
He suddenly had an idea for a film. A bunch of children who were pals, white black, fat thin, rich poor, all kinds, mischievous little urchins who would have funny adventures in their own neighborhood, a society of ragamuffins, like all of us, a gang, getting into trouble and getting out again.
One might easily miss this little joke as one rushes to the conclusion of Doctorow’s captivating book, but it’s certainly there. Which leads me to think that an idea I formulated while thinking about Ragtime, an idea that turns on a profound playfulness of mind, a sly ingenuity, might have some truth to it.
In 1968, seven years before Ragtime appeared, Norman Mailer published a book, The Armies of the Night, that — from the moment its text first appeared in Harper’s Magazine — was seen as emblem and apotheosis of the New Journalism, a fertile field of literary activity that Mailer would continue to dominate, through the early seventies, with works like Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Of a Fire on the Moon, and Saint George and the Godfather. Not only was Mailer’s prominence hard to ignore in this period, one can only assume Doctorow was paying special attention to his work, as he had been the older writer’s editor at The Dial Press not too long before. In a brief recollection in The Mailer Review, in fact, Doctorow described a conversation with Mailer that took place not long before the latter’s string of nonfiction successes commenced:
One day after a lunch, we were walking back to my office and Norman said that he thought time had passed him by. It was an astonishing moment. I was hearing not the public man’s intent to make a revolution in the consciousness of his time, but a normally worried writer. I say normally because self-doubt rides with us all our lives and, however painful, is a necessarily productive state of mind. It is generative, it leads to the next thing. We don’t move on from complacency, from self-satisfaction. So I had to smile as I assured Norman that time wouldn’t dare to pass him by. And of course it was this particular concern attached to a fortuitous event, the 1967 anti-war march in Washington in which men of draft age made a bonfire of their draft cards, that led him to write The Armies of the Night . . . if not his greatest work surely among the best three, or top five, certainly in the top ten.
Best three for sure, if you ask me, but that’s another discussion. What would not be lost on a writer of Doctorow’s gifts reading Armies, I’m sure, is the exuberant way in which Mailer sends up not only himself as observer-participant in the march on the Pentagon (which he does with great hilarity), but also our received ideas of how history is comprehended and composed. The subtitle of Mailer’s book — History as a Novel, The Novel as History — signals his ambitions, which, while considerable, limit the stakes of his inquiry to a literary bet: You’ll learn more about what really transpired at the event if you see it through the eyes of “Norman Mailer” (Mailer’s account is, quite smartly and merrily, written in the third person) than you might in an “objective” account. “Now we may leave Time to find out what happened,” Mailer concludes his first chapter, which consists of a verbatim presentation of Time magazine’s not-very-flattering account of the author’s antics in Washington, DC.
Doctorow, if my speculations have any validity, took Mailer’s sub-titular diptych in a deeper direction, not as rubrics about the writing of history but as prompts to investigate the nature of history itself. With their unflinching assurance in bringing real-life personages into the personal orbits of invented characters, and their unblinking steadiness in encompassing Polar expeditions, sexual celebrities, immigrants, Sigmund Freud and Harry Houdini, racial tensions, abandoned infants, political explosions, and not least, ragtime as music and metaphor, the matter-of-fact sentences of Doctorow’s novel seem to be positing something: What if history is not a story at all, is indifferent to its observers and participants, does not occupy time vertically but only horizontally, “as if history were no more than a tune on a player piano”?
The sentences of Ragtime, it strikes me, in addition to everything else one can and should say about them and the life they narrate, were set by Doctorow with the mischievous intent of turning the self-regard and portentousness of its era’s reigning literary fashion — the observer-driven nonfiction of Mailer and others — entirely on its head, giving both History and The Novel their due.
