Doctorow’s universe
On Tuesday night, it was announced that one of the great American writers of the 20th century died from lung cancer. E.L. Doctorow was 84 years old.
The author of three collections of short stories, experiments in other genres and many essays, Doctorow was known primarily as a novelist. Between 1960 and 2014, he published 12 varied and strange novels; his habit of setting them in vastly different points in history constitutes, apparently, grounds for calling him “a historical novelist.”
But Doctorow was less a careful historian than an intuitive encyclopedic. He once remarked that to prepare for writing several chapters about J. P. Morgan in Ragtime, “The main research … was looking at the great photograph of him.”
Doctorow was a first-rate experimental novelist, beginning with the points at which our myths about the past and about ourselves overlap and then carefully pulling them apart. These are less historical novels than studies in the way we fictionalize history and success, and his best work rejoices in its pliable form without sacrificing narrative momentum. 2005’s The March is General Sherman’s savage path through Georgia and the Carolinas seen through a postmodern kaleidoscope. 2000’s City of God is a riveting novel of ideas.
I discovered Doctorow later than I should have. I was already writing my master’s dissertation when my supervisor sent me 1971’s The Book of Daniel, thinking I might enjoy reading it over the winter break. I wrote back to say I could not imagine keeping him out of my project. Doctorow’s Daniel is drawn from the same ichorous well as Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, an example of the corrosive effects McCarthyism had on the trust necessary for love, in any form. In a literary moment that often confuses ease of identification with quality, The Book of Daniel is ruthless and sickening and necessary.
A few years later, I came to work on my PhD at New York University, where Doctorow taught for the past 30 years and was scheduled to teach again in Spring 2016. The first book I picked-up at the campus bookstore was a collection of essays to which he contributed, While We Were Sleeping: NYU and the Destruction of New York: “The work of university officials and the architects they’ve commissioned,” he wrote, “is patented Donald Trump.”
What sets him apart from his paranoiac midcentury peers — Pynchon, DeLillo, Coover — was his belief that massive organizations could perhaps do good as long as they were well-organized by good people, and that innovative art could propel political conversations without being coopted. He encouraged community outreach programs in his own department, connecting writing instructors with disadvantaged children, recent veterans, and hospitalized New Yorkers.
I can’t speculate on his private feelings, but in life, he seemed to embody someone that knew how to be a version of Writer that allayed the worries about selfishness or narcissism or ineffectuality, that for him politics was not just an ideology he was sneaking into characters’ mouths or the proper conclusion of a Good Novel, but the motivation for trying new forms. He was the best version of a public intellectual, which is to say that he was brilliant, and perceptive and unafraid to speak, but was self-effacing and by all accounts generous with his time and support.
During the fall of 1981, E.L. Doctorow appeared before a subcommittee of the United States’s House Appropriations Committee to argue against the elimination of several grants earmarked for experimental, collaborative, and folk arts. But during his testimony, he changed course:
“The truth is, if you’re going to take away the lunches of schoolchildren, the pensions of miners who’ve contracted black lung, the storefront legal services of the poor who are otherwise stunned into insensibility by the magnitude of their troubles, you might as well get rid of poets, artists and musicians. If you’re planning to scrap medical care for the indigent, scholarships for students, day-care centres for the children of working mothers, transportation for the elderly and handicapped — if you’re going to eliminate people’s public service training jobs and then reduce their unemployment benefits after you’ve put them on the unemployment rolls, taking away their foodstamps in the bargain, then I say the loss of a few poems or arias cannot matter. If you’re going to close down the mental therapy centres for the veterans of Vietnam, what does it matter if our theatres go dark or our libraries close their doors?
“And so in my testimony for this small social program I am aware of the larger picture and, really, it stuns me.”
Doctorow would pursue this argument for the rest of his life, using speaking engagements to draw attention to injustice and poverty as much as his own work.
Yes, his career was uneven. Big as Life is out of print for good reason. Sidney Lumet’s film adaptation of The Book of Daniel, screenplay by Doctorow, is a risible misfire. Last year’s Andrew’s Brain will not change any minds. And America seemed to get worse as often as it got better. Yet Doctorow continued to ask: “despite all these discouragements, after all, what writer worth the name will not seriously, however furtively, take on the universe?”