More Writers & Company by Eleanor Wachtel

Author:Eleanor Wachtel [Wachtel, Eleanor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-36616-0
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 1997-09-08T00:00:00+00:00

E.L. DOCTOROW

Edgar Lawrence Doctorow started off as a script reader for Columbia Pictures and then as a literary editor in New York, first with New American Library and later Dial Press. But for thirty-five years now, he’s dedicated himself to writing popular and intensely readable novels—taking as his subject, as one critic put it, “the making of the American people.”

Ragtime (1975) takes place in early twentieth-century America; Loon Lake (1980), World’s Fair (1985) and Billy Bathgate (1989) are located in the 1930s; and The Book of Daniel (1971) in the 1950s and ’60s. To put things in historical context and lend a further air of actuality, Doctorow often intersperses real people in his fiction. In Ragtime, for instance, Emma Goldman, Theodore Dreiser, Sigmund Freud, Henry Ford and Harry Houdini figure in the lives of Doctorow’s fictional families. The Book of Daniel is set against the spy trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

E.L. Doctorow was born in New York City in 1931, and he’s something of an “urban romantic.” Not only are many of his novels set in New York, but in The Waterworks (1994), the city of 1871 is virtually the main character—dreamy, atmospheric, menacing, peopled by Civil War veterans, journalists and sleazy politicians. As Doctorow says, “I realized I was writing about everyone Edith Wharton had left out.”

Doctorow can be playful and elusive. When asked once where he gets the ideas for his novels, he said that Ragtime came from staring at a wall in his house in New Rochelle and writing the sentence, “I live in a house built in 1906.” He dropped the line from the book, but it got him started.

An old hand when it comes to interviews, he has a relaxed, friendly, avuncular demeanour. But what surprised me was his spontaneity, his engagement. Twice in our conversation in the Toronto studio, he started: First, at the connections I was making between the conservative, text-based New Criticism he had imbibed at Kenyon College and how that fit with his socialist background. He acknowledged what an interesting mix it yielded in him and clearly enjoyed unravelling it. Later, when I observed a shift in his view of science and technology, from the optimism of World’s Fair to the darkness of The Waterworks, he said, with bemusement, “I have to tell you at this point that your perceptions are really making me very uncomfortable.”

One of my favourite stories of Doctorow’s response to an interviewer was when he was asked about the title of his novel, Loon Lake. It’s a rich, complex book, involving a failed, alcoholic poet, gangsters, a rich industrialist and his aviatrix wife who live in the Adirondacks and so on. Doctorow claims he got the idea when he was driving one Sunday in upper New York state and saw a sign that said Loon Lake. “You’ve got to let things happen to you to write,” he maintained. When asked, “What would have happened if instead of passing a sign which said Loon Lake,

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