Novelist Tries to Dry the Tears of Childhood

For novelist E. L. Doctorow, the past is as layered as an onion--and as pungent.

Hidden somewhere deep in all of us, he believes, is a childhood that makes our eyes water.

“Being a child is a time we don’t want to remember, usually, because it’s too painful,” he said. “What we remember about our childhood is the humiliation of it, a state of almost constant humiliation, of terrors and fears and nightmares and powerlessness and shame.”

Doctorow, 54, had come to Los Angeles to promote his latest book, “World’s Fair” (Random House: $17.95), on one of two trips he has made outside New York on behalf of the fictional memoir of growing up in the Bronx in the 1930s.

Whatever the book’s merits, “World’s Fair”and its author have not lacked for attention. Ever since he hit the fiction big time with “Ragtime” in 1975, the arrival of a new Doctorow book has become both a time of praise and of head-shaking, if not downright opprobrium. In this latest foray, both the book, his eighth, and Doctorow have been savaged and praised by critics nationwide. Pros and cons are running nearly neck and neck, Doctorow calculated.

Relaxed and casually dressed, the lifelong New Yorker seemed more upset the other day by the Southern California rain, which ruined his plans for tennis, than the high percentage of unfavorable notices about the adventures of Edgar Altschuler, whose first name, family members and childhood diseases strongly resemble Doctorow’s.

In fact, he’s pleased, he said, that hardly any critic seems to have been lukewarm to his re-creation of a boy’s life in the Depression, culminating with trips to the 1939 World’s Fair, an extravaganza of corporate commerce that tried to project a rosy glow over a time of looming world war.

While the critical reception has been mixed, Doctorow claimed that actual readers have been far more receptive because “World’s Fair” is a book that unpeels the past for each, recovering childhoods that have been suppressed by adults who have been afraid to look back.

“You know the feeling when you meet someone you knew when you were a kid--you really don’t want to talk to the guy about it,” he said. Chuckling, he added, “Whatever it was, somebody twisted your arm behind your back or made you say ‘uncle.’ . . . So when you read a book like this it’s a kind of release, a catharsis. People do tell me, ‘Gee, it did make me think of all that.’ ” (He appears to be supported by the numbers--131,000 copies of “World’s Fair,” published Nov. 22, have been sold so far.)

Childhood is forbidden territory for many reasons, Doctorow said, not least because aging is often coupled with education and affluence, so that we move away from our past not only temporally but mentally and materially as well.

‘A Previous Life’

“There’s the fact that so many of us as we’ve grown up have not only aged and changed as we put on the mask of adulthood,” he said, “We’ve not only moved on but we’ve moved up. When you move up--culturally, intellectually, economically, whatever way--then the past becomes a danger to you. It becomes a previous life.”

Many people, Doctorow suspects, also don’t want to recall the bad things they did as children. His own bag of horrors includes this incident:

“Once at summer camp, this is not in the book, my friends and I found a frog, a very large frog and I don’t know why we did this . . . We wrapped it very loosely in newspaper, sheet after sheet of newspaper, and then we set fire to this big ball of newspaper. That was a hideous thing to do. Why did we do that?

“And then when everything was all burnt off, we kicked away the ashes of the newspaper and there was the frog, absolutely whole--and red. Then one of the kids touched it with his foot and it just crumbled into dust.”

And he went on to re-emphasize his point about remembering the past. “Now, a child is filled with terrible things of that sort, so when you make the connection you sort of forgive yourself. If you write about childhood, if you think about childhood, it’s an act of redemption. A book like this can be a kind of sacrament for the reader.”

Childhood was not a golden time for Doctorow. He remembered his family’s struggles with money, his father’s failing business, his parents’ arguments and the smaller and smaller apartments.

“I think the presumption of the book is that childhood is a very morally complex time,” he said. “Children are profoundly observant and perceptive. In fact, their perception is the means by which they catch up to the world because they find everyone in advance of where they are. The perception becomes sort of an act of betrayal. The kid is dependent on everyone around him, on the parents, but begins to hone his capacity to perceive and make judgments, which is independence. So he gets trapped in the tension between dependence and independence and feels very guilty about what he knows.”

Child Recaptures Adult

While he was writing the book, Doctorow said he discovered that the child can recapture the adult.

“In the writing of it I realized something was happening. As a matter of fact it was the most interesting technical discovery that I’ve made. As the adult was recalling his childhood, he began to be possessed by it so that the language gets younger and younger. It doesn’t happen all at once and it doesn’t happen smoothly . . . (but) finally, I think, the last 50, 100, pages of this book, it’s the adult and the child simultaneously. In other words it’s as if memory, the act of recollection, has transformed him into the child he was recalling.”

Even though the book draws on the broad outlines of his life, Doctorow was adamant that it is a novel, not a true memoir.

“Like every book I’ve done, it’s both autobiographical and invented at the same time. Even when I write about previous centuries and other people, it’s still autobiographical. Each book encodes your own life. Whatever the code is changes from book to book. So I’ll accept that it’s autobiographical in those terms. But not in the obvious way. I have a terrible memory. Everyone around me remembers more than I do and I think I use memory as a resource but an awful lot of the book is made up and composed.”

(At one point, Doctorow unintentionally proved his point by losing the glasses he uses as much for a prop as for seeing. When the wayward spectacles were found, he remarked, “I only lose them about 20 times a day.”)

Even though he resists romanticizing the past, Doctorow does find virtues there that seem especially appealing today. Moreover, when writers today look back, as many seem to be doing, they are partly searching for a sense of wholeness that may not exist in these times, he said.

“The thing I realized in writing this book is that however bad things were in the 1930s--and they were very bad--people seemed to be more connected with their lives. They knew what was happening to them, whereas today we are so much appreciably better off but some lines have been cut, some kind of circuit has flipped out in our self-perception. . . . See, the thing about people in those days was that they sought to live morally, they had some connection with what they valued, with what’s true and what’s fair and what’s just. We have been making so many moral concessions in return for our comforts that something is broken somewhere in our national psyche. If that’s true, you can understand why not only the writers are looking back but everyone is looking back and why there’s this sort of cultural ceremony of looking back to try to find that time when it all worked somehow.”

At the same time, the 1939 New York World’s Fair was an attempt to imagine the future. That attempt at prediction is to Doctorow the flip side of reminiscence.

Fair Was Prophecy

“One of the reasons I like the idea of World’s Fair as a metaphor is that, in effect, it prophesied the life we were going to lead. They showed you the little radio-controlled cars going around the GM Futurama and the various thrills of the rides and the latest technology . . . television got its first public exposure there. So much of the furniture of modern life was depicted at the World’s Fair but all the other stuff we know about was left out.

“It did not predict the Holocaust, it did not predict environmental pollution, it did not predict the Cold War, it did not predict the rise of the super-state, it did not predict the continuation of racism and bigotry, it did not predict religious war, terrorism. . . . So it was kind of like a hope for a technological utopia. Well, in a sense we have a technological utopia. In a sense we’re now living out the World’s Fair and seeing that it’s not sufficient.”

The organizers of the World’s Fair must have sensed that the future was iffy, Doctorow said, noting that the burying of the Westinghouse time capsule, to be opened in 6939, was one of the fair’s big events.

“You’re having a fair about the world of tomorrow and you’re burying a time capsule,” he said. “There’s some sense that there won’t be any continuity between who we are now and 5,000 years from now. It was a very necropolitical act. Like the Egyptians who buried everything with the Pharaoh--his pots and his pans and his gold and his boats with the oars--there was some sense of getting this record underground where it would be safe because there might not be a future. They wanted some record of what we had accomplished.”