NONFICTION - Nov. 21, 1993

JACK LONDON, HEMINGWAY, AND THE CONSTITUTION: Selected Essays, 1977-1992 by E.L. Doctorow (Random House: $20; 206 pp.). It shouldn’t come as a surprise that E.L. Doctorow, writing nonfiction, is at his best discussing novelists like Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, and George Orwell; they, too, were sociopolitical writers, interested in the hypocrisies and duplicities of modern civilization. It is a surprise, though, that straightforward political writing should bring out the worst in this estimable novelist, showing little of the understanding that marks Doctorow’s fiction. The 1980 article on Ronald Reagan, for example, is a predictable, ad hominem attack; the one on presidential character is unmemorable, partisan journalism, again showing Doctorow preaching to the converted (both pieces were commissioned by The Nation). These personal assaults make Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution as uneven a collection as its title indicates--but it also contains, fortunately, some thoughtful pieces on politics, such as the bicentennial “A Citizen Reads the Constitution” (another Nation reprint). Here, Doctorow takes the Constitution as a kind of “scripture”--the founding fathers did, after all, “ordain and establish” the document--that created “not just social order but spiritual identity.” And as a sacred text, he writes, the Constitution must be argued over, for it demands that believers “engage to understand its meanings, its values, its revelation “ . . . even as it begins to “shimmer with ambiguity,” as every interpreted text must. This essay is certainly worth preserving in hard covers, as some of the others in this collection are not--and one can only wonder why Doctorow omitted probably his most widely reported public address in recent years, in which he roundly criticized his then-and-current publisher, Random House, for “beheading” its money-losing Pantheon imprint by forcing out its respected publisher.