An American tale

E .L. DOCTOROW spends his summers in Sag Harbor, a former whaling town on the eastern end of Long Island now best known as a seasonal resort. His house is square and orderly, on a side street in the village, which is the kind of place where, he notes in his new book “Creationists: Selected Essays, 1993-2006” (Random House: 178 pp., $24.95), “ordinary seamen left their families when they went to sea.” For Doctorow, Sag Harbor is an emblematic landscape, just a couple of hours from New York City, where he was born in 1931 and still lives, a town with connections both to the 19th century and the elusive paradoxes of the present day. Sitting in his backyard on an August afternoon, he laughs as a helicopter buzzes overhead. “It’s Steven Spielberg,” he speculates, referring to the director who also has a summer home here, a notion that clearly leaves the author ambivalent. Listening to him, you get the sense that he’s inhabiting a different Sag Harbor altogether, a territory threaded through with history, where, he writes, “for some years in the nineteenth century with the whaling industry booming, its denizens had reason to believe that someday, with its deep-water harbor, it would rival New York as a major port.”

“Creationists” is Doctorow’s third volume of nonfiction, an inquiry into literature that has more than a little in common with his 2003 collection “Reporting the Universe.” Opening with a piece on the Book of Genesis and closing with essays on Einstein and the atom bomb, the book explores the question of narrative, and what value it may have in a world fragmented by the complexities of contemporary life. “Storytelling lost its authority when the enlightenment came on,” Doctorow explains, speaking slowly, carefully, his voice still bearing a breath of the Bronx, where he was raised. “Suddenly, to make something true, you had to prove it. You had to observe it, demonstrate it, see that it worked again and again. Whereas in the old days, the presumption behind telling a story was that it was true because stories were all people had.” Yet even now, as he writes in his introduction, “[s]tories, whether written as novels or scripted as plays, are revelatory structures of facts. They connect the visible with the invisible, the present with the past. They propose life as something of moral consequence. They distribute the suffering so that it can be borne.... The storyteller practices the ancient way of knowing, the total discourse that antedates all the special vocabularies of modern intelligence.”

It’s interesting because Doctorow is not generally thought of as an essayist, and “Creationists” is slight in places, made up as it is of speeches, introductions and occasional pieces composed over the last 14 years. What holds the book together are his reflections on a dozen or so writers -- Poe, Melville, Twain, Sinclair Lewis and John Dos Passos, whose “U.S.A.” trilogy remains, for Doctorow, an elemental touchstone. In that sense, “Creationists” might best be read as an analogue to Doctorow’s fiction, a set of context clues.

Of course, when it comes to context, that list of writers is doubly instructive, for it suggests the company in which Doctorow belongs. At 75, he is a literary elder statesman, author of 17 books, including 10 novels, recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Book Award. His latest novel, “The March” -- which reimagines Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s relentless trek through Georgia and the Carolinas -- won a PEN/Faulkner Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award.

More to the point, Doctorow may be our most broadly American author, writing novels that operate as what he calls “immense social documents,” taking on the messy ambiguities of the national mythosphere. “Ragtime,” which 31 years after its initial publication remains his best-known work, weaves historical figures such as architect Stanford White, his lover Evelyn Nesbit, and anarchist Emma Goldman into the fabric of its fiction to create a three-dimensional pastiche of turn-of-20th-century America. His 1971 novel “The Book of Daniel” re-creates, from the point of view of one of their adult children, the story of a Julius and Ethel Rosenberg-like couple executed at the height of the Cold War as atomic spies. If part of the appeal here has to do with Doctorow’s ability to look beyond his experience, equally important is his sense of history as personal, as something with an inner life. “When you use a historical character like Sherman,” he says, “it’s your Sherman. You’re doing what a painter does when he paints a portrait. It’s a rendering. And there’s nothing wrong with that, even if the man is a public figure. Writers do that with characters composed of their own family members. Whether the character is publicly known or not publicly known, you’re doing the same thing.”

FOR Doctorow, the idea of fiction as a wide-angle lens on the culture has a lot to do with genre, which has fascinated him since the beginning of his career. His first novel, “Welcome to Hard Times,” published in 1960, subverts the conventions of the western; he started it while working as a reader for a movie company. “There’s a certain amount of creative accident to all this stuff,” he admits, a grin playing at the corners of his mouth. “I was reading all these lousy westerns and writing a very autobiographical novel about a young man just out of college. And suddenly, one day, I wrote a story. It was a parody of the western, where the bad guy just wipes out this town. I showed it to the man I was working for, and he said, ‘This is good. Why don’t you turn it into a novel?’ So I crossed out the title and put in ‘Chapter One,’ and just went on from there.” Six years later, he produced “Big as Life,” which brings a similar sensibility to science fiction, although, Doctorow believes, far less successfully; of all his books, this is the only one he has never allowed to be reissued, and he seems uncomfortable talking about it in much detail.

Yet if in that book’s aftermath, Doctorow stopped “thinking consciously about genre,” he’s continued to play at the edges of popular literature, taking up elements of crime fiction in “Billy Bathgate” -- which features Dutch Schultz as a central character -- and reinterpreting the war novel in “The March.” A novelist, he says, “partakes of many identities. People say to me, ‘A lot of your novels take place in the past. Are you a historical novelist?’ I don’t think of myself that way, but if you want to call me that, go ahead. Then someone will say, ‘There’s a certain political quality to a lot of your work. Would you call yourself a political novelist?’ And I’ll say, ‘I’ve never thought of myself as a political novelist, but if that suits you, why not?’ And then someone will say, ‘You’re a Jewish novelist’ -- and yes, I guess that’s true, too. So I accept any kind of identity. I’m willing to participate in all of them, as long as none claims to be an exhaustive interpretation.”

This notion of fluidity, of not being bound by category, asserts itself in different ways. Although he’s written deftly about New York -- in “Ragtime” and “Billy Bathgate,” as well as “The Waterworks,” which takes place in Manhattan in the 1870s -- he is not a New York novelist. “I don’t feel New York conferred a literary identity on me,” he says, “as South Carolina or Wyoming or even Chicago might have. Somewhere along the line, it wasn’t the place that mattered to me but periods of time. For me, that meant the turn of the century in New York City and its suburbs, or the Civil War, or the post-Civil War period out West or 1930s New York City. I was conscious of the constructive principle that comes with a cross-section of time.”

By the same token, Doctorow is one of the few Jewish American novelists of his generation not to feel compelled to come to terms with that experience, although he did write about it in the 1985 novel “World’s Fair.” Partly, he suggests, this has to do with growing up in a Bronx neighborhood where “everyone was Jewish, and so it was invisible in a way. I was never required to carve out that identity as a defensive mechanism; it was just there.” Yet even more, he believes, it was the nature of his household, which was “split down the middle between the religious impulse and the irreligious impulse.” For his mother and his grandmothers, Judaism offered solace, even if they weren’t especially observant. His father and his father’s father, on the other hand, were “total skeptics and politically left.” Standing in the middle, the young Doctorow kept, in his own words, “bouncing back and forth. Yes, I was bar mitzvahed, but my grandfather gave me a copy of Tom Paine’s ‘The Age of Reason.’ So it’s always been that way with me, that nothing dogmatic was stamped on my soul.”

In recent years, Doctorow’s sense of being pulled, of moving back and forth between the poles of faith and reason, appears to have grown more pronounced. Beginning with his 2000 novel “City of God,” his work is suffused with it, constantly circling back to the question of meaning, of how much we can ever truly know. That’s fitting, given his affinity for the Transcendentalists and their circle -- Emerson, from whom he took the title of “Reporting the Universe”; Hawthorne, whose work he’s loved since he was young. Yet even more, his is a profoundly contemporary fascination, an inquiry into the very essence of consciousness, what Doctorow describes in “Creationists” as “the philosophical despair of a mind in the appalled contemplation of itself.” Toward the end of the collection, in his essay on Einstein, Doctorow cites philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who along with Einstein also appears in “City of God,” and once said: “If all possible scientific questions are answered, our problem is still not touched at all.”

This is territory Doctorow first explored in the late 1990s, in a lecture called “The Politics of God.” “I began to wonder about time,” he says. “Is it a loop? Are we going backwards? I have the rabbi talk about this in ‘City of God.’ ” Such issues reside at the heart of that novel, which may be Doctorow’s finest: an expanding universe of a book that juxtaposes the Holocaust with questions of theology and quantum physics to frame a portrait of the universe as essentially unknowable, in which truth is elusive and even our connection to one another can never be enough. Similar concerns motivate “Sweet Land Stories,” his 2004 collection of short fiction, and the essays in “Reporting the Universe” and “Creationists,” as well as “The March,” with its dense, nearly Faulknerian swirls of language, its multiple perspectives that highlight, with visceral immediacy, the existential chaos of war.

IT’S tempting to interpret this as a trend, a movement, even a turning point in Doctorow’s career. Certainly, he’s put together an incredible run over the last six years, publishing more and (arguably) more densely wrought material than at any other point in his writing life. In his view, though, all that is coincidental rather than programmatic, a matter of how “every book encodes your life.” “The March” may share elements with Doctorow’s earlier novels, but it also has to do with the author’s “melancholy view of the way things are now and the endless warring that the human race goes through, to which there seems to be no end.”

The key is voice, language, the ebb and flow of the sentences, the way they get inside us, creating an emotional undertone. “Every book has its own voice,” Doctorow explains. “I think there’s a kind of ventriloqual thing that goes on when I write. I don’t ever want to hear my own voice; it’s one of the worst things that can happen. And the fact that the voice in my books keeps changing makes it easier for me to indulge my sense of language and to play with the music in words, the rhythms in sentences, which are a large part of how any book gets written. In ‘The Book of Daniel,’ I wrote 150 pages and threw them away, they were so bad. It wasn’t until I realized that Daniel should write the book, that it should be his voice rather than mine, that it began to work.”

In the end, this multiplicity echoes back to the Transcendentalists -- or, at least, to one of their fellow travelers, Walt Whitman, who, as he liked to exult, contained multitudes. At the same time, it’s a comment on the mystery of creation, which has always been central to Doctorow’s work. Early in “Creationists,” in an essay on “Moby-Dick,” he separates “those writers who make their language visible, who draw attention to it in the act of writing and don’t let us forget it -- Melville, Joyce, Nabokov in our own time, the song-and dance men, the strutting dandies of literature -- from those magicians of the real who write to make their language invisible, like lit stage scrims that pass us through to the scene behind, so that we see the life they are rendering as if no language is producing it.” But in truth, the line is far less conscious, as Doctorow’s career shows. At different moments, he has been both types of author; it’s hard to imagine novels more writerly than “The March” or “Ragtime,” while “The Book of Daniel” and “World’s Fair” are less overt. “Whatever identity the book has,” Doctorow says simply, “will force you to write a certain way. The language will precede any intention you may have.”

The same could be said of stories, which continue to exist all around us, always, framing how we see the world. These stories may have shifted, may have become more discontinuous, but this only makes them more essential, especially in a universe where their value is no longer assured. “Without getting too sanctimonious about it,” Doctorow says, “I relate storytelling to any kind of witness. That’s what Emerson means when he says, ‘a man is the faculty of reporting, and the universe is the possibility of being reported.’ For some people, the book has already been written and there’s no need for any other book. But in a pluralistic, presumably democratic society, the inquiry is endless, it goes on. It’s up for grabs, whatever the truth is. And every book is an answer to another book.” *