Ragtime

Al Alvarez introduces Ragtime, E. L. Doctorow’s 'Great American Novel'

In the golden age of the American century, the eighteen years between the end of World War II and the assassination of President Kennedy, when the US was triumphant, prosperous and seemingly at ease with itself, there was intense competition between ambitious young authors to write the Great American Novel, a work that would somehow encompass the richness, diversity, optimism and energy of a nation that was now at the peak of its power. It would be as long, complex, wide-ranging and inclusive as its European counterparts but more restless and questing. Since America was a nation founded on abstract principles embodied in a Declaration of Rights and a Constitution, the Great American Novel at its deepest level would be metaphysical, like Moby Dick, less concerned with class and manners than with ideas, idealism and the self. Hence perhaps Saul Bellow's unexpected shift from his terse, anxious, Camus-like early novels, Dangling Man and The Victim, to the widescreen picaresque of The Adventures of Augie March, as though to be unbuttoned, freewheeling and hungry for ideas was the only way to be American.

The Great American Novel was an essential part of that other cliche, the American Dream, and for two long decades publishers, reviewers and readers, as well as authors, pursued it as obsessively as Captain Ahab pursued his white whale, until it became a kind of literary running gag, with a new contender every season. It was a joke that ran and ran until 1973 when Philip Roth - who else? - killed it off by writing a slapstick comedy about baseball, the national game, and calling it The Great American Novel. It was, not surprisingly, one of his least popular books.

Doctorow, like Roth, came of age in the 1950s and belongs to what Joan Didion called 'the last generation to identify with adults', well behaved, sternly educated young people who looked down on the hype and trivialisation of the publishing business because they believed in high culture, high principles and the moral authority of literature. Doctorow had acquired this belief at its purest, most high-minded source - from John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon College. He graduated from Kenyon with honours, did graduate work at Columbia, was conscripted into the US army, then served time in Hollywood, reading scripts for Columbia Studios. This was the high noon of Western movies and for a man with Doctorow's tastes and talents, reading scripts was not just a chore, it was an irritant, a challenge to do better. The result was his first novel, Welcome to Hard Times, a cowboy story reinvented as serious literature, a book more concerned with good and evil than with gunfights.

In 1959, Doctorow moved back home to New York and took a job in publishing, first as senior editor for New America Library, then as editor in chief at Dial Press. For ten years he worked on the books of other writers, some of them distinguished, and, like his time in Hollywood, the experience seems to have convinced him that he could do as well or better himself. In 1971, two years after he quit publishing, he proved the point with The Book of Daniel, a political novel of great psychological depth and intensity about the Rosenberg spy case and its aftershocks in Cold War America.

Ragtime came four years later and it seemed inevitable. After the great Western novel and the great political novel, the great American novel was the only way to go, even though Doctorow's version of it was probably not quite what the publicists or the public had in mind. On one level, of course, Ragtime is everything the Great American Novel was set up to be - a dazzling kaleidoscope of the country as it moved slowly towards maturity in the opening years of the 20th century. The book is stuffed with lovingly researched inventories of period Americana, everything from the network of trolley-cars that covered the eastern seaboard to the 'filigreed iron treadle' of a sewing machine [p.41] and

a black 45-horsepower Pope-Toledo Runabout... [which] had big wheels with pneumatic tires and wooden spokes painted in black enamel. It had brass headlights in front of the radiator and brass sidelamps over the fenders. It had tufted upholstery and double side entrances. [p.7]

The detail throughout is so meticulous, vivid and full of awe that the energy and appetites of the country itself seem to shine through it.

There is also a cast of the period's most famous figures - Admiral Peary and Houdini, Emma Goldman and Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White and his murderer Harry T. Thaw, J.P. Morgan and Henry Ford, Freud and Jung - all of them historically correct and precisely located, but reinvented as fictional characters with physical tics and ambiguous motives, slyly dancing to Doctorow's ironic tunes. Freud, for example, has a weak bladder and is beginning to distrust Jung. When his young disciples Ernest Jones and A.A. Brill take the great men to Coney Island,

The distinguished visitors rode the shoot-the-chutes and Freud and Jung took a boat together through the Tunnel of Love. The day came to a close only when Freud tired and had one of the fainting fits that had lately plagued him when in Jung's presence. [pp.32-33]

So much for the Tunnel of Love and Jung's loyalty.

At the centre of all this swarming life is an unnamed archetypal American family - Father, Mother, the Little Boy and Mother's Younger Brother - whose income, appropriately, 'was derived from the manufacture of flags and buntings and other accoutrements of patriotism, including fireworks. Patriotism was a reliable sentiment in the early 1900s.' [p.3] Doctorow's prose style, also appropriately, is confident, authoritative and as deceptively simple as a reading primer.

That, at least, is how the book begins, but Doctorow is a writer of great subtlety who can do whatever he wants with prose and one of the book's sharpest pleasures lies in its sudden shifts of tone. His faux-naif shell of short clear comma-less declarative sentences is constantly cracking open to reveal unexpected depths. Sometimes it is no more than a brief glimpse:

Now the sun shone brightly, the sky was clear; there was a full moon in the blue sky and the great ice thighs of the earth heaved and shuddered and rose toward the moon. At midmorning of April 9, Peary called a halt. [p.67]

Every so often the relentless quasi-historical narrative drive modulates into an altogether slower pace, as though the march of time had suddenly been stopped short by nostalgia - above all, by an artist's nostalgia for beauty:

The musician turned again to the keyboard. 'Wall Street Rag,' he said. Composed by the great Scott Joplin. He began to play. Ill-tuned or not the Aeolian [piano] had never made such sounds. Small clear chords hung in the air like flowers. The melodies were like bouquets. There seemed to be no other possibilities for life than those delineated by the music. When the piece was over Coalhouse Walker turned on the stool and found in his audience the entire family, Mother, Father, the boy, Grandfather and Mother's Younger Brother... .

Coalhouse Walker Jr. turned back to the piano and said, 'The Maple Leaf.' Composed by the great Scott Joplin. The most famous rag of all rang through the air. The pianist sat stiffly at the keyboard, his long dark hands with their pink nails seemingly with no effort producing the clusters of syncopated chords and the thumping octaves. This was a most robust composition, a vigorous music that roused the senses and never stood still a moment. The boy perceived it as light touching various places in space, accumulating in intricate patterns until the entire room was made to glow with its own being. [pp. 132-33]

Like Coalhouse Walker's playing, Doctorow's writing is precise, vivid and clear, and it shifts effortlessly in tone as though to accommodate the different members of the audience, from Father's orotund Edwardian - 'a most robust composition, a vigorous music' - to the little boy's naked illumination. Nobody in our time has written better prose.

Nostalgia, V. S. Pritchett once wrote, is 'the generic American emotion which floods all really American literature' and Ragtime is, among other things, shot through with nostalgia for a grandeur that has been lost:

That was the style, that was the way people lived. Women were stouter then. They visited the fleet carrying white parasols. Everyone wore white in summer. Tennis racquets were hefty and the racquet faces elliptical. There was a lot of sexual fainting. There were no Negroes. There were no immigrants. [pp. 3-4]

These, at least, are the certainties with which the book starts, but within a few pages Father sets sail with Peary for the Arctic and passes 'an incoming transatlantic vessel packed to the railings with immigrants':

Thousands of male heads in derbies. Thousands of female heads covered with shawls. It was a rag ship with a million dark eyes staring at him. Father, a normally resolute person, suddenly foundered in his soul. A weird despair seized him. The wind came up, the sky had turned overcast, and the great ocean began to tumble and break upon itself as if made of slabs of granite and sliding terraces of slate. He watched the ship till he could see it no longer. Yet aboard her were only more customers, for the immigrant population set great store by the American flag. [pp.11-12]

Father's soul founders because he has seen the future and it has dark eyes.

Ragtime was published in 1974, a troubled time in America when all the social and cultural certainties on which Doctorow's generation had been raised were being blown away by drugs and contraceptive pills and the Vietnam war. Doctorow taps into that deep anxiety, but turns the clock back 65 years to a seemingly quieter, more orderly period when the great melting pot was only beginning to stir and seethe. Even so, the past is cunningly filtered through the present and Ragtime is a highly political novel, fuelled by outrage. Although it is witty, inventive, inward, there is a sheen of ideology over everything and the characters are set off against each other so that they seem, in the subtlest way, to be arguing. History has everyone by the throat - not just historical figures like anarchist Emma Goldman and the great capitalists, Morgan and Ford, but also the characters Doctorow creates. Stubbornness and offended dignity turn Coalhouse Walker Jr. into a violent revolutionary, a Black Panther before his time. Mother's romantic intellectual Younger Brother is radicalised by Coalhouse and becomes proto-Weatherman; having learned about explosives in Father's fireworks factory, he ends up in Mexico fighting for Emiliano Zapata. Even Houdini, escape artist and magician like Doctorow himself, whose 'self-imposed training, his dedication to the perfection of what he did, reflected an American ideal', broods about class: 'The wealthy knew what was important. They looked on him as a child or a fool'. [p.27]. At the centre of them all is the Yiddish-speaking immigrant Tateh, silhouette artist and fervent socialist, who eventually discards his politics, 'point[s] his life along the lines of flow of American energy', [p.111] is reborn as Baron Ashkenazi, movie producer and entrepreneur, and ends up marrying Father's widow. And that improbable union embodies, in a way, the theme at the centre of the book, the revelation Father took with him to the Arctic: the end of the WASP hegemony.

Nobody now remembers what the publicists had in mind fifty years ago when they rattled on about the Great American Novel, except that it would be unlike anything European and its scale and Americaness would somehow match the nation's power and post-war international authority. Doctorow's genius was to take the idea literally. Ragtime is a portrait of America itself - energetic, argumentative, resourceful, teeming with every kind of life and, in this instance, artistically flawless.

Links

Ragtime
The Book of Daniel