“It is hardly wise, in what looks to be a factual account, to have Harry Houdini chat with Walt Whitman aboard the Titanic, or whatever. But at heart he sided with the professional historians against writers such as Doctorow, doubting the wisdom of playing fast and loose with the facts. Vidal accepted no corrections from the professors. Long lists were compiled of his scholarly misapprehensions. Gore Vidal received heavyweight attacks from the leading Abraham Lincoln scholars when he published Lincoln in 1984. (He may not have been fully serious on this point.) Doctorow was attracted by the idea of improving upon the historical record. Doctorow claimed that his portrait of the financier JP Morgan in Ragtime was largely based upon deep study of an Edward Steichen photograph of the formidable money man. The titillating scene in Ragtime, his international bestseller of 1975, between the anarchist Emma Goldman and Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White’s squeeze, was wildly out of character for Goldman, as her two-volume autobiography Living My Life made abundantly clear. So when it’s all done it’s all autobiographical and none of it is.”Ī poster for the film Ragtime, 1981, based on EL Doctorow’s 1975 book. And the act of composition has no regard where the material comes from. “Every book is an act of composition,” he remarked in 1989, “and if you happen to use memories or materials from your own mind, they are like any other resource they have to be composed. “My premise is that the language of politics can’t accommodate the complexity of fiction, which as a mode of thought is intuitive, metaphysical, mythic.” Although he wrote lovingly of the lost world of the Jewish Bronx in the 1930s, where he grew up, he rejected the idea that he was an autobiographical writer. He did not want to be called a political novelist. He lived contentedly within the paradoxes of his career. In a career spanning five decades, Doctorow feared that tidy labels were a distraction. He proved elusive when dealing with the pigeonholes crafted by reviewers, and not a few readers. Anointed “our pre-eminent lefty” among contemporary American novelists, EL Doctorow, who has died aged 84, was praised as the “epic poet” of the forgotten American left.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |