“If I’m a leftist, it’s because, as I think of them, the Ten Commandments is a very left dogma. What is just? What is unjust? That’s where it all begins for me,” novelist E.L. Doctorow told the New York Times in 1985. “But I tend not to accept any modification of the word novelist. So if you ask, am I a historical novelist, I say no. Am I a political novelist? No. Am I an ethnic novelist? No. I’m a novelist.”
Early on in my pursuit of this story, I was told I could not interview Doctorow. That he had made it known he would do no press in the lead-up to his April 8 appearance in the Valley. But perhaps that is appropriate. If this story were a Doctorow novel, I would fearlessly appropriate the real Doctorow and fictionalize things for him to say and do, based upon my feeling of the spirit of the age. And it would be brilliant.
Perhaps I’d imagine him standing behind the podium at Hofstra University on Long Island, giving the commencement address in 2004. Perhaps I’d catch him in the midst of his speech on that September day, taking President George W. Bush to task for the dishonest stories he told to get us into war. Perhaps I’d try to fill in the blanks of what he must have been thinking at that moment, looking out into the crowd of future accountants and communications professionals and their beaming parents, Miami businesspeople or retired New York City cops. What goes through his head when the roar of boos forces him to pause, while the university’s president beseeches the audience to let him speak?
Who is this 70-something native New Yorker, son of Russian Jewish immigrants, who went off to Kenyon College, studied with John Crowe Ransom, and quit a career in publishing to become a novelist in the 1970s with the breakthrough novels The Book of Daniel and Ragtime? But this is not a Doctorow novel. This is a story for a free weekly, the kind of paper that Doctorow’s narrator in City of God, a novelist, conveniently scratches out and replaces with the Times as he composes the events around him into his novel.
So it is perhaps appropriate that this story won’t have any real-live Doctorow for you. You’ll have to come to Western New England College on April 8 for that.
Sleith 100 is a lecture hall with stadium seating in the engineering building on campus. In preparation for Doctorow’s appearance on Lecture Day, there has been a weekly colloquium meeting there, of students taking a one-credit course and interested faculty members. Professors from different disciplines on campus have been giving talks related to the themes in some of Doctorow’s novels.
I strode into Sleith 100 on the day English Department Chairman Winthrop “Chip” Rhodes was scheduled to speak on the novel Ragtime. I was looking for Pearl Abraham, the new creative writing professor who was the college’s Doctorow contact and the organizer of the colloquium. As I went to introduce myself, I realized I had walked into an impromptu committee meeting for Lecture Day. I found myself in a small group of faculty members discussing how to try to get more students to come to the colloquium talks and how to get the campus excited about Doctorow coming.
Later, after the colloquium got started, Rhodes prowled the stage, holding up a dog-eared copy of Doctorow’s novel, quizzing the students on terms like verisimilitude and making them giggle when he described the entirely fictional scene in the book involving the real-life early 20th-century anarchist Emma Goldman giving the starlet Evelyn Nesbitt a “sexy massage.” He told the collection of some 30 students scattered through the 200-seat-capacity hall that Doctorow is “one of the two or three most important novelists of the 20th century.”
In a 1986 interview with radio host Don Swaim, Doctorow defended his novel World’s Fair against the criticism that fictionalizing historical events was taking the easy way out, evading the truth: “That depends on what you think the truth is. I don’t think of the truth as being attached necessarily to facts. Visionary truth is revealed truth, discovered truth. There is the truth in religion which is not factual. Perception, revelation of a superior force in our lives: there’s nothing factual about that.”
Doctorow is scheduled to give his talk on “Religion and Literature: Texts that are Sacred, and Texts that are Not” Tuesday, April 8 at 6:00 p.m. in Rivers Memorial Hall. The event is free and open to the public. By choosing Rivers Hall, which seats some 400 people, the Lecture Day committee has shown that it is anticipating a large crowd.
On March 6, the students and faculty gathered at the weekly colloquium to hear a talk on Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel. Doctorow’s 1971 novel is a fictional account based loosely on the trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. Giving the talk was the chair of the Economics Department, Michael Meeropol.
Meeropol is, in fact, one of the Rosenbergs’ children.
Meeropol did not talk about his own biography, but gave a perspective on the Old Left and the New Left in the United States, speaking as somebody intimately familiar with both movements. Knowing full well that his students were born into the age of Reagan, Meeropol sought to provide an alternative view of who communists in the 1930s and 1940s were.
At best, they are often thought of as traitors or dupes, but Meeropol passionately held that communists were ordinary people who went to baseball games and even fought in World War II in the U.S. Army. Meeropol said that his gut feeling was that what the communists wanted was “Jefferson plus Lincoln plus a planned economy.” They honestly thought that the Soviet Union was a beacon of hope, and they operated within the democratic system to try to influence policy.
The New Left, on the other hand, was more anarchic. They were interested in action rather than theory. They participated in the civil rights movement and preferred to stand up to the system rather than work with it. They were impatient with the Old Left and the Soviet Union and looked instead to guerrillas like Che Guevara for their inspiration. They also tended to be from privileged backgrounds, often college students, unlike their Old Left forebears. They were brash and thought that no matter what the obstacle, the power of the people would prevail.
Meeropol sensed that the students might not be 100 percent with him. To those who would say, “Oh, that’s rubbish,” Meeropol excitedly responded, “Guess what? It happened!” And he ticked off a litany of accomplishments from the Civil Rights Bill to the abolishment of the draft in the middle of the Vietnam War.
The essence of the New Left, Meeropol said, was “young people outraged at the failure of our country to live up to its ideals.”
Abraham is a novelist (her third and most recent novel is The Seventh Beggar) and a professor at Western New England College, helping to launch the English Department’s fledgling undergraduate creative writing program. I met her on another colloquium Thursday. She started up the movie Billy Bathgate — based on another Doctorow novel — for the students and we walked back to her small office in Emerson Hall.
“When I first interviewed here,” Abraham said, “I had lunch with Michael Meeropol. The next day, I had dinner with Doctorow and I said, ‘Guess who I met?'”
Doctorow was intrigued and he said he would come to visit some day if she got the job. That was two years ago. Abraham did get hired and she thought she’d give it a shot to ask her old mentor—Abraham was a student of Doctorow’s at New York University— if he’d make good on that promise.
“I thought it wouldn’t happen. He’s so busy,” Abraham said. “But when I took the job and invited him, he said he’d come.”
Getting Doctorow to WNEC is really a bit of a coup. The English Department was excited by it and they had a member on the selection committee for the college’s annual Lecture Day, so they pushed for Doctorow to be the choice. That allowed them a little bigger pot to dip into for an honorarium, but even so, one might not expect a writer like Doctorow to appear at a college of somewhat modest reputation like WNEC.
A writer of Doctorow’s stature would be expected to appear at a place like Amherst College or Smith College, Abraham said. But instead he comes to Western New England College. In that, Abraham sees something of Doctorow’s sensibility.
“He has a sensibility of helping,” she said.
Abraham said she hoped that her students, specifically her creative writing students, would see in Doctorow a model of someone who has given himself over to the writer’s life.
“I hope they come away with a sense of the seriousness, the exaltedness of it,” Abraham said. To be a writer, she said, “is not a job, but a calling.”
When I met Meeropol for lunch later, he remembered the very first Lecture Day at WNEC in 1975, when the author Robert Heilbroner came to campus to talk about his book, An Inquiry into the Human Prospect.
Meeropol called Doctorow “the most outstanding novelist of the second half of the 20th century.” He said that over the years, he and Doctorow have become friends, talking by phone and email. That all happened after The Book of Daniel had been published. He said his goal for Lecture Day was simple: “If one student reads one novel that they wouldn’t have read absent this, then we’ve done our job.”
Meeropol said that the opportunity to talk about The Book of Daniel, to talk about the Old Left and the New Left, was a liberating one for him. He said he doesn’t often discuss politics and history in his life as an economics professor. He mostly keeps to economics.
“My public advocacy is almost exclusively economics,” he said. “I haven’t done the other kind for over 30 years. I enjoyed the opportunity.”
I called Chip Rhodes at his house in Longmeadow to make sure I got the viewpoint of someone who could speak to Doctorow’s literary stature. Rhodes is an Americanist by specialty. He often teaches Doctorow in his classes, especially Ragtime. In Ragtime, Rhodes sees a view of the age of mass production that is different from that of most of Doctorow’s peers.
Doctorow’s breakthrough work is set in New Rochelle, N.Y., in the years before World War I. It has become known for the way Doctorow employs historical figures—a way that blurs the line between fact and fiction. But Rhodes sees in Doctorow’s novel a unique positive view of the logic of duplication. Using the symbols of baseball, ragtime music and motion pictures, Doctorow shows how the logic of mass production can bring creativity and social progress.
“For somebody writing in what is considered postmodern literature, Doctorow is one of the very few, if not the only one, who remains committed to political ends,” Rhodes said.
Where many novelists either celebrate popular culture or bemoan mass culture, Doctorow sees both points of view. Not only that, but he is a literary innovator. “He has done things with the novel that others haven’t done,” Rhodes says.
Rhodes sees WNEC neither as a pure liberal arts school or as a purely pre-professional school, but a hybrid of the two. In some ways, he said, having a novelist come to campus makes more sense for the liberal arts side than the business side, but it is Rhodes’ hope that the gap will be bridged.
“The challenge is more ours than his,” Rhodes says. “Because of our unique identity, the challenge will be for us to fully appreciate what he has to offer. Not to just ask the useful.”
Andrew Varnon is a former Advocate staffer and is teaching three classes at WNEC this spring.