Fiction
TV times
Peter Ackroyd
Ragtime D. L. Doctorow (Macmillan £3.50)
All our friends have been reading it, haven't they? Here it is at last, the biggest piece of iLiclustrial machinery since Gone With The Wind, hot with the breath of American reviewers, 85,000 copies printed in England alone, and now the final accolade: "The most Widely discussed and critically acclaimed novel of our times." Well, 1976 has hardly begun in London yet, and publishers' memories are invariably short; what we actually have, in 'Ragtime, is a sometimes discussed and infrequently acclaimed exercise in public relations. Of course the American reviewers loved it, they related to it, it had a "central vision", it offered manifold ironies", it was "stately" and it was even "bitter". The book itself goes something like this: "Father went home for the day although the twelve-noon whistle had only just blown. Mother could not look at him. She was seated with the baby on her lap. Her head was oent in a meditative attitude unconsciously suggestive of the dead Sarah. Father wondered at this moment if their lives might no longer be under their control." Is this bitter, or is it just stately?
I read that Mr Doctorow is not much interested in Literature, which is elitist, or in Art, . which is worse, but in Ragtime he has done the next best thing: he has produced a ennlic-strip version of the American Tradition, replica of the Great American Novel designed for those who strain irritably at anything -,,,Y°rict films and television soap operas. ,"-le book is set in America in the early years of 1.„.he twentieth century, that age of driving Yankee know-how, when individual ambition reached a corporate stage and frontiers were :driven back by infernal machines; the stage neroes and villains of that time — some of them Still famous, like Houdini and Pierpoint Morgan, and some of them further from the nostalgia industry, like Emma Goldman and E4,,velyn Nesbit — appear and reappear uneasily narrative the pages of the novel. As for the narrative, it proceeds jerkily from one histori cal to another, in the general manner Of historical romance, while the central story develops around Coalhouse Wilson, a black rtlan who leaves a trail of arson. This eventually i ,S to the only fictional characters in the .,;.„`"c. who have been cleverly. named Father, twrother, and Mother's Younger Brother, and h , e novel turns into an American melodrama. If think you have read any of this before, in `,1",le novels of Richard Wilbur no doubt, or in e work of Henry Roth, then perhaps you hi-n ave. Mr Doctorow has twisted the 'tradition' to his individual talent, mainly by transposing histories scenes from memoirs of the period, histories and other novels. s0 is this a popular version of that academic dr ',earn, the meta-novel? Is this book about t-',1-'nks, this novel about other novels, back in cue Mould which James Joyce established some e rIturies back? If it is, then in the interim the manner has become a mannerism. Or is it really a Jcunning aggregate of history and fiction? o belsirrialists have been announcing this as the t new technique since the invention of
chapter-headings, but writers like Robin Maugham and Barbara Cartland have been practising it for many, many years. In more contemporary terms, Doctorow combines the two worlds with far more crudity and sentimentality than Thomas Keneally, for example, has done in his last two novels. Ragtime is sentimental because it suffers from a great desire to be charming and original, with the result that very little thought has been given to construction or execution, and the 'modern' deadpan surface gets beaten very thin. Characters flit in and out quite elegantly, but some are quickly forgotten and none are ever developed. It is always pleasant to amalgamate history and fiction but, when you do so, you must take much more care over the fiction than Doctorow does. The story proceeds by fits and starts, its inventiveness lags somewhere toward the middle, and it slowly grinds to a halt in the final sections of the book. The problem is that Doctorow has relied upon external effects to make all the running for him, and as a consequence he really can't sustain his own inventiveness.
Why, then, was Ragtime received with such rapturous applause and attention in America? It is true that American reviewers have practically no powers of discrimination; their talent is for reverence and celebration — they can weave great external myths or trace long internal symbols, they trot easily into the realms of metatext and Edenic parallel, Jewish angst and New York synecdoche, but they can't concentrate upon the actual words on the page. They are, in short, easily fooled. But Ragtime provided more than this. The American critics are always looking for a great literature and for a real, national tradition, and then Ragtime comes along, a book dedicated to the American experience, a novel with all the marks of being true to the great American sensibility. Why, even its title shakes off the chains of the European tradition; Ragtime is alive and madcap, its characters are America's own, it borrows constantly from America's great movie tradition (one of the characters in the book is even supposed to invent the awful thing, and the book itself uses so many filmic techniques that actually to make a film out of it is unnecessary); in fact Ragtime really is the brave new Yankee sensibility, even if it does seem a little jaded now. Here is Sigmund Freud through the words of Doctorow:
The whole population seemed to him overpowered, brash and rude. The vulgar wholesale appropriation of European art and architecture regardless of period or country he found appalling. He had seen in our careless commingling of great wealth and great poverty the chaos of an entropic European civilisation. He sat in his quiet cozy study in Vienna, glad to be back. He said to Ernest Jones America is a mistake, a gigantic mistake.
Did you notice there "our careless commingling ..."? That note of quiet pride in a bustling, chaotic civilisation which is so different from "quiet, cozy" Mr Freud back there in quiet, cozy Europe? Ragtime is also intended to be bustling and chaotic, and the American critics took it to their hearts; Mr Doctorow is speaking for them. It is left to us quiet and cozy English critics to notice that the book is sentimental and meretricious, does nothing which has not been done more skilfully elsewhere, and really only a historical romance which is slightly more romantic than most. Ragtime is an easy read for our television times, but it Gould only succeed in a culture which has no roots, and no soil.
Benny Green is on holiday. 'Talking of books' will be resumed next week.
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