Certainly one cannot say Anya Seton or John Dos Passos is “truer to history.” The tendency in Doctorow, in Pynchon and Lelchuk, in Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man, in Philip Roth’s essay in which Franz Kafka teaches Roth Hebrew, is to insist that these more purely or openly imagined versions are truer than those historical fictions that always give facts where facts are known. Treat it as game and it will turn serious treat it as serious and it becomes fun, rippling, careless, careful. Now here, in Ragtime, what had been a pastime becomes a way of life: Houdini escapes from the prison in which Harry Thaw is incarcerated Father sets out for the North Pole with Peary Emma Goldman massages Evelyn Nesbit until “the younger woman began to ripple on the bed like a wave on the sea,” at which point Mother’s Younger Brother jumps out of a closet and on top of Nesbit the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria does not know who Houdini is and “congratulated him on the invention of the aeroplane.” Byrnes, carefully indented as if it were being quoted from a document. In Gravity’s Rainbow we learn about the toilets in the men’s room of the Roseland Ballroom when Malcolm X was there shining shoes in Alan Lelchuk’s American Mischief Norman Mailer is murdered and the Fogg Museum blown up in Doctorow’s own The Book of Daniel, trickily based on the story of the Rosenbergs, there is a conversation between Molotov and James F. More recently some American novelists, high-flying and showmen all, have been ransacking history along with everything else. Your basic historical novelist plods along, takes the evidence as given, filling in details when needed, seeking accuracy as well as truth the fun, be the author Anya Seton or John Dos Passos, is to mix the “real” or the “known” with the “imagined” and to end up with a confectionery or acerbic or somberly insistent sense of the way it once was. In the canneries and mills these were the hours they were most likely to lose their fingers or have their hands mangled or their legs crushed they had to be counseled to stay alert.īaron Munchausen might well ask: “Was you there, Doctorow?” Indeed, had the Baron turned up in the pages of Ragtime to ask that question, Doctorow would have been delighted to answer: Yes. They were more agile than adults but they tended in the latter hours of the day to lose a degree of efficiency. If there was a problem about employing children it had to do only with their endurance. Employers liked to think of them as happy elves. They did not complain as adults tended to do. They were valued everywhere they were employed. Near the beginning we learn this about America at the turn of the century:Ĭhildren suffered no discriminatory treatment. Washington, the Fire Chief of New Rochelle, the District Attorney of New York. Morgan, Henry Ford, Admiral Peary, Baron Ashkenazy and his daughter, Booker T. Doctorow’s very splashy Ragtime are a family, called by name Father, Mother, Mother’s Younger Brother, and “the boy,” plus Harry Houdini, Emma Goldman, Evelyn Nesbit, Harry K.
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