Playing Ragtime Slow

E. L. Doctocow's Ragtime is historical fiction, like Johnny Tremain. And while I realize that in some circles this is nothing short of blasphemy, I think it's as good a book--the same wide-eyed, burrowed-under-the-covers-with-secret-flashlight fascination, the same wonderfulness. Doctorow's way of letting you slip into the sheets of history has been compared to the work of Robert Altman, who is planning to film Ragtime, and with the magical trickle of ragtime music. These are good analogies, but a passage from the novel might give a better idea. Father is a Harvard-educated family man, the owner of a large house in Westchester County, and the proprietor of a thriving business manufacturing firework displays and patriotic gear. Past president of the New York Explorer's Club, he is setting out upon the North Atlantic with Admiral Peary to explore the Pole, to conquer it. It is the fulfillment of a dream. It is 1905.

As he stood at the ralling there was transmitted to his bones the awesome unalterable rhythm of the ocean. A while later the Roosevelt passed an incoming vessel packed to the railings with immigrants. Father watched the prow of the scaly broad-beamed vessel splash in the sea. Her decks were packed with people. 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 floundered 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.

This kind of wonderfulness rolls on and on, these granite slabs shifting and heaving and finally buckling under--for Father, who is broken on the rocks, though others have hopes that fight up and sprout through cracks. Characters dash off onto the ice floes of history--with the stirred-up sureness of manifest destiny or the desperation of an immigrant's flight, of a striker's decision to strike--and whether they come back or float away depends on their understanding of the terrain.J.P.Morgan understands it, or at least keeps himself so entombed in greatness that he can afford to. He is obsessed by the ancient Egyptians, by their religion and the idea that a colony of gods may be chosen to inherit the earth and build huge monuments.

He is different from everybody else, reclining on a European tour as frail aristocrats line up to beg for favors. He is the most powerful man in the world. Meanwhile, a black ragtime pianist, thought to be a Junatic, is holed up in J.P.'s library, ready to blow it up. He is holding all New York at ransom to correct a racial humiliation. He bombs fire stations, dominates the tabloids, and threatens to detonate the Morgan property if he is not avenged. As in Attica, a "representative" is sent in, Booker T.Washington, but the ragtime man is adamant. He has put America into a panic--if this can happen, what next? They can't let him give the orders. Everything is out of kilter, the world is topsy-turvy, the granite is crumbling underfoot. They send a telegram to Morgan. He wires back: Give him what he wants and hang him.

Harry Houdini, an immigrant on the way up, doesn't have such a sure footed trek. He is a hero to the working classes, and it is only they who are impressed when he strips, is strait-jacketed and dumped into the sea, or locked into the most impossible jail to emerge fully clothed, even respectably dressed. It takes Houdini some time to realize that his gift is only a theatrical exercise in feeding false hopes--that he can't communicate with the people he is performing for.

These individuals overlap so that the structure of the novel, too, is ever-shifting, molecular, always replacing itself like plants growing and dying a billion times a second in a rich, dank forest--you can hear the process. There's something in the language that achieves this: short sentences appearing and vanishing like postcards and daguerrotypes. Doctorow doesn't invest his people with modern concerns like Gore Vidal does, in his historical fiction, adding sex and neurosis and perversity of motive. The grainy literariness of the ragtime people is inviolable--ladies constantly fleeing to the garden, derbies dotting riverside parks on a Sunday.

The book's epigraph is from Scott Joplin: "Do not play this piece fast. It is never right to play ragtime fast..." And it seems like Doctorow's player piano has some brake on it, because Ragtime seems much longer than it is. It goes fast, but the prose is economical and touches such a torch to the imagination that when you go back to look for a ten-page scene it turns out to be a paragraph.

Doctorow, who teaches at Sarah Lawrence, is one of the most political of novelists. I would hazard that he is a socialist, a leftist anyway, and that he is troubled by the leaping, bursting, delicate hope this vision holds, and how hard it is to harbor this hope without it breaking or your breaking into cycnicism. He is concerned with more than survival, with survival not being enough, which is refreshing after more indulgent writers. His first novel, Welcome to Hard Times, is set in a grim prairie expanse in the west, a badland blowing as cold and vacant as the plains near ancient Thebes. An outlaw comes to the frontier town and idly levels it; the book is about weak humans who build it again though they know in their hearts it will probably be razed again. The Book of Daniel, his most recent work, is about the son of a couple like Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, executed when he was a child, who is trying to live and grow with it. So what better for Doctorow than the era of ragtime--the most hopeful and buoyant, robust and adventurous time in American history, with Teddy Roosevelt president, the muscles of American imperialism first flexing, the First World War not yet fought.

The population customarily gathered in great numbers either out of doors for parades, public concerts, fish fries, political picnics, social outings, or indoors in meeting halls, vaudeville theaters, operas, ballrooms. There seemed to be no entertainment that did not involve great swarms of people. Trains and steamers and trolleys moved them from one place to another. 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.

Maybe the lure of a book like this, as with Johnny Tremain, comes from some stunted attempt years ago, children trying to identify with the towering figures of history as people, and stopped cruelly short by dry tones of reverence or cheap Bicentennial ads. Pigs though many were, there's a childish urge to connect to these people of the American past, maybe the more so when the myths about them fall away with age. When Doctorow winds up these dead dollies and starts them teetering, you get seized, as though some buried roots inside you are churning up again. And from then on it's a frenzied, kid's read, one night's worth, a movie of a book which will make a wonderful movie.