“What made you write about the firestorm in Dresden?” a confused woman asked E. L. Doctorow during a 1986 Q&A with George Plimpton at the 92nd Street Y. She had Slaughterhouse-Five in mind. When Doctorow corrected her, he added, “[In Kurt Vonnegut’s book] the Dresden firestorm had been done so beautifully there was little reason for anyone else to try.” This anecdote is revealing of both Doctorow’s second-string status in the public eye and his playful attitude toward literature and history: If he could’ve done Dresden better, he would have.
This year, E. L. Doctorow’s novel Ragtime, a kaleidoscopic evocation of the early 20th century, turns 50. A fast, fluid novel about post-World’s Fair, pre-World War America, it was a bestseller, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was adapted into an Oscar-nominated movie by Miloš Forman and a Tony-winning musical by Terrence McNally. The story follows three fictional groups, a Westchester family who sells American flags (“Patriotism was a reliable sentiment in the early 1900s”), a Lower East Side family of Jewish immigrants, and a Black ragtime pianist and his wife and young son. These characters are joined by a host of real figures: Harry Houdini, Booker T. Washington, J.P. Morgan, Franz Ferdinand, Jacob Riis, Emma Goldman, Emilianoo Zapata. The book is a collage of key events assembled with a modern ironic eye and tied together by fictional characters who, Forrest Gump-like, have a way of bumping into history. Doctorow is not precious with the past and his prose tends toward comic understatement, but occasionally he floats out some capital-P prose. Sentences like “The faces of the dead were upturned into the streams of water that poured over them like the irrepressible mechanism in death of their own tears” are alone worth the price of admission. Ragtime is a great novel, and, more importantly, an accessible one. So why have so few young people read it? (I asked around.) My suspicion is that the musical is to blame.
In December 2013, I spent third period watching a high school production of Ragtime. I did not realize there was a novel, much less a literary one, on which it was based. Looking back at the coverage in the school paper, my misunderstanding appears to have been shared, as the reporter claimed that the play was “based on Terrence McNally’s book of the same name.” So not only did Doctorow not write Slaughterhouse-Five, as of a dozen years ago, as far as people under 45 are concerned, he didn’t even write Ragtime. (In fairness, McNally did write the book, e.g., the libretto.) When I learned about the existence of Doctorow’s novel, in college, its association with the musical dampened my interest. But, in reading it, I realized that the musical had misled me. On the boards the focus is on plot; in Doctorow’s novel, the focus is on the historical moment.
As in To Kill a Mockingbird or The Brothers Karamazov, Doctorow devotes the entire first half of his book to world-building. In Harper Lee’s book, this introduces readers to the town of Maycomb, Alabama, and its system of extralegal permissions and exclusions; in Dostoevsky, to the religious and philosophical differences in a tormented family. In Doctorow, you get attuned to the rhythm of a new century. In all three, you get a crime.
Coalhouse doesn’t want what’s best, he wants what’s right.
From Ragtime: “America was in the dawn of the Twentieth Century, a nation of steam shovels, locomotives, airships, combustion engines, telephones and twenty-five-story buildings.” It was a “time in our history when Winslow Homer was doing his painting,” when Taft was president, and “a man who carried a great stomach before him was thought to be in his prime.” Baseball players had names like “Rabbit Maranville” and “Butch Schmidt,” and there was scientific debate as to whether “the curve ball was an optical illusion.” People were still “tarred and feathered” as punishment, “children died of mild colds or slight rashes,” and a grown man could love his mother deeply without thinking too hard. (Doctorow also observes: “Houdini was destined to be, with Al Jolson, the last of the great shameless mother lovers, a nineteenth-century movement that included such men as Poe, John Brown, Lincoln, and James McNeill Whistler.”) This was a time when Scott Joplin, who had been taught pro-bono by a German-Jewish music professor while growing up in Texarkana, created a new style of music, and that’s where the titular metaphor comes from. Just as Joplin syncopated meter, Doctorow emphasizes the notes that anticipate or follow the beat of history. He plays all the major notes — J.P. Morgan, Henry Ford, Freud, Houdini — but lays his emphasis on empty spaces.
The first half of Ragtime is fast and fun. No stakes, just riffing, looking only at the Westchester family: Father joins Robert Peary’s mission to the North Pole (he’s sent home early); mother’s younger brother has an affair with “the first sex goddess in American history,” Evelyn Nesbit (she ditches him); and Houdini crashes his car out front while house hunting (he doesn’t make a purchase). Doctorow’s showing off, he’s teasing the notes without emphasizing them. In the musical, this deliberate devotion of pages is reduced to background.
More sober social progressives are called on to reason with the firebrands.
Ever the ironist, Doctorow ends his riffing abruptly when we meet Coalhouse Walker, a ragtime piano player. Scott Joplin might get the title, but Doctorow’s novel has another major source: the 16th-century case of Hans Kohlhase, a merchant whose fanatical quest for justice after having his horses seized in Saxony by a Junker nobleman ended with him being condemned by Martin Luther and broken on the wheel (and inspiring Heinrich von Kleist’s 1810 novella Michael Kohlhaas, a classic of German lit). The rest of the novel leaves history behind to follow Coalhouse as he retraces the steps of his early-modern forebear. (Coalhouse, Kohlhase, get it?) This more traditional plot, not the ragtime of Doctorow’s first half, is, paradoxically, what Ragtime the musical follows.
Like the real Kohlhase, Coalhouse Walker’s mode of transport (modernized into a Model T Ford) is taken by a petty official (now a racist Westchester fire chief). The act is a minor one in the eyes of the official, less a robbery than a prank — much of the harm is limited to the custom Pantasote top, which is torn and defecated through. Had petty tyranny been shrugged off, the result would have been a modest one-time loss. “We’ll push your tin lizzie back on the road and you’ll be on your way,” says a policeman. “There’s no real damage. Scrape off the shit and forget the whole thing.” But Coalhouse refuses to suffer it, repeating first to the policeman and then to a stream of potential peacemakers: “I want the damage paid for and I want an apology.” He doesn’t want what’s best, he wants what’s right.
Instead of driving his vandalized car back home, he starts recruiting for a guerilla campaign. Kohlhase was unable to get justice in the Saxon courts because the man who wronged him was nobility; Coalhouse can’t get justice in America because the man who wronged him was white. Both found fellow sufferers sympathetic to their cause, but neither mission ever evolved beyond their original personal grievance.
There is a straightforward comparison to be made here, between the American civil rights movement and early class struggles in Europe, but Doctorow is getting at something deeper. He’s observing how fanaticism and pride can motivate leaders of social movements, including within the somewhat sacrosanct quest for civil rights. Coalhouse, like Kohlhase, is unreasonable, he sacrifices lives thoughtlessly for his cause — returning to the firehouse not to retrieve his car but to bomb the building, killing four people. Later, he kills policemen and security guards. Long after he has no hope of redress, he keeps blazing the warpath. Coalhouse is a fictional character, but what is Doctorow saying about the people who really fought for change?
“His sense of justice led him to robbery and murder,” says Kleist in his novella. In his telling, Martin Luther calls Kohlhaas a “mad, baffling, and appalling man”; Doctorow, in turn, has Booker T. Washington refer to Coalhouse as “desperately brainsick.” In both cases, these more sober social progressives are called on to reason with the firebrands. Trying to de-escalate the 16th-century conflict, the great reformer Luther asks, “Wouldn’t you have done better to forgive the Junker?” In the 20th-century story, Booker T. Washington says, “A thousand honest and industrious black men cannot undo the harm of one like you.”
The lead of my high school’s production of Ragtime seems to have felt this frustration too, telling the reporter, “It was difficult to play Coalhouse at first, because I couldn’t identify with somebody so violent.” Although the actor eventually “began to understand” Coalhouse and concluded that he was “very human,” his first impression gets at what the stage production often misses: Coalhouse Walker is a violent fanatic. He’s not motivated by fidelity to a broader social movement but to his own pride. My high school paper described Ragtime as “a period piece that follows an African-American man seeking equality under the law.” And yes, it can read like that when presented in song by a dozen 15-year-olds, but I think few readers of Doctorow’s novel would see things that way. The musical imposes a pop sensibility on its heroes and villains, but if you syncopate the notes, you hear more. Doctorow’s novel is jazzier, it’s funnier, it’s sexier, it’s, well, ragtime. So what if it isn’t Slaughterhouse-Five. ❖
Gideon Leek is a writer who lives in Brooklyn.
