Doctorow Takes on the Creationists

By STEPHEN HAZAN ARNOFF

CREATIONISTS
Selected Essays: 1993-2006
By E. L. Doctorow
192 pages. Random House. $24.95.

Throughout his career, E. L. Doctorow has been fascinated by the intersection of history and writing. Many of his books’ heroes and all of his time-traveling narrators are writers reflecting upon a swirl of reconstituted events and characters at formative moments in the American story.

Mixing fact and fiction freely in more than a dozen novels, Doctorow’s extended literary gaze into national life has spanned from Book of Daniel’s account of persecutions of McCarthyism in the 1950s to Ragtime, a turn-of-the-20^th-century narrative intertwining fictional lives with those of historical figures including Harry Houdini, Booker T. Washington, and Emma Goldman, to Billy Bathgate, the tale of 1930s New York told through the eyes of an apprentice Doctorow invents for Jewish mafioso Dutch Schultz. Doctorow’s most recent novel, The March, offers Doctorow’s vision of William Tecumseh Sherman’s slash-and-burn of the South at the close of the Civil War.

As they wander within the annals of “real” history, Doctorow’s protagonists are castaways and lonely travelers stumbling upon American crossroads, charged not only with reporting on the state of the nation at the moment they encounter it, but also grieving its failures, celebrating its triumphs, and, both wittingly and unwittingly, falling like Walter Mitty upon opportunities to change—in their own modest way—the course of American history.

Doctorow calls his latest book, Creationists: Selected Essays 1993-2006, “a modest celebration of the creative act.” In less than 200 pages, Doctorow reviews work by some of the major stars of American literature (with a few erudite detours into the work of Europeans Franz Kafka, Heinrich von Kleist, and Andre Malraux) and their impact on the perception and spirit of American life. The results are far from modest.

If Doctorow’s favorite fictional characters have provided him opportunities to imagine the “what ifs” of history, here he argues that writers themselves carry the true burden of telling America’s story in ways that politics, newspapers, and history books cannot. Writers, according to Doctorow, are America’s great “creationists,” quite “literally” the creators of the soul of the nation. Tracing how writers respond to the challenges of American life in their work is Doctorow’s way of explaining the American narrative in ways that even his own compelling fiction cannot.

Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is the true star of Creationists, setting a paradigm for how American literature takes up the task of forming a national identity in the “New World.” Doctorow claims that Moby Dick is “the book that swallowed European civilization whole, and we only are escaped alone on our own shore to tell our tales.” Like Captain Ahab’s whale, something huge and dangerous lurks beneath each great American writer’s quest. Edger Allen Poe’s bourgeois dreams are haunted by uncontrollable hollows of murder and fear. Predicting the unhealed wounds of the Civil War, Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriett Beecher Stowe—the author whom Abraham Lincoln once greeted as the “little woman who wrote the book that started this great war”—is, despite being a “religiously driven protest,” laden with damaging and cruel racial stereotypes. Similarly, Mark Twain fails to carry Huck Finn towards the reconciliation with the runaway slave Jim that the story of Tom Sawyer had promised. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Moby Dick is the Jazz Age itself, which eats him alive at age 44. Ernest Hemingway, the larger-than-life and ultimately tragic individualist, confronts the beast of war in For Whom the Bell Tolls. The result is a “distrust of society, a principled loneliness” feeding an anti-communal, every-man-for-himself attitude at the heart of American self-perception ever since.

Even if American writers facing the great white whales of slavery, capitalism, and war results in great art, American history wreaks havoc on them. Prolifically engaged in the creative life himself for more than half a century and well-aware of his own set of American fears, particularly with regard to the current state of war, Doctorow tells a tale not only about how he understands the struggles of the writers who move him most, but reveals what gives him the strength to continue his own work.

Even before describing the shadows of Moby Dick looming over the rest of the book, Doctorow begins Creationists with a meditation on the King James Bible. “Every writer,” Doctorow says, “has to be in awe of the staying power of the Genesis stories.” If Moby Dick marks the dark forces shaping a writer’s journey, symbolizing the waves of reality threatening to flood their inspiration, the Bible models intentions for a creative, protective ark navigating the deep reservoirs of the writing life.

According to the Hebrew Bible, God created the world and set the engagement between the human and divine realms through words: “In the beginning God said, ‘Let there be light.’” Doctorow takes such a standard very seriously. Writing, he says, is “the struggle for human distinction or identity in a precarious, brute life.” Like God, who brings order to the chaos before history through speech, writers bring order to the chaos of history that follows creation. And in this sense, working close to the essence of their art, writers themselves embody a touch of the divine. Sounding more like a psalmist than a novelist, Doctorow says, “And so in reverence and ethical action do our troubled conflicted minds find holiness, or bring it into being. Recognizing the glory of God is presumably our redemption, and our redemption is, presumably, His.”

For one of the most distinguished American men of letters, whose fascination lies at the nexus of history and writing, a personal journey towards making sense of the narrative of the nation begins with a close reading of his literary heroes. Despite the magnitude of the challenges they encounter and knowing that “All creationists are mortal,” Doctorow also quotes 20^th-century Jewish-American master Abraham Joshua Heschel, who said: “Reverence is the discovery of the world as an allusion to God.”

Doctorow suggests that if God is the ultimate master of the words that create the world, then great American writers making use of the divine art of writing—at least for the readers who dare to follow them—are the ultimate human guides through the wild landscape of their country.