E.L. Doctorow's Talk With Bill Moyers: Some Thoughts

E.L. Doctorow is one author of whom I have only read a little over the years. (I did pick up Ragtime, long ago, and while it had its interest in its use of historical figures it did not seem to me to add up to very much.) Still, I did find some interest in Doctorow's remarks during his interview by journalist Bill Moyers back in 1988, because of the ways in which he broke with the tendency prevailing in literature and "respectable" intellectual life, rather than the ways in which he has been representative of it.

In that interview, at least, it was Doctorow's view that contemporary writers had become "Miniaturists," writing small stories about small things and ignoring "the big story"--"who we are, what we're trying to be, what our fate is, where we will stand in the moral universe when these things are reckoned." He also drew a comparison between the situation of the 1980s and that of the interwar period, when writers (he named Dreiser and Hemingway as examples) "whether they were on the Right or the Left . . . Marxists . . . [or] southern Agrarians . . . whether they believed in the past or the future," all seemed to be " vitally connected to [a] crisis which everyone recognized" as the crisis of the time, whereas "our crisis today" (which in America he thought a crisis of democracy) "is something that we recognize as writers or that we have any particular passion for." In explaining that situation he stressed what seemed to him a declining tolerance of political criticism in America (except when it was of other countries, especially those on the official Enemies List), and the fatuousness of the standard behind which proponents of the view hid that treated Dissent--the kind that as his interlocutor Bill Moyers put it "challenge[s] the underlying belief system of the rulers," what Doctorow called their "mythology"--as having no place in art, or anywhere else, such that anyone who does question it "is going to find himself in a very uncomfortable position," with "orthodox intellectuals . . . defending the prevailing myths" eagerly playing their part in that.

Of course, Doctorow was less than perfectly consistent in challenging those orthodoxies himself, expressing a characteristically centrist suspicion of "ideology" and pluralistic resistance to "truth claims" (in his talk of the "democratic mind"), and also a characteristically centrist, psychologism-touched pessimism about people (citing Wilhelm Reich's remark about "the average man's mind [being] structured for fascism"). Indeed, Doctorow shows himself a horseshoe theorist, speaking of Fascism and Communism as equivalents at one point as sources of "violence and evil." All this certainly carried over to his view of fiction. (The writer who "knows what's right and . . . wrong . . . good and . . . bad . . . is going to write worthless stuff" he declares, seeming to all but regard confusion and muddle as an artistic necessity!)

Still, the extent to which he did raise the matter of the evasions of authors and the shrinking space for dissent is undeniable, with something of this combination of views reflected in his stance toward the Cold War. He did not reject the "orthodox" view of the Cold War as necessary opposition to a threatening Communism, but he also did not hesitate to see the Cold War as having played a pernicious part in it, as having "cut into our democratic sense of ourself," citing the security state with its militarism, its "secrecy and deception and assassination and all sorts of un-American things . . . defending democracy by attacking people who ran the world who don't do it the way we want it done."

It seems to me that few of our major writers dared say that much in his time, and still fewer of them since, all as what he saw as troubling in society and in art has only come to dominate it the more completely.