Remembering the Little Brother: Kate Medina on E. L. Doctorow

Kate Medina: I always loved Edgar’s books, and was thrilled to be his editor. The first book I worked on with him was Sweet Land Stories. In these amazing stories, he creates whole little worlds, filled with surprising characters and such vivid and beautiful writing, and many of the stories have bizarre situations and mesmerizing plotlines that knock you out. I think one story, “Joelene,” was optioned for a movie. Many of Edgar’s stories have been published in the New Yorker, over the years. I felt that we understood each other right away. I had such respect for his work and for him, and I felt a kind of comfort in being in his presence. He was so smart and very straightforward, and he had such a lovely, sometimes almost puckish sense of humor.
BNR: Re-reading his famous interview on writing in the Paris Review, I was struck not only by his famous line about writing a novel being like driving at night, but another passage, in which he described his early experience reading as a child, and seeing himself as the “little brother” of the writer, standing by and taking silent part in the writing. It’s a beautiful image, and it also captures the importance of reading to a great writer. Did you talk with him about the books and writers that were important to him?
[caption id="attachment_66468" align="alignright" width="240"] Kate Medina.[/caption]
KM: Edgar loved the great nineteenth-century American writers, writers such as Melville and Twain — maybe in particular Melville and Twain. In an interview once with Charlie Rose, Edgar said that Chekhov was one of the writers he went to for inspiration, because Chekhov was so clear.
BNR: In his speech at the National Book Awards in 2013, he exhorted writers and publishers to be particularly vigilant about freedom of speech. Was this a lifelong passion, more so than for any novelist?
KM: I think Edgar wanted America to be the best it can be, and that individuals, and maybe particularly writers, had to be vigilant about speaking out about freedom and challenging anything that seemed to be an incursion on individual freedom, or on fairness. He was a serious citizen of the Republic. He was always holding our feet to the fire. He had high standards for himself, and for all the rest of us, and for America. In 2013, when he was awarded the National Book Award Lifetime Achievement Award, in his speech at the National Book Awards ceremony he urged writers and all of us to be vigilant about incursions into our privacy, including through the Internet; anything that could possibly inhibit a writer from free expression. Later that evening, when James McBride was awarded the National Book Award for fiction, for The Good Lord Bird, he told a nice story. He said that some years ago at a college graduation, Edgar had made a speech urging the students and the audience to be active about some aspect of our culture that he felt was wrong. McBride said he remembered agreeing with Doctorow and thinking he would do something about this himself, and then he walked out of the auditorium and didn’t do anything, he forgot about it. He said at the National Book Award ceremony in 2013, that he was not going to make the same mistake again.
BNR: His progressive politics were no secret; was his fiction consciously informed by his engagement with contemporary political issues? Do you see places in his fiction where he wants readers to come to see reflections of our contemporary political issues?

KM: I think he wanted to create novels that made you go into a world of the imagination, first and foremost — and live there in the book, in your mind. And then, to be provoked to think about our lives today, in light of what you read. In Andrew’s Brain, he perhaps came a little closer to provoking us to think about contemporary political issues — he pokes fun in the book at George W. Bush and his team. In Andrew’s Brain, he also makes you feel the tragedy for individual people, of 9/11.
BNR: One of the things that many readers I know comment on is the timeless quality of his writing. His books in a sense escape classification into one literary movement or school or another. Did you see this as a conscious resistance on his part to trends or fashions?
KM: I think the writing itself — the voice, images, lines of dialogue, the cadence, everything connected to the writing itself was important and unique for the particular novel or story he was writing. So I think he sort of exited out of time, existed on an imaginary plane outside of time, in some sort of inner realm of freedom of the imagination. I don’t think he was interested in trends or fashions. He was after something more eternal.
BNR: There is a love of mystery and puzzles that surfaces in multiple places in his work; both City of God and The Waterworks turn on detective stories of a kind, and Andrew’s Brain represents a sort of narrative puzzle. Was he influenced by the tradition of detective fiction in particular? Or by literary puzzlers like Nabokov?

KM: Edgar was a very serious guy, with a serious purpose in his work and in how he spent his time, but he was also in possession of an ever-present wonderful sense of humor, and of the bizarre, the nonsense, the crazy things that people do, or that happen. One of the great puzzles surely would have to be people, and who rises, who falls. He liked to have fun and to make us think, to puzzle over the meaning of his stories.
BNR: You have said that E.L.D. didn’t like to be pigeonholed as a historical writer. Yet his novels are in many ways documents that seek to reveal aspects of moments of history that we haven’t seen. Do you think this was a conscious project?
KM: I think Edgar said on a Charlie Rose interview that history was a kind of terrain he sprung off, in works of the imagination. I think he may have seen himself as a writer, not a writer of an particular kind. That being said, I was thrilled to see a timeline Random House prepared, of his novels — “Read Doctorow’s America.” Overall, you see that his books form a tapestry of America in different eras — that would be one way to see them, collectively, especially for young readers today. But each one is a work of the imagination, simultaneously part of time and existing outside or above it.
BNR: I think that the conclusion of Homer and Langley is one of the most heartbreaking in recent fiction. Many writers become more attuned to the tragic in their later work; do you think this was true of Doctorow?
KM: I think it was just what those characters did, who they were, what came out in the end, of his weaving of that thread about those people and that story.
BNR: You’ve said that you think the tradition we should place Doctorow’s work is in the tradition of Melville. Is there a Moby-Dick among his books, a work that challenges his contemporaries more than the rest?

KM: I think possibly The March, and The Book of Daniel. My personal favorite is The March, the language and writing, the big vision The March conveys of war, of the displacement of people, of the chaos.
BNR: Do you have a favorite among his books? In a related vein, which of his works do you think will endure the longest?
KM: I guess my personal favorite is The March and also some of his short stories, including a story in All the Time in the World called “All the Time in the World.” This story rearranges your mind about so-called reality, the reality we create, which this story stands on its head, and right from the first paragraph. His first paragraphs in general are to me remarkable. “All the Time in the World” is a story that could have been written by a young modern writer, but then, the language, that first paragraph — it has to be a work of a great and mature artist. I think Ragtime, The Book of Daniel, Billy Bathgate, and The March will endure, and The Waterworks could surprise us.