E L Doctorow

Poets and Presidents: Selected Essays 1977-1992

By E.L. Doctorow

Papermac, 1994. 206 pp., $24.95 (pbk)

Reviewed by Phil Shannon

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/8485

E.L. Doctorow is one of the few American writers today who does not shy away from novels about people's social and political passions. In one of his essays in Poets and Presidents he reflects, with regret, on contemporary novelists who "withdraw from society" to "dwell in some sort of unresounding private life" where grand social themes are taboo.

Most current novelists, he says, have imbibed the bad teaching of conservative political correctness about art, society and political engagement. The 1930s, when literature and commitment were inseparable, have come to be seen as "a time of misfired artistic energy, of duped intellectuals and bad proletarian novels. Having turned ideological we suffered for it, or so the lesson goes".

In our so-called postmodernist age, the clash of ideologies has supposedly been muted, but the struggle between the individual greed of the rich few and the community needs of the rest of humanity still exists, says Doctorow. Today's novels, however, limp about in "stunned submission to the political circumstances of our lives", gazing obsessively into the personal psyche.

For Doctorow, by contrast, "communitarian alternatives to industrial capitalism" are real concerns. The "way power works in our society" is a central issue for him, and one that can help to light the way to an exploration of the psychological dimension of individual people's lives.

On the one hand are US Presidents (who are all elected "by the forces of established wealth and power") such as Nixon who was "rigid and lacking in honour or moral distinction of any kind, someone so stiff with crippling hatreds, so spiritually dysfunctional, out of touch with everything in life that is joyful and fervently beautiful and blessed, with no discernible reverence in him for human life". Carter "ran as a liberal and governed as a conservative" whilst Reagan epitomised "the philosophical conservative as someone willing to pay the price of other people's suffering for his principles".

On the other hand are Doctorow's characters from ordinary life who feel the pull of selfishness yet know what solidarity and empathy with others mean for moral self-respect and a healthy citizenship.

Doctorow's complex and social characters are a far cry from the thin heroes who populate Ernest Hemingway's novels. Hemingway's ethos was a masculinist individualism, not community. Hemingway, like his novels' heroes, went to every war on offer, shot every animal that moved and fell out of airplanes, in search of the heroic individual proving himself. He wrote tough prose for tough men — when Hemingway hit the typewriter keys they stayed hit. In For Whom The Bell Tolls, the hero, who fights on the anti-fascist Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, dies alone, bravely, but the politics of the war does not inform his death; the Spanish Civil War is merely "the means by which one's cultivated individualism can be raised to the heroic".

Yet even Hemingway was touched by the progressive political sentiments of the thirties. In a 1937 novel, "a Hemingway hero, a smuggler off the Florida coast, came as close as he ever had to articulating a communal sentiment ... saying as he dies that 'a man alone ain't got a bloody fucking chance'". This "monumental [for Hemingway] insight" was temporary, however.

A more intense example of political contradictions within the writer is Jack London who combined both socialist dreams with "rugged individualism". London had a liking for Nietzsche's elitist concept of individual "Will" overcoming the constraints of industrial capitalism which kept the mediocre herd of humanity downtrodden. London could write powerfully on poverty and the threat of fascism but he could also turn out reams of Social Darwinist wilderness stories like "Call of the Wild" which featured Buck "the Nietzschean superdog".

George Orwell is another writer to attract Doctorow's attention because of Orwell's concern with society and the individual. In one of the more balanced treatments of Orwell's 1984, Doctorow concedes that the novel can justifiably be seen as a conservative attack on socialism for allegedly crushing individual freedom, coming as the novel did in the early years of the Cold War, laden with negative Soviet iconography (Big Brother clearly resembles Stalin, and other "Soviet reference is substantial").

Yet the "centre of the Orwellian nightmare" was, and remains, "the political manipulation of reality through the control of history and language", every bit as much a capitalist enterprise as a Stalinist one.

Today, writes Doctorow, Ministries of Truth throughout the capitalist world are "clubbing history dumb and rendering language insensible" to assist "the defence of the indefensible" such as US imperialism in Latin America (other examples spring readily to mind — the Dili massacre in 1991 was an "incident", and Suharto is a "moderate", in Gareth Evans-speak).

Doctorow's essays are a fine example of his compassion, humanist political commitment and an artistically engaging facility for using language to enlighten the reader about the real world and our moral responsibility to it. If you haven't yet discovered E.L. Doctorow, then this book of essays is recommended. Any of his novels, but particularly The Book of Daniel (about the Cold War and the state murder of the "atomic spies" Ethel and Julius Rosenberg) will serve to demonstrate a masterful and committed novelist in action.