E. L. Doctorow’s The Book of DanielRichard Ault, September 30, 2016

First Thoughts and Origins

When I chose Boll’s Billiards at Half-Past Nine for my first review I

did so from the mistaken memory that it was a fairly straight-

forward little book. This time there is no doubt, that at least at a

superficial level The Book of Daniel is, perhaps, a fairly straight-

forward little book. However, during the course of my

preparation, I discovered that E. L. Doctorow is anything but a

straight-forward little author. I do not think that I am

exaggerating when I say that Doctorow is one of the most

complex, confounding, and controversial American authors of the

past century. Is he, as one critic called him, “the greatest

American novelist of the last 100 years”, or might he simply be in

the words of another simply a “folksy craftsman” weaving

“intricate historical brocades?” I think we can safely say that he

is neither, but we are left with the considerable task of

determining what we do think of Doctorow generally and Daniel

in particular.

Edgar Lawrence Doctorow was born in the Bronx to Rose

and David Doctorow, second generation Russian Jewish

immigrants. Despite the relative poverty of his upbringing, his

family was at least on the fringes of the artistic community, his

father running a small music shop. In interviews he remembered

a pleasant childhood with frequent theater and museum

excursions, and he tells us he was “a beneficiary of the incredible

energies of European emigres … hounded out of Europe by

Hitler. They brought enormous sophistication to literary criticism,

philosophy, science, music. I was very lucky to be a New

Yorker.” He matriculated at the Bronx High School of Science,

though he took refuge from the mathematical geniuses by

becoming active in the operation of the school’s literary

magazine. He then attended Kenyon College in Ohio, where he

studied with the poet and leading light of the “New Criticism,”

John Crowe Ransom. Now, I am not a literary type and wouldn’t

know the “New Criticism” from the infield fly rule, let alone the

“Old Criticism.” However, I will return to this issue shortly.

Suffice it to say that Kenyon was, and maybe still is, “a place

where people think about writing the way they think about

football at Ohio State.” In addition to literary studies, he

concentrated on drama at Kenyon, and remembered that he

started getting some good parts after his older classmate, Paul

Newman, left.

Doctorow began a graduate program in drama at

Columbia, but his studies were interrupted by World War II, and

after returning home he began a series of odd jobs before

settling in as a script reader at CBS Television and Columbia

Pictures. Significantly for his future career as a novelist by the

mid ‘50’s he moved to publishing where he started as an editor

at the New American Library, and then moved to Dial Press,

where as Editor in Chief he worked with Mailer, Baldwin, and

William Kennedy, among many others. Though he published two

novels during this period, in 1969 he left to concentrate on his

writing, and from this point on he produced a novel almost

exactly every five years, beginning with Daniel in 1971.

My choice of The Book of Daniel was driven mostly by my

deep interest in the period that David Caute calls “The Great

Fear” in his excellent history of America in the throes of

McCarthyism. It was a period populated by heroes, villains,

victims, fools, knaves, and various highly placed cowards.

Despite the rich material this period presents, not much

interesting fiction has emerged from it. Daniel, however, is the

seminal exception, and, I think, a worthy book for our

consideration. The original conception of my review envisioned a

considerable exposition of the Rosenbergs and McCarthyism and

the historical crossover to Daniel. After my second reading,

however, my path changed. McCarthyism provides the general

backdrop and “origin story,” but it is a topic far too large to

explore in much detail here. As to the Rosenbergs themselves,

while Doctorow wrote Daniel during a period when it was an

article of faith for the American Left that they were innocent,

subsequent post-Cold War revelations have shown that Julius, at

least, was guilty as sin. As to their execution by a vengeful state,

let us just say that while Julius Rosenberg might have died for our

sins, Ethel sure as hell died for his. And no less an authority than

Doctorow himself regularly made the point in recent years that

the question of their guilt or innocence is essentially irrelevant to

the book. As he put it, Daniel is not about the Rosenbergs, but

the idea of them. Thus the book stands on its own, no matter

what the evolving historical record might show.

The Novelist as Historian

The large majority of Doctorow’s canon are historical novels, and

that designation opens up an interesting set of issues to ponder.

Upon the publication of Ragtime, the author’s best known book,

William Shawn, the legendary editor of The New Yorker would not

allow a major review because in Doctorow’s words it was

“immoral” to have “people say things they were not historically

known to have said!” Even more telling criticism has come from

John Updike who was quite vocal that Doctorow’s tinkering with

history “smacked of playing with helpless dead puppets, and

turned the historical novel into a gravity-free, faintly sadistic

game.” He was particularly disdainful of Ragtime. Interestingly,

though, Updike shifted gears in his review of The March,

Doctorow’s re-imagining of Sherman’s March, and in my mind his

greatest book. Updike wrote that The March “pretty well cures

my Doctorow problem…It has little of (Ragtime’s)…impudent,

mocking shuffle of facts; it celebrates its epic war with the

stirring music of a brass band heard from afar…”

While I weigh into this debate with trepidation, as a lover

of history I have always felt that good historical fiction provides

texture, insight, and a wonderful platform for moving past factual

recitation to consider motivation, human dynamics, and the

“why” behind the “what.” Still, we must be on guard again the

havoc that can be wreaked by some of the more imaginative

historical flights of fancy, both in written and the visual arts. I

shudder to think that a significant proportion of American high

school students, upon watching Tarantino’s “Inglorious Basterds”

may well be convinced that Hitler met his demise at the hands of

the OSS in a Parisian theatre.

It is indisputable that Doctorow was a master craftsman,

and he regularly provided us with a vivid re-imagining of the

American past. He ranges from the rollicking ride of Ragtime, to

the barely fictionalized treatment of Dutch Schultz in Billy

Bathgate, (to my thinking a dreary book far below his standards)

to the magnificent evocation of Sherman’s March, and finally, at

least for our purposes, to Daniel, a book one critic called “the

best American political novel in a generation,” and Joyce Carol

Oates deemed “a very nearly perfect piece of art.”

Daniel and the World it Inhabits

“It was a queer sultry summer, the summer they executed the

Rosenbergs…”

Opening sentence of Plath’s The Bell Jar

As I have read about Daniel and its author I have been intrigued

by the continuing theme running through much contemporary

criticism which has deemed Doctorow to be “a supremely

political writer,” and in the words of one cultural critic “the epic

poet of the disappearance of the American radical past.” I have

preferred to see him as a supremely gifted story teller, at times

too clever for his own good. See, for example, the high-brow

critical reaction to Ragtime, and the relative lack of attention to

him in the academic literary community compared to Pynchon,

DeLillo, Roth, and other modern American writers. While I do not

see the “disappearance of American radicalism” in any way as a

continuing theme running through his work, there is no doubt

that Daniel is a “supremely political” work. Doctorow himself

tells us that the idea for Daniel came to him in the late ‘60’s and

he was energized by the comparison between the “New Left” of

that period and the “Old Left” of the ‘30’s and ‘40’s, and that “I

could tell the story of the country’s life over a 30-year period by

dealing with its dissidents. And I realized that the Rosenbergs

could be the fulcrum.” Also, I think Doctorow’s early immersion

in the largely Jewish radical politics in New York in the era of the

Old Left provided him with the critical mass for the imagining of

Daniel. Indeed, there were probably more good communists in

the Bronx in 1946 than in Moscow!

And so, with enough prologue for three reviews, in the

“dark coves of the Browsing Room of the Columbia University

Library we meet Daniel Lewin, in actuality the eldest son of the

notorious Atomic spies, Paul and Rochelle Isaacson. Supposedly

working on a doctoral thesis in the social sciences Daniel

produces instead an autobiographical novel, part narrative, part

indictment, part confession, about his parents, the old left, the

diaspora of Daniel and Susan, the new left, and the damaged

souls left in the wake of all.

One review describes Daniel as being written in “crackling”

prose which even after forty years still feels fresh. Well, I’m not

so sure about crackling, but having read a good portion of

Doctorow’s canon this summer, it is undeniable that he had an

incredible gift for precise and nuanced language faithful to the

times being portrayed. Earlier, I spoke of his exposure to the

“New Criticism” at Kenyon and I think this may provide insight for

thinking about the incredible diversity of his output. In my

limited efforts to understand the tenets of the New Criticism it

appears that it compelled deep textual analysis (Doctorow

himself recalled in an interview writing a thirty page paper on an

eight line Wordsworth poem.), and it is not too much of a stretch

to make the case that the historically faithful voices of his

characters have their origins in this early immersion in the

precison of language. On this point, reading a Doctorow novel

opens us to no distinctive “Doctorovian” style; each book evolves

with a style of its own. This is a characteristic of Doctorow’s that

has been noted by more than one critic, and it may be may be

one of the reasons the academic and critical community has

neglected him. Two pages of a novel by Fitzgerald, Hemingway,

Dos Passos, (or eight words by Wolfe!) and you know with whom

you are dealing. Not so with Doctorow. Every novel has a

distinctive voice. Among other American novelists of the

twentieth century with whom I am reasonably familiar, perhaps

Steinbeck compares to Doctorow in this regard.

And with Daniel Isaacson specifically we have a voice

haunted by a past filled with promise, loss, rage, and betrayal.

Ranging from first to third person and passing sometimes

seamlessly and sometimes jarringly from one epoch to the next

Daniel drives the narrative forward to Doctorow’s “Three

Endings.” But more about that later.

I really don’t think the power of this book derives from the

historical and fictional events which define the narrative. Just as

I discovered that it’s not that important to worry about Paul and

Rochelle’s guilt, it’s not what happens in the book that drives it to

its shattering conclusion. It is, rather, the gradually revealed

emotions of the main characters as Doctorow/Daniel pulls back

the curtain on them.

In the case of Paul and Rochelle we see true believers who

never waiver in their devotion to each other or their cause and

who are proudly prepared to pay the ultimate price for their

beliefs and actions. Do they realize the hideous consequences

their children will pay for their actions? After all, their suffering

ends in seconds while Daniel and Susan get the real life

sentences. While the history of the Rosenbergs is not my focus it

is interesting in this section of our analysis to compare fact and

fiction to gain a little insight. Doctorow’s most significant

departure from the historical record is in his treatment of Paul. I

think it is safe to say that Paul Isaacson is a stronger, perhaps

heroic, figure, who in this regard bears little relationship to Julius.

While he met his end with quiet dignity the historical Julius was,

in fact, an inconsequential little man, and not much of a spy at

that. But Doctorow molds Paul of sterner stuff, inventing for him

a heroic stand against the fascists at the Peekskill riots (which

are historical), and makes him a clear leader of their devoted

little band.

Rochelle, on the other hand, bears great similarity to Ethel.

Again, the prison correspondence of Julius and Ethel reveals Ethel

to be the truest of believers with great strength of character.

Rochelle, through the book, evokes the historical Ethel. Of

course, before we canonize Rochelle/Ethel it’s fair to ponder how

a mother could calmly allow her children to face what she had to

know would be a dreadful future. Perhaps her devotion to a

collectivist future inured her to the sufferings of those two little

“young pioneers.”

Then there is the story of Daniel and Susan together which

we must consider before we look at them as individuals.

Doctorow’s treatment of Daniel and Susan’s journey through

uncaring relatives, over-matched protectors, and finally the

juvenile “system” before their apparently happy landing with the

Lewins is compelling, heart-breaking, and dreadful throughout

and it forms the emotional core of the book. In fact, from the

writings of Michael Meeropol (the Rosenberg’s eldest son) we find

that while reality was no bed of roses, it was, shall we say, less

operatic than that experienced by Daniel and Susan. For our

purposes suffice it to say that Daniel and Susan were indelibly

marked by this experience and nothing should surprise us as we

find them in young adulthood.

First, let us ponder Daniel. At a superficial level he is a

thoroughly unlikable protagonist. A half-assed husband with a

sadistic streak, a half-assed graduate student, a half-assed

radical, and an ungrateful half-assed step-son. But, Doctorow’s

point, I suppose, is that Daniel is the sum of his history, and we

ought to be surprised that he’s not worse than he is. His rage

and general unworthiness is honestly won, and who are we to

judge someone who has been through the lingering hell he has?

And just to make matters that much worse, even as he is

launched on what passes for his young adulthood, he gets a ring

side seat at the deconstruction of Susan. How much, we might

ask, can a “boychik” take. And, if he’s not much of a radical, who

knows better the dreadful power of the state to punish those who

dissent. Still, I think there is a worthy conversation about Daniel

and what we think about him. Personally, I have a very hard time

getting past his poorly disguised contempt for the Lewins, whose

only sin is being gentle and kind. I think Doctorow would have

loved a nice debate about this broken boy.

Now, as we come to the end of our consideration, I have to

say the final pages of this book disquiet me more than just about

any book I have read in my life. First, there is the penultimate

confrontation between Daniel and the pathetic Mindish which

gives no satisfaction to anyone. As literature, however, it really

got my juices flowing. You may remember that in my review of

Billiard at Half-Past Nine, I took Boll to task for ham-handed

symbolism. Well, Boll’s effort was positively rapier-like compared

with the symbolic meat-axe Doctorow wields. How can you not

love our villain being an incompetent, pain-inducing Dentist who

worked on people in the “chair.” And then, in what should have

been a lovely little riff on the culture that blithely murdered

innocent parents in the name of national security, Doctorow

places the final confrontation in Disneyland, and in Tomorrow-

Land no less. But he just can’t quit there and goes on to inform

us that Anaheim is “a town somewhere between Buchenwald and

Belsen” and that the Disney organization’s skill at “the problems

of mass ingress and egress seem to have been solved here to a

degree that would light admiration in the eyes of an SS Transport

officer.” Well, taking a shot at Disney is pretty low hanging fruit

as far as cultural criticism is concerned, and further, my brow is

just low enough to be nauseated by the upper-west side literati

smarminess which drips from these words.

Then, just as I want to be really pissed off at Doctorow, we

have the last four pages and the “Three Endings,” which is, for

my money one of the most beautifully written endings I have

ever encountered. I can only conclude with this final passage:

We stand at the graves. An enormous crowd presses behind us. The prayersare incanted. Everyone is in black. I glance at Susan. She is perfectly com-posed. She is neat and trim in a black sleeveless dress. A black lace handker-chief rests on her head. She looks beautiful, and I am enormously proud ofher. She is getting to be quite a young lady, with her hair parted in the middleand combed over her ears and tied at her neck in a very grown up way. I feel her warm hand in my hand and see her lovely eye cast down at the openearth at our feet and an inexpressible love fills my throat and weakens my knees. I think if I can only love my little sister for the rest of our lives that’s all I will need.

The Lewins ride in the rear seat, Phyllis and I in jump seats at the knees. My Mother wears a black hat with a veil over her eyes. Her eyes are swollen and red and her mouth is turned down in ugly grief. My father wears a dark suit and tie. He is demolished. He did not shave well and I can see patches of gray stubble that he missed under his chin and at the corner of his mouth. Phyllis’s face is pale, drawn. It is a sunny day and her weeping eyes are blue. She wears a pea coat and dungarees.

In the cemetery we wait behind the hearse while the drivers smoke and talk on the sidewalk and the funeral director goes up to the office and deals with the cemetery people. This is a small funeral and he will have others today.

My sister is dead. She died of a failure of analysis.

And in these final words we find that we have, in fact, been reading, “The Book of Susan.”