The Music of Time

By R. Z. Sheppard

RAGTIME by E.L. DOCTOROW 271 pages. Random House. $8.95.

"Divided between power and the dream" is the way F. Scott Fitzgerald saw it in his luminous projection of lost innocence, The Great Gatsby. In Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow plays a dazzling variation on that theme in a slightly earlier era: the final days of America's privileged childhood.

His novel is carefully framed between 1902 and 1917, surrounding the robust, unambiguous patriotism of Teddy Roosevelt and the complex, brooding morality of Woodrow Wilson. It was Winslow Homer time, when, as Doctorow writes, "a certain light was still available along the Eastern seaboard." Eccentrics still putter in their garages and produce inventions without the aid of research-and-development bureaucracies. Henry Ford's new assembly line and Albert Einstein's peculiar idea that the universe is curved crack the dawn of the modern age. Before long, Doctorow notes, painters in Paris will be putting two eyes on one side of the head.

Like ragtime, the jazz form made famous by Scott Joplin, Doctorow's book is a native American fugue, rhythmic, melodic and stately. "It is never right to play ragtime fast," said Joplin, and the same can be said for reading it.

Yet the book never stands still for a moment. Story lines constantly interweave; historical figures become part of fictional events and fictional characters participate in real history. In ways both fantastic and poetically convincing, the members of a suburban upper-middle-class family combine and change in the undertow of events. As if Clarence Day had written Future Shock into Life with Father, Doctorow's images and improvisations foreshadow the 20th century's coming preoccupation with scandal, psychoanalysis, solipsism, race, technological power and megalomania.

Harry Thaw empties his pistol into the face of Architect Stanford White, the lover of Thaw's showgirl wife Evelyn Nesbit. White goes to his grave and Thaw to an insane asylum. But Doctorow has his own plans for Evelyn. Down from her red velvet swing, she drifts to the immigrant slums of New York's Lower East Side, where her social consciousness is raised by anarchist Emma Goldman. Sigmund Freud confronts the pleasure principle at Coney Island and cannot get back to Vienna fast enough.

A black musician turns violent revolutionary after his new Model T is vandalized by jealous whites. Harry Houdini, the immortal escape artist, cannot slip from his mother's apron strings. He is also a man incapable of political thought because, in Doctorow's moving phrase, "he could not reason from his own hurt feelings."

Elsewhere, J.P. Morgan and Henry Ford meet secretly to discuss their beliefs in reincarnation. Morgan has spent millions harvesting civilization's mystic wisdom. Ford, in his ready-made suit and L.L. Bean shoes, notes dryly that his occult education came from a 250 booklet ordered from the Franklin Novelty Co. of Philadelphia. It is the same organization that will buy moving-picture flip-books from a penniless Jewish immigrant. The peddler will end in Hollywood as Baron Ashkenazy, producer of those Rosetta stones of American nostalgia, the Our Gang comedies.

Literal descriptions and interpretations make many novels sound better than they are. With Ragtime, just the opposite is true. Its lyric tone, fluid structure and vigorous rhythms give it a musical quality that explanation mutes. In Doctorow's hands, the nation's secular fall from grace is no catalogue of sin. no mere tour de force; the novelist has managed to seize the strands of actuality and transform them into a fabulous tale.

Not long after he got out of the Army in 1954, E.L. (Edgar Lawrence) Doctorow sat down on a wooden crate in front of his typewriter and told his wife Helen, "This is the way we are going to survive." He had $135 to his name. Forty-eight hours later, he had $50 left and a lot of blank paper.

For the next 20 years, Doctorow fought the blank page--and won four times. Between novels he was a reservations clerk for American Airlines, a reader for CBS, Ian Fleming's editor at New American Library, Norman Mailer's editor at Dial Press, and most recently a teacher at Sarah Lawrence College.

At 44, Doctorow is about to realize his original survival plan. Ragtime is a Book-of-the-Month Club selection with a first printing of 60,000 copies. Director Robert Altman (Nashville) will film the book next year. To date, Doctorow is best known as the author of The Book of Daniel, an extraordinary succes d'estime that narrowly missed the National Book Award for 1971. Despite parallels to the Rosenberg atom-spy case, the novel has an anguished life all its own. Many of its scenes were set in the Bronx neighborhood where Doctorow grew up. Part of Ragtime also has resonances from the Doctorow past, principally from the New York City suburb of New Rochelle, where the author now lives with his wife and three children.

Doctorow's mother was a pianist and his father owned a record and musical-instrument store in Manhattan's Hippodrome Theater building--components of Ragtime's vanished New York. After graduating from the select Bronx High School of Science, he studied literature at Kenyon College in Ohio. It was the kind of education that sharpened his critical faculties at the expense of his creative talents. "I had to purge myself of the sense of the writer as an intellect," he recalls. The purge has worked. Ragtime is free of the self-consciousness of form that mars most contemporary novels. "It was actually fun to write," says Doctorow, who wryly quotes Scott Joplin: "The scurrilous invention of ragtime is here to stay."

R. Z. Sheppard

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