Between Books

By John Skow

LIVES OF THE POETS by E.L. Doctorow

Random House; 145 pages; $14.95

Anyone shrewd enough to make a living in the man-of-letters dodge knows that an occasional desk-clearing miscellany, a dustpan with hard covers, will be indulged between actual, seat-of-the-pants books. To E. (for Edgar) L. (for Lawrence) Doctorow's credit, he includes no commencement speeches, letters to the Times, book reviews or similar lint balls in this between-books collection. Instead, the author of Ragtime and Loon Lake offers six short stories, impeccably done, rather academic, mostly forgettable, and one 65-page mishmash called, for want of an accurate tag, a novella. The mishmash, surprisingly enough, is a delight, largely because it knits up all that has gone before.

The odd arrangement of the book suggests that Doctorow is not altogether happy with the stories. The first, an agreeable family anecdote about a secret kept from an old lady in a nursing home, could be told as a one-paragraph joke. But the third is a small marvel, a conventional short story that works, and the only one of the six whose vibrations resonate after the last page is turned. A boy sees his mother making love with his tutor. The child cannot prevent himself from telling the dreadful secret to his father. The narrator, who was the boy, relates his turmoil in a way that seems resigned and detached, and then adds two sentences that haunt the mind with the littleness of private tragedy: "This was in Galicia in the year 1910. All of it was to be destroyed anyway, even without me."

Of the other stories in the collection, two are standard imponderables, vaguely suggesting those irritating fictional non sequiturs of Donald Barthelme that prove without effort that the world is a strange place. The last short piece is called The Leather Man, after a strange tramp who wandered southern New England in the 19th century, insulated from the world by an outer leather armor he had devised. It is an awkward tale that works only intellectually, as an argument the author is having with himself. Is it possible that a life can be understood only when one has deliberately estranged oneself from it, turned oneself into an outsider, a leather man?

Who knows? But now, in the title novella, we see where the question leads. The narrator, a blocked writer, has moved from his wife and his comfortable home in Connecticut to a Greenwich Village pad. He can't write in the burbs, can't stand the entanglement. Can he write in the Village? Well, he's trying, but his roiling thoughts won't order themselves tamely and obediently into fiction. There he sits at his desk, staring idly out of the window, listening to his middle-aged frame creak, finding a suspicious bump on his scrotum, brooding about traditional marriage: "battling, shrieking and occupying each other's brains like some terrible tumor until one of them dies." A theme here? Apparently not; he goes on to muse about middle age ("On the whole we are all quite game. It's life itself that seems to be wanting"), about his comical doorman, about whether to crank up an old affair with a woman who has sent him a postcard, about the arresting fact that the Manhattan Yellow Pages are available in Spanish. No, he decides, he can no longer write; the whole thing is hopeless. The novella peters out as messily as could be wished, without even a period to nail down its last sentence: "... maybe we'll go to the bottom of the page get my daily quota done come on, kid, you can do three more lousy lines"

But the reality, of course, is that Doctorow is writing, telling prickly truths, getting a life down on the page. The result is totally shapeless, but it is also funny and full of juice. It is interesting to note that John Updike, in his Bech chronicles, Philip Roth, in his Zuckerman books, and now Doctorow have written some of their best recent work about the impossibility of writing. Writers, it seems certain, will outsurvive cockroaches, no matter what toxins they spray on themselves. --By John Skow