The opening bars of E.L. Doctorow's 'Ragtime'

 

E.L. Doctorow establishes the tone of his landmark 1974 novel "Ragtime" from the opening preamble - a rambling, eight-page opening that quickly introduces the era, the characters, and the personalities in precisely the light its author wishes through his prose style. It's a subtle, deft maneuver, mixing avant garde touches with historical research and a little bit of chicanery, burnishing the turn of the century with a murky fairy dust of legend - enough to hold readers for half a century. 

"Ragtime," named one of the 100 best American novels of the 20th century, has inspired an enduring film by Milos Foreman, as well as a Broadway musical. Now The New York Times last month adopted E.L. Doctorow's "Ragtime" for its T Book Club, and it's worth a second look at its beginning, just to see how Doctorow guides the reader into his world. 

Musicologists tell us one of the defining characteristics of ragtime music is its anticipatory notes that accentuate the beat, turning what might sound like a march into something that "swings." Using his style, characters, and the organization of his material, Doctorow accomplishes something very near this. 

The novel opens with a series of bland, placeholder sentences:

"In 1902 Father built a house at the crest of the Broadview Avenue hill in New Rochelle, New York. It was a three-story brown shingle with dormers, bay windows and a screened porch. Striped awnings shaded the windows." 

A few details stand out. The first is "Father," the word through which this character, the first mentioned, will always be referenced. By capitalizing the word, the narrator's father takes on the mantle of deity, and because we are at the turn of the century, we might give the man a bland Jehovah quality. His actual name is not necessary. He is a personage. Doctorow does not tell us the color of the house, but gives its features, which is his way of telling us this is a family of means. When we learn that Father makes "the best part" of his income off flags and buntings, followed by the fact that Teddy Roosevelt is president, we are able to fill in the gaps as Sousa marches play in our imagination. 

Doctorow then gives a list to further punctuate the background:

"The population customarily gathered in great numbers either out of doors for parades, public concerts, fish fries, political picnics, social outings, or indoors in meeting halls, vaudeville theatres, operas, ballrooms."

In one sentence, he has sketched out great throngs of patriotic people, mass movements, entertainments, and though we have only encountered the names of Father and the president, we already have in our minds multitudes. But what is the character of the country? He answers this immediately:

"There was a lot of sexual fainting. There were no Negroes. There were no immigrants." 

Without having it spelled out, the reader might also introduce another kind of mass throng into the picture - a lynch mob.

Now Doctorow is establishing rhythm. He has given us long paragraphs, long sentences with elaborations on the ways of society. He follows with a series of short declarative sentences. We are aware that he is talking about a white dominated society, and even though we are several pages away from the first appearance of Coalhouse Walker Jr., who will dominate the action of the book, a specific tone has been established. 

He then returns to Father, and Mother is introduced, as well as Grandfather and Mother's Younger Brother. The house is mentioned again. We get the image of Mother's Younger Brother as a nervous, aimless manchild "having difficulty finding himself." And as Doctorow tells the story, he continues to set scene, with the mention of the painter Winslow Homer and the "heavy dull menace" of the sea. Long sentences sit side-by-side with short ones. There is a sensation of the rhythm of rolling waves, just as Doctorow begins to introduce once again the idea previously hinted at - there is more going on beneath the surface; dark, unmentionable movements are trembling beneath the snapping flags:

"Odd things went on in lighthouses and in shacks nestled in the wild beach plum. Across America sex and death were barely distinguishable. Runaway women died in the rigors of ecstasy. Stories were hushed up and reporters paid off by rich families. One read between the lines of the journals and gazettes."

And between the lines of novels. America now assumes the tone Doctorow wishes to impart - that of white society in the midst of self-congratulation and self-regard, where human lives are being snuffed out with barely a whisper, where a pious, self-righteousness has no room in its heart for anything beyond its own interests, and those with more material wealth have the power to erase the evidence of their shortcomings, if not the residue. 

It is at this point that we have our first mention of Harry K. Thaw's assassination of Stanford White and the scandal of Evelyn Nesbit. Here, the prose becomes almost journalistic, sketching in the details of the case that dominated the headlines and conversations of the time. "Ragtime" was published in the immediately aftermath of Watergate, the kidnappings of Patricia Hearst and John Paul Getty III, when revolutionary bombings were happening every week in the U.S. Doctorow contrives what is believed to be a fictional meeting with Evelyn and the revolutionary Emma Goldman, and the anarchist's presence acts as a reminder in several ways:

"Apparently there were Negroes. There were immigrants. And though the newspapers called the shooting the Crime of the Century, Goldman knew it was only 1906 and there were ninety-four years to go." 

In addition to suddenly breaking through the wall that Doctorow has erected around the world of the narrator's family, he has also reminded the reader that this legendary past does not seem so remote or unrecognizable at all. And he gives the reader leave to imagine all the crimes of the century that will inevitably follow. At the time he wrote the novel, for example, O.J. Simpson was merely known as the star running back of the Buffalo Bills.

Another reason for introducing the Thaw-White case is because it further characterizes Mother's Younger Brother, who is in love with Evelyn Nesbit. In so doing, Doctorow not only touches on his theme of the dark side of America, but also introduces the allure of danger and celebrity. Eventually, this will lead not only to how Mother's Younger Brother becomes himself radicalized, but also points to the as-yet unmentioned character of Tateh. 

Up until now, we only have had hints of scenes. Mother and Father shut the door of their bedroom on a lazy Sunday afternoon. The reader might imagine a nap, a daytime romp, or the dutiful submission of a wife to her restless husband. Doctorow does not say (until the next section). Grandfather dozes on the divan. Mother's Younger Brother has ridden to the end of the line and walks barefoot in the tide marshes. The little boy, his name not capitalized, dressed in a sailor blouse, waves away the flies on the porch, but the narrator tells us he is precocious, his intelligence growing, unseen.

"He felt that the circumstances of his family's life operated against his need to see things and to go places."

Again, there is the recurring element of mystery, clouded menace, unspoken, either left beneath the surface or covered over. But the relative peace - or gathering anxiety - of the afternoon is broken by the serendipitous appearance of the boy's idol, the escape artist Harry Houdini, whose car breaks down right outside their home. 

The Houdini section of the preamble is where Doctorow returns to his prose rhythms, in enumerating the many different death-defying stunts of Houdini's career, followed each time by the words, "He escaped." The former Erik Weisz, son of a Eastern European rabbi, reminds us that there are indeed immigrants. He also sums up this section with, "Today, nearly fifty years since his death, the audience for escapes is even larger." Doctorow does not tell us what kind of escapes he means, but we can assume he is not referring to strait-jackets, rivers and giant sausage casings. No, it is the readers, the public, awash in non-hushed up scandals and killings, that craves escape. 

This might be the best place to mention how Doctorow deploys his real-life historical figures. John Updike's famous assessment was that "Ragtime" "smacked of playing with helpless dead puppets, and turned the historical novel into a gravity-free, faintly sadistic game." The only hint of this comes briefly with the imagined meeting between Nesbit and Goldman, though we do know that Evelyn Nesbit made a donation to her. Later on, Houdini, J.P. Morgan, Henry Ford, and others will weave in and out of the story, and we trust that they act in character. But they act within the character of Doctorow's story, which means they serve his motives. 

Which is why Houdini feels trapped within the family's hot house with its shut windows, its "heavy square furnishings." If he seems depressed in his inappropriately worn tweed suit, we assume it is the demands of his fame. But he is different - a self-made, self-invented personality who is not totally at home in the domestic tension of New Rochelle. "He was very respectful to Mother and Father and spoke of his profession with diffidence. This struck them as appropriate." Doctorow has Houdini interact with Mother, turning his blue eyes on her, to which she lowers her gaze. The narrator doesn't have to mention Houdini's famous love of his departed mother. If the reader is aware of this part of the escape artist's biography, the work has already been done. This is in keeping with Doctorow's strategy of deploying history - the reader knows as much as necessary to explain the plot, to set tone. He isn't in a hurry to "show his work."

Throughout this scene, there is no dialogue. Doctorow sprinkles in phrases of the period. Took his leave. An annual disbursement. The car was parked correctly. Houdini thought the boy comely.

Order has been restored. At least for a time. Until the little boy says, "Warn the Duke." Who is the Duke, and what does he need to be warned about? Doctorow does not tell us, but the reader will know later that this is the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The boy, who is aware of more than he appears, gives a preternatural hint at the story that will play out in years to come beyond the novel.

Since the opening scene takes place during the first Thaw trial, we know it is 1907. That means the Duke has seven years of life left before his assassination in Sarajevo will trigger World War I, and the resulting chaos will wipe away the ragtime world that E.L. Doctorow has given us in a few pages, only pointing the way toward the first blasts to the wall that keeps Negroes and immigrants unmentionable, with the promise of more to come.