RIP E.L. Doctorow http://biblioklept.org/2015/07/21/rip-e-l-doctorow …
Nancy Groves@nancyarts
Wednesday 22 July 2015
Suffering isn’t a moral endowment. People don’t always do well under duress.
I think of my politics as biblical politics: you shouldn’t murder, you shouldn’t steal, that sort of thing.
I like commas. I detest semi-colons – I don’t think they belong in a story. And I gave up quotation marks long ago. I found I didn’t need them, they were fly-specks on the page.
We’re always attracted to the edges of what we are, out by the edges where it’s a little raw and nervy.
Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.
The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.
A new reader shouldn’t be able to find you in your work, though someone who’s read more may begin to.
I don’t have a style, but the books do. Each demands its own method of presentation, and I like that.
EL Doctorow, author of Ragtime and Billy Bathgate, dies in New York aged 84
When you’re writing a book, you don’t really think about it critically. You don’t want to know too well what you’re doing. First, you write the book, then you find the justification for it. The book is constructed as a conversation, with someone doing most of the talking and someone doing most of the listening.
The writer isn’t made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.
In the 20th century one of the most personal relationships to have developed is that of the person and the state. It’s become a fact of life that governments have become very intimate with people, most always to their detriment.
Suffering isn’t a moral endowment. People don’t always do well under duress.
I think of my politics as biblical politics: you shouldn’t murder, you shouldn’t steal, that sort of thing.
I like commas. I detest semi-colons – I don’t think they belong in a story. And I gave up quotation marks long ago. I found I didn’t need them, they were fly-specks on the page.
We’re always attracted to the edges of what we are, out by the edges where it’s a little raw and nervy.
Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.
EL Doctorow: 'I don't have a style, but the books do'
Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
A physical book is great technology if you think about it. Once it’s produced it doesn’t use up any energy, and if you take decent care of it, it will last for ever. That’s a considerable technological achievement.
Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.
A book is not complete until it’s read. The reader’s mind flows through sentences as through a circuit – it illuminates them and brings them to life.
E. L. Doctorow
Author
Edgar Lawrence "E. L." Doctorow was an American author, editor and professor, best known internationally for his works of historical fiction. He has been described as one of the most important American novelists of the 20th century. Wikipedia
Born: January 6, 1931 (age 84), The Bronx, New York City, New York, United States
Died: July 21, 2015, Manhattan, New York City, New York, United States
Spouse: Helen Esther Setzer (m. 1953)
Movies: Ragtime, Billy Bathgate, Jolene, Daniel, Welcome to Hard Times, Sunstroke
Parents: Rose Doctorow, David Richard Doctorow
Doctorow Wove Fact And Fiction To Imagine America As It Could Be
JULY 22, 2015 5:29 PM ET
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The way E.L. Doctorow told it, the phrase "historical novel" is something of a misnomer when it comes to his writing. "I think really of myself as a national novelist; I am an American novelist writing about my country."Mary Altaffer/AP
E.L. Doctorow used to tell a story about a journalism class he took as a high school student in the Bronx. As he told NPR back in 2003, he wrote a profile of a doorman at Carnegie Hall who was beloved by all the performers there. His teacher, apparently, loved the story so much, she wanted to publish the story in the school paper — so she told Doctorow to get a photo of the man.
There was just one problem.
"I hadn't expected that kind of enthusiasm," Doctorow recalled, "and I said, well, 'Not exactly, there is no Carl.' I made him up."
Doctorow, who died of complications from lung cancer Tuesday at the age of 84, was never meant to be the kind of guy who cared much for the old journalistic pillars of who, what, when, where, why and how. But he did love mixing some facts into his fiction. Known best for his historical novels, like Ragtime and Billy Bathgate, Doctorow often mingled fictional characters with figures from history books, in vivid and playful ways.
"It's interesting how perceptive Doctorow was about the thin line and blurred line that divides factual writing and fictional writing," says Liesl Schillinger, a book critic forThe New York Times.
Schillinger fondly recalls the time she interviewed Doctorow when she was an undergraduate. He was generous with his time and patient with her sometimes naïve questions. And she still remembers what he said that day about writing.
"One thing he told me so long ago was that novelists have always had to persuade their readers that what they were reading was not fiction by kind of 'urgent truth,' so that the reader could break down the distinction between fiction and nonfiction in his own mind," she says. "But as a writer, he was always aware of what he was doing to manipulate the nonfiction to make it delight and captivate the attention of the reader."
E.L. Doctorow on Sherman and 'The March'
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AUTHOR INTERVIEWS
Doctorow Ruminates On How A 'Brain' Becomes A Mind
Doctorow used fiction to explore history — from Gen. Sherman's March to the Sea during the Civil War, inThe March, to the tumult at the turn of the 20th century, in Ragtime, and the Cold War story of the Rosenbergs, in The Book of Daniel. Laid back to back, his books covered more than a century of American history.
But he insisted he never planned it that way.
"Historical novel is, it seems to me, a misnomer," Doctorow told NPR in an interview last year. "I think really of myself as a national novelist; I am an American novelist writing about my country."
"Everything that he wrote was really about a vision of America as it could be," says novelist Mary Gordon, who calls Doctorow an idealist.
Gordon, who worked with Doctorow on free speech issues in the PEN American Center, says he was not afraid to speak out on subjects that were important to him.
Source: http://www.npr.org/2015/07/22/425360954/doctorow-wove-fact-and-fiction-to-imagine-america-as-it-could-be
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