It took me a few months’ grieving to get over the fact that I’d never have the chance to learn directly from E. L. Doctorow, at least not as an MFA student. His work, which I came to rather late, still teaches by example, if only to show how poetry can sit quietly on the page, without intruding.

So when I came across a battered copy of his acclaimed historical fantasia Ragtime, the 1975 book so many of my colleagues at LAGCC used as the spine of entire composition classes, I thought: now’s the time. And like many readers before me, I first ate it up with a spoon, laughing and gaping as people I long knew in other contexts —Houdini, Emma Goldman, and Stanford White (who designed the late lamented Pennsylvania Station) — turned up as full-throated characters. I thought of Tony Kushner’s Ethel when I read of Emma, too – I want to ask him if he did.

And I was jealous, as always, of the ability of fiction writers to create composites, make up dialogue, and weave events whose plots match their themes. Of course, turns out he was jealous himself, as he told the New York Times in 2005: it was 1974, the world was abuzz with New Journalism, and “My feeling was ‘if they want facts, I’ll give ’em facts like they’ve never had before.’ ”

Now, I’m reading the book again, and wondering if there are lessons I can draw from it without crossing over into making shit up (as he acknowledges having done again in The March) or even crossing the line into “creative nonfiction,” a la John Edgar Wideman or Terry Tempest Williams (both of whom my admiration threatens to cross that borderline into worship).

But I’m looking at a few things Doctorow does, and wondering if I can echo them. First, he summarizes a period by accumulations of detail like these, doubtless swiped from someone’s memory:

Patriotism was a reliable sentiment in the early 1900’s. Teddy Roosevelt was President. The population customarily gathered in great numbers either out of doors for parades, public concerts, fish fries, political picnics, social outings, or indoors in meetings halls, vaudeville theatres, operas, ballrooms. There seemed to be no entertainment that did not involve great swarms of people. Trains and steamers and trolleys moved them from one place to another. That was the style, that was the way people lived. Women were stouter then. They visited the fleet carrying white parasols. Everyone wore white in summer. Tennis racquets were hefty and the racquet faces elliptical. There was a lot of sexual fainting. There were no Negroes. There were no immigrants. On Sunday afternoon, after dinner, Father and Mother went upstairs and closed the bedroom door.

Might there be some use for paragraphs like that, especially when there are so few scenes I can paint? Or is each of those sentences so steeped in what the Foucalt crowd calls “subjectivity” that I lose my authority?Second, at first Doctorow ends each chapter with a scene that hints at the themes of the one to come, which may at first seem unrelated but then opens up similar subject matter with new complexity. I’m not sure if that’s possible in Ain’t Marching, but the idea holds me.

Third, there’s this small rant about a war made by chicken hawk Woodrow Wilson that I can’t emulate, but makes me think about how better to offer poetic glimpses of other figures:

Teddy Roosevelt accused Wilson of finding war abhorrent. He thought Wilson had the prim renunciatory mouth of someone who had eaten fish with bones in it. But the new President was giving the Marines practice by having them land at Vera Cruz. He was giving the army practice by sending it across the border to chase Pancho Villa. He wore rimless glasses and held moral views. When the Great War came he would wage it with the fury of the affronted. Neither Theodore Roosevelt’s son Quentin, who was to die in a dogfight over France, nor the old Bull Moose himself would survive Wilson’s abhorrence of war.

More as I keep re-reading. The book reminds me that I am as determined to hold onto the book’s intense, novelistic style as I am to strive for scholarly rigor and loyalty to facts. The dance may leave me with even more vertigo than usual.

“To this moment, I dream about America.”As the last line of “Betrayed,” George Packer’s acclaimed 2007 New Yorker article about Iraqis working for Americans in Iraq, that sentence was moving and near-elegiac. But as Waleed Zulaiter speaks that line on the stage of the Culture Project, ending Packer’s play BETRAYED, the pain in his voice reaches an audience already in tears.

I’d hoped to bring Captain Montalvan with me to the preview on Sunday, since like Packer he carries memories of Iraqi allies that he feels were betrayed by incompetence and greed. When he told me he was ill, I felt as though I were bearing witness for both of us.

And most of the play was fantastic. I loved all the composite characters: Adnan, a slim bearded Sunni at first galvanized by the overthrow of Saddam, who quotes a British existentialist as he calls himself “a non-belonger,” and Laith, a Kurdish Shiite who learned English by listening to American TV, is played by Sevan Greene with humor, pathos and constant motion — beginning with his entrance, when he arrives at Adnan’s apartment glad that he hasn’t been killed by the militias pursuing him. And I cried at the death of Aadya Bedi’s Intisar, a slender young woman who refuses to wear a hijab (Muslim headscarf) despite militia threats. Before then, she’d stolen my heart by telling her newly-in-Iraq supervisor, Foreign Service officer Bill Prescott (played by Mike Doyle) that one of her goals in life is to bicycle down the streets of Baghdad. “And perhaps someday I will!”

Director Pippin Parker, using very simple sets, clearly evokes the few places he needs: Adnan’s living room, Baghdad checkpoints and side streets, and most of all the simple table and chairs that establish the Green Zone and the U.S. embassy, where the three are hired as translators. Told by one of the two American protagonists, a security officer played by Jeremy Beck, that “anyone coming from the Red Zone must be considered suspect,” Intisar responds simply. “You mean Iraq.”

For the next two hours, we see all three working steadily, living increasingly double lives as Iraq grows ever more sectarian and violent and neither the embassy or the U. S. military (embodied by Beck in two different characters, each a combination of boisterous energy and explosive anger) seem interested in protecting them. We also watch Prescott’s transformation from naïf to grieving parent, limned masterfully by Doyle — from someone who can say with a smirk, “You can’t say everyone’s against you, our poll numbers say 45 percent still favor the occupation!” to a rebel against what he calls the “mental blast-walls” surrounding American conceptions of Iraq. When the play’s narrative returns the moment of the opening, with Laith fearing for his life and asking Adnan for the ultimate sacrifice, the audience can only pray that the latter’s cell phone will ring, with long-distance news that his friend will be spared.

The play is as unflinching as all good journalism, describing hard realities and charging that officials’ reluctance to be seen as “losing” a war has left many good people stranded, dead, imperiled. And as theatre, as a glimpse of interior life during wartime, it works better, perhaps, than it has a right to.
“It all looks very familiar,” said one audience member beside me, a native of Lebanon.

I do wonder, though, at one of the script changes that happened as Packer’s 20,000-word article was being turned (as he wrote last week) “from journalism to theatre.” Now, all characters use the term “Al-Qaeda” when referring to Sunni militias. While it may have helped simplify the narrative, especially when competing names of Shiite militias are already crowding the dialogue with unfamiliarity, that very simplicity felt more political than narrative, given that most observers have attributed only a minor percentage of crimes in Iraq even to Al Qaeda’s homegrown Iraqi offshoot, Al Qaeda in Mesopatamia. Did they do it to blunt charges that the play (which takes no actual stand on the war itself) is anti-patriotic? Haven’t we moved, as a country, past the point where such charge hold any water?

—

A few reading this may already have noticed that I took this post down Monday, at the producers’ request, until opening night. Now the Times review is in, just as a print version of my own (less personal than the one here) hits the streets.

And I just deleted some tedious. Livejournal-style notes on why I haven’t been updating here: if you want to know what I was up to, check the relevant weeks of Chelsea Now or ask yourself what Edgar Allen Poe, William Apess and William Lloyd Garrison have in common. I thought I’d be through with the 19th century by now, on this draft,  but instead have only about 3000 tossed-aside words and too many research materials to show for it.

So if I decide, like those from halfway around the world, that the new year starts now, it means that I have to discover somehow a new means of concentrating on this maddening story. On writing it and on immersing myself in the events as they unfold, whether it’s Winter Soldier, ongoing debates about veterans and PTSD, or the end/middle game of this particular war. 

Meanwhile, I’ll leave you with a poem by a writer I have always mildly detested, even though I’ve taught his work — written the year he enlisted in the U.S. Army as a private:

 SPIRITS OF THE DEAD

THY soul shall find itself alone ‘
Mid dark thoughts of the gray tomb-stone—
Not one, of all the crowd, to pry
Into thine hour of secrecy.
Be silent in that solitude
Which is not loneliness—for then
The spirits of the dead who stood
In life before thee are again
In death around thee—and their will
Shall overshadow thee: be still.
The night—tho’ clear—shall frown—
And the stars shall not look down
From their high thrones in the Heaven,
With light like Hope to mortals given—
But their red orbs, without beam,
To thy weariness shall seem
As a burning and a fever
Which would cling to thee for ever.

 Time to revisit the dude, for me – as I am having to do with this old soldier, whose response to having been a prisoner of war was perhaps not unlike that of one of our leading Republican presidential candidates.