If you give credence to the various claims of book publishers, short-story collections don’t sell, poetry books don’t sell, essays don’t sell. That such books continue to be published must either be some form of publisher’s penance or “doesn’t sell” has a different meaning for us civilians. In any case, imagining a bookstore devoid of goodies such as the literary essays assembled in Edgar Doctorow’s “The Creationists” is to imagine, well, uh, an airport bookstore. And if you are reading this book section, that’s not a bookstore to suit your tastes.
Doctorow, who has established his imaginative credentials with a skein of well-crafted novels going back three decades, has plumbed American history for novelistic source material. In this instance, he coyly terms the Creationists “a modest celebration of the creative act” – as he argues for the centrality of storytelling, asserting that “composition is the reigning enterprise of the human mind.” And so to illuminate his view of storytelling as a system of knowledge in which the storyteller “practices an ancient way of knowing,” Doctorow “re-purposes” the 16 pieces found therein, stringing together a novel and, in some instances, unusual gamut from a discussion of Genesis, the first book of the Bible to the Atom Bomb – not exactly normal subjects for investigations in literary creativity.
The playfulness of Doctorow’s exploration of literature’s topgraphy certainly begins with his choices. The obvious opening with Genesis, is followed by a snapshot of “hack genius,” (Edgar Allan) “E.A. Poe,” whose “narcissistic cocoon of torment had him blind to the American nation that was booming around him.” Nonetheless, his body of work is admirable. This is followed by a respectful treatment of the only woman in Doctorow’s pantheon, Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” we need to be reminded, was translated into 40 languages and the 19th century’s second-best-selling book behind the Bible. Doctorow adds: Abraham Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1862 and said, “So you’re the little lady who wrote the book that started this great war!”
Little she was, under 5 feet tall, but a parlor powerhouse of evangelical intellect who managed to draw through her life all the great moral and cultural struggles of her century. Doctorow, in an aside, opines, “It is illuminating … to see how hard our 19th-century greats (all men) worked to put themselves and only themselves into the American literary canon.”
In “Composing Moby-Dick: What Might Have Happened,” Doctorow summons up his own compositional skills and biases to shine light on the normally hidden authorial decision process as he speculates on what he calls Melville’s “big gamble,” which he claims was “to pass the time by destroying it, to make a new thing of the novel form by blasting its conventions.” And he astutely concludes, “I know this to be true: Herman Melville may have been theologically a skeptic, philosophically an existentialist, personally an Isolato with a desolation of spirit as deep as any sea dingle – but as a writer he is exuberant.” Hardly a conventional view of the overlooked in his lifetime and tragically misunderstood (until last year’s excellent biography by Andrew Delbanco) author.
The remaining bon-bons in this Whitman sampler of literary treatments feature more original Doctorow insights on Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer (“Sam Clemens’ Two Boys”), Sinclair Lewis, F. Scottt Fitzgerald (“Malraux, Hemingway and the Spanish Civil War,” Arthur Miller, Heinrich Von Kleist, Franz Kafka’s Amerika, W.G. Sebald, Einstein: Seeing the Unseen and the resonant “The Bomb.”
Doctorow’s selection of these nimble essays from slightly more than a decade’s work adheres to no literary doctrine, it covers an array of topics that shine in their joyful openness and that stand as serviceable contexts for discussions on these necessarily subjective literary themes.
That these pieces fall into a more rarefied form (literary essay) as well as subject matter (authors and then some) is served well by Doctorow’s avoidance of scholastic cant and academic jargon. For example, the word “deconstructs” does not appear in this tome and “trope” only once. And as he, under no obligation to present rigorous briefs, in fact not battling under any banner except for the creationist’s, is at ease to reveal that, “whatever any author says of his novel, is of course another form of fiction and is never to be taken on faith.” And this apparent trade secret, “Somewhere from the depths of your being you find a voice and it is the first and most mysterious moment of the creative act.”
These are occasional and uncommon collections (last year gave us Cynthia Ozick’s sublime “The Din in the Head,” which shares the same intentional space as Doctorow’s new opus) to be sure – in “The Creationists,” beyond the functional and transparent prose, and a welcome unpredictability of the subject or characters, Doctorow’s choices are also exemplars of the deceptively simple axiom he asserts in his introduction, “We are what we create.” (Of course, he also reminds us, “There is no necessary equivalence between the aesthetic and moral achievement of a novel and the confused, drunken and tormented or immoral package of humanity who has produced it.”)
A notion that, as it should, invites some serious fun.
Robert Birnbaum is a freelance writer in Boston.
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The Creationists
Selected Essays 1993-2006
By E.L Doctorow
Random House, 192 pages, $24.95
