Creationists

I just read Creationists, E. L. Doctorow's collection of essays, mostly about writers. While I prefer his novels, it's always interesting to hear what a writer says about other writers. He has some intriguing insights on how authors go about creating.

For instance, he believes--in one of his most speculative moments--the Melville realized after about 100 pages that Moby-Dick would have to be long because at that point it was still on land, and he'd have to spend a lot more time on the water before the final battle. More important, Melville deconstructed the concept of the novel, no longer using the adventure narrative of Typee and Omoo, but instead threw everything he knew into Moby-Dick, stopping the plot every other chapter for learned discourse, from a narrator who was aware of everything.

On Mark Twain, Doctorow talks about the different ways kids and adults read Tom Sawyer, and also how Twain eventually read it. Tom is the bad boy (who's actually good) while brother Sid is the "good boy" who's puts on a show to convince everyone. But, for Twain, it wasn't enough. It was a new kind of book for him, and he can barely bother to create any dimension in his secondary characters (save Huck Finn)--he's just telling a happy version of his childhood. After a while, it had to grate. He knew about the ugliness of the past, and had to comment. But more important, Tom Sawyer himself started to look like the "good boy" who was happily a member of society, a fake rebel. Twain was able to take Huck Finn, an outsider, and, in the first person, instead of the third he used for Sawyer, say what he wanted to say. Still, he had trouble ending his tale and fell back on Tom to sew it up. The triumph of Sawyer over Finn is paralleled in Samuel Clemens' life--he was an upstart, an outsiders, but he married up and moved into society. It may have been a society he burlesqued, but one he was willing to become a respected member of. Mark Twain may have felt like Huck Finn, but he acted the part of Tom Sawyer.

Kafka never finished any of his three novels. Doctorow takes us into his first, Amerika (not Kafka's title). There was a lot of European literature (especially dime novels) about the new, rugged country overseas, much of it more about what the authors hoped to find than the reality. Kafka himself did some research, though his statements about the USA, where he'd never been (Kafka didn't even travel that much in Europe) are nothing short of surreal. The Statue Of Liberty brandishes a sword, for example. Doctorow notes, however, that much of the misunderstanding, if that's what it is, is simply Kafka making America seem more like Central Europe. More important for literature, this is a young writer who abandoned the novel after two drafts, all the while figuring out what he can and can't do. Kafka isn't Kafka without claustrophobia, and much of Amerika has the protagonists stuck in small rooms or areas. Doctorow figures it's ultimately the openness of America that defeated Kafka.

There are plenty of other interesting thoughts about Poe, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Hemingway and Harpo Marx. Recommended.