A Review of Ragtime: A Novel by E.L. Doctorow, 276 pages, New York Random House (1975)

“What is scurrilously called ragtime is here to stay.” That was how Scott Joplin, the “king of ragtime,” chose to introduce his 1908 instructional on a genre that would, within a couple of decades, be completely eclipsed by the rise of jazz, bluegrass, and swing. But he wasn’t entirely wrong. Songs like “The Entertainer” and “Maple Leaf Rag” continue to provide the anthems for ice cream vans and the soundtracks to nearly anything set in a saloon, for no other reason than that these honky-tonk rags are richly evocative of the excitement and vibrancy that defined fin de siècle America. Such vaudeville associations must have been uppermost in the mind of E.L. Doctorow when he named his fourth and best-known novel, which stunned readers when it was published fifty years ago this month, winning the National Book Critics Circle award and securing the reputation of an instant classic.

Set in New York at the dawn of the 20th century, Ragtime follows the wanderings, escapades, and encounters of a motley cast of characters, both real and imagined, poor and wealthy, crooked and incorruptible. Here is a world in which industrial tycoons and Jewish émigrés rub shoulders with magicians and murderers, while the devastation of the Great War looms like an iceberg ahead. At the centre of this whirligig is the “family,” a conventional upper-class brood of unnamed individuals loosely based on Doctorow’s own relatives. When an articulate African-American pianist by the name of Coalhouse Walker shows up at their door, claiming to be the father of the housemaid’s newborn baby, the family is won over by his charm and by his insistence on sharing responsibility for the child, despite the mother’s rebuffs. But Walker’s sense of determination finds a violent outlet when his car is vandalised by a gang of racist firemen. Finding the police uncooperative, Walker takes justice into his own hands, committing acts of arson around the city and eventually barricading himself and his stalwart disciples in the library of investment banker J.P. Morgan, where he threatens to detonate the building if his car isn’t returned to him in its original condition. The climax is as convincing as it is thrilling—so much so that it prompted the director of the Morgan Library to have a new security system installed.

Ragtime is an exercise in the Great Man Theory of History. In Doctorow’s reckoning, history is shaped not by material forces but by the whims of powerful individuals. If “Freud’s immediate reception in America was not auspicious,” he writes, the Austrian psychoanalyst would by the middle of the century “have his revenge and see his ideas begin to destroy sex in America forever.” Thomas Edison is “the man who invented the Twentieth Century,” while Morgan himself is an Elon Musk-like pioneer with polymath pretensions, obsessed with the Ancient Egyptian idea that there is “a sacred tribe of heroes, a colony from the gods who are regularly born in every age to assist mankind.” He even believes that he may be one of them. In fact, Morgan is blessedly absent from the showdown in the library, travelling to Egypt on a “slow pilgrimage” to build a pyramid for himself. The whole enterprise is meticulously detailed:

He expected that with modern construction techniques, the use of precut stones, steam shovels, cranes, and so forth, a serviceable pyramid could be put up in less than three years. The prospect thrilled him as nothing ever had. There was to be a False King’s Chamber as well as a True King’s Chamber, an impregnable Treasure Room, a grand Gallery, a Descending Corridor, an Ascending Corridor. There was to be a Causeway to the banks of the Nile.

His first stop was at Giza. He wanted to feel in advance the eternal energies he would exemplify when he died and rose on the rays of the sun in order to be born again.

In this passage and the many others like it, the evidence of Doctorow’s exacting research and the passion of his characters conspire to make an otherwise outlandish incident seem believable—an achievement of which the author was proud. “[E]verything in Ragtime is true,” Doctorow claimed in an interview for the Paris Review. “It is as true as I could make it. I think my vision of J. P. Morgan, for instance, is more accurate to the soul of that man than his authorized biography.” 

But one should never take a novelist’s words literally. Doctorow is gesturing towards fiction’s capacity to imagine the day-to-day lives of historical figures. Thus we see Morgan, that “monarch of the invisible, transnational kingdom of capital”, meeting Henry Ford to discuss esoteric theories of magic. Freud and Carl Jung enjoy the thrills of a fairground ride at Coney Island. Harry Houdini attempts to escape from a prison cell in Manhattan Detention Complex but is derailed by the eerie appearance of Harry K. Thaw, incarcerated for killing the architect Stanford White in a dispute over their shared lover, Evelyn Nesbitt. Seeking to escape Thaw’s brutality, Nesbitt succumbs to the seductive charms of anarchist Emma Goldman, although their sexual liaison is interrupted by the sudden appearance—and ejaculation—of Younger Brother, sibling of the family’s similarly nameless matriarch.