(This interview with the writer Ron Carlson was done for the show Books & Co on KAET TV in Arizona. I'm posting it here because it seems to have been dropped from its home web server. I found it in Google's cache.)
Ron Carlson: What obligation do you have to your research? Because you've done a lot of research. You've written a lot about different places.
E.L. Doctorow: I don't know if what I do can be called research. It's so idiosyncratic and subjective. I've known too many writers who have researched things so thoroughly that they're stopped in their tracks.
Ron Carlson: That's what I'm asking.
E.L. Doctorow: And I believe when I'm asked this question "How much have you researched," I say, "Just enough." You start writing, and if you are writing well, I think really you create kind of a magnet force field around you. Whatever you need will come to hand. You'll see something in the street or run into -- I'll give you an example. In "Ragtime," I wrote a scene in which this -- the old silhouette artist Tateh and his little girl take streetcars from New York up to Lowell, Massachusetts, on the interurban street lines, which I knew were very widespread in those days, in the 1910s era, but I felt, well, this is really a stretch, and I’d better find out if it was possible to do this. But I didn't know how to go about researching it. So I was wandering around in the New York Public Library in the mid-Manhattan branch through the stacks, and my knee banged into a shelf of oversized books that were protruding from the shelf, and there was one with a big orange cover that was very prominent. So I just picked it up and looked at it, and it was a history of trolley car companies in America. And I’d found out, yes, you could go to Lowell, Massachusetts, from New York paying nickels with each new line. In fact, you could go from New York to Chicago by streetcar in those days, and it was a great system, and it was destroyed probably -- J.P. Morgan bought up some lines that he felt were competing with the new haven railroad. He destroyed them. Then the general motors corporation went around to cities saying buses are much cleaner and better, which was not true. And so trolley cars, streetcar transportation folded. Too bad.
Ron Carlson: But you found that book by accident.
E.L. Doctorow:By accident.
Ron Carlson: So it's a little different now with the internet. Everyone researches everything on the internet. It's all I hear about. People are "Googling" and finding out this stuff. You don't have a research staff? You just do your own research, correct?
E.L. Doctorow: I don't use a research -- one book I hired a guy to get some old magazines for me. I guess that was for "World's Fair." but, you know, a lot of what you make up is simply applying yourself logically to the situation, and there's really not that much trouble. I never corrected the problem in "Welcome To Hard Times." I left it. You know the Hawthorne story, the birthmark, where this man's married to this beautiful woman and she's absolutely perfect, and he loves her, but she has a little birth mark on her cheek in the shape of a tiny hand, and he's a natural scientist, so he concocts a potion and says, "Drink this and the birthmark will disappear and you'll be perfect." Because she loves him, she drinks it and the birthmark disappears and at that moment she dies. So that's why I've left Jenks out eating the roast haunch of prairie dogs.
Ron Carlson: Leave your beautiful flaws.
E.L. Doctorow: You want flaws.
Ron Carlson:Sure, I understand. Talking about research, so many times the question becomes your responsibility to be exact but, I mean, what you're saying is very much more kindred to what I've experienced, that is to say, as you focus on the work, that what you're writing becomes its own research, that you create and find the information you need.
E.L. Doctorow: I think so. You do look things up, but basically you have to trust the act of writing to guide you.
No comments:
Post a Comment