SOURCE: "The City, The Waterworks, and Writing: An Interview with E. L. Doctorow," in Kenyon Review, Vol. 17, No. 1, Winter, 1995, pp. 32-7.

[In the following interview, Doctorow discusses his views of The Waterworks and elaborates some ideas on writing fiction.]

The author of nine novels—Welcome to Hard Times, Big as Life, The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, Loon Lake, Lives of the Poets, World's Fair, Billy Bathgate, and The Waterworks, as well as a play, Drinks before Dinner, and a collection of essays, Hemingway, Poe and the Constitution—E. L. Doctorow grew up in New York City and was educated at Kenyon College and Columbia University. A recipient of the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Arts and Letters Award, and the National Book Award among others, Doctorow teaches creative writing at New York University.

[Tokarczyk:] I've been intrigued by your choices to set so many of your novels—The Book of Daniel, Lives of the Poets, World's Fair, Billy Bathgate and now The Waterworks—in New York City. How do you think being a New Yorker who has lived in the City for most of your life has affected your writing, your outlook in general?

[Doctorow:] It was a very fortunate thing for someone who was going to be a writer to grow up at the cutting edge of American culture. In those days the country was more regionally directed than it is today. What went on in New York wasn't as well distributed, so there was a tremendous advantage to living here. New York was a very rich experience for a child. As a teenager, I used to go almost weekly to the Museum of Modern Art. I'd look at the permanent collection, look at the new work, go downstairs to the theater and see a foreign film. As a boy I went matter of factly to plays, to concerts. And as I grew up, I was a beneficiary of the incredible energies of European émigrés in every field—all those great minds hounded out of Europe by Hitler. They brought enormous sophistication to literary criticism, philosophy, science, music…. I was very lucky to be a New Yorker.

And, I was also in touch with, what turned out to be, although I couldn't realize it at the time, the last vestiges of Jewish immigrant culture. Those vestiges were in my grandparents, and to a lesser extent in my parents, who were born here. But it was enough for me to pick up on that wonderful sort of beautiful trade-union spirit of the early twentieth century—the expectation that this was a country where you could work out some justice for yourself and everyone else in your situation if you worked at it. So I was lucky in that sense. I was nourished by that Jewish humanist, not terribly religious, spirituality. I imagine that's another part of the New York mind-set.

And then, of course, the place itself, the city as spectacular phenomenon. All writers find a place for themselves, a home for their imaginations, and I suppose the city is mine. It's the quintessential city—so much so that I've felt at home in every city I've been anywhere in the world.

How did you come to The Waterworks?

It began with the very short dream story in Lives of the Poets, "The Waterworks." I never fully got that story out of my mind. I kept thinking about it.

It is a puzzling and eerie story.

I would think about it, and go on to a novel, and come back to it. I understood eventually that image, the waterworks, meant I was in the industrial nineteenth century. Transporting water to the city, to any city, was a great engineering feat of that time. Then, of course, the reservoir described could have been the Croton holding reservoir at Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue.

Oh, I didn't know there had been one there.

Where New York Public Library is now. The reservoir walls were over forty feet high, twenty-five feet thick, and inward slanted. The style was ancient Egyptian. You could walk from the street through these temple doors, go up a flight of stairs, and come out on the embankment. People went up there to take the air, to stroll about. That was the New York version of pastoral, Central Park not having been built yet. Once I was into the book I realized how much of the nineteenth century city is still with us—not in just the obvious architecture—Central Park, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Sixty-seventh Street Armory, the row houses in the West Village, the Jefferson Market Courthouse and so on—but even the shape of the streets, the widths, and the names of them. My studio looks south over Soho to lower Manhattan. One night a heavy fog came down and covered the World Trade Center, covered all the big glass, steel buildings of lower Manhattan, then the Woolworth Building of the 1920s. The entire twentieth century was erased until all I could see was the ground-level city. It was the most uncanny experience: I was looking at the city that Melville walked in. I was looking at the nineteenth century. So in this way, step by step, the book proposed itself to me. In a sense the entire book is deduced from the story. For instance, the drowned boy who is carried off by the man in the black coat: I reflected on the uses of children in the nineteenth century. There were thirty to forty thousand vagrant children running around. Children who were unclaimed, who were totally on their own. People called them street rats. The city, my sense of the city of the time—New York in the post-Civil War—is what that story speaks to. And once I realized that, I was able to do the book.

Talking about the urchin children in nineteenth-century New York reminded me how much of your work is concerned with children. Particularly I thought about Billy Bathgate. I am very curious about him. He is, like Daniel Isaacson in The Book of Daniel, such a ruthless child. I wonder how you see his corruption.

Billy Bathgate is everything that you would want a boy to be; he's bright, he's loyal, he's enterprising, he's observant, a quick learner. He has feelings, he is connected to his feelings, he works things out. But all these virtues are in service to the underworld, which fascinated him.

When I first read Billy Bathgate in the late 1980s I was reminded of crime's attraction—especially drug dealing—to many slum children. Criminal lives are incredibly dangerous but still alluring.

Crime—along with sports and the arts—is the instant way up from the lower depths. They want the same things, those kids who sell drugs. They want what they see on television; they want the good life. They want a nice house, they want a car. A place in the world.

After Billy Bathgate came out, you published an essay "A Gangsterdom of the Spirit" in the Nation. I wondered if there was some connection between that gangsterdom you write about in the essay and the crime in Billy Bathgate.

I suppose there may be some connection. It's not the kind of thing you can afford to think about in the writing. But it is a fact that this book about crime came to me in the 1980s. That's all I can say. It's a strange thing. I have never had the sense of enormous, indiscriminate power that would allow me at a given time to write any number of books. I have never had that feeling about myself. I find myself in a book and my understanding is: This is my book. There is nothing else I can do right now. At any given time you can do only the book that you are given to do.

The Waterworks is very interesting in the context of your other work. It seems that there are some recurring themes: Sartorius's quest for immortality reminds me of Ford and Morgan in Ragtime. McIlvaine's relentless search for the truth reminds me of Daniel's search for the truth about his parents' case.

Comparisons to my other works don't occur to me because I don't think that way when I'm writing. If I did it'd probably worry me. The work has to dominate. That's where you live, in those specific sentences. But all writers have preoccupations, things they're attached to. So I suppose there must be recurring themes.

As I was thinking of the vagrant children Sartorius exploited, one of the things that came to mind was Stephen Dedalus's words in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, "Ireland is a sow that eats its farrow." Are you perhaps suggesting something similar about American society during this period?

I think what Joyce meant is something different. He's writing about Irish culture and a provincial repressive Catholicism that permeates every aspect of life and discourages vitality in the people. The Waterworks is a different sort of story. I think it's more a novel about all modern industrial culture, its presumption of continuous modernity, and the extent to which modernity is an illusion.

There seems to be a connection between the various kinds of evil depicted in the novel—Tweed's corruption, Sartorius's experiments, and slavery.

Or among government, wealth, and science. But the discovery that came over me in writing the book was more the despair of being locked in history. I was very interested in the city's architecture, not only in the waterworks and the reservoir, but in the orphanage, and the grid layout of Manhattan. The narrator is quite sensitive to such things; in fact, at one point he talks of how architecture can inadvertently express the hideousness of a culture.

The main character, as a newspaper editor and reporter, reminds me of a writer as you've often depicted writers: that is, he searches out the truth. He's as relentless in his pursuit as Daniel in The Book of Daniel.

I suppose The Waterworks is like The Book of Daniel in that each describes a process of discovery. Something is unfolded.

I was struck by the book's oral quality, by the sense that McIlvaine was indeed telling his story. I believe that when you wrote World's Fair you were striving for a sense of oral history. Were you doing so in The Waterworks?

In World's Fair the oral history passages were set off from the main text. Here the narrator is meant to be talking all the way through. It's a spoken book. At one point I was thinking of indicating through another voice—in a prologue, afterword, or introduction—that McIlvaine in the last year of his life had dictated what he had to say to a stenographer. He says at one point, "You have your motorcars and telephones and electric lights." He's looking back thirty years or so, you see, motorcars and electric lights and telephones being the glories of the period after the turn of the century. I always imagined he was dictating, that the unnamed stenographer—me possibly—became the captive audience. But I decided I didn't have to frame it all up, as Conrad does when an unnamed narrator gives us the scene—everyone sitting on the afterdeck smoking cigars, the sun going down over the Thames, as Marlowe begins one of his marathon monologues.

I had thought of Hawthorne and Poe as possible influences here, particularly because Hawthorne wrote sinister stories like "Rappacini's Daughter" about scientific experiments.

Undeniably. The Waterworks is a tale.

Aside from the narrative tale-telling voice, what other features of the book were particularly important for you?

There are certain gifts that the book gave to me—for instance, the idea of the elusiveness of villainy. If you think about it, the old man Augustus Pemberton is never seen alive. His existence is reported secondhand from the newspapers or the fact that his son saw him. His factotum, Simmons, is found only after he's dead. As for Tweed, you never see more than a glimpse or two of him. He's a ruling ethos, a configuration of the clouds. As McIlvaine says, you can't really get your hands on these people. The only one who finally appears as a presence—in the end and after great delay—is Sartorius. His elusiveness, however, is not physical, it's intellectual. A man with his own standards, not society's.

In reflecting on Lives of the Poets especially, I've been thinking about something you said in an interview with Christopher Morris, "All writers have doubts about the value of their work as compared with, for example, a well-made house"

Words have no physical existence. Books are events in the mind. You don't know as time passes if what was in your mind as you wrote is really what's on the page. I find my view of my books shifts as I continue to think about them, but certainly my relationship to the books that have been done is distant. I think, "Well, all right, but with this new one I'm really going to do it." You always have the "this one."

I meant … that you can look at a house and walk around it and live in it; the windows are built so that the light comes in, the stairs are here, and you know where the closets are. Space is measured and defined. The house is solidly constructed, the floors are parqueted floors, and there's nice tile in the bathroom.

Right, it's very solid.

Several people can walk into the house and more or less agree that it's a useful, livable house, but I'm not sure that the house of fiction is ever something most people would agree on. I mean, there are obviously great works that we admire. But I don't think self-satisfaction is very useful or constructive for an author, even if I were capable of it to any great degree. Maybe to people who write one book and stop. If you did something perfectly, what would be the need to go on? But it all operates in the mind. Words are there … and not there. Books are, and are not. When you've finished with a book, nothing will ever match the experience you've had writing it.