The Waterworks
A New Yorker, E. L. Doctorow has explored aspects of his city at the turn of the century in Ragtime (1975), during the Depression era of gangster Dutch Schultz in Billy Bathgate (1989), and during the Cold War in The Book of Daniel (1971). In The Waterworks, he takes readers back to 1871, when the corruptions of the Grant administration were notorious and Boss Tweed ran the New York political machine, amassing a fortune like a bloated spider gorged on its prey. At first, The Waterworks seems like a realistic historical novel, as Doctorow introduces readers to the graft and greed behind the façade of New York and to the unsavory world of poverty, of grimy little girls selling flowers or selling themselves in brothels, of newsboys trying to survive by brutal brawling for street corners—newsboys who will never succeed like those of Horatio Alger, Jr.’s fictions. The hard world of 1871 was justified by Calvinists as fulfilling the aim of God, by Social Darwinians as nature’s design. Gradually, however, the novel evolves from historical reconstruction into a science-fiction horror story.
The narrator is McIlvaine (readers never learn his first name), city editor of The Telegram, a leading New York newspaper, who reflects back on the bizarre and sinister events of the narrative from the perspective of his old age. He begins by introducing one of his freelance writers, Martin Pemberton, a brilliant author of iconoclastic reviews. One day Martin astounds his employer with the story of how he was walking down Broadway on a rainy morning when he passed a horse-drawn white omnibus whose passengers were all ancient men in black; one of them was his father, who had been pronounced dead and buried months earlier. It turns out that Martin has sighted his father several times and has tried to track him down to see what mystery has resurrected him. During the course of his investigation, he too disappears, after which McIlvaine becomes so obsessed with the case that he hires a detective to solve it. Eventually, McIlvaine loses his job, as the clues lead to the corruption of the city manipulated by Boss Tweed. As the investigation continues, readers see in vivid detail the sights and sounds of New York shortly after the Civil War, during the early days of the gaslight era, the rapid growth of the Industrial Revolution, the high-speed printing presses, the opulent lifestyles of the incredibly wealthy, and the squalid lives of the working poor who made their leisured lives possible and of Civil War amputees reduced to beggary.
During his investigation, McIlvaine goes to the Reverend Charles Grimshaw, an Episcopal high church clergyman who is pastor to the Pembertons. Grimshaw is a former abolitionist and an idealist who shies away from the all-too-true vision of evil that street-corner preachers shout in their millenarian visions. Grimshaw’s world is that of the sheltered rich, and he is not much help except in assisting McIlvaine to see Emily Tisdale, Martin’s fiancée, who relates to him her lost lover’s account of yet another mysterious sighting of his dead father. Augustus Pemberton turns out to have been an unscrupulous scoundrel of a financier whose illicit activities even embraced the slave trade. Upon his death, his immense fortune seems to have evaporated mysteriously, so that his widow and young son lost their mansion, became impoverished, and had to throw themselves upon the hospitality of a modestly provided-for relative.
The more deeply McIlvaine gets involved in the case, the more realism segues into surrealism, as his narrative becomes increasingly subjective and his prose increasingly metaphorical. By his own...
(This entire section contains 1783 words.)
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account, McIlvaine is not necessarily a reliable narrator. Recalling the events from his old age, he admits, “Remembrances take on a luminosity from their repetition in your mind year after year . . . so that what you remember as having happened and what truly did happen are no less and no more than . . . visions.” In them, his recollection of New York City is like a “negative print, inverted in its lights and shadows . . . its seasons turned around . . . a companion city of the other side.” He confesses, “It is my own mind’s experiences that I report, a true deposition of the events, and the statements, claims, protestations, and prayers of the souls whom I represent as seen or heard . . . so that my life is wholly woven into the intentions of the narration.” Insisting that his narrative is not a ghost tale, he calls it rather “some awful Reading out of Heaven.”
The inspector whom McIlvaine has recruited is Edmund Donne, a tall, gaunt bachelor, a rare incorruptible among the corrupt city police, who falls in love with Augustus Pemberton’s young widow Sarah (or is she still his wife?). This case seems to be something he had been expecting, awaiting. When one of his informants is murdered, the case becomes more tense. During his last months, Pemberton supposedly took an extended trip to Saranac Lake, noted for sanatoriums treating consumptives. Dr. Wrede Sartorius, who is supposed to have attended Pemberton in his last illness, is an elusive character not listed among the city’s physicians. When McIlvaine and Donne talk to Martin’s friend the dissipated painter Harry Wheelwright, he tells a macabre tale of digging up Augustus’ grave and finding in it not Martin’s father but the body of a boy. Subsequently, both editor McIlvaine and police inspector Donne engage in such irregularities that they lose their respective positions.
The narrative becomes increasingly indirect, as McIlvaine pieces together for readers the fragments that he gleans from others, so that to some extent one gets the story of the story. As he says,
I want to keep to the chronology of things but at the same time to make their pattern sensible, which means disrupting the chronology. . . . There is a difference between living in some kind of day-to-day crawl through chaos, where there is no hierarchy to your thoughts, but a raucous equality of them, and knowing in advance the whole conclusive order . . . which makes narration . . . suspect.
When Martin Pemberton reappears as mysteriously as he had vanished, he tells a bizarre story of falling into the clutches of Dr. Sartorius, who at first almost converts him to a disciple by the force of his personality but then has him locked up in a black hole and starved nearly to death. During a gradual recovery that leaves him little more than a ghost of his former self, Martin has answers to the questions that everyone has been asking, but for a long time, he is unable to think or speak clearly. Eventually, he reveals that the commanding, supremely confident Sartorius has been draining the income of elderly rich men on the edge of dying and has been draining into them the blood, bone marrow, and glandular matter of young boys from his “scientific orphanage” to keep them alive, though in a condition little better than suspended animation, like geriatric zombies. Martin holds no resentment toward Sartorius and seems to have been mesmerized by him in the way that victims of terrorism or kidnappers sometimes become dependent upon and justify their captors. Consequently, Martin is another not entirely reliable narrator as he recalls his ordeal. To the reader, Sartorius seems a mad scientist out of a science fiction, but Martin admires the unshockable mind of this man for whom nothing is sacrilege, who has no fixed or unchanging ideas and is devoted only to pure scientific experiment for its own sake. His elaborate combination of fortress, palace, and laboratory is hidden implausibly within the municipal waterworks, as a symbol of the corruption at the core of the city’s life. McIlvaine considers the reservoir “not a reservoir at all, but a baptismal font for the gigantic absolution we require as a people.”
Connecting all this with the web spun by Boss Tweed and his associates seems very far-fetched; the splicing of historical reality with a speculative fiction of gothic horror does not entirely work. In Doctorow’s symbolism, Sartorius reflects the battlefield carnage of the Civil War linked through elusive villainy (Doctorow’s word) to the powerful, unseen men hidden behind the brownstone fronts of their opulent mansions. The once-powerful old men who try to evade the graves beyond which they cannot take their fortunes are no more than dying husks when the police finally uncover Sartorius’ grotesque inner sanctum and arrest the doctor himself. Augustus Pemberton is not there but is found dead at Ravenwood, the former family estate up the Hudson River. Rather than set in motion the legal machinery of a trial that would reveal the depth and breadth of evil genius that has been energizing New York, rather than let Sartorius articulate his case and expose to public view his unsettling views about the composition of humankind and God, the authorities declare him insane and commit him to Blackwell’s Island, where he is murdered by a fellow inmate.
As the story, told by multiple and unreliable indirections, progresses, it becomes increasingly less realistic (McIlvaine admits that some of it is his imaginings, even calls himself insane in his old age) and more like an evil dream of a moment that has rent a hole in the moral consciousness and revealed a disordered existence running parallel in time to the ordinary lives people live. It is a dream suffered for years by McIlvaine, who has never been able to publish it for the newspapers that were his life until he became obsessed with the Pemberton/Sartorius case. For Martin and Emily, Inspector Donne and Sarah Pemberton, the nightmare ends when they are married, but McIlvaine is left with the debilitating illusion of the city “frozen in time” and “God-stunned.”
Bibliography
Baker, John F. “E. L. Doctorow.” Publishers Weekly 241, no. 26 (June 27, 1994): 51. Doctorow discusses the influences on writing The Waterworks and his techniques in writing the novel.
Doctorow, E. L. Interview by Donna Seaman. Booklist 91, no. 3 (October 1, 1994): 238. Doctorow discusses the influences and themes in The Waterworks as well as its connections to his other works.
“Doctorow’s City.” The New Yorker 70, no. 19 (June 27, 1994): 41. Review that discusses the uses of New York in The Waterworks and other novels. Also recounts Doctorow’s views on writing a historical novel.
Goodman, Walter. “The Waterworks.” The New Leader 77, no. 6 (June 6, 1994): 35. A review article that focuses on the genre elements in The Waterworks as well as its relationship to other Doctorow novels. Also discusses the narrative technique and possible influences from British literature.
Solotaroff, Ted. “The Waterworks.” The Nation 258, no. 22 (June 6, 1994): 784. A review article that discusses the influences of Poe and Melville on The Waterworks and gives an in-depth analysis of the novel’s characterization and themes.
Techniques / Literary Precedents
Within the pages of The Waterworks, Doctorow's passion for pushing the boundaries of narrative form once again shines through brilliantly. Unlike the nostalgic reflections of youth found in Ragtime (1975), World's Fair (1985), and Billy Bathgate (1989), this tale unfolds through the eyes of an elderly man looking back on his life's journey. The narrator's motivations may echo the vanity of those who crave eternal life from the deranged doctor, leaving readers to ponder whether the story is being recounted from the eerie limbo of the waterworks.
Doctorow's meticulous crafting of a specific era and locale in American history once more illustrates his flair and proficiency in the realm of historical fiction. Much like the newspaper tidbits woven into Ragtime, he anchors The Waterworks in a vivid and believable setting. The choice of a newspaper editor as the narrator seamlessly offers a window into the city's social and political pulse. This approach not only builds upon Doctorow's narrative legacy but also echoes the news reportage style of John Dos Passos's U.S.A. (1938).
Historical Context and Literary Tradition
Doctorow's historical fiction often zeroes in on transformative periods in America, times when social and political upheaval were at their zenith. Hence, Ragtime and World's Fair unfold in decades teetering on the brink of global conflict, while The Waterworks immerses readers in the post-Civil War metamorphosis of America.
The narrative craft in The Waterworks draws heavily from the rich vein of mystery and detective fiction. Doctorow expertly ratchets up tension by scattering clues about the enigmatic waterworks, letting a police captain gradually piece together the puzzle while keeping the mad scientist shrouded in mystery until the climax. This technique pays homage to Edgar Allan Poe, whose work laid the groundwork for such storytelling. As seen in "The Purloined Letter" (1844), where the narrator is entwined with the detective, suspense builds until the enigma is unraveled.
Gothic Influence and Narrative Style
Poe's shadow looms large in the gothic undertones of Doctorow's novel. Although The Waterworks does not veer into ghostly realms, the uncanny appearances of men believed to be dead stir an atmosphere of mystery and shadow characteristic of gothic literature. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) is likely the inspiration for the clandestine laboratory of Dr. Sartorius. Doctorow's narrative triumph hinges on this rare fusion of realism and gothic motifs, conjuring a nightmare vision of American history.
