His life was absurd. He went all over the world accepting all kinds of bondage and escaping. He was roped to a chair. He escaped. He was chained to a ladder. He escaped. He was handcuffed, his legs were put in irons, he was tied up in a strait jacket and put in a locked cabinet. He escaped. He escaped from bank vaults, nailed-up barrels, sewn mailbags; he escaped from a zinc-lined Knabe piano case, a giant football, a galvanized iron boiler, a rolltop desk, a sausage skin.When I talk about hip-hop giving me an aesthetic, I think about how I felt when I read that passage. Now Ragtime is a great story, but on a basic beautiful sound level, it's incredible. Hip-Hop told me that, when writing, you should try to assemble words in a beautiful fashion. That sounds basic, but it really isn't. There are plenty of highly-touted writers with a tin-ear.
His escapes were mystifying because he never damaged or appeared to unlock what he escaped from. The screen was pulled away and there he stood disheveled but triumphant beside the inviolate container that was supposed to have contained him. He waved to the crowd. He escaped from a sealed milk can filled with water. He escaped from a Siberian exile van. From a Chinese torture crucifix. From a Hamburg penitentiary. From an English prison ship. From a Boston jail. He was chained to automobile tires, water wheels, cannon, and he escaped. He dove manacled from a bridge into the Mississippi, the Seine, the Mersey, and came up waving. He hung upside down and strait-jacketed from cranes, biplanes and the tops of buildings.
He was dropped into the ocean padlocked in a diving suit fully weighted and not connected to an air supply, and he escaped. He was buried alive in a grave and could not escape, and had to be rescued. Hurriedly, they dug him out. The earth is too heavy, he said gasping. His nails bled. Soil fell from his eyes. He was drained of color and couldn't stand. His assistant threw up. Houdini wheezed and sputtered. He coughed blood. They cleaned him off and took him back to the hotel. Today, nearly fifty years since his death, the audience for escapes is even larger.
When I read Doctorow, I always felt like I was listening to a great M.C--the greatest M.C. I'd ever heard. That riff of escapes is just gorgeous, and then ending with a line like The Earth is too heavy. And calling Houdini "absurd." It was how I wanted to sound in my prose, and it heavily influenced the way I looked at sentences.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
Ragtime, one of my all time favorites also has the recurring line that I would nominate for "best use of irony," : "And there were no Negroes."
God, I love that book. I haven't read anything by him in ages; I guess I should check out the new one.
I read The Book of Daniel before Ragtime my junior year of high school. I believe it was the first time I deeply felt a novel and also coincided with a rising political consciousness. I have to credit him with giving me an awareness of what literature can do. It was about the same time that the Smashing Pumpkins really opened up rock music for me.
I haven't read Doctorow in some time or listened to the Smashing Pumpkins (I don't want to say I've moved on). But they were my gateway drugs. They hit me at exactly the right moment, and I'm still grateful.
Ragtime was recommended to me by the elderly woman in my small hometown who ran the one room library branch who hired me to work one summer and then let me do my community service there when I really needed some help and a friend. But beyond that kindness, I'll always truly remember her for recommending Ragtime when she found out I wanted to be a writer. Here was this woman who, though nice, I felt knew very little about me, and though nice, what did she know anyway? Though nice, she'd barely finished high school half a century ago and now lived in a town of 857 people.
As I grew to know her and love her, I realized she knew me better and faster than many people had yet at that point in my life. And I find the fact that she recommended that book to me for that reason one of the highest, kindness compliments I've been paid.
My own ignorance as a youth and my love of this woman (who is still alive, and who I just visited with this weekend, which is why she's so close to the top of my heart) are the very reason I get so upset by those who have quick ignorant judgments of the Red State flyover country.
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Following your link, I read this opening:
"I was a teenager when the Collyer brothers were found dead in their Fifth Avenue brownstone. Instantly, they were folklore."
And I want to read the book immediately. And that's just from Doctorow's essay about the book.
Thanks for the heads up and the recommendation.
Thanks for this comment, it means I have a little less to write! I too came to Ragtime through a librarian that I worked for (in high school), though she was just high on having seen the Broadway production and afterward reading the book. She knew I wanted to be a political speechwriter (at the time I did want to do that, I just didn't believe that anyone would be able to convincingly speak the optimistic hopeful liberalism that I would write best, too bad I never imagined Barack Obama back then), and she was determined (so much so she stressed it every day) that when the history of my career was written, that it would mention Ragtime and Doctrow.
Also. Logopolis might be one of my all-time favorite pieces of television ever. I still think Tom Baker was the best ever....
I've never read anything of Doctorow's, but now I'm gonna seek that out. The prose reminds me of what I loved about William Kennedy's Albany novels. And yeah, those are some killer paragraphs (which is what's important - not writing a great sentence, but piling them one on top of another). I gotta read more of that. Thanks.
This is wonderful. I love finding authors like this, one who pays as much attention to the sounds and the rhythms of his words as he does to their meaning. I think when sentences have that musicality, they have an added resonance -- like they enter through a different door, somewhere that goes deeper into our minds. And with clever wordplay it is just all the more satisfying.
It's also why I love this blog so much!
The person that affects me that way is Douglas Adams. HHGTG is a work of poetry as far as I'm concerned. I first encountered it as the radio show, in spoken form, and many of the speeches of "The Book" still stick with me.
"Space is big. Really, really mindbogglingly big. You may think it's a long way down the street to the chemists, but that's just peanuts to space."
Or.
"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral Arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
...
And then one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying great it would be if we were nice to each other for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.
But before she could get to the phone to tell anyone about it, the Earth was destroyed to make room for a hyperspace bypass."
[By the way, this is the form of the speech in the radio show. It's slightly different in the book. I prefer it this way.]
Quite a bit of standup comedy is this way, too. Jokes and monologues have rhythms. Some words are funnier than others, even though the meaning is the same.
One of the hardest things to do is write short, consecutive beautiful sentences. It's not just the words, but the rhythm. This is why Hemingway was such a big deal.
There are many writers one admires--right now rereading Melville's Moby Dick, I am just staggered by how passage after passage he packs the writing with meaning, information, and lyricism as well as characterization. It's a monster novel--a leviathan, the foundation for all modern novel writing in its multiplicity of narrative strategies and voices. I want to stand up and shout author every other page.
Earlier this year, reading George Elliot's Middlemarch, I was amazed by her virtuosity for precision. No matter how many times I pick up Zora Neale Hurston, her ability to bring language alive as if words were living, embodied things wakes me up. And I remember after reading Toni Morrison's Jazz for the second time, I thought to myself that I could not figure out how to write that way no matter how long I sat at her knee and listened.
Influences, however, come early in one's writing. Ultimately, you don't want to write the way someone else writes; you want to hear yourself accurately (using your early influences as foundation perhaps)and get that down on paper.
I'm late to this, but I've been wanting all afternoon to tell you how much I enjoyed this post. The music of the words is something I always look for, and try to put into my own writing. I love reading you talking about writing/being a writer/reading the work of really good writers. I don't get enough of that kind of talk in my life, I guess!
PS This is part of what I've been so enjoying reading Lincoln's speeches, and reading about Lincoln's speeches. The man was clearly writing for ear and and eye at one and the same time, and it is just a marvel to behold.
A post script on Melville--this from my reading today, Ahab on the day preceding the first chase of Moby Dick to Starbuck, in his last reflection before finally committing himself:
"What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozzening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike. And all the time, lo! that smiling sky, and this unsounded sea! Look! see yon Albicore! who put it into him to chase and fang that flying-fish? Where do murderers go, man! Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar? But it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and the air smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have been making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the mowers are sleeping among the new- mown hay. Sleeping? Aye, toil we how we may, we all sleep at last on the field. Sleep? Aye, and rust amid greenness; as last year's scythes flung down, and left in the half-cut swaths..."
"Where do murderers go, man! Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar?" Tough stuff.