Billy Bathgate

by E. L. Doctorow, 1989

Characters:
Billy Bathgate
Dutch Schulz
Drew (Lola)
Irving
Lulu
Berman
Mickey
Bo

In an interview on NPR's Talking Volumes, Doctorow made the mildly provocative claim that the novelist writes to find out what he is writing about. I think many writers would agree: tidiness, cohesion, and design are largely fruits of a second draft. Billy Bathgate provides an excellent example of this exploratory technique at work. The novel apparently had its origins in a picture Doctorow saw hanging on a wall, a dark scene of a tugboat by the wharf with a few moustached men. What were they doing there? The first fifty pages gives the answer: fitting a gang member with a pair of concrete boots and sending him off to the great hereafter.

In rereading the first several pages of the novel, I can see the process of discovery at work, in ways that I could not when I read the book the first time. For the book holds together very well: objects, scenes, characters casually referenced at the beginning build and resonate, transmuting into symbols, motifs, key personages. To plan this pastiche in advance, to conceive in one overarching artistic vision the complex interrelation between the people, the places, the material objects, to understand how they naturally blend and support one another: this would be a major achievement. But to give free reign to a fecund imagination at the beginning, populating ones scenes with as many names, mannerisms, and quirky references as one's natural creative imagination can support, and later letting a judicious sense of word and world dictate which of these to develop, where to do it and how to blend them, this seems to me a comprehensible and effective process.

A new concept: narrative evolution. Stories, like ecosystems, can stably support species only in certain numbers and mixtures. Too many jackelopes? They get hungry, breed less, their numbers decline, and the snow tufted marmosets bounce back. To many moustached toughs named Gus or Mugs or Stubsy chopbreaking and roughtalking and fistcudgeling the natives? The story will bog, the toughs will turn to cardboard, and if the author is an attentive and knowledgable steward, she can ween them from the landscape: a proper narrative can support and develop only so many characters. The task of the writer is to exercise a kind of landmanagement, both to encourage propagation of species and to prune the excess. The overflow can be repopulated: a new chapter, a different novel. Slaughter is not the only solution. But balance is key.

So what I have learned from this book (at least in principle) is that rather than storyboarding, one can just write, and if the writing goes well, one can work backward to build both complexity and cohesion. It is an obvious but easily forgotten fact that the public has no access to the formal origins of a work of fiction, and whether it evolve by accident or design is immaterial, provided it evolve well.

A few technical notes:

1. The book is divided into four sections, corresponding (roughly) to the four locations: new york, the burbs, the track, and back to new york. Section breaks are a nice divide: they give the reader some coordinates, a frame in which to measure position. Structurally, however, they seem to me quite pointless.

2. The voice is odd: at once brash street urchin and free wheeling flower poet. There is almost something Whitmanesque about this rough, lumbering rhythm that moves from the crude syntax of the Bronx to the lofty prolixity of pastural poetry. At the end of the story the voice is explained: Billy has gone to an Ivy League school, made good, holds now a position of some distinction. As the story of this boy's ascent, his meteoric rise through the chain of power, his first jarring collisions with love and responsability, it makes sense that the voice should reflect the full semantic range of american speech, from the very lowest classes to the very highest. The occassional excursion into poetry provides a lovely parallel to the upward movements of Billy's own consciousness. I think the fact that we accept this voice, find it odd and elegant and seductive, is one of Doctorow's principle achievements in this book.

3. Sex is deftly stiched in--the quickies on the rootop, the scene where Drew dresses while Billy watches, the odd cock in hand of the cuckholded husband, the romp in the swamp. Doctorow doesn't dwell on sex, but in the book, as in life, it is always there, forming and defining the flow of action. I like the range of language Doctorow uses: from crude statements of fact (the rooffucks, the whorehouse) to a restrained syntax that just flutters on the cusp of strong feeling.

4. The violence is at once explicit and distant. An interesting trick: many of the more greusome acts (e.g. the braining of the firemarshall) are described without judgement. Billy observes how these acts are viewed by other men, but he himself makes no pronouncement. This restraint is logical: a precondition of Billy's apprenticeship is the total submission to the ethos of the circle, and he needs to observe people's reactions to understand this ethos. But though Billy plays the game well, one of the great movements in the book is how he begins to develop his own moral standard. Though he feels bad about the killing of Bo and the fire marshall, he consents to the logic of their deaths, he becomes complicit. But later, he takes it upon himself to risk his own life in saving Drew from the lethal hand of Lulu, and at the very end he takes responsability for a child and his mother and his life as a respectable citizen. It is this honest, naive, emperical sense of ethics that ultimately exposes the bankruptcy of Dutch Schulz' twisted moral scheme.

5. Numbers myths are propogated shamelessly. Berman, the genius accountant, with his puzzles, his predictions, his odds: lovely way to fuse mysticality with the gritty calculus of the street.