'Ragtime' Razzle-Dazzle

...There was no sign from Mother that it was now to be resumed...

...It is a characteristic display of American one-upsman-ship...

...He was solemn and attentive as befitted the occasion...

...They are exactly like the mother and father of Delmore Schwartz' poignant story, "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, except that Schwartz was trying to embody in the fantasy of his parents' courtship something of the complex relationship of one generation to another...

...In contrast to his thin thread of invention, reticently volunteered, is the book's lustrous core, a cavalcade of newsworthy figures from the beginning of the 20th century: Harry Houdini, Emma Goldman, J.P...

...Sweat from Father's chin fell on her breasts...

...Writers & Writing 'RAGTIME' RAZZLE-DAZZLE BY ISA KAPP When John Dos Passos published his monumental trilogy, U.S.A., in the 1930s and speckled his narrative with "newsreels" and biographies of famous Americans, he was using a new technique to accent his recognition that our lives are a tangle of public and private events...

...He was clutching in his hands, as if trying to choke it, a rampant penis which, scornful of his intentions, whipped him about the floor, launching to his cries of ecstasy or despair, great filamented spurts of jism that traced the air like bullets and then settled slowly over Evelyn in her bed like falling ticker tape...

...Not only does E.L...

...When the entire house was asleep he came to her room in the darkness...

...That was the style, that was the way people lived...

...Even more chilling in terms of the novelist's psychology is the scene in which Emma Goldman, having spied Evelyn Nesbit's alabaster face at a Socialist meeting, ushers the girl home, instructs her (as a gesture of emancipation) to remove her corsets, and massages her body with oils...

...So you see," Ford says, "what you have spent on scholars and traveled around the world to find, I already know...

...She fled to her garden...

...Indeed the disheartening outcome is surprising, since the writer has until now, possibly out of sheer susceptibility to the pictorial, been portraying America as an open platform for Achievers, a coast-to-coast Macy's department store where those on flat ground or descending stairs have always before them the pulse-quickening sight of the rising escalator...

...Mother shut her eyes and held her hands over her ears...

...Whenever she and Father appear, they are boons to the reader, mortal flesh amid the parade of distant Titans...

...and Tateh and his daughter, who live first in New York's East Side and then, with other immigrants, in the dismal tenements of a Massachusetts mill town, on the six dollars he earns for 56 hours in front of a loom...

...Like other novelists of varying calibre-Jules Romains, Upton Sinclair, Tolstoy-he was interested in the junctures at which history made its dent upon his heroes and heroines, and aspired to bring his fiction as close to reality as he could...

...Meanwhile the innocent reader, though diverted, continues to cling to his old-fashioned longing for a story, and searches eagerly for the book's few imaginary characters in the hope that he can still extract one or two familiar pleasures from this new phenomenon, minimal fiction...

...Note, for instance, what patience, succulent imagery and obvious enjoyment Doctorow puts into the scene when J.P...

...Thus Ragtime glides us, like Cinerama, from the scandalous murder of Stanford White the famous architect (shot out of jealousy over a celebrated beauty, Evelyn Nesbit) to Hou-dini escaping from prison ships, jails and cannons, to Ellis Island where immigrants stink of fish and garlic-and so on, through the headlines of 1906-14...

...In the most infectious section of the book, reverberating with the rags-to-riches glamor of silent films, Tateh decides that the few pennies in wages won by the union will get him nowhere...

...The population gathered in great numbers either out of doors for parades, public concerts, fish fries, political picnics, social outings, or indoors in meeting halls, vaudeville theaters, operas, ballrooms...

...Doctorow resist expanding the imaginative range of fiction, he thinks it has become so enfeebled a form that only a massive infusion of facts and news can revive it...

...An artist in his spare time, Tateh shows the owner his book of drawings of a skating girl...

...He is an accomplished pianist who plays the "Rags" of Scott Joplin, and the family assumes a proprietary interest in the courtship, only to find itself in the midst of social violence and tragedy...

...These magic names are ignited like Fourth of July sparklers to bestow upon us an instant sense of the past...

...The same deja-vu charm, out of old forgotten films, colors the chapters set on the beach in Atlantic City, where Mother bathes in a modest costume of skirt and pantaloons, sponges salt from her skin and strolls to the piers and shops...

...Ragtime never becomes more than an extra-vagent photogenic Production, full of motion, dexterity, gorgeous Effects, recalling those sequined girls who danced or swam themselves into formations of gigantic roses in the Ziegfeld Follies...

...Trains and steamers and trolleys moved them from one place to another...

...As it happened Houdini's visit had interrupted Mother and Father's coitus...

...A well-dressed, resolute-looking black man named Coalhouse Walker, Jr., comes to the home of Mother to court the deserted black girl and baby she has impulsively taken in...

...Ordinarily a sly one when it comes to committing himself to an opinion, much less a political sentiment (his dispassionateness makes Dos Passos' sincere radicalism look ingenuous), Doctorow shows his concern, in spite of himself, by the detail, skill and time he invests in tracing through this offbeat character the slow momentum of rage between blacks and whites...

...Everyone wore white in summer...

...Patriotism was a reliable sentiment in the early 1900s...

...At dinner the night before he was to leave, the cuff of Mother's sleeve brushed a spoon off the table and she grew flushed...

...Extraordinarily reminiscent of the U.S.A...

...They visited the fleet carrying white parasols...

...I think the effrontery of this passage rests squarely on Doctorow's conviction that private feelings are small potatoes, no longer worth the preoccupation of writer or reader, and that both would do better to turn their attention to the big wheels of society...

...Doctorow-a Robert Altaian, who is slated to direct the picture to be based on this book-means to stir senses, memory, curiosity, not the mind...

...He and his daughter leave their belongings to the landlord, refresh themselves in a public lavatory, breakfast on rolls and coffee at the station cafe, and look into the window of an emporium displaying exploding cigars, rubber roses that squirt water and statues of liberty...

...Morgan, hooked on Egyptian civilization and reincarnation, invites Henry Ford to his Murray Hill brownstone to reveal that the auto king's features are those of a Pharaoh, Seti the First, whose sarcophagus Morgan has imported in a glass case...

...He is, in fact, utterly in thrall to the two professions now in the heydey of their status, journalism and movies, and seeks to recreate for a bygone era the same speedy illusion of participation in world affairs hawked by TV anchormen who switch us with such panache from the studio to their man at Cape Canaveral or Cairo...

...Like any confident reporter, Doctorow is happy, and his prose is virile and animated, as long as he is daubing the social scene, documenting a tense public moment, situated somewhere in the vicinity of crowds, lights, camera, and action...

...There seemed to be no entertainments that did not involve great swarms of people...

...It is published as a "movie book," and he is on his way to success...

...Both men are ambitious and restless, both women passive and beautiful, but Doctorow chooses to believe it would be tedious to pursue their fortunes in a traditional way, and he arms himself instead with the formidable detachment of the news media...

...There is one extended episode, occupying almost the final third of the book, that is charged with suspense and intensity throughout...

...At this moment a hoarse unearthly cry issued from the walls, the closet door flew open and Mother's Younger Brother fell into the room, his face twisted in a paroxysm of saintly mortification...

...biographies in its imagistic clarity, its kangeroo leaps over time and space and its ironic cast of mind, Ragtime (Random House, 270 pp., $8.95) is a best-seller whose "innovations" have an exactly reverse purpose...

...He brings to fiction tools and talents that are imposing yet not enough by themselves...

...That Vista-Vision orgasm may have taken considerable talent to put into words, but it is a talent compounded mainly of laughing gas and dry ice...

...It is about two typical American families whose paths cross: Father and Mother (plus, as in many an old album photograph, a small boy in a sailor suit), who live in a three-story house in New Rochelle, New York, on an income derived from the manufacture of flags and fireworks...

...One offshoot of the dubious intellectual legacy of Marxism is the notion that the forces without are inevitably more decisive (and therefore more fascinating) than those within...

...As it turns out, Ford has believed in reincarnation all along, ever since he read a 25 cent book, An Eastern Fakir's Eternal Wisdom...

...One could almost say their story has a touching quality, but touching only in the momentary way of a photograph-she caught in cameo gentleness, he stiff and inner-directed, together generating that sad, impersonal marital intimacy seen in turn-of-the-century daguerreotypes...

...To be sure, there is an actual plot in Ragtime, one that might have been sufficient for our emotional involvement had Doctorow's thinking made it so...

...Teddy Roosevelt was President...

...And I'll tell you something, in thanks for the eats, I'm going to lend that book to you...

...Morgan (and even, if briefly, Freud, Dreiser and the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand who was assassinated at Sarajevo...

...Perhaps photographically accurate, this is surely a remote if not plainly disparaging way to describe sex...

...Why, you don't have to fuss with all these Latiny things you don't have to pick the garbage pails of Europe and build steamboats to sail the Nile just to find out something that you can get in the mail order for two bits...

...Although we learn very little about society's dynamics from Doctorow's assiduous research on Head-liners, it should be said that such pathos as the novel achieves is social in nature...

...Women were stouter then...