Doctorow Is In
In his propulsive new novel, The March, best-selling author E. L. Doctorow makes us see the chaos that Civil War Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman invoked when he declared, "War is hell." Doctorow's panoramic vision of Sherman's relentless and destructive advance, from Atlanta to Savannah and on through the Carolinas, encompasses a large cast from North and South, of all ages, social classes, army ranks, and racial heritages.
You ' ve criticized the war in Iraq. Is it coincidence that your new book is about war?
I didn't write the book specifically thinking about Iraq. All I will say is I thought it was necessary to start writing it about 2 1/2 years ago.
Actually, The March struck me as more about the upheaval of war than antiwar.
I did not think of it as an antiwar novel. What interested me about Sherman's march was that it so transformed everyone in it. The people--freed slaves and whites--who were dispossessed by this march simply attached themselves to it because there was nothing else left for them to do.
You show Sherman struggling with the phenomenon: 60,000 Union troops, thousands more civilians following in their wake.
They became a kind of great nomadic civilization--not just the military but the whole culture. Staying in one place was no longer stable and secure; movement was.
Besides Sherman and Lincoln, the book ' s characters include the future parents of Ragtime ' s fictional Coalhouse Walker Jr. Where do " real " characters end and imaginary ones begin?
I take the position that all the characters are real. The invented characters spring to mind whole with their names and their physiognomy and status established in the first sentence of writing about them. Sherman or any of the others who are recognizably historical come to me in the same way. Whatever research I've done boils down to an impression, and they spring into the book in the same way.
Are you a historical novelist?
The genre doesn't interest me. Besides, all novels are historical, written after the fact. We don't think of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn as a historical novel, but he describes the time of his boyhood, 45 years before.
The March has a very cinematic feel to it. It would make a great TV miniseries.
Hmm. [Laughing] Would you like to produce it?
This story appears in the October 10, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
advertisement
