A wonderful town, even then
John Whitworth
The Waterworks is a marvellous book, gathering such momentum that I read the last 120 pages in one go at four o'clock in the morning. Doctorow has given us a novel of the prelapsarian state, a late 19th- century novel, something out of Conrad and James, out of Stevenson and Wells and Conan Doyle. Of course it's a bit of a cheek, taking this American for our own, for this is a book about New York in the years after Lincoln's assassination. And perhaps Doctorow would prefer to make his bow to Theodore Dreiser (on whom he has written two fine essays); he quotes F. 0. Mathiessen — Dreiser was 'virtually the first major American writer whose family name was not English or Scotch- Irish'. And therefore, I take it, a direct literary ancestor of Doctorow himself. The novel is a celebration of 19th- century New York in the grip of a Boss called William Marcy Tweed. Deep in British ignorance, I was unsure whether Tweed was fact or fiction, a historical fiction like the South American dictator of Conrad's Nostromo. But fat, bald, red- bearded, twinkling Tweed is fact. So much I gleaned from Doctorow's essay 'The Nineteenth New York'.
The waterworks is also fact, together with the white-painted stages of the omnibus company, Lincoln's funeral and all the careful documentation of New York in 1871. And the plot, 'one man's search for the truth about his father's death' (the publisher's words), is fiction, beautiful fiction like a well-oiled piece of machinery, one of those Conradian plots before plot descended from the 'literary' to detective stories and science fiction and P. G. Wode- house, before people like me stopped read- ing those damned thick books with `literature' written all over them.
Conrad for the fictionalised history, James (or Conan Doyle) for the unravel- ling of crime, Stevenson/Wells, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and The Island of Dr Moreau for the frisson of horror as the scientist steps into our century, announcing coolly that God is dead and stirring up what might be better left alone. Doctorow's sci- entist is Dr Sartorius, who goes in for a ghoulish form of tailoring.
I am reduced to this obliqueness because the book is so like a detective story in one respect, that if I revealed the machinations of the plot I would be as bad as those biro- wielding autodidacts, scribbling The Butler done it' at the top of page one.
Of course the waterworks is a symbol. Why else give a novel such a boring title? Doctorow tells us in his essay that New York's waterworks system was put in place in the 1840s. He mentions a viaduct with 15 Roman arches, and keeps up the conceit of New York as an industrialised ancient Rome, a technological, godless marvel, the New City, the first modern city.
And it is to the Croton holding reservoir that New Yorkers go (for there is as yet no Central Park) — 'They strolled along the parapet arm in arm and were soothed in their spirits.' This,' says the narrator- newspaperman, 'was the closest we could come to pastoral.' But a lowering pastoral, for 'the bouldered retaining walls were 25 feet thick and rose 44 feet in an inward- leaning slant. The design was Egyptian.' Which is seemly, for the pyramids stand for a kind of godless immortality of the rich. If there is no transcendental reality then not- dying is the summit of all happiness.
Getting rich and living for ever!
The war of secession made New York rich. When it was over there was nothing to stop progress — no classical ruins of idea, no superstitions to retard civil republican ardor. Not that much had to be destroyed or over- turned ...
This is from the essay, and also, with mini- mal changes, from the novel. And the novel goes on:
Nowhere else in the world was there such an acceleration of energies. A mansion would appear in a field. The next day it stood on a city street with horse and carriage riding by.
Why are there no long poems now — or not many you and I would want to read? Because the long poems are novels. This is one, written in a supple and subtle, multi- claused and pre-modernist prose, a voice which isn't quite (it is clear from other essays) Doctorow's distinguished profes- sional one. He is Professor of American and English Letters at NY University. And a wonderful novelist.
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