[Mb-civic] The Time Travels Of E.L. Doctorow - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

The Time Travels Of E.L. Doctorow
With 'The March,' the Novelist Continues To Invent the World as It 
Really Was

By David Segal
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 1, 2005; Page C01

NEW YORK -- E.L. Doctorow began his writing career with a spectacular 
failure. At the time, he was a student at the Bronx High School of 
Science, where a teacher told Edgar, as he was known back then, to 
profile a colorful person. Doctorow soon delivered a brief biography of 
Carl, a doorman at Carnegie Hall who had escaped the Holocaust and came 
to work every day with a thermos full of tea, which he drank Old-Europe 
style, through a cube of sugar held between the teeth. The great 
classical musicians of the day, like Vladimir Horowitz, adored the guy.

Edgar's teacher was so enamored of the piece that she told him she 
wanted to photograph Carl and run the picture, along with the story, in 
the school newspaper.

"You can't do that to Carl," Doctorow replied.

"Why not?" asked the teacher.

"Well, he's very shy," he said.

"What do you mean, he's shy? He talked to you, didn't he?"

"Not really," Doctorow confessed. "There is no Carl. I made him up."

She slashed an F across the story.

"It seemed to me so much more sensible to make something up than go 
through the tedious business of interviewing someone," Doctorow says, 
now 74 and smiling a little slyly at a table at the Metropolitan Cafe on 
the Upper East Side. "I was just a kid and so maybe I was scared that no 
one would want to talk to me. And I figured that if there wasn't a Carl 
the doorman, there should have been."

Nobody realized it at the time, but the outlines of Doctorow's future as 
a novelist were scrawled like body chalk around this failure as a 
reporter. The impish disregard for the wall between fact and fiction, 
the cross-thatching of real celebrities and invented characters, a 
slight sentimental streak -- all of it would turn up in "The Book of 
Daniel," "Billy Bathgate," "Ragtime" and the other historically based 
novels that made Doctorow famous.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/30/AR2005093001847.html
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