E.L. Doctorow is our loudest contemporary champion of the social novel, whose defining characteristic he posits as “the large examination of society within a story” of “imperial earthshaking intention.” (The genre’s American apotheosis is Frank Norris’s The Octopus.)
Billy Bathgate is Doctorow’s latest, and if his publicist’s yowling chorus of “masterpiece” is a bit much, the novel is nevertheless entertaining, mordant, and surprisingly—for those who have read Doctorow’s dreary socialist harangues in The Nation—sage.
Fifteen-year-old Billy of Bathgate Avenue in the Bronx is standing outside a beer warehouse, juggling a battery of balls, fruits, and stones, when gangster Arthur Flegenheimer, AKA Dutch Schultz, espies him and pronounces the dexterous lad “a capable boy.” This throwaway remark begets in Billy grand dreams, and he bids adieu to his urchin-pals, to their “dead witless eyes” and inevitable “slow death[s] of incredible subjugation.” With great resourcefulness, Billy insinuates himself into Dutch Schultz’s inner circle as the mobster’s “proto-jay.”
Schultz is a brutal psychopath, given to crushing the skulls of hapless marplots. He is a primitive, an anachronism almost, in the brave new world of the 1930’s. Dutch’s comptroller, Abbadabba Berman, explains to Billy that in the “upcoming generation,” the criminal will, perforce, be of a sleeker, more refined shape. “Everything will be streamlined,” he declares, echoing the regnant New Deal faith in a progress that is founded on science, efficiency, and centralization.
Try as he might, Dutch just can’t adapt. To attain polish he takes up with a blue-blooded member of the Saratoga horsey set; she cuckolds him (with callow Billy, no less!). Awaiting trial in Syracuse, Jewish Dutch converts to Catholicism as an “insurance policy”; the Church, in his last desperate days of supplication, will let him down. Even Tammany boss James J. Hines, Dutch’s ethical kin (he, too, adjudges Billy “capable”), refuses a bribe; the ward-healers are giving way to good-government prigs like Thomas E. Dewey. Dutch, pace Elvis Costello, is a man out of time.
And what of Billy? Doctorow has said elsewhere that “a child’s life is morally complex . . . a child is a perception machine.” Maybe. But our narrator Billy witnesses—even abets—the grisliest murders, including a concrete-shoe drowning, and by novel’s end he is surveilling prosecutor Dewey prevenient to a daring assassination attempt. Throughout these sanguinary adventures, Billy is wholly remorseless, without compunction. We never learn how this bright lad became inured to the most sickening violence. Book chat has it that Doctorow views Billy as a ghetto Huck Finn: an odd analogue, given Huck’s supremely moral choice in the matter of Jim’s freedom.
“A perception machine” Billy indubitably is. He puts Schultz’s appeal tersely and well: “People liked to be where things happened, or could hap; pen. They liked power.”
That is what Billy Bathgate is about; that is why young Billy is first attracted to Dutch. Doctorow understands the devilish lure of power—the marcelled, sluttish girls, the expensive booze, the evening wear and Black Packards and the feeling that one is at the center of something very big indeed—and he knows that the purpose of glamour is to conceal enormity, to gloss over carnage and conquer.
In the past, Doctorow has written feverishly of the transcendence of the collective. When To Have and Have Not’s Harry Morgan snarls, “A man alone ain’t got no bloody chance,” this is epiphany; Hemingway, Doctorow exults, has glimpsed “a monumental insight.”
But the gang offers Billy Bathgate poor sanctuary. He finds only menace in numbers. The slightest deviation from prescribed behavior—a loud noise, an inept crack—can get him killed. In Dutch’s ambit, betrayals “issue perpetually from the seasons of life.”
Safety can only be found in ever-larger conglomerations of thieves. Abbadabba Berman lectures: “The modern businessman looks to combination for strength and streamlining. He joins a trade association. Because he is part of something bigger he achieves strength. Practices are agreed upon, prices, territories, the markets are controlled.”
The stifling regimentation of this new order—(coincidentally?) redolent of the New Deal—breeds respect for creeps like Schultz. As the discerning Billy admits: “How I admired the life of taking pains, of living in defiance of a government that did not like you and did not want you and wanted to destroy you so that you had to build out protections for yourself with money and men, deploying armament, buying alliances, patrolling borders, as in a state of secession, by your will and wit and warrior spirit living smack in the eye of the monster, the very eye.”
Dutch comes to his meet end: Billy, the capable and flexible boy, survives and thrives. Abbadabba Berman taught him well. He regrets missing the gang’s salad days—”I had caught on with the great Dutch Schultz in his decline of empire, he was losing control . . . a bloody maniac” (anyone for metaphor?)—but Billy is smart, and no doubt his subsequent life is smooth, streamlined, and profitable.
Doctorow has written a bleakly accurate assessment of the nature and price of power. But the incongruity of it all nettles: the, author is a New Rochelle socialist, a grandee in the world of Long Island summer homes, backyard tennis courts, lavish grants and emoluments. Is he a hypocrite or just obtuse?
Doctorow’s runaway best-seller was published coincident with the appearance of two extraordinary and sempiternal novels: Wendell Berry’s Remembering and Edward Allen’s harrowing Straight Through the Night, neither of which received one-fiftieth the hype or lucre that our Abbadabba Bermanized economy showered on Billy Bathgate. The monopoly capitalism that he rightly deplores has been very good to E.L. Doctorow, the literary lord of Sag Harbor. Counting his millions, bedecked by Governor Cuomo with the laurel of “Official New York State Author,” peering into the Mammonish abyss of blockbuster movie deals, he knows even better than Billy of Bathgate Avenue just how seductive power can be.
[Billy Bathgate, by E.L. Doctorow (New York: Random House) 323 pp., $19.95]
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