LIVES OF THE POETS by E.L. Doctorow
Random House; 145 pages; $14.95
Anyone shrewd enough to make a living in the man-of-letters dodge knows that an occasional desk-clearing miscellany, a dustpan with hard covers, will be indulged between actual, seat-of-the-pants books. To E. (for Edgar) L. (for Lawrence) Doctorow's credit, he includes no commencement speeches, letters to the Times, book reviews or similar lint balls in this between-books collection. Instead, the author of Ragtime and Loon Lake offers six short stories, impeccably done, rather academic, mostly forgettable, and one 65-page mishmash called, for want of an accurate tag, a novella. The mishmash, surprisingly enough, is a delight, largely because it knits up all that has gone before.
The odd arrangement of the book suggests that Doctorow is not altogether happy with the stories. The first, an agreeable family anecdote about a secret kept from an old lady in a nursing home, could be told as a one-paragraph joke. But the third is a small marvel, a conventional short story that works, and the only one of the six whose vibrations resonate after the last page is turned. A boy sees his mother making love with his tutor. The child cannot prevent himself from telling the dreadful secret to his father. The narrator, who was the boy, relates his turmoil in a way that seems resigned and detached, and then adds two sentences that haunt the mind with the littleness of private tragedy: "This was in Galicia in the year 1910. All of it was to be destroyed anyway, even without me."
Of the other stories in the collection, two are standard imponderables, vaguely suggesting those irritating fictional non sequiturs of Donald Barthelme that prove without effort that the world is a strange place. The last short piece is called The Leather Man, after a strange tramp who wandered southern New England in the 19th century, insulated from the world by an outer leather armor he had devised. It is an awkward tale that works only intellectually, as an argument the author is having with himself. Is it possible that a life can be understood only when one has deliberately estranged oneself from it, turned oneself into an outsider, a leather man?