E. L. Doctorow: The long view

There was not much money in the New York household in which E.L. Doctorow was raised, "but there were a lot of books and a good deal of music". His mother, who is represented in lifelike form in Doctorow"s novel-cum-memoir of childhood, World"s Fair (1985), was "a very fine pianist. My father was the proprietor of a music shop on Forty-third Street, where many of the finest performers and musicians of the day would come to shop. He knew the classical repertoire inside out." A baby grand stands in one corner of the living room in the well-appointed apartment Doctorow shares with his wife in mid-town Manhattan, near the East River, but, he says, casting back, "the whole family was greatly relieved when I decided to stop taking piano lessons. I had been torturing everybody." Music remains an important reference in his effort to get words on to the page in fluid, cohesive form. "Somewhere along the line the rhythms and tonalities of music elided in my brain with the sounds that words make and the rhythm that sentences have."

read in The Guardian PWF 1997