Joplin's Ghost

 

I thought it would be interesting to follow Ragtime with another book that had Scott Joplin as a touchstone. Tananarive Due published Joplin's Ghost in 2005, thirty years after E. L. Doctorow published Ragtime. She notes in an afterword that the stories a curator of Joplin's house shared with her became the kernel of the book. Due has won the American Book Award and the British Fantasy Award. Like Doctorow, she is a professor. Due, like Joplin, is Black. We have books from different times, different authors, and different genres with one composer and performer as a common element. 

A small detour into titles: Ragtime points at Joplin indirectly, by mentioning the musical style largely associated with him; Joplin's Ghost includes his name, a direct target. 

I'll let you draw any further comparisons yourself. Feel free to look back at the previous First Sentences post. I'm eager to dig into Due's specific words.

Here we have one and possibly two people, a very specific place, two uncommon verbs, and a situation that is curious at minimum and possibly quite ominous. 

First we have the new arrival. He is confined to a wheelchair, yet active enough to move himself. He is in a hospital – not just any hospital – Manhattan State Hospital on Ward Island. Notice the words "State" "Ward" and "day room" – I don't know the history of this specific hospital, but these words suggest confinement, inability to pay bills, and perhaps mental illness. These very exact words tell us that the author has a place in mind – she has done some research and filled out the world of her story. 

Then we have a dead wife. Is a ghost a person? Or could she be a hallucination or delusion? There are already signs the mind of the new arrival may not be clear. The ghost casts his state in further doubt. She walks beside him, in itself a benign activity – but we have trouble trusting the dead when they remain. And "always" also seems worrisome, on second thought. To say you'll stay by someone always is romantic in the abstract – to remain, constantly, beyond death, crosses the line to creepy. 

He whispers to her, as if he has something to hide. 

"Wheeled" is the first uncommon verb. "Whispering" is the second. They share the starting "wh" sound, a poetic touch. Look at the other words that start with "w" – Ward's, wife, walked. Both "wh" and "w" are rich on the lips, and the shared starting consonants – alliteration – ties these two sets of words together. 

For all the new arrival may be the haunted inmate of an asylum, the sentence remains fairly detached. No adjectives or adverbs express emotion or sensation. If the new arrival is afraid, or angry, or chilled, we do not know it. If the day room is gloomy or ominous or seems to press upon the new arrival, that remains unsaid. What's here could be simple facts – the wife is dead, she is always there, the man wheels through this particular room in this particular hospital on this particular island, whispering to her. We are left make our own interpretations of these facts – and left to wonder what will come next. 

Tananarive Due's sentence opens the door on a curious scene. I'm ready to step through into her world. 

Graphic design by Ken Silbert

Ragtime

 

Ragtime won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1975 and E. L. Doctorow continued to receive prestigious awards, up through the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction in 2014. He had the acclaim most writers only dream of. 

What do I see when I look at the very narrow sliver of his work that is the first sentence of Ragtime?

We have a time, a place, and two people. We have strong implications of prestige. We have rhythm choices that echo the music named in the title. Let's take them one at a time. 

1902 is the named time. However, the narrator mentions that "Father built" then – which means we are looking back at 1902, with the house complete and the child of the builder grown enough to look back. We don't yet know how far into the past 1902 is. 

Similarly, we have two people – "Father" and the narrator – one observed, and one observing. 

Every word after "built" adds more dimension to the location. "A house" is broad enough to allow many different buildings. "At the crest of the Broadview Avenue hill" places the house on a commanding rise. Broadview Avenue suggests a wide and stately road. In most cities, the homes with the best views – and the ones displayed by rising on the heights – belong to wealthy citizens. I was not familiar with New Rochelle, New York – but the French ending "-elle" suggests refinement. A quick search shows that in 1902, families from New York were moving there to have more spacious homes. It was an early suburb, and, for people who lived in the area, that flavor of wealth and escape would resonate as reflexively as the knowledge of which are the wealthy areas of one's own town. 

"Father built a house" shows that he had the money and power to make his dwelling to his liking instead of buying someone else's design. Compare this to "Dad bought a home." Doctorow's version is cooler and more formal. Father is more distant than Dad and house is less loving than home. 

Doctorow doesn't need to say "my father was a wealthy man." The details show it. And then we wonder, how does the narrator relate to that father, and what has happened since 1902? The motion of the story begins subtly and slowly. 

Two parts of the rhythm particularly grab my interest. First, I would have put a comma after "1902." Doctorow is adept enough to have put one if he wanted it. Without it, the sentence has less of a break there, and the words roll together until the only comma, after "Rochelle." So we have one long string until "New Rochelle, New York." Prepared by the title of the book, I hear the final two words, "New York," as the final two notes in the iconic phrase of Scott Joplin's ragtime hit, "The Entertainer." The long stretch of words followed by the quick two syllables reflects the rhythm of one of the most likely songs to come to mind when someone hears the word "ragtime." What fun! Joplin wrote "The Entertainer" in 1902. 

Did Doctorow intend that connection? I'm unaware of him having said so, and without his statement, we can only infer his intent. Such puzzles are one of the pleasures of reading – and are also one aspect of more literary writing. Even this one sentence has clues to Doctorow's many awards. 

Thank you to Sasha Eileen Sutton for suggesting the sentence and to Ken Silbert for graphic design.