Haunted by Science E. L. Doctorow The Waterworks. Random House, 253 pages, $23
reviewed by Gerald Weissmann
Il y a à parier que tout idée publique, toute convention recue, est une sottise, car elle convenue au plus grand nombre. It’s safe to bet that every public idea, all conventional wisdom, is foolish because it is acceptable to the mass.
—Chamfort
The French epigraph begins Edgar Allan Poe’s review of Longfellow’s ballads in Graham’s Magazine of March/April 1842. It seems equally appropriate to E. L. Doctorow’s new novella The Waterworks, in which a free-lance writer and critic named Martin Pemberton serves as a stand-in for Poe. The book is set in 1871, twenty-one years after Poe’s death of alcoholism in Baltimore. Pemberton has disappeared from the streets of New York, soon after he had gotten into a literary row with the Brahmins who presided over the Flowering of New England. Pemberton’s editor, McIlvaine, who serves as narrator of The Waterworks, receives a packet of journals from his boss which includes:
… the latest issue of that organ of Brahmin culture, the Atlantic Monthly, [with] an article by no less a personage than Oliver Wendell Holmes. Holmes was railing at certain ignorant New York critics who were not sufficiently in awe of his fellow trinomials of New England literary genius, James Russell Lowell, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Though he didn’t identify the offending critics, it was clear from
