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“E.L. Doctorow: Boy Gangster”

Leonard’s review of Doctorow’s Billy Bathgate (1991). Leonard writes in the essay’s opening paragraph “…Doctorow has added some amazing grace and made a masterwork. Though Billy Bathgate mediates on many matters - mobsters and orphans, East Bronx and the Great depression…'how ritual death tampers with the universe’… -think of it as a fairy tale about capitalism. And color it wonderful.” I think he likes it more than Harlot’s Ghost. He says of Doctorow’s writing, “For Doctorow language is the agency of moral awareness.” High praise.

Here’s a beautiful quote from the book in the words of Bill Bathgate, the protagonist:

I will confess that I have many times …sough to toss all of the numbers up in the air and let them fall back into letters, so that a new book should emerge, in a new language of being…It was what Mr. Berman [Otto “Abbadabba” Berman, Dutch Schultz’s accountant] said might someday come to pass, the perverse proposition of a numbers man, to throw them away and their imagery, the cuneiform, the hieroglyphic, the calculus, and the speed of light, the whole numbers and fractions for the infinite and the numbers of nothing.

New word: vigorish = (for short “the vig”) is a Yiddish term for the interest a bookkeeper charges. Derives from the Russian word for “winnings”: выигрыш.

New learning: William S. Burroughs wrote a screenplay called The Last Words of Dutch Schultz based on the fever addled last words of the gangster after being shot in the men’s room of a Newark, NJ bar. Evidently made into a short film by Dutch director Gerrit van Dijk in 2003. He spoke a lot as he died (and was being questioned by the police). Here’s the actual last of the last words:

I am all through. Can't do another thing. Look out mamma, look out for her. You can't beat him. Police, mamma, Helen, mother, please take me out. I will settle the indictment. Come on, open the soap duckets. The chimney sweeps. Talk to the sword. Shut up, you got a big mouth! Please help me up, Henry. Max, come over here. French-Canadian bean soup. I want to pay. Let them leave me alone.