The Time Travels Of E.L. Doctorow

His latest, "The March," is an account of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's ruthless slog through the South as the Union razed parts of Georgia and South Carolina to break resistance and end the Civil War. It's a sprawling story -- Doctorow calls it "my Russian novel" because it weaves together so many lives -- and a departure for an author who has focused mainly on New York in the early 20th century. But Sherman and the destructive swath he burned into the ground seemed irresistible.

"He was a brilliant man, a complex man," Doctorow says, sipping a cup of decaf. "The march justified him as a military man, but he had a great deal of guilt about it, and when the war was over he immediately left his troops and went down to do rescue-and-recovery operations. He wanted to rehabilitate the people he'd been destroying and dispossessing."

Doctorow speaks softly and methodically, and has the air of a guy who will indulge your curiosity on a time-limited basis. ("Shall we get down to business?" he asks soon after the opening pleasantries.) He looks eager to return to whatever had his attention before he started publicity rounds for "The March." He is pensive, a bit mischievous and very tweedy, and you can tell there are layers to the man that he isn't going to reveal.

What he gives you is the occasional grin that has a hint of the wry and devious about it. He pauses at length to compose his thoughts, staring into middle distance as though readying a second draft of his next sentence. His characters, you can't help but notice, are vastly more colorful than he is, or at least the version of himself that he presents over this particular cup of coffee. He comes across as refined and somewhat aloof.

"He's a very shy and very private person, but I wouldn't take that as a sign of weakness," says Sidney Lumet, director of "Network" and "Twelve Angry Men," who collaborated with Doctorow on the screen version of "The Book of Daniel."

"He is not a gentle man. He only seems gentle."

Mysterious Muse

The spark for Doctorow's novels comes from places that are mysterious to him. For "The March," it was an image on a Smithsonian Web site of a Civil War photographer. That led him back to a book he'd read about Sherman 20 years earlier, by the historian Joseph T. Glatthaar.

"Somehow I found myself starting to write and these people appeared to me with no effort on my part," he says. "Why someone says something instead of another thing, who is this person -- I don't know. It just sort of happens. You don't write with a sense of possession. You write with a sense of discovery."

What he discovered in "The March" was a way to turn Sherman's army into a living and lethal animal, a catalyst for history that doubles as a monstrosity with a heartbeat and an appetite. As the army threshes its way through woods and towns and civilians, a surgeon in the novel elaborates on the analogy for a disconsolate Southerner named Emily Thompson:

"Imagine a great segmented body moving in contractions and dilations at a rate of twelve or fifteen miles a day, a creature of a thousand feet. It is tubular in its being and tentacled to the roads and bridges over which it travels. It sends out as antenna its men on horses. It consumes everything in its path."

Sherman hovers over the action, a tortured man who can't sleep and who worries that "victory is a shadowed, ambiguous thing." The general, in a closing reverie, imagines that Southerners will cling to a sense of aggrievement that "will empower them for a century," words intended to be prophetic.

"Think about the history of black people after that war," says Doctorow. "How Reconstruction was sabotaged -- segregation, poll taxes and lynchings -- right up on to the civil rights liberations of the '60s. Reagan and Nixon and the Bushes using subtle race messages to capture the white South. You could make the case that the South won the war."