Reading groupBooksThe Book of Daniel by EL Doctorow: spies, conspiracy and a clever quest for the truth
Inspired by the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, EL Doctorow’s 1971 novel would prove uncannily perceptive
“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.”
So begins Sylvia Plath’s novel 1963 novel, The Bell Jar. A great opening. Attention-grabbing and wrong-footing in equal measure, it immediately situates the story in the middle of one of the cold war’s most hysterical moments, in the summer of 1953.
Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were killed at sunset on 19 June, 1953. It was their 14th wedding anniversary. A few days earlier, they had said goodbye to their children, Michael and Robert, who were 10 and six. They were young parents. They were people who loved. Their fate was awful.
The narrator of The Bell Jar says: “It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves.”
The narrator of EL Doctorow’s novel, The Book Of Daniel, goes further: “I suppose you think I can’t do the electrocution,” says Daniel. “I will show you that I can do the electrocution.”
Over four of the most painful pages in modern fiction, Daniel describes the execution of his parents. His mother has to enter the room just after it has been cleaned up from her husband’s execution and encounters “the organic smell of his death masked in the ammoniac scent of the cleanser”. She has to sit in the same chair, be restrained with the same straps, endure the same assault of electricity – and go through it again after the first attempt fails. The executioner resets the switch, pulls it down again and blasts more volts into her.
It is an astonishing, terrifying scene, and one that hits all the harder because we know it to have gathered charge in reality. A 1971 New York Times review of The Book of Daniel shrewdly announced that the author had “leaped into the first rank of American writers”. It explained that Doctorow “freely acknowledges the looming presence of the Rosenberg case by building a high-tension bridge between reality and fiction”. We know that Daniel’s parents, called Paul and Rochelle Isaacson, have real counterparts in Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
That brutal scene is uncomfortably close to what we now know about the Rosenbergs’ execution. If you have a strong stomach you can watch footage of a witness describe how Ethel Rosenberg “died a lot harder” than her husband. The first blasts of electricity failed to kill her, just as Doctorow portrayed, and the switch had to be thrown again. The witness saw “a ghastly plume of smoke that rose from her head and went up against the skylight overhead”. There were two more jolts.
Chillingly, in spite of what he had seen, the witness suggests he believes in the justice of her execution. Plenty of his contemporaries agreed with him. “Spies Die in Chair” read one headline. The Rosenbergs had been accused of handing over materials to the Soviets that helped them develop a nuclear bomb. The trial judge said in his summation that as a result they had helped bring about the Korean war. His judgment paved the way for McCarthyism, for more inquests into un-American activities, and for the persecution and humiliation of many innocent people. It was a catastrophe for the American left – and for justice and decency.
But some people disagreed. From the safety of France, Jean-Paul Sartre rained down contempt, calling the trial “a legal lynching which smears with blood a whole nation”.
By the time EL Doctorow was writing The Book of Daniel, Sartre’s view had become more mainstream. The Rosenbergs were a cause célèbre for the left. Plath’s view of the execution – as a moment of national madness – held sway. The electrocuted Rosenbergs were victims of the hysteria and terror that followed Russia’s detonation of a nuclear bomb. They couldn’t have hoped for a fair trial when everyone feared annihilation.
The trial was a farce. The drawings the Rosenbergs supposedly passed on to the Russians were amateur and would have been of no use to nuclear scientists.
Ethel and Julius had been convicted on the evidence of Ethel’s brother, David Greenglass, who said almost half a century later that he had lied. Originally, Greenglass said his wife had helped him with the sketches that were passed to the Soviets. It was only late on that he said Ethel had typed up the notes. She had been prosecuted, it was later revealed, in order to pressurise her husband into confessing his guilt and to make him sing. Then deputy attorney general William P Roger later admitted: “She called our bluff”. Ethel Rosenberg stood by her man and sacrificed her life for … well, what?
This is one of the profound questions that Doctorow plunges into. Why would this apparently innocent woman stubbornly refuse to avoid death, even though it would mean abandoning her children? Rich territory for a novelist as talented as Doctorow, not least thanks to his clever device of using the couple’s child, Daniel, to try to interpret the events – even when Daniel himself doesn’t understand them.
With that strange eye for truth that the best fiction writers sometimes have, Doctorow saw more than almost anyone else at the time. He so inhabited his characters that he was able to view the world through their eyes. He looked beyond the conspiracy and the farce of the trial and discovered an imaginative truth.
Doctorow put forward the idea that the Rosenbergs – or at least Paul/Julius – might have been spies. The trial may have been a setup, but the question of guilt remained complicated. He also suggested that Rochelle/Ethel could have been innocent and died for the sake of her husband and for her stubborn adherence to principle.
Years later, this imaginative truth turned out to correspond with reality. In 1995, two revelations pointed the finger right back at Julius Rosenberg, who by then was widely considered innocent. There was the declassification of a decryption program known as Venona – containing Soviet diplomatic cables, which suggested that Julius was a spy. In the same year, journalist Alexander Vassiliev was given access to KGB archives containing files pointing to the Rosenbergs. Julius, it seems, was the head of a spy ring – even if his wife appeared to have been guiltless.
Doctorow had considered all these possibilities, although he also suggests plenty of other possibilities in the novel. He is too clever a writer to claim to have definitive answers.
It should also be said that the very darkest story potentially belongs to the real world rather than to The Book of Daniel. In the novel, Doctorow has Ethel/Rochelle sacrifice her life with her children for her beliefs. In 2001, Sam Roberts published a book called The Brother about the testimony that put Ethel in the chair. David Greenglass admitted he really had been a spy – and that his wife had helped him with his notes, not Ethel. He also suggested that this wife had been the crux of the whole thing, because she made him change his testimony. He explained: “I told them the story and left her out of it, right? But my wife put her in it. So what am I gonna do, call my wife a liar? My wife is more important to me than my sister. And she was the mother of my children.”
And so his sister, the mother of someone else’s children, had to die. Even EL Doctorow couldn’t envisage that horror.
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