442 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW
zienowski, Joseph Conrad, at the end of Loon Lake. To the question, "Why did you do it?" you replied, "Perhaps to confound the
Ph.D.s." As a follow-up question on Billy Bathgate, the novel, and
"The Songs of Billy Bathgate," is the intertextual connection there to
confound the reader?
DOCTOROW: No, there is no attempt to confound there. I wrote the
story in 1968. It was written in the form of record liner notes. In
those days on record albums the artists would say something about
each song. The idea of the record liner note, of the singer offering an
explication right there on the package, intrigued me. I thought I
could do something with that. Ted Solotaroff published the piece in
New American Review. It's an attempt to deal with the '60s using
two characters roughly equivalent to Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. The
writer-singer whose album notes you're reading is Billy Bathgate. A
few years later I reread the story, and thought it badly needed
editing. I liked the chance I took and the loopiness, but I thought
there was some false poeticism in it and some things that just didn't
come off. I had gone back to it because someone wanted to produce
it as a radio broadcast and to write music to go with the lyrics. They
wanted me to flesh out the lyrics I had written for the songs. I liked
the lyrics, or I did then, probably better than the text. In any event,
one of the things that happens to authors is that they're given to
certain images, settings, even characters that they use over and over
again. As if they carried their own repertory company with them.
One of mine being the old grandma, whom I used in Daniel, whom
I used in World's Fair... the crazy maternal figure who's transformed in Billy Bathgate to his mother. Another image that pops up,
as you know, is the genial neighborhood macrocephalic. Something
about the nature of those images: you don't exorcize them by using
them once. They come back. One of my settings is Bathgate Avenue,
which appears in the story, and again in Daniel, and it may be
mentioned in World's Fair, I'm not sure. When I came to write Billy
Bathgate I used that street again. And whoever Billy was he would
not now celebrate Bathgate Avenue in a song, but he would choose
that name, under the pressure to find an alias, since it came out of
his dream world, of the world of plenty, the street of the riches and
fruits of the earth. But I put together the two names, Billy and
Bathgate, as far apart as they occur in the book. I used Billy the
minute his mother called him Billy, very early, but he isn't Billy
Bathgate until they get up to the country, Onandaga, halfway
