My new book – the Age of Ragtime
A writer, in finishing a piece of work, is sometimes seized with an overpowering desire to never again look on the words that have consumed weeks, months or years of attention and emotion.
Paragraphs that once gleamed as pearls seem dull and uninteresting. Deductions arrived at after hours of research are no longer novel or inspiring. The whole subject has acquired a doubtful legitimacy.
The feeling diminishes when the manuscript proofs arrive. You set to work to correct minor errors, fix up disjointed sentences, and perhaps squeeze in a new thought here or there where space permits.
Then the day comes when the finished product is in your hands. The book has arrived from your publisher. You see the whole work in a new perspective.
In my case, a carton filled with copies of my new book, Scott Joplin and the Age of Ragtime, stared up at me from the floor of my front porch when I happened to pass by the front door. The courier hadn’t bothered to ring. But I knew by the shipping label what the package contained.
I suspect that no matter how many books a writer may publish, one always hesitates to open the first copy of a new work. Most writers are insecure, at best. Maybe it’s all a mess. Perhaps it should never have been published.
My new book had a fairly long gestation. I’d been interested in the early years of the 20th century, leading up to the First World War. They set a pattern for our lifetimes. I thought about how one could select a single year from that time and reflect on what it means for our generation. That’s what Margaret Macmillan did with Paris 1919
Here I have to give Garth Drabinsky some credit. I watched his stage version of E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime from an almost front row seat in New York. It captivated me, and got me interested in Ragtime as a motif for that era. I had the peg, the angle I’d been looking for.
In the preface to my book, I say that I wrote it to bring together the colorful story of Ragtime and its preeminent composer, Scott Joplin, with an account of the remarkable burst of creativity that brought on modern music, culture, and technology at the start of the 20th century.
Holding the book in my hands, I realized what a wide range of material I’d been dealing with.
I managed to turn up new information on the tragic life of Scott Joplin. I also made a point of weaving in sketches of artists, writers, politicians, athletes and businessmen who made their contributions to the Ragtime era.
People like Louis Armstrong, Irving Berlin, Andrew Carnegie, Charlie Chaplin, Joseph Conrad, W.C. Handy, Jack Johnson, Jack London, Evelyn Nesbit, Mary Pickford, Frederic Remington, Teddy Roosevelt.
They all helped shape an era that’s left a legacy which has influenced art, culture and science ever since.
And I found a surprisngly large amount of Canadian material. As my book was taken by an American publisher, McFarland, I’m pleased to have this Canadian content in a work that is international in scope.
“The journey,” I wrote, “that began in the twilight past will go on and our dreams will endure into the future. Whether we realize it or not, we’re all still playing Ragtime.”
If you’re interested in ordering a copy, you can do so here and here.
