“I don’t think of myself as writing historical novels,” he says, bristling “There is such a genre, of course But I don’t think I participate in it. I have burned his cities, his forges, his armories, his machine shops, his cotton gins. I have eaten out his crops, I have consumed his livestock and appropriated ten thousand of his horses and mules.. And that is not enough for the Secretary of War. I must abase myself to the slaves.”Another American writer might have blanched at the prospect of putting words into the mouth of so storied a historical figure, but not Doctorow. Ever since he published Ragtime, with its historical montage of early 20th-century Manhattan, Doctorow has entered a zone where boundaries don’t seem to exist.

His novels read not like researched books but restored originals, recently rediscovered. The Book of Daniel (1971) revolved around the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage, while Billy Bathgate (1989), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, involved the Jewish gangster Dutch Schultz.Although Doctorow admits that time and its passage has been his key framing device, he has trouble with the term “historical novelist”. “It wasn’t only the troops, but the freed slaves who attached themselves to the columns,” says the novelist. “So their safety and movement came from attaching themselves to the army.

Everything was transformed, including their identities.”This comet trail of slaves hoping to march with Sherman to the Promised Land pushed the general into the role of an emancipator, says Doctorow. He correctly reflects the record by having his Sherman – the fictional one – being none too thrilled about this.”I have marched an army intact for four hundred miles,” says Doctorow’s Sherman in one scene “I have gutted Johnny Reb’s railroads. Comic relief arrives occasionally at the expense of two bumbling soldiers who resemble Rosencrantz and Guilderstern – as Tom Stoppard imagined them.This racial mix seems strange from a contemporary vantage-point, but Doctorow says that the chaos of the movement put the country into a kind of fugue state of devastation, where unusual bargains were made out of necessity. “I was thinking of a certain amount of pressure; if you see 60,000 men tramping across the land, it creates its own weather system.”Caught within this storm are an array of men and women, running for their lives. In addition to Sherman, there is a freed slave masquerading as a white drummer boy, and a doctor who later becomes the first Surgeon General of the United States. “I didn’t think of napalm,” says Doctorow, referring to what the destruction wrought by a column of soldiers a mile wide and several deep might look like.

Asked once by the novelist Russell Banks how much research he did for a novel, he replied: “Just enough.”
And yet to sit with him feels like speaking with someone who stepped out of a time machine from the year 1865, fresh with eye-witness accounts. “But he didn’t invent the idea of total war; that is, living off the land and pillaging That was actually done in Mississippi by Grant. But Sherman made it epic in size.”Doctorow knows this because he reads history, but he is not what they call a civil war buff. In fact, as with his other novels about history, from Billy Bathgate to Ragtime, he composed The March in an improvisational style and did the research later. It tracks the Union army’s march of destruction from Atlanta to the Carolinas in 1865. “The march was actually Sherman’s idea,” says Doctorow, making a typical interjection – not so much to elucidate as to correct the record.