Into the Night

By M.D.

A PEEP INTO THE TWENTIETH CENTURY by Christopher Davis. 200 pages. Harper & Row. $5.95.

THE BOOK OF DANIEL by E.L Doctorow. 303 pages. Random House. $6.95.

These two novels deal seriously with death in the electric chair. Inevitably they inflict a kind of emotional blackmail on the critical faculty. Legalized killing is a cruel and unusual procedure, so that the condemned, whether guilty or innocent, become miserable victims. Under such circumstances, it takes very little skill to arouse pity and terror in the reader.

Christopher Davis, always a painstaking craftsman (Ishmael, Lost Summer), reacts to the situation by underwriting to the point of blandness. His subject is William Kemmler, an ignorant laborer who back in 1889 took a hatchet to his common-law wife when she complained of his sexual inadequacies at the wrong moment.

Guinea Pig. It was emphatically the wrong time for Kemmler, too. Dr. Alphonse David Rockwell was then advancing the notion that electrocution would be a humane method for executing criminals. Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse were noisily disputing the relative merits of direct and alternating current. Kemmler was a convenient guinea pig, and so became the first man ever to be executed by that new scientific wonder, electricity. Calling his hero-victim Rupert Weber to suit his fictional purposes, Davis takes the reader through the last months of Weber's life--his moods and his memories, fears and dreams, and particularly his effect on the prison staff that must deal with him.

Weber is a good character, a laconic man who is, by his lights, both skeptical and ironic. Davis plays him off chiefly against Hannibal Snow, the young prison chaplain, with whom the author is not nearly so successful. Snow is frantic in his efforts to prepare Weber's soul to meet God and increasingly tormented by spiritual doubts of his own. In the end, the condemned man is comforting the minister.

It is a nice turnabout, but sympathizing with Snow's dilemma is difficult. The jacket blurb describes him as "Hawthornesque"; and indeed he is an energetic scruple collector. But unlike Hawthorne's eloquent slaves to conscience, Snow is neither articulate nor even very bright, and finally he saps the novel of the considerable drama it might have had.

No such charge can be brought against Doctorow's bravura effort. The Book of Daniel, transparently based on the Rosenberg case, is a bold novel that, all things considered, is surprisingly successful. Doctorow's biggest gamble was sinking his energies into the Rosenberg case in the first place. Not that successful fiction cannot spring from old newspapers, as Dostoevsky and Dreiser both demonstrated. But the Rosenberg trial was a kind of drawn-out, draining and rather grisly national ordeal.

Wisely, Doctorow almost completely avoids politics, concentrating on the private disaster. A 40-year-old former editor in a New York book-publishing firm, the author has no connection with the Rosenbergs or their two surviving sons. The question that obsesses him is not what the Rosenbergs did, or did not do, or the legality of their execution, but how it must have felt to be a member of that doomed family.

His protagonist is 25-year-old Daniel Lewin, whose parents, Paul and Rochelle Isaacson, were executed for treason. He and his younger sister Susan were adopted by the Lewins, kind, intelligent people who raised them quietly and conventionally. But there is no appeasing outraged memory. In 1967, when he is supposed to be writing a doctoral dissertation, Daniel is actually compiling a bizarre family history: his parents' ordeal, his blasted childhood, Susan's furious, futile rebellions.

Traumatic Memory. In scene after scene, the crowded past spills into the empty present: his parents' rather fierce love, the trauma of their arrest, the long period when the children were boarded in a public home, stealing newspapers for news of the trial, the final family reunions in the death house. Rochelle is the stronger of the parents, a warm, gallant woman. Paul is a tendentious intellectual "who would never believe that America was not the cafeteria at City College."

There is nothing subtle about the book. Every scene is played for maximum impact, culminating in Daniel's imagined re-creation of the execution: "My father snapped back and forth, cracking like a whip. A hideous smell compounded of burning flesh, excrement and urine filled the death chamber." Occasionally Doctorow overdoes his aggressiveness. There are too many stray references to "volts" and "currents," too many gory inserts about earlier methods of execution. Both detract from the starkness of the tragedy. But these are quibbles. Doctorow has produced a relatively rare commodity: a serious novel on a distasteful subject that succeeds out of energy, conviction and an old-fashioned respect for drama.

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