Riding the Yellow Trolley Car: Selected Nonfiction

by William Kennedy

  No matter what it was in town, wherever you could make an illegal dollar, that’s where the Irish were, that’s where the politics were, that’s where the church was, that’s where the morality was. And it was all fused. You couldn’t separate it because the families were so interlocked, and the goodness walked hand-in-hand with the evil. But it wasn’t viewed as evil. It was viewed as a way to get on in the world. Objective morality didn’t interest Albany. The Irish didn’t care about it. They understood that they had been deprived and now they were not. Now they were able to get jobs. In the previous era, when the Irish were not in power, they had not been able to get jobs. Their families were starving, and starvation for them was immorality. So once they took power, O’Connell became kind of a saint. He became the man who would save your soul by putting you to work.

  QUINN: Was he a Robin Hood?

  KENNEDY: Of course he was a Robin Hood. Of course he was also a rascal. I don’t know what the original Robin Hood was like. Maybe he has been romanticized out of existence, but there’s no question that Dan O’Connell as we knew him was a Robin Hood. He certainly gave away a lot of money.

  Nobody really knows how much he died with. What came out in the papers was ridiculous. A quarter of a million or so. But they would spend $200,000 in five-dollar bills every election day. He was raking it in from all quarters. All the beer drinkers in the county were adding to the party’s profits, and Dan O’Connell controlled the beer. Thousands and thousands of fortunes were made in this town through politics.

  QUINN: Politics was the Irish stock market?

  KENNEDY: Yes, the Irish stock market. I never thought of that. That’s a great phrase. You’ve invented something.

  QUINN: Politics, then, is one of the common threads among the American-Irish? If anything united them, it was that. In Kansas City, Boston, Albany, New York, always the same story.

  KENNEDY: What else could they do? They could have done other things if they had the education, but they didn’t. They were the people of numbers. That was the important thing about them. They were not the people of knowledge, the people with connections to power, the people of Harvard and Wall Street. What they knew was politics. What they knew was the church. What they knew was their Irishness. What they knew was clannishness. The network was a great strength. It let Dan O’Connell hold on to the allegiance of the masses. In the face of the most vile declarations by enemies, in the face of the obvious stealing that was going on, and despite the slimy meat and the whorehouses, Dan went on and on and on.

  QUINN: Albany is more than a setting for your novels. It becomes kind of a character. But do you think of yourself as a regional writer in the way that Flannery O’Connor thought of herself as a Southern writer?

  KENNEDY: Yes and no. All regional writers are trying to capture the uniqueness of their region, obviously. And most writers who use regions are trying for universality, to speak to life outside the region. It depends, I suspect, on how well you are able to make your cosmos, however small—Milledgeville, Georgia, or Albany, New York, or Dublin, or the Pequod—become a center of vitality, a center of ubiquity, a center of spiritual life that will transcend any kind of limitation that geography imposes. If you never find that center, all you’re doing is floating free. Until you have a Milledgeville, or unless you’re a genius like Beckett, you can’t coalesce your meaning. Creating life in an abstract place—that’s very hard to do, you have to really have genius.

  QUINN: Do you think you could move to a place, let’s say to Scarsdale, stay there for two years, study the place, become familiar with its characters, and then create the same sort of magic that you’ve done with Albany?

  KENNEDY: I don’t think so. I would probably begin to impose my knowledge of Albany on Scarsdale. I tried to do that in Puerto Rico, and I couldn’t do it. I didn’t understand Puerto Rico that well. In those days, I could write about Puerto Rico as a reporter, but I didn’t really understand the dynamics of the place, what was going on in the soul of Puerto Rico, in the soul of San Juan. When you don’t have that, you don’t have anything, as far as I’m concerned. You can do all the navel-gazing you want and until it’s centered on a place, it seems to me that it’s a vagrant pursuit, a Sunday afternoon in the park, or with the soap operas. It’s an absence of significance. If you don’t have the place, you don’t have the dynamics of the society that exists in that place, and they’re very different in Scarsdale from Albany, or San Juan, or Dublin. Georgia is not in any way equivalent to North Albany, where I grew up. No matter how Catholic Flannery O’Connor was, she’s writing about a society where you have peacocks on the front porch, you have blacks and whites with active hostility toward one another, and that’s not where I grew up.

  QUINN: What about Ireland? Does it ever tug on your imagination? Any of the Albany cycle spinning its way back there?

  KENNEDY: I’ve been to Ireland several times. I’ll go again in quest of my ancestors, like so many other Irishmen in this country, to comprehend origin and consequences. But it’s very unlikely that I will ever set a novel in Ireland because I don’t know enough about the places. It’s a foreign country to me. I’ve thought about writing about Ireland, I’ve been to the North, I’ve lived in Dublin, but I feel I don’t know enough about any particular place to give me what I’d need for a novel. I’m thinking seriously about the Irish-American experience, which is not the Irish experience. I feel that I’d be a fraud if I went to Ireland and tried to write significantly about somebody there, when I’m not from there. I’m from Albany.

  I believe that I can’t be anything other than Irish-American. I know there’s a division here, and a good many Irish-Americans believe they are merely American. They’ve lost touch with anything that smacks of Irishness as we used to know it. That’s all right.

  But I think if they set out to discover themselves, to wonder about why they are what they are, then they’ll run into a psychological inheritance that’s even more than psychological, that may also be genetic, or biopsychogenetic, who the hell knows what you call it? But there’s something in us that survives and that’s the result of being Irish, whether from North or South, whether Catholic or Protestant, some element of life, of consciousness, that is different from being Hispanic, or Oriental, or WASP. These traits endure. I’m just exploring what’s survived in my time and place.

  I don’t presume that I could go back in time and find out what was going on in Belfast or Dublin before my own day, to go back as a fiction writer and reconstitute it. For me, it’s a question of imagination. I don’t feel I own those Irish places, but I do own Albany. It’s mine. Nineteenth-century Albany is mine as well. It’s a different time and in many ways a different place from what it is now, but I feel confident I can reach it.

  QUINN: Do you think your fascination with place is particularly Irish?

  KENNEDY: The natural world is always very important to writers. You use it wherever necessary. But it’s not peculiarly Irish to have a sense of a place. For me, fiction exists, finally, in order to describe neither social conditions nor landscapes but human consciousness. Essays, documentary films, editorials in newspapers can persuade you to a political position. But nothing except great fiction can tell you what it means to be alive. Great fiction, great films, great plays, they all center in on consciousness, which always has a uniqueness about it, and that uniqueness is what a writer can give you that nobody else in the world can give you: a sense of having lived in a certain world and understood a certain place, a certain consciousness, a certain destiny, a grand unknown, all the squalor and all the glory of being alive.

  And if you reduce fiction to political or social argument, or to a kind of sociological construct, you lose its real strength. When you think of Chaucer or Boccaccio, you remember the individualistic elements of their characters in the same way you remember the people in, for example, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. They don’t go bad. Great fiction doesn’t go bad.

  QUINN: Do you write with a certain aud
ience in mind? Do you have an ideal reader?

  KENNEDY: You know who I write for? I write for people like me who used to appreciate Damon Runyon sentences. I write for people who appreciate writing first, who understand the difference between an ordinary sentence and a real sentence that jumps off the page at you when you read it.

  I’m working on a preface for a new book about the state capitol. As always when I do research, I read an incredible amount of horseshit that’s been published on the subject. Tons of it. The same old stuff rewritten and rehashed every which way. But every once in a while a historian gets hold of something and creates a real sentence, maybe one in a whole book of essays, but it stops you. You look at it and say, “Terrific sentence.” That’s the reaction I’m looking for.

  QUINN: Does writing—the creation of a “terrific sentence”—ever get easier?

  KENNEDY: Some things get easier. Journalism gets easier. I’m not sure it gets better. Fiction, at least for me, seems to get more complicated. Not that it’s hard to write a sentence or a paragraph, but it’s hard to believe that the current sentence or paragraph is new and that I’m not just saying something that’s been said a hundred times before. Making it new, that’s what’s hard. I don’t expect it will ever get any easier. I’m not counting on it.

  QUINN: Do you ever look back at what you’ve written, and say, “I’ve learned so much since then. I know so much more now”?

  KENNEDY: Yes, absolutely. But it doesn’t mean the writing gets easier just because you know more now.… Because what you have to do now is not repeat yourself, at least try not to repeat yourself. You feel that maybe you’re in better command of the language, of your ability to write a sentence, of your ability to conceptualize, of your ability to create a new character. But the process is problematical. It’s still a great game. That’s what the whole thing is still all about, as far as I’m concerned, what it’s always about: the invention of something out of nothing. That’s the classic definition of what writing is. And I believe this is the whole satisfaction that comes from writing: That you’re able to create something, out of nothing, that seems new to you.

  Maybe you don’t have the same response to it that you had as a kid, when you were discovering these wondrous elements of your unconscious, or your talent, or even the nature of your existence. But at the same time, what I feel about my life is that there are still so many unknowns. When I begin to write, I begin to confront things that I never confronted before. I begin to invent things, willfully going into the unknown. As I face the challenge of an empty page tomorrow morning—and that’s what I live for—what I need to do is discover something that will surprise me, something that I’ve never done before, written before, seen before, heard before.

  It’s not as if you want to write science fiction, or go to another genre or invent another bizarre character. But you must penetrate into something beyond an ordinary story. You start with an ordinary story. You have a man or a woman moving quietly through life. A man and woman in trouble, both of them. And there’s a classical way to create the clichéd situations about how they meet and get back together, or how they stay together for forty years. But you can’t do any of those things. You must do something that you have never done before. And how do we do that? Mostly, it seems to me, through language. It can happen through dialogue—sometimes through language alone. When your language is leading you in, it’s like watching the sea, and the sea is never the same. And it’s never the same sentence. And as long as it isn’t, you’re in good shape. As soon as it becomes the same sentence again, you’re all washed up.

  QUINN: Your next project, besides the new novel, is to write screenplays for Legs, Billy Phelan and Ironweed. Any trepidations? Any fear that Hollywood might hurt your writing?

  KENNEDY: No, I don’t have that kind of conflict. I believe it’s a very rare writer in the twentieth century who can separate himself from films. They’re such an enormous and important part of our imaginative lives. Only hermits haven’t been influenced by them. And I love the movies. I’m glad to be a part of the movies. I don’t confuse them with novels. I don’t see them as competition. I think the novel is far superior to the film because of its complexity. But I think the film can also do many things that engage you in ways that no novel can. You can’t get quite such an exciting vision of womanhood from a book as you can with Garbo or Monroe or Ava Gardner on the screen. When you see these people idealized up there, there’s nothing quite equivalent to it in literature. Literature is an extension of your imagination, but here’s an incomparable illusion of visual reality.

  QUINN: How different is screenwriting from writing a novel?

  KENNEDY: Very different. I’m glad to write the screenplays for the films that are going to be made out of my books since I’ve got some control on each of them. I respect films very much. I think film can be a tremendously exciting medium. It’s been that for me all my life, from the time I was a kid on up to the time I began discovering Ingmar Bergman. The whole idea of the translation of any kind of life into cinema is important, because it’s a medium that reaches so many people. And if you can reach those people with something that’s valuable to you, it’s the same as reaching them with your novel in a certain way.

  QUINN: What do you most want to preserve from your novels when they’re made into films?

  KENNEDY: I’d like to preserve the whole novel, but you can’t. You can’t preserve the language. You can’t preserve the unconscious center of Francis Phelan’s soul as it’s articulated in Ironweed. You’re not going to be able to depict it, except maybe in a fleeting scene or phrase. You’re not going to be able to put that into the movie. One medium is language, the other is the visual. Movies can only do so much. The novel is the supreme form of explaining how it is that any human being exists on this planet, complexly, with a history, with a soul, with a future, with a present, in an environment. You can get some of the environment, you can get a bit of the language, you can get the look of things in the movies. But you only get a small bit of the soul. You can’t get the density of the unconscious, you can’t get the ineffably complex element of what it means to be alive. It’s all but impossible in the movies.

  At their best, movies can only suggest great complexity. John Huston, Orson Welles, Bergman, they’ve done it. They’ve required us to be alert to complexity. But maybe only two percent of the movies ever made have required this of the audience.

  QUINN: A final question. We’ve talked about the “Irish-American experience,” literary and otherwise. I don’t know if we’ve come to any conclusions but, in your opinion, what is it that unites us?

  KENNEDY: What unites us? It’s song, drink, wit, and guilt.

  QUINN: No politics?

  KENNEDY: That’s included in all four.

  1985

  FRAGMENTS OF A TALK WITH THE PARIS REVIEW:

  Ironweed and Style

  INTERVIEWER: Success came to you very late. Ironweed was turned down by thirteen publishing houses. How could a book which won the Pulitzer Prize be turned down by so many publishers?

  KENNEDY: Yes. Thirteen rejections. Remember that character in “Li’l Abner,” Joe Btfsplk, who went around with a cloud over his head? Well, I was the Joe Btfsplk of modern literature for about two years. What happened was that I sold this book, then my editor left publishing; so that threw the ball game into extra innings. They gave me an editor in Georgia and I said, “I don’t want an editor in Georgia; I want an editor in New York.” They didn’t like that. She was a very good editor, but she only came to New York every two months. Georgia is even more remote from the center of literary activity than Albany. She was living on a pecan farm, as I recall. So that got the publisher’s nose out of joint. My agent was not very polite with them and finally we separated. In the meantime, my first editor came back to publishing and, finding that Joe Btfsplk cloud hanging over my head, was not terribly enthusiastic about taking me back. So I went over to Henry Robbins whom I had met at a cocktail party.
Henry at that point was a very hot New York editor. He had just gone over to Dutton. Everybody was flocking to him. He was John Irving’s editor. Joyce Carol Oates moved over there. Doris Grumbach moved in; so did John Gregory Dunne. It looked like Dutton was about to become the Scribners of the new age. So anyway, at the cocktail party he said, “Can I see your book?” And I said, “Of course.” I sent it to him and he wrote me back this wonderful letter saying that he loved the idea of adding me to their list. I picked up the paper a week later and he had just dropped dead in the subway on his way to work. So I then went over to another publisher where a former editor of mine had been; she was somewhat enthusiastic, thought we might be able to make it if there were some changes in the book. And then she was let go. I bounced about nine more times. Then fate intervened in the form of an assignment from Esquire to do an interview with Saul Bellow, who had been a teacher of mine for a semester, in San Juan. He had really encouraged me at a very early age to become a writer. So he took it upon himself—I didn’t urge him, and I was very grateful to him for doing it—to write my former editor at Viking, saying that he didn’t think it was proper for his former publisher to let a writer like Kennedy go begging. Two days later I got a call from Viking saying that they wanted to publish Ironweed and what did I think of the possibility of publishing Legs and Billy Phelan again at the same time.

  INTERVIEWER: How would you assess your development as a stylist?

  KENNEDY: Somewhere back in the late sixties a friend of mine named Gene McGarr—we were sitting in the Lion’s Head in Greenwich Village one afternoon—said to me, “You know, Irishmen are people who sit around trying to say things good.” That is the purest expression of style I’ve ever come across. I remember being enormously impressed by Damon Runyon’s style when I was a kid because it was so unique. It just leaped out at you and said, “Look at me! I’m a style!” And Hemingway had a style. These people were egregiously stylish. Then I read Graham Greene and I couldn’t find a style. I thought, why doesn’t this man have a style? I liked his stories enormously, and his novels, but what was his style? Of course he has an extraordinary style in telling a story, great economy and intelligence. Obviously these were adolescent attitudes toward style, valuing ways of being singular. I admired journalists who had style, Red Smith and Mencken. You wouldn’t mistake their writing, you’d know it right away. What I set out to do very early on, in college, was to mold a style; and then I realized it was an artificial effort. I was either imitating Red Smith or Hemingway, or Runyon, or whomever, and I gave up on it. I realized that was death. Every time I’d reread it, I’d say that’s not you, that’s somebody else. As I went on in journalism I was always trying to say something in a way that was neither clichéd nor banal, that was funny if possible, or dramatic if possible. I began to expand my language: sentences grew more complicated, the words became more arcane. I used the word “eclectic” once in a news story and it came out “electric.” It was a willful strain at being artsy, so I gave that up too. And as soon as I gave up, I wrote the only thing that I could write, which was whatever came to my head in the most natural possible way. And I evolved into whatever it is I’ve become. If I have a style, I don’t know how to evaluate it. I wouldn’t know what to say about my style. I think The Ink Truck is an ambitious book in language. I think certain parts of Legs are also; but Marcus is still telling that story in a fairly offhanded way, using the vernacular in large measure. Billy Phelan goes from being inside Martin Daugherty’s mind, which is an educated mind, to Billy Phelan’s, which is only street smart, and the narration is really only in service of representing those two minds. This was very different from what I came to in Ironweed, where I set out at the beginning to use the best language at my disposal. I thought my third-person voice was me at first, but the more I wrote, the more I realized that the third-person voice was this ineffable level of Francis Phelan’s life, a level he would never get to consciously, but which was there somehow. And that became the style of the telling of the story; and the language became as good as I could make it whenever I felt it was time for those flights of rhetoric up from the sidewalk, out of the gutter. Francis moves in and out of those flights sometimes in the same sentence. A word will change the whole attitude toward what he’s thinking, or talking about, or just intuiting silently. I think that as soon as you abandon your overt efforts at style, that’s where you begin to find your own voice. Then it becomes a matter of editing out what doesn’t belong—a subordinate clause that says, “That’s Kafka,” or “That’s Melville,” whoever it might be. If you don’t get rid of that, every time you reread that sentence you think: petty larceny.