Riding the Yellow Trolley Car: Selected Nonfiction

by William Kennedy

  INTERVIEWER: The first chapter of Ironweed sets the tone for the rest of the book by showing us Francis Phelan through the eyes of the dead, and through his own encounters in memory with the ghosts from his past, with many shifts back and forth in time. The first chapter has a literary magic about it that persists throughout the book and makes the book work in a unique way—but I wonder if you encountered any editorial resistance to the narrative technique when you took Ironweed to publishers.

  KENNEDY: Considerable. There was one editor who said it was not credible to write this kind of a story and put those kinds of thoughts into Francis Phelan’s mind, because no bum thinks that way. That’s so abjectly ignorant of human behavior that it really needs no comment except that Congress should enact a law prohibiting that man from being an editor. I also sent the first few chapters to The New Yorker and an editor over there said it was a conventional story about an Irish drunk and they’d had enough of that sort of thing in the past, and they wished me well and thought it was quite well done, and so on. That seemed very wrongheaded. It’s hardly a conventional story about an Irish drunk when he’s talking to the dead, when he’s on an odyssey of such dimensions as Francis is on. I’d never read a book like it, and it seems to me that that’s a comment I hear again and again. But again, you have to put up with editors who don’t know what they’re reading. One editor said there were too many bums in the book and I should get rid of some. And a friend of mine said, “I understand, I love this chapter, but there’s an awful lot of negative things in it, there’s vomit and a lot of death and violence and there’s a lot of sadness, you know, and it’s such a downbeat chapter that editors won’t want to buy it. Maybe you should alter it to get the editors past the first chapter.” Well, there was no way I could take his advice; I had written the book, and it was either going to stand or fall on what it was. I also felt that there was no real merit in the advice, although it was an astute observation about the way some editors are incapable of judging serious literature seriously. There were also people who just said, “I don’t like it.” Somebody said, “I could never sell it.” Somebody else said, “It’s a wonderful book, nobody’s ever written anything better about this subject than you have, but I can’t add another book to my list that won’t make any money.” These were more mundane, these were money considerations, but I think those other, more pretentious rejections had the same basis; they just didn’t believe a book about bums was ever going to make it in the marketplace, but they didn’t dare say so out loud. It’s not simply a book about bums, you know, but that’s the way it was perceived. I got a letter from Pat Moynihan after I won the Pulitzer and a story had come out on the AP wire, describing Ironweed as a book about a baseball player who turns out to be a murderer. Moynihan quoted that back to me in the letter, and he said, “Perhaps you will have a better understanding of what we poor politicians are up against.”

  INTERVIEWER: The most prominent characters in your novels are seekers after a truth or meaning or experience beyond the repetitive patterns of daily life. Do you find that your own worldview changes as a result of creating these characters and moving them through a series of life experiences?

  KENNEDY: I think that my worldview changes as I write the book. It’s a discovery. The only thing that’s really interesting to me is when I surprise myself. It’s boring to write things when you know exactly what’s going to happen. That’s why language was so important to me in journalism. It was the only way you could heighten the drama, or make it funny, or surprising. In Legs I was endlessly fascinated to learn how we look at gangsters. I discovered what I thought about mysticism and coincidence when I wrote Billy. I feel that Ironweed gave me a chance to think about a world most people find worthless. Actually, anybody who doesn’t have an idea about what it is to be homeless, or on the road, or lost and without a family, really hasn’t thought very much at all. Even though I’d written about this, the small details of that life weren’t instantly available to my imagination until I began to think seriously about what it means to sleep in the weeds on a winter night, then wake up frozen to the sidewalk. Such an education becomes part of your ongoing frame of reference in the universe. And if you don’t develop Alzheimer’s disease or a wet brain, you might go on to write better books. I think that some writers, after an early peaking, go into decline. Fitzgerald seems to me a good example of that. He was writing an interesting book at the end of his life, The Last Tycoon, but I don’t think it would have been up to his achievement in Gatsby or Tender Is the Night. But if you don’t die, and you’re able to sustain your seriousness, I don’t think there’s any rule that you can’t supersede your own early work. I remember an essay by Thomas Mann about Theodor Fontane, the prolific German novelist who believed he was all done somewhere around the age of thirty-nine. But he lived to be a very old man, and published his masterpiece, Effi Briest, at age seventy-six. I believe in the capacity of the imagination to mature and I am fond of insisting that I’m not in decline, that the next book is going to be better than the last. It may or may not be, but I have no doubt I know more about how to write a novel, more about what it means to be alive, than I ever have. Whether another dimension of my being has faded, and will refuse to fire my brain into some galvanic achievement, I can’t say. We may know more about this when the next book is published.

  INTERVIEWER: You said before that you don’t write novels to make money. Why do you write novels?

  KENNEDY: I remember in 1957 I was reading in Time magazine about Jack Kerouac’s success with On the Road. I felt I wasn’t saying what I wanted to say in journalism, wasn’t saying it in the short stories I’d been writing either. I had no compelling vision of anything, yet I knew the only way I would ever get it would be to give my imagination the time and space to spread out, to look at things in the round. I also felt that not only did I want to write one novel, I wanted to write a series of novels that would interrelate. I didn’t know how, but this is a very old feeling with me. I came across a note the other day that I wrote to myself about “the big Albany novel.” This was way back, I can’t even remember when—long before I wrote Legs, even before The Ink Truck. It had to be in the middle sixties. It was a consequence of my early confrontation with the history of Albany when I did a series of articles on the city’s neighborhoods in 1963 and 1964. I began to see how long and significant a history we had had, and as I moved along as a part-timer at the Times-Union, writing about blacks and civil rights and radicals, I began to see the broad dimension of the city, the interrelation of the ethnic groups. The politics were just incredible—boss machine politics, the most successful in the history of the country in terms of longevity. And I realized I could never tell it all in one book.

  INTERVIEWER: Is this enormous sort of Yoknapatawpha County in your mind? Do the characters emerge as you think about them? You give the picture of being able to dip into this extraordinary civilization.

  KENNEDY: Every time out it’s different, but one of the staples is the sense that I have a column of time to work with; for example a political novel that could move from about 1918 to maybe 1930; and in there is a focal point on a character, probably the political boss. But that’s not always enough, having a character. I once wrote a novel’s worth of notes about three characters and I couldn’t write the first sentence of the book. It was all dead in the water. There has to be a coalescence of influences that ignite and become viable as a story.

  INTERVIEWER: What do you think the ignition thing is? It’s rather frightening that you work on these things and do not know whether it’s going to come together. How do you know?

  KENNEDY: You don’t. It’s an act of faith.

  INTERVIEWER: What is the feeling when you’re done with a book?

  KENNEDY: I remember the day I finished Ironweed. I came down and I said, “I’m finished.” My wife was there and so was Ruth Tarson, one of my good friends; they had read most of the book along the way and they sat down and read the ending. Somehow they didn’t
respond the way I wanted them to respond. I was thinking of an abstract reader who would say what every writer wants you to say to him: “This is the best thing I ever read in my life.” I knew something was wrong, though I didn’t know what; I knew the elements of the ending should be very powerful. I thought about it and their lack of proper response. After dinner I went back upstairs and rewrote the ending, adding a page and a half. I brought that down and then they said, “This is the best thing I’ve ever read in my life.”

  —Douglas R. Allen

  Mona Simpson

  1989

  AN ARGUMENT:

  Rejection and Henry James

  (Ironweed award speech to National Book Critics Circle)

  I am now as much awash in critical magnanimity as I was bathed two years ago in insolvent obscurity. The nature of this new status is extreme pleasure, but also part of it is residual bewilderment at the causes of the previous condition. I was once deeply resentful at the rejection of Ironweed—it was rejected thirteen times—but of course I am slowly coming out of that. As Ironweed’s hero, Francis Phelan, says to the ghost of the man who had tried to cut off his feet with a meat cleaver, “I don’t hold no grudges more’n five years.”

  It is the substance of the rejections that is disconcerting; and that substance is twofold. First: My immediately previous novel, Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, was not only not a best-seller, it was a worst-seller. Was the book’s lack of sales the author’s fault? Well, I must have had something to do with it, but I won’t take full blame. Yet its failure to galvanize the American imagination in 1978 dogged my future. The line I heard most frequently was that publishers would rather take the risk on a first novelist than on a fourth novelist with a bleak track record. I hardly think this the received wisdom of the ages—to reward the apprentice at the expense of the journeyman. Literature, I suggest, deserves a different ordering of values. Scott Fitzgerald’s line that there are no second acts in American lives was the sad, solipsistic truth about that wonderful writer’s self-destructive career; but for those who take this as wisdom it can be a pernicious fallacy.

  Innumerable case histories illuminate my point, but I will focus only on Henry James, an optimist. After early success his popularity plummeted, but not his self-esteem. “I am in full possession of accumulated resources,” he wrote in 1891. “I have only to use them, to insist, to persist, to do something more—to do much more—than I have done …”

  He went on to seek fame in another direction, the theater, and poured his soul into the creation of a play, which proved to be an abysmal failure. He had already published forty books. And then, in the depths of his failure as a playwright, and at the age of fifty-one, he wrote: “I take up my own old pen again—the pen of all my unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles.… Large and full and high the future still opens. It is now indeed that I may do the work of my life.” He went on to publish thirty-five more volumes, including his masterworks.

  The second element of Ironweed rejections concerned subject matter more than economics. “Too many bums in this book,” I was told. “Who wants to read about bums, and especially bums in Albany?” I again invoke Henry James, who wrote: “… we of course never play the fair critical game with an author, never get into relation with him at all, unless we grant him his postulates. His subject is what is given him—given him by influences, by a process, with which we have nothing to do.…” James argues that only the author’s treatment of those postulates should be the subject of critical concern.

  James (and if I may impose a parenthesis, he emerged into the light from an old Albany family), writing also of Ivan Turgenev’s concern with the poor and the grotesque, said that the Russian viewed fictional character “through a broken windowpane.” He added that one might collect from Turgenev’s tales a “perfect regiment of incapables, of the stragglers on life’s march,” and spoke of such writers as explorers of “the great grimy condition.”

  My story of the straggler Francis Phelan was an effort to bring news of that condition, on down to the ninth circle of Francis’s grimy soul.

  These two rejective arguments against my novel have their own modern logic. I rebut them tonight, not on my own behalf—my life at this moment has transcended complaint—but on behalf of the numerous novelists whose work has been relegated to limbo, or worse, by prevailing editorial judgment. And the happy fate of Ironweed suggests that this judgment may, at times, be flawed. I proselytize, therefore, not only for a more open-minded attitude toward seasoned writers of talent, goodwill, and rotten luck, but also for a more recalcitrant attitude by those writers in the face of what people say is the inevitable.

  I was enormously saddened recently to see the death of the word predicted by one of my heroes, Joseph Campbell. Literature is folding, is what he said—moving over into the visual field. I hope he will forgive my reluctance to accept his prediction. I am simply not ready to believe that we are done with storytelling and that all we will get hereafter are dancing images. In the beginning, another writer once said, the word was God. I think this is the motto writers ought to live by.

  Invocation of the divine word also brings with it the notion of immutability; and perhaps it is true that there does come a time when acceptance has to set in; when we must bow before the inevitable. I recall an instance of this which is worthy of reflection. It took place in Albany during a conversation between the mayor and a party official who was trying to get a job for a fellow in his ward. The mayor was the late Erastus Corning, Albany’s mayor for forty-two consecutive years, and also, at this point, the town’s supreme Democratic party boss.

  At any rate, the mayor listened and finally said, “No, no job. That fellow used to be a Republican.”

  “Yes,” said his booster, “that’s true enough. But he quit the Republicans and became a good Democrat. Just think of Mary Magdalene, Mr. Mayor. She was once a great sinner, but the church made her a saint.”

  “Yes,” said the mayor, “but not in her lifetime.”

  1984

  Postscript: I gave this speech in New York to a gathering of editors, critics, and writers, after being introduced at the event by Doris Grumbach, a novelist, biographer, teacher, editor, critic, and person of great substance. For two decades, as literary editor of The New Republic, and as a critic for major literary publications throughout the U.S. thereafter, she was, among other achievements, a champion of young and unheralded fiction writers. She has been a friend of mine for almost three decades, and was my benefactor in too many ways to count here. But this does seem the logical place, this time in print, to express gratitude for what she has done, and love for who she is.

  WINNING THE PULITZER:

  Who Are You Now That You’re Not Nobody?

  I was in Parsons bookstore in Dublin with David Hanly, the Irish novelist and journalist, and an old friend, buying some books by John Banville, another Irish novelist about whom I’d heard good things. One of the proprietors asked would I sign their writers’ book, as Frank O’Connor, John Montague, Paddy Kavanagh and many others had done. I was glad to join such illustrious company and began to write something on a blank page. A young man entered, saw my pile of Banville books, saw me signing and inquired: was I John Banville? I said no, that I was someone else entirely. The young man excused himself but came over to me later and apologized for not knowing me. He had discovered that even though I wasn’t Banville, I was somebody, and therefore: could he have my autograph?