Riding the Yellow Trolley Car: Selected Nonfiction

by William Kennedy

  The end of anonymity, even in Ireland, is pleasant enough, but it raises the new issue that the anecdote illustrates: who are you, now that you’re not nobody? Prizes have come to me and to my work during the past two years, my books have been received with inordinate goodwill in this country and abroad, and even strangers seem to know me. In Central Park I was sitting for a photographer when a jogger passed by, called me by name and gave me a thumbs-up gesture. Very sweet. Very different from a few years back when only my children recognized me (and sometimes even they weren’t sure who I had become) and the bank knew me only because of the absence of my mortgage payment.

  There is money on the table now and so the mortgage department recognizes me from the photo on my book jacket. People want to give me loans and bond deals and credit cards, I am a friend of lawyers and brokers, and to certain charitable and cultural organizations I look like an annuity.

  As a teacher it was beyond expectation that I would ever do much more than survive at subsistence level. I own only a bachelor’s degree (at twenty-one I couldn’t abide another lecture). Now invitations come in, five a day, to write, speak, teach or, when May comes, just to stand still and shimmer in the baccalaureated afternoon. I remember when all I wanted to do was make a few dollars to live on and talk literature to bright students. Now movies are there to write if I want that. People want me to write a play, a musical, a documentary film, a TV series, a history of their family, the story of their lives. Magazines want me to write about movies, books, the blues, baseball or myself.

  It took me two weeks to work up this piece simply because I resisted yet another session of self-analysis. I succeeded finally because a friend raised a question worth pondering: “You seem to be becoming all the things you fantasized about in the lean years. So, what now? What do you do when you can do anything at all?”

  We were in a taxi in Barcelona, near La Rambla. My wife, Dana, and I were in search of what in 1972 Gabriel García Márquez had called “the best secret restaurant in Barcelona.” The month was October and we were at the end of a tour of six countries where my novel Ironweed was being published. Again García Márquez was in town, but not with us at this moment, which was why we were lost. We resorted to a map and saw the restaurant was near. I paid the driver, and we set off on foot to have dinner, perhaps another spectacular perdiz—partridge—as we’d had twelve years ago.

  But our restaurant was elusive. The light worsened, the mood altered. I stopped a young couple and was asking directions when I heard Dana yell and I turned to see a youth in a white windbreaker yanking down on her shoulder bag. With one long double-handed stroke he broke the strap, tucked the purse under his arm and ran. I gave chase, yelling clichés in two languages: stop thief, policia, etc., seeing the distance between us widen as we ran uphill on the crooked street. I thought of Dana behind me, alone, and I slowed as the thief turned a corner. Would I tackle him? Wrestle the purse from him? Would he have a knife?

  Suddenly I was at an intersection of three streets, hearing no footfalls, only silence, and the darkness deeper than ever. I went back to Dana, who had been reliving Nicolas Roeg’s film Don’t Look Now, in which a bereaved father believes he sees his drowned daughter running in the street, chases her, catches up and discovers the figure is a dwarf, who stabs and kills him. When I told our story, my Spanish publicist observed that if I’d been stabbed it would have been very good for the sales of my book.

  The neighborhood of the theft had changed since 1972, when I’d relished its vitality at all hours, its exuberance with crowds and flowers and bookstalls on Barcelona’s annual Day of the Book. This time we were warned against going there at night, but we didn’t pay attention. After the theft I saw La Rambla for what it had become: an arena of drugs and raffish lowlife where even taxi drivers fear the violence. Franco is gone and the repression has lifted. Barcelona now spawns the free enterprise of the underworld. “A problem of the democracies,” García Márquez explained to us.

  We never got to his secret restaurant. The thief stole not only Dana’s history—address book, notes, receipts—but also our airline tickets home. At the police station, a dismal, decaying building whose walls reeked of fascist memory, a genial policeman told us that thoughtful thieves sometimes took only the money and dropped the purse into a mailbox.

  And the purse was returned the next day, all money, traveler’s checks, papers and passport gone, but the tickets intact, that much of the future restored. We ate a late supper at our hotel after the theft. I had a hamburguesa instead of perdiz, the price of being willfully ignorant of the dangerous unknown.

  The first stop on our tour had been Stockholm. My Swedish publisher, Lars Grahn, had come to Albany earlier in the year and marched in the North Albany Saint Patrick’s Day parade with me, and later that evening we formally made him an honorary Albany Irishman. I talked to Lars about Ingmar Bergman and how he had transformed my vision of life and film after I saw a double bill of Wild Strawberries and The Magician in the 1950s. I’ve seen almost all of Bergman’s films since then, some of them six and seven times, and for me he is the grand maestro. Lars said he would try to arrange a meeting with Bergman for me, an event about which I used to fantasize.

  Now here we were, Lars and Dana and I, at the Royal Dramatic Theater, where Bergman was to have an open rehearsal of his production of King Lear, a day away from opening night of the play’s second season. Bergman had sent word he would meet us, and we were escorted into the actors’ lounge. In he came in corduroy pants, green shirt, V-neck sweater, tan windbreaker, his glasses on a string around his neck, his gray hair sticking out over his ears, his smile broad and welcoming. He kissed Dana’s hand.

  My first question to him was, would he make another film? Please, would he make another film? I will save his answer for the moment, but let me say we went on to talk for an hour about film and theater and how he is terrified by the light and noise of New York City and how he is “interested only in the faces” in his films now. He spoke of the muscles around the mouth and how important they are in the filming of speech. Dubbed films are unwatchable to him because of the way the dubbing distorts faces.

  He was interested in my involvement with Francis Coppola’s Cotton Club. He said he did not know Coppola personally but loved his cinematography. “Send him my admiration and love,” Bergman said. “I love what he does with film.”

  He was also interested in my own love of film. I told him that, like him, I owned a projector when I was a child, a 16mm Excel that still lights up but will not run. He wanted to know how success had affected me. I don’t remember what I said in reply. Probably I said what I usually say: that I am trying to avoid substantial change, that the past was valuable and I want to perpetuate some of it, that I will continue to write novels, and an occasional film, perhaps; that I am too old to be undone by sudden attention, that I love the recognition of the work. But even as I was speaking I was struck that this supreme icon of the modern cinema saw no need to keep the focus on himself, an unlikely development in the ego city most icons inhabit.

  What I took away from the conversation was not only a personal exhilaration, as well as his invitation to attend one of the great theatrical experiences of my life, his Lear, but also the sadness of confronting the mortality of art. For what he said was that he will not make another film; that Fanny and Alexander was, truly, his last; for he is weary. “You must be at your peak, always,” he said, “in order to make only three minutes of film a day. You must do this no matter what happens, even if you have the flu.”

  Now he wants to direct works of theater and make an occasional chamber film, such as After the Rehearsal, his most recent, made for TV. “That is somebody else’s production problem,” he said. “If it isn’t ready this week, you can rehearse another week and open when it’s better.” He said he wants his work to disappear. He knows the plays he directs will disappear and he wishes it could be that way with film. “But unfortunately the film remains.

  “Y
ou do theater,” he said, “and then it’s gone, and only the memory remains with you.” He gestured to an image on an imagined stage, then to the internalizing of that image, striking his stomach.

  Bergman’s vision seems to conflict with that of Faulkner, who said the writer wants to scrawl his name on the cave wall, “Kilroy was here.” I think Faulkner was accurate about the writer at a certain stage of life, but as the writer matures, grows impatient with any buffoonery having to do with immortality, he passes into a Bergmanesque realism, which is a profound sadness.

  I’m sometimes asked whether the good fortune that has come to me will be reflected in my work. Will I, in short, now write stories that end happily? The question is apparently fatuous but has some import. For there is a danger in being seduced by opportunity after long isolation; a hedonistic response to psychic hunger is as perilous as giving knee-jerk chase to a thief down a blind alley. Some writers go silent after success, or they explode with pomposity, or they squander their spiritual capital and shrivel. Success was such a diabolical burden to Thomas Heggen and Ross Lockridge that they took their own lives.

  Fantasies are realizable. My visit with Bergman, indeed my whole present condition, corroborates this. But there are also fantasies, born of anxiety, that become visible in nightmares; and these, too, are out there waiting to become flesh.

  Bergman stood and we shook hands in farewell. He said he had to tend to a crying actress. “I must hold her hand,” he said. We left the theater and walked in the sweet Swedish rain, and I entered then a still point that even now endures—a moment in which the restless spirit, the consciousness glutted with actualized dream, and the sagely aggressive oversoul are all harmonious in the advice they offer up: Don’t make a move. Tread softly. The next life you save may be your own.

  1985

  PART TWO

  Examining Writers: Some Interviews and Essays

  A WEEK WITH THE VERBIVOROUS JOYCEANS:

  The Quest for Heliotrope

  The airline clerk refused to cash my check for the price of a round-trip ticket, so I flashed assorted documents confirming I was en route to Dublin in search of James Joyce and literary truth and zap went the money problems. I wondered what the Franciscan who taught me religion and who liked to refer to Joyce as “that pig” would say, now that the drop of his name opened transatlantic corridors to truth-seekers. Here I was, about to join 176 literary scholars, two-thirds of them Americans, at the Fourth International James Joyce Symposium, a week-long revel in Joyce’s real and imaginary worlds.

  Americans have a mystical affinity for Joyce. The headquarters for Joyce scholarship in the world is the James Joyce Quarterly, published at the University of Tulsa, and the Quarterly’s advisory editors and consultants also interlock with the directorate of the more international James Joyce Foundation, which runs the biennial symposium.

  The Quarterly recently printed a checklist of work about Joyce that had been published during 1970. This included 155 books, articles, or complete issues of magazines, with American scholarship dominating numerically.

  An often-heard view is that the Irish have a greater awareness of Joyce today, principally because of the first two Joyce symposia, held in Dublin in 1967 and 1969. (The third was in Trieste in 1971; Joyce lived there for a time.) Irish newspapers covered those first symposia’s lectures and discussions at unusual length and to the astonishment of many Dubliners.

  How, they wondered, could this long-dead renegade author of foul-mouthed gibberish dragoon so many otherwise bright Americans into swarming all over the city and all over those filthy books in search of God knows what? The sin of the foreigners, to the Irish, was not only presumption but the reverence with which they treated Joyce. The Irish view their writers more with hostility than solemnity, and Joyceans were as solemn as bloody owls, so went the rumble. The gentlest comment I heard about them from an Irishman was that they were “an affectionate joke” to the Irish.

  I had forgotten it, but it was swiftly pointed out to me as the Joyceans gathered at the National Library, that the Gresham Hotel, where I was staying, was where Gabriel and Gretta Conroy stayed on that immortal evening in “The Dead,” when snow was general all over Ireland. “His own identity,” Joyce wrote of Gabriel in that story, “was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.”

  That world had indeed dissolved, but some of it was coming back to visual life in the library, where an exhibit of photos of Joycean time past was interwoven with some of his manuscripts and memorabilia. Kieran Hickey, who lent the photos and also directed a film, Faithful Departed, which used them and which was about to be shown, wrote in a flyer: “The Dublin through which the young James Joyce walked, that Dublin which he carried with him in his heart, in his mind and in his memory during his long years of exile, no longer exists. The destruction during the past decade of so much of the Victorian city removed most of what remained of the atmosphere of Joyce’s world.”

  Hickey’s film was lovely, a montage of photos of the time between 1880 and 1917, taken by Robert French, a once anonymous, now revered documentarist: O’Connell, and other streets of old, with their horsecars and wagons, men in derbies and boaters, women in shawls and straws, taking their pleasure, going to work, caught and stilled for our eyes.

  “It is difficult now,” Hickey wrote, “to see these fadographs of a yestern scene in anything but Joycean terms.” Jack McGowran, the late actor who popularized Samuel Beckett’s work for Dubliners with his television adaptation of Beckett fragments, narrated and closed Hickey’s film with a line of Leopold Bloom’s at Paddy Dignam’s funeral in Ulysses: “All these here once walked round Dublin. Faithful departed. As you are now so once were we.”

  And so Joyce and Dublin were mutually evoked on a note of sacred humanism. Terence de Vere White, literary editor of The Irish Times, spoke briefly in the library, which was almost unchanged from the days Joyce read here, and he added a sour note to this Irish love song. Joyce, he said, neglected the library, giving it few of his manuscripts. And after he died, his wife, Nora, said he hated this country and she wouldn’t give the library anything either.

  Out on the sidewalk I met two delegates to the symposium, one named Knight, another named Day. Someone immediately wondered if Father Noon was attending this year and we were off on the punnyride. Even the Irish newspapers reflected the need to pun when Joyce’s name was raised. A review of Anthony Burgess’s new book on the hero, Joysprick, carried the equivalently organic headline: Joystalk.

  We adjourned for a welcoming wine party at 86 St. Stephen’s Green, part of University College, where the symposium would be held, and whose worn floors and stairs were still weighted with Joyce’s spiritual tread from student days. In the men’s room (sometimes called the Jacks), I turned up two bits of graffiti which kept the punning on course: “I know they have no ’arm in ’em, but I just can’t find Jacks writers humerus.” And one which would surely put the visiting pundits at ease: “Wholly, Holy, Holey, A Sponge Saint.”

  Yes, Mr. Joyce, it was apt. The gang was here to bathe in every drop of blessedness they could squeeze from you.

  At the first Ulysses seminar two dozen people, a third of them women, sat in an old high-windowed classroom overlooking the splendid, sprawling Green, while a man on a panel discoursed funereally on “the comic in Ulysses.” Joyceans seem to be willing to tolerate anybody at least once in their continuing quest for a new nugget of insight into the master. Of course, the symposium functions on attendance (twenty dollars a head) and the organizers strike a democratic attitude toward neophytes, nebbishes, and bores to avoid giving the gathering a more elitist image than it already has. The school back home usually kicks in at least part of the carfare for a professor invited to give a paper or speak on a panel, and the symposium’s urge for self-perpetuation through such support counterbalances worry over the dud factor.

  Academic obeisance to
status is also part of the game. If a professor wrote a great paper on Joyce twenty years ago, it follows he will always write great papers, and so he is up there still as we doze, floating toward oblivion on the nuances of old nuances, the discovery of yet another Homeric allusion.

  The young man at the front of the room was telling us that to Joyce, Bloom was not comic. Did he really say that or was he blaming somebody else for it? Must pay attention. The dynamics of the novel … the complex choreography of characters … the Catechistic style of Ithaca … the collision … the agon … the seguri … the seven samurai … the twee-twee-twee-qua-qua … zzzzzzz.

  Movies. Joyce and movies. Somebody else talking. My head snapped to. Wandering Rocks chapter is a virtual blueprint for a script.… Yes, even camera angles dictated … It would be interesting to see … Yes, Joyce anticipated movie technique.… He opened the first cinema in Dublin.… He met Eisenstein.

  Did he go to the movies in Paris? Someone who knew him there said, oh yes, indeed yes, even after his eyesight was so poor. His friends sat with him and filled in the gaps he missed, such as the famous topless film of the thirties, Hedy Lamarr in Extase, and there went Hedy in the buff, bouncing through the woods; and Joyce nudging his companion to ask, “What are they doing now?”