Riding the Yellow Trolley Car

by William Kennedy

  Albert the Swimmer

  The oil slick on the Hudson River drifted lazily out to sea on the ebb tide and on the dock of the Albany Yacht Club Albert Black, twenty, slobbered himself with all-purpose grease.

  The bright sunlight warmed the skin but a chill wind reminded bystanders that this was not ideal swimming weather. Black dipped a hand in the river and sloshed it about.

  “It’s cold,” he said.

  The 187-pound young man from West Atlantic City, New Jersey, was preparing for a 156-mile swim from the Albany Yacht Club (now at Rensselaer) to the Statue of Liberty (still in the same old place).

  SWIMMER’S AIMS

  Three associates and two newsmen were at the dock to watch the start of what Black hopes will be a record-breaking swim. He figures to shatter the speed record set by Marilyn Bell of Canada for thirty-two miles. He also claims that if he makes New York Harbor (present estimate: sixty-one hours), he will have made the first nonstop swim of the Hudson.

  A swimmer since he was two, Black has trained for this event for three years. Last January, his plans went awry when a chlorinator in a hotel swimming pool exploded. He inhaled the gas it exuded and was hospitalized ten days. He was told he would never swim again, but last week, upon discharge from doctors’ care, he decided to swim the Hudson lengthwise.

  Robert George of Somers Point, New York, and Jack Cantrell of Philadelphia will precede him by ten feet in a rowboat. Bill Jones of Pleasantville, New Jersey, will follow down Route 9-W by automobile.

  WELL SUPPLIED

  Cantrell sat alone yesterday in the boat which was stocked with soup, chocolate bars and other goodies, while Black greased himself.

  “Bring the boat around, Jack,” someone said.

  Jack pulled on the oars and the boat banged into the dock. He smiled thinly and pulled on the oars again. The boat started downriver.

  “No, Jack,” he was told. “Back this way.”

  “I’ll get the hang of it,” he said.

  Jack is going to row halfway on the trip.

  EXPLAINS GOALS

  Swimmer Black is making this swim, he says, to “prove to people and myself that when you’re hurt you can overcome it if you work.” Also because “if you want to do a sport, don’t do it halfway.” Also because “I’d like to have Atlantic City and New Jersey and the United States known as the home of someone who set an important record.”

  Also because his sponsor is an Atlantic City restaurant owner who stands to gain substantial local publicity.

  He donned a rubber cap and slipped on a nose clip and goggles. He looked very strange. The nose clip caused him to talk like a man with a head cold. He walked to the dock’s edge leaving a trail of greasy footprints.

  “DURE HE’D WARB”

  “Are you nervous?” he was asked.

  “Yedd. You always are before yo duo subthig.”

  “It’s a little chilly. Aren’t you cold?”

  “No. I’be nide and warb.” He patted the grease on his chest.

  It was 1:31 P.M. then and with a wave to observers he leaped into the water, flailing the air with legs and arms like a mixed-up frog. He swam out a ways while George stepped into the boat and Cantrell guided it cautiously away from the dock.

  He paddled patiently for two or three minutes, beginning to feel the penetrating chill of the water. Then he had a sudden thought.

  “Brig more grease,” he yelled half-frantically to Jones. “I’be going to need more grease.”

  Jones nodded and waved. The boat and swimmer Black moved out into the river. Next stop, Miss Liberty?

  1955

  Tracking the Missing Leopard

  It was beastly hot when we started out on the safari. The afternoon sun was blistering the paint on our Buick.

  We were after leopard: Great White Hunter Bill Kuenzel and I. Kuenzel carried the cameras. I was armed with an Ebony Jet Black, Extra Smooth, No. 6325 pencil.

  The leopard had been ranging in rural Ojus in North Dade since it broke away from its owner, Mrs. Bonnie Tindall of 2330 NE 197th Street, Thursday morning.

  It was three feet long, a foot and a half high, brown, black and white. It had been known to eat dish towels, furniture and sweaters. We could take no chances.

  Jaba Gatito was the leopard’s name and it had been sighted twice Friday near the Maule Industries rockpit.

  It had also attacked a tomato in the Tindall back yard during the night. Large toothmarks were found in the tomato’s carcass.

  We approached the Tindall house cautiously. No sign of life anywhere. I got out of the car and rang the doorbell. It went “ding dong”—the only sound for miles around.

  I wondered what to do if I spotted it. I had no gun. No knife. Only an Ebony Jet Black, Extra Smooth, No. 6325 pencil. But you don’t think of yourself. You think only … the leopard must be caught. Or do you?

  I got back in the car.

  The Humane Society of Greater Miami had its hunters out searching all day. They hadn’t found anything either.

  We drove along a road next to a rockpit, looking for tracks. All we could see were tire marks. The sun was scorching. We were thankful for the breeze.

  We saw a herd of animals grazing on a grassy plain.

  “Look there!” I told Kuenzel.

  He turned his trained hunter’s eye on the herd.

  “They’re Shetland ponies,” he said.

  There were two other ferocious-looking animals in an adjacent field. Kuenzel identified them right away as cows. They had a mean look.

  We drove along the wilds of NE 22nd Avenue. The undergrowth was dense. Our right front wheel snapped a twig.

  We stopped at the Greynold Park Stables. L. O. Grassman said a party of twenty had canceled its riding date because of the leopard.

  While we were at the stables a saddleless horse broke out of the stable and ran off. It seemed the whole animal world had gone on an emancipation kick.

  We went back to the Tindall home and I pushed the doorbell again. It repeated that same ominous “ding dong.”

  Mrs. Bonnie Tindall, a fifteen-year-old bride, of twelve days, came to the door. No, she said, the leopard hadn’t returned. They just moved into the house and they had no place to keep the leopard except outside.

  She kept it on a chain, with a garbage can nearby so it could crawl inside during a storm.

  Mrs. Tindall had been looking all day for her leopard, she said. She said she has a girl friend who owns a lion.

  It was getting late. Kuenzel snapped his first picture of the day—of Mrs. Tindall. We drove back the same way we came. The sun wasn’t nearly so beastly any more.

  We saw a goat on the way home.

  1957

  A SPEECH:

  Be Reasonable, Unless You’re a Writer

  Shelley believed that poets—and by that he meant all imaginative writers—are good people. He writes in his essay “A Defence of Poetry” that “cruelty, envy, revenge, avarice, and the passions purely evil, have never formed any portion of the popular imputations on the lives of the poets.” Thank you, Mr. Shelley. However, he also thought that writers don’t necessarily know what they’re doing.

  He attributes to them great power to change opinion or institutions beneficially. And this power, he writes, is “seated on the throne of their own soul.” And further, “electric life … burns within their words.” But he concludes—with some chagrin, I suspect—that the writers themselves are the ones most sincerely astonished at the manifestation of their own power, for he sees this power derived less from their spirit than from the spirit of the age working through them.

  This spirit of the age, this sensitivity to what is temporal, is what American writers are sometimes thought to be lacking. That is a confusion, and a serious one. Such criticism was very much in evidence last year during the International PEN Congress in New York, when a parade of foreign writers castigated their American counterparts for being too removed or aloof from, or indifferent to, the pressing needs of
society. I found myself under siege in 1985 in Germany in a similar conversation with several writers. One German novelist concluded that there was no such thing as political writing among modern American novelists.

  This is, to say the least, very silly; especially when you consider the work of Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison and Norman Mailer and Grace Paley and E. L. Doctorow and Richard Ellman and Robert Stone and Saul Bellow and William Styron and Alice Walker and William Herrick and Tim O’Brien and Don DeLillo and so on and so on. Make your own list.

  Not all these writers I’ve named would agree on what is proper to the temporal element of writing, the political temporality if you will. But I know that as writers of serious intent they understand the self-destructive element in the temporal—that being the appeal of propaganda, or partisan writing. Hemingway’s famous line on this subject is, “All you can be sure about in a political-minded writer is that if his work should last you will have to skip the politics when you read it.” Yet politics abounds in his own writing, the politics of war, for instance, in the retreat from Caporetto during the Italian campaign in A Farewell to Arms; or the stories of the Spanish Civil War, in which political attitudes among the combatants are central to the meaning. These works have not gone dead in fifty or sixty years, and you do not have to skip them when you read Hemingway’s books; and so it is not the matter, and it is not the subject, that goes dead. Survival depends on the way the work is written, the way the writer does it.

  How does the writer do it? How does he write about the temporal without falling fatally into the pit of propaganda? Consider Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial. Was there ever a more telling blow struck against totalitarianism? Here, without doubt, was a stunningly original attack on the state and on its courts—was it not? But then, again, wasn’t it really the analysis of a neurosis? Or take Kafka’s shorter work “In the Penal Colony”—clearly an attack on the church, and on every dogmatic form of theology or ideology, wasn’t that what it was? Or was it, too, like The Trial, a case of the writer looking into the center of his own deceitful mind and finding something other than a one-for-one metaphor reflecting this morning’s political logic?

  Propaganda is logical. It takes sides, foursquare. It argues, it finds enemies and targets, it promotes or opposes love and allegiance toward the object being propagandized, whether it be the flag, the revolution, the mother church or the genocidal death machine. Love me or leave me, it argues. If you’re not with the revolution or the death machine, you are against it. Such directness is the function of reason, and synthesis, and unity. But writers are made of another fabric; and their fabric is the imagination.

  “Reason is to the imagination,” says Shelley, “as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance.” He defines poetry, or writing, as the expression of that imagination, and he likens the imagination to the wind—an ever-changing wind—blowing over a mythic aeolian lyre, and by this motion creating an ever-changing melody. This is unarguably what the literary imagination does. It does not reach for, nor does it arrive at, simple conclusions. It is more concerned with centering on the action of things, the fluid condition of things, the whatness of things, the open-endedness of things, than it is with formulating prescriptions for proper revolutionary or reactionary behavior.

  Albert Camus is one of the most political of writers, but consider his line, “I like men who take sides more than literatures that do.” He points out that if the merit of a piece of writing is imposed either by law, or by professional obligation, or by terror, then where is the merit? Camus writes in his diary: “It would appear that to write a poem about spring would nowadays be serving capitalism. I am not a poet, but I should have no second thoughts about being delighted by such a poem if it were beautiful. One either serves the whole of man or one does not serve him at all.”

  The work by Camus that seems to be universally valued is The Stranger. It is a most political piece of work and, as with the work of Kafka, you search it in vain for conventional logic, or an appeal to reason. An appeal to unreason is closer to what it is: mirror images of certain dark unknowns of our deepest selves, a revelation of relationships that exist not on a basis of one-to-one, but of one-to-ten, or one-to-forty. The reward in reading it is similar to that provided by betting long shots at the track.

  My uncle Peter, who was a horseplayer, once pointed out to me a forlorn citizen of the world, a man in tatters who was picking a cigarette butt out of the gutter. “There’s a guy,” he said, “who used to play the favorites.” You can’t win much of anything playing the favorites. It’s too logical. Too much reason, too much method, goes into it. It is important to remember Gallant Fox, the world’s best horse in 1930, going off at 1-to-2 in the Travers Stakes at Saratoga. But in the stretch here came Jim Dandy, a 100-to-1 shot, and Jim wins it going away. Wrote Damon Runyon: “You only dream the thing that happened here this afternoon.”

  The tale goes to the core of the kind of writing I’ve come to value: first dreaming, and then executing, the improbable, and on good days, the impossible. This involves a serious reliance on intuition, and an enduring reverence for the irrational. It has very little to do with reason. Let me quote from the diary of Lionel Trilling, the literary critic and teacher, and a man of reason if there ever was one. Trilling saw a letter that Ernest Hemingway had written to Clifton Fadiman, the critic, and Trilling thought the letter crazy, arrogant, scared, trivial, absurd and written when Hemingway was obviously drunk.

  And Trilling could write this: “Yet [I] felt from reading it how right such a man is compared to the ‘good minds’ of my university life—how he will produce and mean something to the world … how his life which he could expose without dignity and which is anarchic and ‘childish’ is a better life than anyone I know could live, and right for his job. And how far-far-far- I am going from being a writer—how less and less I have the material and the mind and the will.”

  This is sad about Trilling, and, to me, no news at all about Hemingway. Even Hemingway’s unfinished fragments now turn up on the best-seller list, twenty-six years after his death, and I’m glad to have them.

  Trilling saw in Hemingway the same qualities Shelley valued in poets: the electricity of their words, the power of their imagination and the anarchy of their melodious minds. And then Trilling posed these questions to himself: how can Hemingway do it so well with such a disordered mind, and why can’t I and my orderly colleagues do the same? Well, as we used to say so frequently in my religion class, that’s a mystery.

  And mystery is not only great sport, it’s also, as Luis Buñuel cleverly pointed out, the basic element in all works of art. But even if writers know all that, and even if they grudgingly admit that Shelley might have a point about their not always knowing what they’re doing, they also perceive that this isn’t a flaw in their makeup, but a happy gift of a particular kind, like being born double-jointed or with hair that falls out and reveals a noble brow; and these writers continue to write with enormous pleasure, and with reverence for the art. For with whatever marginal gift of reason that may have been doled out to them, they concluded long ago that not only was writing truly worth pursuing, it was the most important thing they could do with their lives.

  1987

  THE HOPWOOD LECTURE:

  Writers and Their Songs

  I was working as a newspaperman when I was drafted into the army during the Korean War, and I decided to write a continuing column about it called “This New Army,” which was what everybody was calling that same old army in those days. I wrote about how unbelievably stupid sergeants and corporals were, how unspeakably dreadful army food was, and how very peculiarly the general behaved when he noticed I was marching out of step.

  When these columns were published back in Glens Falls, New York, enlistments in this new army dropped to zero, the first time I changed the world with my writing. This change was testified to by the local doomsday recruiting sergeant, who packaged off my clippings, along with a formal complaint
, to Fort Benning, Georgia, where I was taking basic training in a heavy-weapons company of the Fourth Infantry Division. Because I could type, somebody had made me the company clerk, and so I also got to answer the phone. A call came in one day and guess who it was for? Me. The major who ran the division’s public information office was calling.

  “Kennedy,” he said to me, “that was a funny column you wrote the other day about the general.”

  “Thank you, Major,” I said. “I’m glad you liked it.”

  “I didn’t say I liked it and don’t write any more.” And then he added, after a pause, “Come up and see me and maybe I’ll give you a job.”

  Well I did, and he did, and for the next two years I spent my days writing for army newspapers in the United States and Germany—Germany because our Fourth Division became the first American troop unit to go back to Europe after World War II. I was also thrown in with the literate and subliterate malcontents who populated the public information section, most of them also draftees and ex-newsmen, and four, including me, aspirants to writing of a different order—short stories, novels, films, plays; we weren’t particular.

  These years were seminal for me, the period in which I dove head first into literature. One of my great pals was Frank Trippett, a brilliant newsman from Mississippi who had not only seen and talked to Satchmo, he had actually attended a lecture by William Faulkner. Closer than that to the Empyrean no man I knew had ever ventured. Four or five nights a week we would gather in our enlisted men’s club in Frankfurt, arguing, over heilbock and doppelbock, the relative merits of Sherwood Anderson, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Steinbeck, Caldwell, Fitzgerald, Mailer, Algren, Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O’Connor, James Jones, Irwin Shaw, Thomas Wolfe. “Wolfe said it all but Faulkner said it better,” was the youthful anthem from Mississippi.

  I tried then and since to read everything that all these writers ever wrote and I have succeeded, perhaps by half, though I’m still working on Faulkner. I also began writing what I thought of as serious short fiction. I had written stories in college, all derivative and blithering, but now I was beginning to match myself against these maestros I’d been reading. At first I was such an amateur I couldn’t even imitate them, but in the year or two after I left the army I managed to write dialogue that sounded very like Hemingway and John O’Hara, I could describe the contents of a kitchen refrigerator just like Thomas Wolfe, I could use intelligent obscenity just like Mailer, I could keep a sentence running around the block, just like Faulkner. But where was Kennedy?