Riding the Yellow Trolley Car

by William Kennedy

  KENNEDY: I wish I had heard somebody say that, but I never heard that before. Joyce is Joyce. He’s by himself, and I wouldn’t make any comparisons. No, it’s not an attempt at conscious imitation, if that’s the question.

  QUINN: Your careful reconstruction of Albany, your fascination with place, certainly evokes Joyce’s obsession with Dublin.

  KENNEDY: That’s true enough. Joyce made things easier for all of us. He prompted us to become aware of our entire heritage, including dishpans and the jakes in the back yard.

  QUINN: You both are absorbed with the place where you grew up. And you both left it. Did you choose, as Joyce did, “silence, exile and cunning,” and set out to chronicle Albany at a distance? Or did you pack up all your cares and woes and only gradually come to understand your relationship to Albany?

  KENNEDY: Silence was imposed on me by all my editors. My might-have-been editors. Exile came because I couldn’t stay in Albany any longer and still function effectively. I had to go elsewhere. I went to Puerto Rico, which is exile under the American flag. It’s as far away as you could get, and still be in the U.S.A. But cunning was not in my kit bag. I never felt that that was necessary. I was always aboveboard. I always put out my work for stomping, whatever I did. And I usually got stomped. But I never felt that it was necessary to retreat and stay home and nurse my wounds and never try again until I had a masterpiece. That was never my understanding of how to write, or how to live as a writer. Somewhere along the line I came across a phrase about “renewing your vulnerability.” And that seemed to me a most important thing for a writer. You renew your vulnerability. Constantly. You start out feeling so vulnerable that you’re afraid the criticism will kill you. But if you’re not afraid of being vulnerable, if you say, “Go ahead, hit me again, I can take it,” you get a thick skin.

  You get that as a journalist. Letters to the editor demanding “Throw this guy in the river.” Or “Why did you hire him to begin with? This man should be destroyed.” Or “This is a radical,” or “This is a liberal”—or some other dirty word. You get to live with that. I remember I wrote a series of articles on the slums of Albany back in the sixties. The mail attacking me came in like you couldn’t believe. I got hate calls and hate mail from grand bigots, wonderful bigots, really creative bigots. It didn’t faze me, because I realized early on that when you get into the business of putting yourself out on the public chopping block, you have to figure you’re going to get chopped at.

  QUINN: With Legs did you set out to write an Albany cycle?

  KENNEDY: No, I chose the word “cycle” because it connotes an open-ended and related series of novels.

  QUINN: Your first three novels are set in Albany in the Depression, which really seems to have captured your imagination. Why?

  KENNEDY: Legs was 1931, and that was researched to discover that era. And once I discovered the twenties and Prohibition and the gangland world, I began to see that it had tentacles that went forward, that people I was writing about in Legs were going to be significant in future books I wanted to write. When I got around to writing Billy Phelan, which was the next one, it should have taken place in 1933, which was only two years after Diamond died, but I felt what I needed to do then was to move deeper into the Depression, into the grit of it, into the end of it, the feeling of coming out of it. I set Billy Phelan in 1938, which was just before the war begins and was also a political year. I manipulated history to suit myself. I made the real-life kidnapping of Dan O’Connell’s nephew take place five years later than it actually had, and I used the “blackout,” for instance, in Billy Phelan, but placed it in 1938. Dan O’Connell [Albany’s political boss] “blacked out” Governor Dewey in ’42 or ’43. He had the civil defense behind him when he turned off the electricity so nobody in Albany could hear Dewey’s radio speech attacking the Albany politicians.

  QUINN: Ironweed is the latest completed part of the cycle. You said in a recent interview that it came “like a bullet.” Is that because you had lived in that world for so long, were so familiar with it from all the research you’d done, that you already knew the characters?

  KENNEDY: No. Ironweed was something else, and had a preexistence in both journalism and early fiction. In that unpublished novel I wrote in Puerto Rico I created Francis Phelan, just one of several characters in a family chronicle. Then, in 1963, I wrote a series of articles on a wino couple for the Albany Times-Union, and I fused the fiction and nonfiction when I started to create Francis Phelan again for Billy Phelan. The early work was all dead at this point, which is what usually happens when you leave it in the drawer, so I began from scratch, and Francis emerged as a new and more complex character in Billy, so much so that I knew he should have his own book. So by the time I got to him in Ironweed I knew far more about the history of the city, and I was reflecting a complexity of life that I had not been able to get to in the first novels. I felt I was into higher mathematics, and that I really knew this man. And the book was written in just about seven months.

  QUINN: You mentioned Farrell before. Are there any other Irish-American writers who’ve had an impact on your writing?

  KENNEDY: Fitzgerald, if you call him an Irish-American. Actually, he was the original Yuppie. The Yuppie Irishman.

  QUINN: There are similarities between Legs and Gatsby. Several critics have mentioned them.

  KENNEDY: Deliberately so. Gatsby’s a great book, I think. And I make that comparison in homage as much as anything else. I wouldn’t want anybody to think I was cavalierly using the narration of Marcus Gorman about a gangster without understanding the precedent. But I also feel that the narrator in Gatsby was boring as a character, and I don’t think Marcus is. Fitzgerald’s narrator came to life only when Fitzgerald let him stop talking about himself and allowed us to see him in action. That, very clearly, was when he leaped off the page for me.

  QUINN: Legs and The Great Gatsby are both about outsiders trying to force their way into America. Is that right?

  KENNEDY: Right. But you never see Gatsby doing it seriously. There are some people who have made the analogy that Diamond is Gatsby, but I don’t think Gatsby was like Diamond. I don’t think Gatsby was a gangster. I think he was just a thief. I don’t think he was a killer. People said he killed a man once, but they said that about everybody in the twenties.

  QUINN: That’s the American story. The immigrant or the immigrant’s son forcing his way in.

  KENNEDY: The ambition was always to reach fame and fortune. Some people tried to shoot their way into it. Some survived, were acquitted, or just got rich and went straight. Big Bill Dwyer did that. He was one of the great rumrunners, and he wound up in Café Society, Palm Beach, racetracks, hobnobbing with the rich, hanging out in tuxedos. A number of Irish-Americans chose that route.

  QUINN: Any other Irish-American writers besides Fitzgerald whom you value?

  KENNEDY: O’Hara, even though he tried to bury his Irishness and come on as a WASP clubman. But his stories still have great vigor and wit. I got lost in his novels, that deluge of information that now seems the trademark of the pulp writers. Eugene O’Neill was a great favorite of mine, especially his Iceman and Long Day’s Journey. Wonderful Celtic gloom and irony in those works. I liked Farrell’s Studs Lonigan but I never wanted to write like that—the naturalism of the city. I was too interested in the dream element in life, the surreal. Flannery O’Connor is terrific, now and always. I always thought Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah was a marvelous book. I fell off the chair reading those great lines about the Curley days and I could see he understood the tension between the church and politics extremely well. But I also felt he was leaving out things either to be polite to the church or to Irish society, or perhaps out of squeamishness. I felt at times that he didn’t reflect Irish-American life as I knew it. I felt I had to bring in the cathouses and the gambling and the violence, for if you left those out you had only a part of Albany. The idealized Irish life of the country club and the Catholic colleges was true enoug
h, but that didn’t have anything to do with what was going on down on Broadway among all those raffish Irishmen. They were tough sons-of-bitches, dirty-minded and foul-mouthed gamblers and bigots, and also wonderful, generous, funny, curiously honest and very complex people. I felt that way of life had to be penetrated at the level of harsh reality—its wit, anger, sexuality, deviousness. It also needed to have the surreal dimension that goes with any society in which religion plays such a dominant role. Those lives are worth recording, and I’m not done with them by any means.

  QUINN: Do you think, in fact, there is such a thing as an “Irish-American literary tradition”?

  KENNEDY: When we talk about Irish-American writers—or Irish-American anything—we’re talking about an evolution. You can’t really be negative about Finley Peter Dunne, or Farrell, or Fitzgerald, or O’Hara, or O’Connor. They all lived in a certain time and reflected that time. And for some of them, maybe, there was a sense of marginality about their background. There was an uncertainty. Certainly, in the days of Fitzgerald and O’Hara there was. The Irish were aspiring to rise in the world. You had Finley Peter Dunne satirizing those “donkey” Irishmen in order to make them become something beyond what they could become. Everybody is a climber. Everybody is trying to come up from below. That’s the first law of motion in America. Nobody wants to live in the Five Points in New York City forever. Nobody wants to live with the stereotypes that were associated with Irish thugs—the derbys and the cockeyed look, the readiness to break your ankle for a nickel or your wrist for a dime.

  God knows where I am in all of this, in this evolution, but I know all that has come before. I know that those who came before helped to show me how to try to turn experience into literature. I know all that came before in the same way I know that the Irish ascended politically to become Jack Kennedy. After Jack Kennedy, anything was possible. Goddammit, we’ve been President, and you can’t hold us back anymore.

  QUINN: Is there a certain defensiveness about the Irish? We know all about the lecherousness and the sinfulness but we prefer to present outsiders with the other face, the saintly side.

  KENNEDY: I just got a letter from the son of the owner of a bar in Albany. You know what he told me? He said, “Dan O’Connell told my father that he closed all the poolrooms in Albany, so how come you’ve got a poolroom in Billy Phelan?” O’Connell didn’t want any poolrooms in Albany, he said, because they were corrupting influences on kids.

  QUINN: As opposed to cockfights?

  KENNEDY: Or as opposed to saloons? And whorehouses? Dan took tribute from them all. I don’t see how you can leave all that out if you’re going to talk about life in the twentieth century. Irish-American life or any kind of life.

  QUINN: But haven’t the Irish been blessed by a wonderful sense of guilt? Isn’t that part of their Catholicism?

  KENNEDY: I don’t think Catholics feel that much guilt anymore. They’re more and more like other Americans.

  QUINN: Isn’t the loss of guilt the loss of a wonderful strength? Isn’t it one of the essential ingredients in the Irish-American mind, as it is in the Jewish-American mind? It’s the one thing you can be sure of never losing.

  KENNEDY: Well, there’s always a sense of sin. I don’t think we’re ever going to lose that. Norman Mailer was unnecessarily worried about the loss of sin, in terms of sex, back in the sixties. He was suggesting that the only thing that makes sense is to have sex when you’re sinning. Otherwise, it’s no fun.

  QUINN: But isn’t Catholicism one of the things that makes those earthy Irishmen you write about unique? The tension created in their lives by the church?

  KENNEDY: That’s only part of it. You only go to church on Sundays, and maybe you talk about it the rest of the week. But politics is far more important than church, because politics is survival. You could postpone your concern about the salvation of your soul. You could always say, “I’ll get to that when I get old,” and if you got a heart attack, God forbid, and died in the blossom of your youth, the chances are you would go to Purgatory.

  QUINN: What about the Catholic element in your novels? One reviewer has seen in Ironweed a parallel between the liturgy of the Catholic church and the events of the three days the book encompasses. Is he right?

  KENNEDY: Absolutely, but not for reasons of celebration and liturgy. In Ironweed, it was all accidental because I had already created the time frame in Billy Phelan.

  I created it because I had to have it all happen during the pre-election period. That was the whole purpose in Billy Phelan. So I made the kidnapping take place in an election year. Then it moves forward into the campaign. Once I had that, I went back, and if you notice, Billy Phelan and Ironweed end on the same day. And they do that only because having created the dynamics of Billy meeting his father, the logical thing when I dealt with Francis was to see him in those postconfrontational days with Billy—to discover what it was that made him go home.

  Francis Phelan wouldn’t go home until he knew that Annie had never condemned or blamed him. So first come these two things: the invitation from Billy and the knowledge about Annie. They stay in his mind. He dries up. And he wants to go home. All of Ironweed is this tap dancing into reality, trying to figure out, “How am I going to do it?” Talking to Helen, getting rid of Helen, walking back, putting her in the car with Finny, walking up to where he used to live, confronting that reality, going back and making some money so he could buy a turkey, and so on.

  QUINN: Editors kept turning down Ironweed because they said it was too depressing. Nobody would want to read a novel about bums. But it’s actually a very hopeful novel, isn’t it? A novel about redemption? And forgiveness?

  KENNEDY: “Redemption” is the key word. That’s what it’s all about. It parallels the Purgatorio. When you talk about the liturgy or Catholic thought, you think of Dante, and eventually you think of the Inferno, and the Purgatorio, and the Paradiso. From the epigraph, you enter my book with Dante, and it’s a journey through planes of escalation into a moment of redemption out of sin. Francis cleanses himself. It reflects something I think is profound about human behavior. I don’t look at it in the way that I used to when I was a kid, when I believed in everything, believed it was the only way to look at the world. Today I believe Catholic theology has great humanistic dimensions, great wisdom about how to achieve peace of mind in relationship to the unknown, the infinite. Maybe it’s a palliative. Maybe it’s one of the great lollipops of history. At the same time, it’s beautiful. It’s as good as I could see on the horizon. I don’t need Buddhism, or Zoroastrianism—I’ve got Sacred Heart Church in North Albany.

  QUINN: All Saints Day is taken from Irish mythology. It’s based on the Celtic feast of Samhain, when the barriers between the living and the dead disappeared. Was Irish mythology a conscious part of Ironweed?

  KENNEDY: No, it was not. I didn’t know that about All Saints Day. I just grew up with it as a holy day. But I’m finding out all kinds of things about myself, things that are pushing me, nudging me into places I’m not yet fully aware of.

  Much of it seems parallel to what I know about contemporary Irish life. Maybe, if there’s such a thing as collective unconsciousness, then this was part of it: a kind of grip that still holds. It’s really remarkable that the Irish, like the Jews, have held on so to their identity, that there was this triumphant resistance to death and genocide and their obliteration as a people. But in this case, the Irish link wasn’t conscious. My consciousness as a Catholic was sufficient.

  QUINN: The Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh has written that he lived in a place where literature wasn’t supposed to happen. It was too conventional, supposedly. Did you ever face that stumbling block? The thought that literature happened in places grander or more exotic than Albany?

  KENNEDY: Oh yes, from the very outset. I understood that Melville went to school here. I understood that Henry James touched down here, in one of his less cosmic moments. Bret Harte was born here, and left immediately. Those kind of moments,
that’s about as much as you used to expect out of Albany. But then I began to figure that it couldn’t be all that bad, I found out that Albany was, and is, a great place. There are not all that many people who lived and died in Albany creating literature that would endure through the ages. But there was a sense of the place being valuable, and this was tremendously important. As soon as I began to understand this, I realized that the town was unexplored.

  QUINN: Was it out of the newspaper articles you wrote about Albany that you began to sink yourself into its history? To sense its depths?

  KENNEDY: No, I was writing in Puerto Rico about myself and my wife and my ancestors trying to understand it all, and then I realized I didn’t understand, and that was it. That ignorance was the main drive: to come back at some point in my life, settle in and do some research in the library, and try to understand. I never expected that I would stay forever.

  How can you write about a place if you don’t understand what the street names mean, or who the mayor is, or what the machine was all about? I was writing from Puerto Rico at a point when I didn’t really understand the political bossism in Albany. I hadn’t paid sufficient attention when I was working at an Albany newspaper. I just said, “I’m mildly opposed to it.” I was very self-righteous.

  QUINN: One of the main components of Albany is its powerful, Democratic machine, an Irish-American machine. For the Albany Irish, you’ve written, “politics was justice itself; politics was sufficient unto itself.” What did you mean by that?

  KENNEDY: When I grew up, there was no sense of morality in regard to politics. If you were Irish, you were obviously a Democrat. If you were a Democrat, you were probably a Catholic. If you were a Catholic, you obviously gave allegiance to the church on the corner, and to Dan O’Connell who was a pillar of the church, inseparable from the bishop and the priests, and who was revered and prayed for. But Dan was also profiting from the whorehouses, the gambling joints, the all-night saloons and the blackout card games. He was in collusion with the grafters and the bankers, getting rich with the paving contractors.