Riding the Yellow Trolley Car

by William Kennedy

  Or E. M. Forster trying to define Moby Dick. He calls the book a yarn about whaling interspersed with snatches of poetry, also a battle against evil conducted too long or in the wrong way, also a contest between two unreconciled evils; and then he throws up his hands: “These are words,” says Forster, “a symbol for the book if we want one, but … the essential in Moby Dick is prophetic song, which flows athwart the action and the surface morality like an undercurrent. It lies outside words.”

  Prophetic song. Nice work if you can get it.

  Almost, but not quite, just by the nature of Melville’s effort, one might conclude he was striving for that song from the outset. But to think that is to believe in creation as nothing more than conception; that the song, the achievement, was already present in the embryo. If this were true, what then can we say of Melville’s years of gestation among whales, his months of research (“I have swam through libraries,” his narrator writes in Moby Dick, and the same was true of Melville), and his year and a half of writing and rewriting the text? One of his biographers pointed out that although seventeen months seems a short time for the composition of such a book, it would have been an unusually long period given the manic pace at which Melville was writing.

  An ancillary note: Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom Melville became a soul mate during the writing of Moby Dick, had taken ten years for his own literary embryo to mature into the form and substance that became The Scarlet Letter.

  Writers (and their songs) grow like plants, like trees, like children, like disease, like love. They go through stages of fragility, woodenness, pubescence, death, and passion. You’ll note that I have put death before passion. This corresponds to the crucifixion, burial, descent into hell, and resurrection that befalls all literary careerists who keep the faith. Fitzgerald’s noted line, “There are no second acts in American lives,” was cockeyed and trivializing. He was talking about stardom. Resurrection has come to many American writers—Melville, the most egregiously belated case, and Faulkner, and Henry James, and Kate Chopin and Willa Cather, and Edith Wharton, and Fitzgerald himself (though he was dead at the time); and it is now happening with Hemingway. It even happened to Faulkner when he was still alive, the problem being that no one knew he was alive, his books all out of print. Then suddenly they were in print and still are, along with those of the other writers in this group, who have all been elevated to a cosmic status that will long outlast the stars as Fitzgerald perceived them.

  Not all of these writers wrote of their own age, though most did; and most of them were realists; but not Melville, and not always James, who wrote romances and took excursions into the world of ghosts. In the words of Maupassant, they each made themselves “an illusion of a world,” each according to his or her sex, knowledge, style, talent, joyful or melancholy disposition, mythic or mordant mind.

  So whose realism is this anyway?

  And what of dreams? Are they part of realism?

  And what of the surrealistic episodes that all of us have gone through but try not to accept as real? Kafka and Borges and García Márquez have made them real, without doubt, just as they were supposed to; because they found it necessary. “The great artists,” said Maupassant, “are those who impose their particular illusion on humanity.”

  I am delighted to report to you that pursuing my own particular illusion I have just finished a section of a new novel in which I use—at long last—that experience I had in Germany so many years ago. I am also pleased to report that I have transformed it to such a degree that it no longer resembles anything I lived through. The character who inhabits this transformed experience is forever doing things that are wild and illegal and outrageous; not at all like me, which may be the reason I could never before write about the place. Yes. Absolutely. That last possibility is so clearly accurate that I hereby aver its truth: that I couldn’t write it because I had lived it; because I knew it too well; because I knew how it would come out: boringly, as it always had.

  The writer usually feels that any successful transformation of the work is a form of personal growth; but also that he’s transformed his chosen art form, the novel, a micromillimeter or two, as well. Mr. Fiedler, and other undertakers who have come after him, tend to think otherwise. As the novel replaced narrative poetry as the reigning form, so the movies and television will replace the novel, is their view. Since the form of the novel no longer progresses, they argue, since it doesn’t redefine itself beyond what the modernists—Joyce, Proust, Mann, etc.—were able to do, then it is doomed to repeat itself, grow moldy, and become an esoteric genre only antiquarians will pursue henceforth.

  Maybe it is all too true that the attention span of the reading audience is now at the level of a manic Siamese cat, and that the future of the word lies with magazine journalists and screenwriters; but I don’t buy it. I’ve worked in those usurping forms and will work in them again. I love them both. But I live for the novel and will never believe it is less than what Henry James called it—the great form, in which anything is possible.

  Back in the late 1950s, when I was trying to read the complete shelf of William Faulkner, I kept coming across speeches or interviews in which he talked of uplifting man’s heart. In his Nobel speech he said it was the writer’s “privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart.” In a literature class at the University of Virginia he said: “… the artist believes what he’s doing is valid in that it may do something to uplift man’s heart, not to make man any more successful, but to temporarily make him feel better than he felt before, to uplift his heart for a moment.”

  This uplift business baffled me. I was reading and rereading The Sound and the Fury and Sanctuary and Light in August and The Wild Palms and Absalom, Absalom!—tales of incest and whoring and rape and dying love and madness and murder and racial hate and miscegenational tragedy and idiocy—and saying to myself, “This is uplift?”

  But I kept reading and found I couldn’t get enough; had to reread to satisfy the craving, and came to answer the question in a word: yes. I felt exalted by the man’s work, not by reveling in all the disasters, but learning from his language and his insights, and his storytelling genius, how certain other people lived and thought. I was privileged to enter into the most private domains of their lives and they became my friends, or people I’d keep at least at arm’s length, or people I pitied, or feared, or loved. This was truly an uplifting experience, something akin to real friendship, and I began to understand the process by which writing reaches into another person’s heart.

  Now let me mention two letters I received from a man who had read my novel Ironweed. About four years ago he wrote the first letter. He was moved by the book and had to write and tell me. Two years later came the second letter, in which he hinted he might have known the street life, the drinking life of a bum, just as Ironweed’s hero, Francis Phelan, knew it. The letter writer was now living with his sister, doing handyman’s work for her, and staying out of trouble. His sister didn’t like drunks, and would even cross the street to get away from a wino. Then her brother pressed Ironweed on her, got her to watch a home video of the film of it, and got her to read the book. At the end she found herself crying, and she said to her brother, about Francis, “You know, he wasn’t such a bad guy.”

  That would be quite enough for me, but the story has a coda. The sister no longer fears winos, no longer crosses the street to get away from them. She now gives them her loose change. And at Christmas she passes out to them, one and all, half-pints of muscatel.

  This is a true story. It is a realistic story of our age. It has been transformed somewhat by the writer, who is very glad to have written it.

  1990

  AN INTERVIEW:

  Tap Dancing into Reality

  It’s the writer’s dream: the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction; a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award of a quarter of a million dollars; the Pulitzer Prize for fiction; movie deals, fame, acclaim, wealth, a success story so improbable that even Fran
k Capra might have turned it down.

  But it’s true. It’s as real as this man sitting on the porch of his house outside Albany, a novelist whose life reads like a novel, who spent years of struggle and anonymity, writing books that, despite praise and plaudits, never seemed to sell.

  “I was broke,” Kennedy says. “I didn’t have any future. I didn’t have anything.” Nothing, that is, but the writer’s craft, nothing but the redemptive satisfaction of his own creativity as he came “to understand that the writing itself was the most important element in my life.”

  Kennedy’s literary odyssey began in good Irish fashion when he turned his back on the parochial world of pols and prelates and left Albany for Puerto Rico. But, also in good Irish fashion, he remained a prisoner to the place, with a knowledge of himself now as “a person whose imagination has become fused with a single place. And in that place finds all that a man needs for the life of the soul …”

  Bill Kennedy has it all now. But sitting with him on a soft summer afternoon, warmed by the sun and the smooth assurance of a glass of Irish whiskey, you realize that the work goes on, that while the fame and good fortune are welcomed and even relished, they are still beside the point. For Bill Kennedy the point is what it has always been: the sentence: words strung together into complexity, words transubstantiated into life, words that jump off the page.

  What follows are some of Bill Kennedy’s reflections on life, art and the Irish-American experience, a self-portrait of an artist in progress.

  —Peter Quinn

  QUINN: John Updike in a recent piece in the New York Review of Books mentions a story that he wrote called “The Happiest I’ve Ever Been.” He says that “while composing a single paragraph I had the sensation of breaking through a thin sheet of restraining glass to material previously locked up.” Did you ever have a similar kind of experience, a moment—an epiphany—when you knew you were going beyond the material?

  KENNEDY: Yes, I wrote something once and I showed it to a friend of mine. He asked, “Who wrote this?” and I knew I was on to something. But it happened to me seriously when I was in Puerto Rico. I was working on a first novel that has never been published and when I read back the next morning what I’d written the day before I knew I had done something, probably just as Updike knew what he had done. It’s when you discover that there’s something else going on in your head, when you find the right metaphor, or symbol, or whatever it is you’re groping for—and suddenly the work begins to blossom in directions that you couldn’t possibly conceive of before then. That’s precisely the way I felt with Ironweed which is the most recent example that comes to mind. You create the structure, you create the character and a number of events, and then you find out that what you’ve done is beyond what you intended to do. Of course, you understand the new developments as soon as you touch them, and in my reading of that paragraph back in Puerto Rico, I realized I knew more than I had given myself credit for knowing. It comes out of your fingertips as you write, the unconscious becoming conscious at the instant that you need it. It first seems a very happy, wonderful accident, but it’s not so accidental—it’s really everything that you always were and hoped to do that is emerging.

  QUINN: What about the “muse,” the sense of something speaking through you? Some writers seem to experience its presence. Have you?

  KENNEDY: Never had that. I never understood the muse. I used to wait for it when I was a kid. I’d stay home on Thursday afternoons and expect it to arrive. That was my day off, and also the muse’s day off. It never did show up, but I’d like the stuff anyway. Nobody ever bought any of it, so I felt there was some other element in writing that I didn’t understand. That was a question I asked in The Ink Truck. “What is it that I don’t understand? What is it that I can’t figure out?”

  With Legs, I began to understand writing a little more clearly. I would work for hours sometimes and nothing would happen, but then after ten or maybe eleven hours, suddenly, something would happen. I used to go to a friend’s lake house and put in time. I knew I wanted to say something, thought I knew what I wanted to say—I had all the material, but nothing would come together. I couldn’t figure out what to do or how to do it. But after those long hours, I would begin to write, and feel very good about what I’d achieved by the end of the day. I came to understand in those days that writing itself was what was important. It was enough. I mean I was broke, didn’t have any future, didn’t have even a prospect. But I would come away from those sessions at the lake house feeling quite happy. It was amazing. I went over to Cape Cod. I went up to the Adirondacks, all by myself, and just hung out and wrote. At the end of the day, I would be ecstatic about the fact that I had produced whatever number of pages it was. I was somehow making something worthwhile out of nothing at all.

  QUINN: There’s a scene in Legs that strikes me as being one of those moments when you felt both a sense of “breaking through” and a sense of achievement. It’s the scene where Legs’s girlfriend, Kiki, is hiding in a closet. It’s a tautly woven, exciting example of what—for lack of a better phrase—is called “stream of consciousness.”

  KENNEDY: That’s a true fact of her life. Kiki was actually arrested in a closet in her friend’s house. She was hiding when the police came and got her. I guess I got to know Kiki. I felt it one afternoon when I was writing about her. That piece didn’t get into the book, but it was a most ecstatic afternoon, another one of those moments when I felt I had done something that I hadn’t expected to do. It was a leap beyond the surface of Kiki. I had gotten beyond the journalistic sense of who she was and into what she truly was, the kind of kookiness of her life, the voluptuousness of her life, and it was all in this page and a half that never got into the book. It was giving definition to something that had not been very clear before, and that is what I really loved. It was a new sense of writing, a breakthrough in saying things obliquely.

  QUINN: John Gardner has described the writing process as getting to the point where you just look at your characters and let them act, let them live their lives. They’re so real that you’re writing down what people are doing, rather than attempting to invent. Have you ever had that experience?

  KENNEDY: That’s the idea of the characters running away with the writer. I’ve never really felt it. I must say that’s probably true for some people. Maybe it was true for Gardner, but it’s not been entirely true for me. My way is to impose myself, my new information, my new interest, my new attitudes on anything in the book. Whatever I read tends to turn up in the next chapter. You may not know that I read it yesterday afternoon, it may be something that happened back in 1846, but quite possibly it can turn up in the writing as a brand-new perception.

  QUINN: You spent several years writing Legs. How well did you get to know him? Was he a real person for you?

  KENNEDY: I believed I knew Jack Diamond, but it took me a long time. I started to write him in the first person, and I couldn’t, because I didn’t know him. I started to write his life as a movie script which would become a novel, a form that now is a cliché, and I could see it was a cliché even then. I only got about two chapters done, and then I was asking myself, “Where am I going to put the camera now? Where is the cameraman going to stand?” All those artificial aspects of the constructed world, the stylistic world, were intrusive and ridiculous, so what I did was spend about two and a half years trying to figure out how to tell that story. I wrote it eight different times. I finally arrived at a narrator who could see Diamond in the round, and when I did that, I began to see Diamond myself. And then I began to wait for him on the road. I figured he’d be a nervous hitchhiker and I’d pick him up. Dana, my wife, had a dream about him being on the front lawn after the book was finished. She went out on the porch and there was Diamond. He rolled around in the grass and kicked his legs up in the air, and Dana asked, “What’s going on?” Legs said to her, “Bill got it just right.” That’s Dana’s dream, not mine.

  QUINN: The Ink Truck was your first n
ovel. It’s said that there’s a special relationship between authors and their first novels, a parent’s pride in their firstborn. Do you feel that way about The Ink Truck?

  KENNEDY: Yes. I love it. Some people badmouthed it after the fact, and before the fact for that matter. Actually, it sold as soon as I had finished it. It sold the first time out. I had a little problem trying to sell it before it was finished, but when it was done, my agent sent it over to Dial Press, where Ed Doctorow was the managing editor, and he bought it. Thereafter, it went out of print fairly quickly, but that’s the nature of first novels. Writers who are serious about themselves don’t worry about that. If you’re going to cut your wrists after your first novel, you’re not a writer. After the twenty-eighth novel, and nobody will buy it, well … But you think of Farrell. He never quit. It’s an admirable thing, because he was getting pleasure out of what he was doing. If there are enough people who understand that, if there are other writers getting some pleasure out of reading your twenty-eighth novel, then maybe that’s enough.

  QUINN: What about the influence of other writers on you? James Joyce must certainly be one of them?

  KENNEDY: Yes, absolutely. I’ve been reading him just lately. I’ve read books about him, by him. There’s no end to that man. He’s the greatest man of letters in the twentieth century. I don’t think there’s a close second. If there is, it’s Faulkner.

  But Joyce has transcendence. Leopold Bloom is someone who is never going to die in the history of literature. Faulkner did great things. He did wonderful, wonderful things. But there’s nothing like Leopold and Molly, the Blooms, in all of twentieth-century literature. I don’t know where the hell you go to find their equal.

  QUINN: What about the similarities between you and Joyce?

  KENNEDY: Similarities? I don’t aspire to similarities.

  QUINN: People have compared the opening of Ironweed to “The Dead” and to the “Circe” chapter in Ulysses. Is there any validity to that?