There's a law that says you can't write about William Kennedy without invoking William Faulkner or James Joyce, or both, the idea being that if a novelist returns to a place in a number of works over time he is not so much writing books as re-creating history into myth or some such. Fine. Granting the core differences--these are three singular sensibilities with deeply divergent artistic ambitions--we can agree that Kennedy's literary imagination, like those of Faulkner and Joyce, flourishes in the contemplation of character and situation constrained by historical--and therefore, significantly, geographical--particulars.
As Joyce did with Dublin and Faulkner with his invented YoknapatawphaCounty, so Kennedy has over a number of novels reared up a place in time--Albany,New York, mainly in the first half of the twentieth century--that may hostuniversal human struggles but is not the world writ small; that is, rather, its own unique locale and has, to use a word that Joyce's Stephen Daedalus liked, its own quidditas.
Where Albany is concerned, this quidditas has everything to do with thegenerational concentration of its Irish population and the particular inflectionthat this has imparted to social and political relations. No, inflection is too mild here--the stronger word would be stamp or cast. In a sense, everything in William Kennedy's created world flows forth from the premise of the Irish character--its family-revering clannishness; its parochial suspiciousness; its grievance-hoarding, sin-believing, thing-rooted obstinacy; its flaring sentimental romanticism. I know that such attributions violate every last canon of correctness, but it is hard to get hold of Kennedy's vision without them. Fanciful or founded, they underwrite his vision.
Kennedy has been channeling the Albany Irish from the very start, in novelslike The Ink Truck (1969), Legs (1975), and Billy Phelan'sGreatest Game (1978). He achieved his first--but meteoric--notoriety in 1983 with the success (Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award, MacArthur Foundation grant) of Ironweed, the beyond-hard-luck saga of Francis Phelan, a good drinking man gone irretrievably into the bottle after accidentally killing his baby boy. Here was a rendition of sorrow that plumbed to the very limits of family feeling.
Ironweed was intelligently packaged by Kennedy's publisher with two earlier works, Legs and Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, as the centerpiece of what is often called his "Albany trilogy," giving the author the beginnings of his Faulknerian claim on locale. Subsequent novels-- including the more historico-mythic Quinn's Book (1988), Very Old Bones (1992), and The Flaming Corsage (1996)--solidified that reputation, as did the publication of O Albany! (1983), a study of the history and politics of his native city. In that work, Kennedy drew heavily on his own family's insider legacy: The Kennedy clan, through the author's father and uncles, has had a long-standing tentacular connection to Albany politics.
Where there are Irish, it's safe to say, there is politics, especially of thelocal stripe. There is no group more prone to complex affiliation. Butinterestingly enough--O Albany! aside--until Roscoe, his newest novel, was published this winter, Kennedy had never put politics squarely at the center of one of his works. Reading Roscoe, I began to understand why. Under the fictional microscope--the lenses necessarily ground to capture reality from the perspective of the individual, the self--politics, at least the root-level local kind, keeps dissolving back into the personal. Kennedy locates this point of slippage in the lives of his characters and explores the implications with great resourcefulness and wit.
Roscoe is a story of alliance and misalliance within Albany's Democratic machine in 1945. The novel opens on V-J Day, August 14, at a moment of imminent political turmoil. Kennedy establishes his links and lineages, sets out his panorama, with a practiced anecdotal ease. All is character and relationship. At the center of the novel--its very axis--is Roscoe Conway, middle-aged party secretary and go-to guy. With him, just off stage, are his two oldest friends, Patsy McCall (based on legendary longtime party boss Dan O'Connell) and Elisha Fitzgibbon. All three are sons of influential Albany pols and moneymen (Roscoe's father, Felix, was city mayor three times before being thrown from office); they all came up together and have kept their fortunes tightly connected. The ascendancy of the new generation--perpetuation of the old--is figured in Elisha's son Alex, a war hero on his way back home to reclaim his post as mayor.
Rumor is strong that the Republicans in the governor's mansion are poised tolaunch a major crackdown on vice--Albany has a flourishing brothel business--in apre-election bid to discredit the Democrats. This tension opens the novel. Buteven before any such initiative is launched, Roscoe receives a late-night callfrom Elisha's secretary: Her boss is dead in his office, victim of a possibleheart attack, more likely a suicide. A cryptic message--"Roscoe will figurethings out"--intimates scandal and urges Roscoe to find a way to set things right.
The scandal turns out to be a complex paternity-custody claim that would takeparagraphs to explicate. The basic upshot, however, is that the suicide andensuing events pull Roscoe both back into the romantic orbit ofVeronica--Elisha's widow, but also his own abiding true love--and into thedeepest zone of intrigue, the place where family secrets intersect with thepublicity machine as it is wielded by powers on both sides of the politicaldivide. If Roscoe does not have a full-tilt plot so much as a densely interwoven set of episodes, it nevertheless generates an impression of great and subtly purposeful social intricacy. What the reader takes from all of this, aside from the satisfactions of gossip and speculation, is what might be called the "ant farm" epiphany of urban political life: the recognition that everything depends on a scurry of figures and motives so ramified as to be nearly incomprehensible. Except, that is, by those few who have the gift--who understand the chaos-theory dimensions of the web and the play of influences between individuals and families, through neighborhoods and districts, and who can read instinctively the current flow of power in its myriad forms.
Roscoe is such a one. Bluff and blustery, savvy and conniving,discomfited by what he knows of ceaseless political leveraging--he tells everyonehe knows that he is getting out of politics--but unable to keep his own handsoff, he is an ideal protagonist. Through Roscoe, Kennedy can explore theambivalence that for the sensitive onlooker must attend all manifestations ofpower and influence--the age-old "disconnect" between means and ends. Indeed, thedisaffected Roscoe proves himself to be something of a philosopher on this verysubject. Writes Kennedy:
Roscoe certainly did not invent the perverse forces that drivehuman beings, and he can't explain any of them. He believes they are a mysteryof nature. He concedes that a morally pure society, with candidates unblemishedby sin and vice, might possibly exist somewhere, though he has never seen orheard of one, and can't really imagine what one would be like. "But I'll keeplooking," he concludes.
Or, elsewhere:
... if a man insists on dealing only with honest men he'll haveto stop dealing. Roscoe knows how honest men think and it is terrifying... . Anda man ought not be simply good, but good for something, and so Roscoe will try tosucceed by making it a practice to be honest whenever it seems feasible.
Yet for all of his moral practicality, Roscoe is ultimatelyheart-driven and heart-guided. His actions derive from his loyalties and hisloyalties from his deep affections--for Elisha, for Patsy, for Veronica. All hisdeals and muscled arm-twistings, and especially his tour-de-force legal sleightsof hand to save Veronica and her adopted son from her venal sister and his ownex-wife, Pamela, reveal a man acting at every turn to protect his own. Principlehas little to do with it. Politics is, for Roscoe, merely primary human relationships carried on by other means. There is no mention anywhere in thenovel of anyone standing for a dream or an ideal, for anything more abstract thana reduction of property tax or an increase in protection.
Kennedy does a masterful job of cross-sectioning this middle-aged man,exposing the intricate layering of emotional, physical, and, yes, spiritualimperatives. At no point do we lose sight of the battered appetitive being, therogue who can tell his longtime mistress, Hattie: "I change like a turnip growingever larger, ever rounder, and palatable only when seriously boiled." At no pointdo we feel that he is a schematic figure or, worse, a pretext for the author tomoralize on the nature of politics.
Years ago, I had an argument with a friend--a man now known in certain circles, only half jokingly, as "the last Marxist." He insisted on the primary conditioning power of the great forces: market and ideology. I countered him withmy naive Chekhovianism, my idea that everything is finally, always, irreduciblypersonal. Situations, I argued, are always concrete, and motives are unfailinglybedded in the vagaries of the subjective. My friend was much smarter--heinstructed me until my head was spinning. I went home feeling chagrined.
Yet here, reading Roscoe, every page of which maps the pressure points of an intimate political sphere, I felt that I was somehow reframing my point, coming back to rebut the last Marxist. For if Kennedy is to be believed, if Roscoe is to be believed, and if the old adage "All politics is local" is to be heeded, then indeed the other great popular assumption can be challenged. If the personal is the political, then isn't the opposite also true? Seen closely enough, seen comprehensively enough, the political seems to disappear into the personal. Politics is not an absolute category, but a way of getting things done. How readily we forget this. Somehow it seems right that an Irishman should be telling us this, an Irishman with a deep understanding of the intersecting hierarchies. There are facts and there are truths. Give Roscoe the last word: "The turf below, the sky above, are true. It's true only if you can't fix it. Everybody in the cemetery is true." Politics is about fixing things, and in this deepest sense, it can't be true.
