Why You Should Read William Kennedy to Save America

 [Moving stuff back from my abandoned WordPress blog.]

I did not get around to reading William Kennedy until I was past fifty. Even though I had a copy of Ironweed lying around for decades, even though I read Legs. My mistake.

When I was younger, 45 years ago, I had my mind fixed on William Faulkner and emulating his Yoknapatawpha County in Indiana. I gave up. It was a concern about whether my talent could make money. There was also trying to emulate a little too closely Faulkner's themes.

I was a coward and an idiot. If you want to write, do so. Find ways to keep body and soul together; use your imagination. I was not devoted enough; I was a dilettante.

And read more widely. William Kennedy is a better example of applying local history to the North. (Joyce Carol Oates' When We Were the Mulvaneys is another example.) All we have to do is to look and see what there is. I admit I had to leave Indiana to see what its story was.

The Los Angeles Review of Books published Heaven of Hell: Colum McCann examines the craft and legacy of William Kennedy’s ‘Albany Trilogy.’ McCann gives what I think is a good overview of Kennedy. even though I have not read all the novels reviewed. It does recall for me those I have read.

But to heaven and hell, simultaneously, with time. Let’s begin instead with place, which has, in Kennedy’s work, an absolute beginning, and an absolute end, and a maelstrom of melodic middles. Joyce had his Dublin. Márquez had his Macondo. Faulkner had his Yoknapatawpha County. Good bedfellows, all. The dust out of which Kennedy builds his world—and indeed his whole notion of time—is, of course, Albany.

Sooner or later, we will all find ourselves on the corner of State and Pearl. With the cops and the crooks. The porkheads and the poolsharks. The singers and the sycophants. The junkies and the jailers. The politicos and the pimps. The hoors and the hustlers. The storytellers, the stolentellers and the swollentellers too. The lovers and the losers all packed together in a single city. On a single street. In a single piece of brickwork. In a single sentence even. Honest to God, Marcus, I don’t think I’m dead. We are only as possible as what happened to us yesterday. I liked all their lies best, for I think they are the brightest part of anybody’s history. He’s just a bum, but who ain’t?

A lot has been made of Kennedy’s hometown, and rightly so, since place determines character, and character determines fate, and fate determines story, and story contains the theory of everything. But, like many writers, William Kennedy had to leave his subject before he found it. As a young journalist, he got out of Albany—the “asshole of the northeast,” according to one of his characters—and headed out to Puerto Rico.

By the way, what I came to see about my part of Indiana (the state itself is a patchwork; any unity is a fiction of its own) is the rise and fall of industry, and (in opposition to Faulkner's Mississippi) is a case of the winner losing the victory. The last insight I own as much to Orhan Pamuk as anyone.

I may never get published. So be it; I will keep on writing. If I get published, I may be labelled a regional writer. So be it; if Willa Cather is a regional writer, then I am overawed by sharing that pigeonhole.

Being political, the federal government seems to be centralizing power; Trumpism seems to be advocating a uniform aesthetic, smothering America's imaginative life. Regionalism, localism, appears to me as the only antidote. The only tools left us to preserve America as a unity, not a totality.

SCH 5/12