William Kennedy, intoxicated both by James Joyce’s Ulysses and by his own father’s memories of Albany, N.Y., once resolved to write an “Albany fantasy” that would “reconstitute the city’s past.” To his notes he appended an ultimatum: “Commit a decade to the creation of this book.” Anyone who has hatched and abandoned a project of such a scope will have reason to smile. Yet, by writing novel after novel of “average size,” he accomplished his goal with his celebrated Albany Cycle. Ironweed, the third book in the cycle, is not only a crucial part of his magnum opus but also a work of genius that stands alone, defiantly, on its own two chilblained feet.
Ironweed begins on Halloween, the “final night of October 1938, the unruly night when grace is always in short supply, and the old and the new dead walk abroad in this land.” That might as well read “the dead and the living dead,” for the hero of Ironweed is an alcoholic vagrant, Francis Phelan, nearly bereft of hope, returning to his city and his family after one of his flights from shame and criminal prosecution. His few friends are bums, some worse off than he is; Helen, his quasi-romantic partner, carries a stomach tumor like a lithopedion. When we meet Francis he is laboring in a cemetery, to pay down his debt to the lawyer who helped him get off for registering to vote some two-dozen times.
Ironweed is a book as acquainted as its protagonist with bad luck. Thirteen publishers rejected it before it went on, with the help of Saul Bellow, to find a home at Viking Press, win the 1984 Pulitzer, land on the Modern Library’s list of the hundred best English-language novels of the twentieth century, and earn a place in Harold Bloom’s Western Canon. The publishing world’s reluctance to embrace the book is easy to understand. “Who wants to read a book about bums?” Mr. Kennedy asked the Paris Review. “Yet it’s not a downbeat book. It’s a book about family, about redemption and perseverance, it’s a book about love.” All of that is true, but Mr. Kennedy perhaps underestimates the importance, artistic and moral, of just how downbeat Ironweed can be.
Few books—other than, say, the Book of Job, or the literature of prison and warfare—show as vividly as Ironweed how low a man can be laid. Francis abandons his family after accidentally dropping and killing his baby, Gerald. (His son Billy’s question “Why is Gerald crooked?” is perhaps the book’s most heartbreaking note.) A former major-league ballplayer, Francis throws a rock too powerfully and accurately during a trolley strike, killing a scab and precipitating the rifle fire that cuts down innocent bystanders. He recalls dead bums, one frozen to the street by his own urine, another discovered “with a red icicle growin’ out of his nose,” still another killed by Francis himself: “There are things,” he says, “I never wanted to learn how to do.”
Throughout Ironweed, Francis is haunted quite literally by the ghosts of his dead; the novel is for Mr. Kennedy a daring departure from the historical focus and scrupulous realism of his other books. In his Albany novels Legs (1975) and Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game (1978), Mr. Kennedy presents men who must sink or swim in the world of other men—manipulative, violent, propelled by agendas both transparent and deeply private. The ever-present ghosts of Ironweed are more slippery interlocutors. They embody the torments (very seldom the pleasures) of conscience and memory. Told that “you gotta bury your dead” because it is a “rule of the Catholic church,” Francis replies, “I’m not talkin’ about the Catholic church.” He understands that the dead do not stay underground. One must learn to live with them, to learn from them.
Before he was a novelist, Mr. Kennedy was a reporter, and in the bulk of his oeuvre his prose is informed by a reporter’s respect for the plain facts. In Ironweed he allows his prose style to range more widely and wildly, from the hard-boiled (“gray clouds that looked like two flying piles of dirty socks”) to the liturgical. Often it settles into a kind of borderline-maudlin rhetoric that evokes either profundity or alcoholic pomposity (“He walked with an empty soul toward the north star, magnetized by an impulse to redirect his own destiny”). This range is well-suited to Mr. Kennedy’s challenging themes—the impulse to flee and the impulse to return; the willingness to drown in squalor and the courage to seek the good remaining in one’s own withered soul.
“Nobody’s a bum all their life,” Francis tells the assembled bums at the discovery of a woman frozen to death and partly eaten by dogs. “She hada been something good once,” even if only a little kid, for “a little kid’s somethin’ that ain’t a bum or a whore.” The redemptive message of Ironweed says not that we return to dust but that, having once had value in the sight of God or family, we have no excuse not to slough off our failures and, whatever the cost, try, try again.