Saul Bellow was a big figure for William Kennedy. Prior to helping him find a publisher for Ironweed in 1983 (with some effective Bellow bluster), he also briefly taught Kennedy in Puerto Rico in the 1960s and provided some excellent advice, as Kennedy told the Paris Review:
He would explain that my writing was ‘fatty’ — I was saying everything twice and I had too many adjectives. He said it was also occasionally ‘clotty’ — it was imprecision he was talking about, an effort to use a word that wasn’t quite as precise and so screwed up the clause or sentence …
Kennedy took Bellow’s criticism “very seriously”, edited what he was working on “ruthlessly” and kept these lessons for life. But as Ironweed shows, what he took from Bellow’s lessons isn’t straightforward. Good writing craft is mysterious. Anyone can follow lessons; it takes extra alchemy to make advice work.
Certainly, I didn’t feel there was any clotting in Ironweed. But fattiness – that’s more complicated. There is a lot of repetition in Ironweed: scenes are revisited, phrases are duplicated – sometimes in immediate succession – as are words. (If someone is “studying” something, chances are you’ll see that word again soon.) But it’s hard to see all that as a fault. It’s clear that Kennedy knows he’s doing it. The repetition is Kennedy reinforcing his meaning, rather than lapsing into redundancy. This is a book about piecing together recurring memories, revisiting old haunts, and receiving visits from ghosts – and the language reflects that. It’s not that Kennedy forgot Bellow’s words; rather, he created something different from the new awareness they lent him.
There are many spare, lean pages in Ironweed where there are hardly any verbal embellishments. But there are also passages like this:
Well not-me, Francis said to his unavailed-for self, and he smelled his own uncancelled stink again, aware that it had intensified since morning. The sweat of a workday, the sourness of dried earth on his hands and clothes, the putrid perfume of cemetery air with its pretension to wind-blown purity, all this lay in foul encrustation atop the private pestilence of his being.
Is that “fatty”? The adjectives are piled on top of each other, spat out in plosives and sibilance. It could almost be Hamlet worrying about the rank sweat of an enseamed bed ... but, it works. That adjectival effluence reinforces Francis’s anger and resentment, as well as giving us a rich, physical sense of overpowering yuck.
Good writing is mainly about getting away with it: you can do anything you want, so long as you do it well. Which Kennedy does, with his often poetic prose, making us feel the energy and potential of Albany, New York, his setting.
Albany is the other key to Kennedy’s style. He has often spoken about the trouble he had writing about Puerto Rico. (It’s notable that he shared these troubles with his other famous friend there, Hunter S Thompson, who went on to write a pretty rotten novel about it.) Instead, it was Albany and the people trudging through it, that got his mojo working. In a preface to his non-fiction work about the town, O Albany, Kennedy wrote that he was: “a person whose imagination has become fused with a single place, and in that place finds all the elements that a man ever needs for the life of the soul.”
All the flophouses and encampments, ball parks and tramways, homely streets and glowing nightclubs feel rich with history in Ironweed; it feels so special that the wannabe novelist in me even started to dream of going to Albany. But Kennedy may be its best spokesperson. “Misery, wretchedness, ennui and the devil. I’ve got to spend another evening in Albany,” moaned HH Richardson, an architect, in 1870. On the audiobook of Ironweed, James Atlas and Russell Banks discuss getting a tour of the town from Kennedy himself, and seeing little more than grimy street corners and dull strips where the Ironweed author saw astonishing stories and myth. He wrote of the town in O Albany: “I love its times of grace and greatness, its political secrets and its historical presence in every facet of the nation’s life, including the unutterable, the unspeakable, and the ineffable.” It’s these last three, I fear, that give the biggest clue to Kennedy’s success – and they’re hard lessons to teach.
