Charmingly Despicable

Legs a novel by William Kennedy.  Penguin.  317 pp.  $17.00.  *****

William Kennedy burst onto the literary scene in 1983 with the novel Ironweed, his fourth.  My memory is that he’d had trouble finding a publisher because his earlier novels hadn’t sold.  In an act of desperation he got in touch with Saul Bellow, whom he’d met when both men were in Puerto Rico (Kennedy lived there for a number of years, and married a Puerto Rican woman).  Bellow had read the books and agreed to give them an endorsement (a rather lame one, it seems to me), “These Albany novels will be memorable, a distinguished group of books”).

Viking agreed to publish Ironweed and reissue the other two Albany novels in paperback.  Ironweed won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle award and was made into a movie starring Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep.  There is one unforgettable Streep scene in the movie.  Otherwise I thought the book was far better.

How’s that for a guy who couldn’t get his novel published?

I read that trilogy at the time—I loved those paperbacks—and eventually it became more than just a trilogy.  The Albany cycle now stands at eight novels.  I’ve read them all, and enjoyed every one, but in my recent obsession with reading the whole of an author’s work, I’ve decided to re-read them, because I feel sure I didn’t see all the connections as I read them through the years.

I’m somewhat astonished to say that I think Legs should have won the Pulitzer Prize, or at least some award.  Kennedy was a great novelist already, in his second novel.  I don’t remember thinking that before.

I also didn’t remember what a despicable person Legs Diamond was.  He had enormous charm; Kennedy, or at least his narrator, Marcus Gorman (Diamond’s attorney), sees him as almost having an aura.  He exuded energy and charisma.  People were drawn to him as he walked into a room.  At the same time, of course, if you said the wrong thing, you might get your head blown off.  It was like that scene in the movie Goodfellas.  “You’re a funny guy.”  “What do you mean funny?”

There is a scene early in the book, for instance, where he sneaks off to a speakeasy in the country (the book takes place during Prohibition, but the booze flows like water) to see his girlfriend Kiki, whom his wife Alice knows about and despises.  Jack is “keeping” Kiki, which means that she spends most of her time sitting around hotel rooms staring at the walls.  When he finally shows up at this deserted bar, in the middle of the afternoon, she wants to dance, something that she herself does for a living.  So he gets a piano player to strike up a tune, and it turns out that Diamond, who is good at virtually everything he tries, is a fantastic dancer, a natural, the Charleston, the Black Bottom, almost better than Kiki.  The scene ends badly, however, when the owner of the place finds the whole thing funny.  He actually goes to the point of spitting beer at Diamond, as a show of contempt.  How drunk was he?

Diamond was a stylish dresser, a ladies’ man, an entertaining companion, and a national hero.  It’s hard to know why a brutal gangster would become a hero, but I think it’s because a determined minority passed prohibition laws while the vast majority of Americans wanted to drink.  In effect, they were criminals themselves, just because they were having a little fun.  So they looked up to, and applauded, the man who got them their booze.  They ignored all he did to get to the top.

The kinds of things he did came to light late in the novel, when Diamond was once again out with Kiki and happened to pass an old guy who was driving a truckload of hard cider.  That meant he had a still somewhere, or knew of a still, and Diamond had a thing about controlling all the stills in a certain area.  So even though this guy was strictly small potatoes, selling hard cider to his country friends so he could make a little spare cash, Diamond pulled him over—it turned out he had a young kid in the truck with him—and tortured the man, there’s no other word for it, trying to find out where the still was.  The old boy was on the verge of death, and still wouldn’t give in.  Diamond finally relented, just because the man was old and pathetic.  (The guy later bragged about having outwitted the famous Legs Diamond.  He actually knew where the still was.  He owned it.)  The authorities made it into a case of kidnapping because the kid was involved, and had a strong case if there ever was one, but Diamond’s lawyers got him off, and the public cheered.  I wasn’t cheering.  That scene made me sick.

Diamond was famous for avoiding death.  Toward the end of his life, he had God knows how many bullet holes in him and still hadn’t died.  So his final death, at the hand of some gangster or other, seems anti-climactic.  A couple of guys shot him while he was sleeping in bed, alone, probably mildly drunk.  There wasn’t much left of him at that point.  No one has any idea who made the hit.

He was 34 years old.

This is a marvelous novel, compelling on every page.  Doris Grumbach, a prominent reviewer (and one I always enjoyed) said, “No one writing in America today has Kennedy’s rich and fertile gift of gab; his pure verbal energy; his love of people.”  Exactly.

This is the next writer the Library of America should pick up.