Man of Principle

Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game a novel by William Kennedy.  Penguin Books.  282 pp.  $14.00 *****

To get the suspense over with immediately, since it’s the first incident in the novel: Billy’s greatest game was when he bowled 299 in a match against a man named Scotty Streck.  They were competing for the best three game total, and Scotty, the better bowler, had given Billy a 55-pin handicap (short of the 20 per game Billy wanted).  Billy had been losing badly until the third game, when he suddenly got in a groove.  He left one pin standing with his final ball.  Other than that he was perfect.  He actually beat Streck by one pin for the three games.  Didn’t need the spot.

Billy is a 31-year-old man who lives (unbelievably, for me, a person who virtually never won a bet[1]) by gambling.  He’s good at all the games, bowling, billiards, darts, but also knows how to bet on other things, including card games and the horses (all this seems to go on freely in Albany, as if it were Las Vegas); he also works at least part-time as a bookie, taking bets from others.  His father left the family when he was nine, and he had to figure out how to make his way; this is how he’s done it.  He wakes up every morning (usually quite late, because he’s been up half the night), dresses fit to kill, in a suit and tie, nice shoes and a hat, and goes out looking for people to hustle.  He doesn’t seem to have much trouble.  They’re all over the place.

I think it is with this second novel that William Kennedy settles into his Albany series.  In the first, Legs Diamond was so outsized a character that you hardly noticed anyone else.  In Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, we’re firmly ensconced in the Phelan family, and the Quinns are around.  The father who left Billy is Francis Phelan, who will return in the third novel (and the big prizewinner), Ironweed.  Martin Daugherty, the journalist and son of the playwright Edward Daugherty, doesn’t narrate the book, but he is a constant presence, and central to the plot.  With Legs Diamond gone, various important characters in the cycle take center stage.

Two guys have taken bets in Billy’s match, Morrie Berman, a Jewish man who has left his devout father behind and dislikes the powers that be, and Charlie Boy McCall, son of the local political boss and a well-connected man in Albany.  The narrator mentions those things early on, and we almost don’t notice.  They become important as the story continues.

The plot immediately thickens when, that very night, Charlie Boy is “grabbed” by some kidnappers as he returns home and taken God knows where, a daring move against the most powerful family in Albany.  For journalist Martin Daugherty, this is the biggest story in years, but when he tries to get details the head of the ruling family, Patsy McCall, tells him not to print a word; the kidnappers have said they’ll kill Charlie Boy if there’s any publicity.  We soon realize that, whatever the political structure of Albany, the McCalls control the city.  Nobody does a thing without their permission.

They immediately suspect that Morrie Berman is somehow involved.  Billy, in the meantime, knows almost nothing about the power structure that surrounds him; he’s Irish like the McCalls, but is as likely to hang around with Berman, who occupies the same world he does.  It takes Martin Daugherty to let us know what’s going on behind the scenes.  The McCalls call on Billy to spy on Berman, not to pump him for information, just report what he says.  That goes against the grain for Billy, for whom friendship, and not ratting on a friend, are the most important things in life.  He says he’ll cooperate, but doesn’t entirely do so.  When the McCalls realize he’s not coming through with all he knows, they shut him out from everything in Albany.  He can’t get a drink, can’t get a game, he can hardly even eat a meal.  He’s been robbed of his livelihood, all because he stood up for what he thought was right.

What Kennedy describes here is a foreign world to me, people living by their wits, often hand to mouth, suffering terrible tragedies and somehow going on, leading ordinary lives that are nevertheless full of drama.  The drinking that goes on, even for a guy like Billy who has to have his wits about him, is almost beyond belief.  For consumption of alcohol, this book is right up there with Faulkner.  At one point someone describes Albany as “the asshole of the Northeast.”  To these folks it’s the whole world.  Take that away from Billy and he might as well die.  It doesn’t occur to him that he could drift to another city and maybe, in time, do just as well.

The mind that unites the story, even though he doesn’t narrate it, is that of Martin Daugherty, for me the book’s most interesting character (though I have strong affection for Billy).  He’s a first-rate journalist, has published a book of stories and written 1200 pages of a novel about his father, who is demented in a nearby nursing home.  Edward Daugherty was a famous playwright in his day, and wrote a play about the two women in his life, Martin’s mother and a younger, captivatingly beautiful woman with whom he had an affair.  Martin himself has had a dalliance with the same woman—she’s spanned the generations—and she shows up in Albany acting in that same play, but as the wife, not the young lover.  There’s enough sub-plot in this novel to fill any number of other books.  In the years to come, Kennedy would sit down and write them.

[1] I gave up gambling in 1964, when I lost a substantial sum on the Clay-Liston fight and realized I wasn’t good at this.  I know that sounds like a stupid bet today, but at the time almost everyone agreed with me, including Joe Louis, who bet on Liston also in the second fight (so there!).  By substantial sum, I mean something like ten bucks, but that was a lot to me.  I could have bought three record albums with that money.

I did later get back at the guy with one more wager, though I don’t consider it to have been a bet, it was such a sure thing.  We all used to watch professional wrestling in those days, and the guy who had taken my money in the Clay Liston fight somehow didn’t understand it was fixed.  Gorilla Monsoon was wrestling Bruno Sammartino, who was the heavyweight champ, and my friend couldn’t believe that the much bigger man wouldn’t win.  But I knew Bruno would never lose his title in Pittsburgh, his hometown, so the bet I made was that he would not lose the title.  Monsoon might win the match on a technicality, but I knew he wouldn’t take the title.  I even explained my reasoning to my friend, but he still wanted to bet.  So I went ahead and took his money.  At that point I saw how stupid gambling was, and never placed a bet again.