The Quick and the Dead

Ironweed a novel by William Kennedy.  Penguin.  227 pp.  $18.00  *****

Despite my huge admiration for the first two novels in the Albany cycle, I can see why Ironweed was the prize winner.  Kennedy’s writing reaches an apotheosis in this book, perhaps from the subject matter, perhaps just because he was growing in confidence.  In 1983, when the book came out, magic realism was all the rage, and critics saw this book in that tradition.  Kennedy certainly knew the tradition, what with his connections to Latin America, but I think the supernatural element in this book is different from magical realism, and a little closer to home.

Throughout the first two novels of the series, there has been an undercurrent of Catholic mysticism.  Legs Diamond, for instance, was seen as a man of extraordinary physical capabilities, to the point where he had a kind of aura; it wasn’t just his charm, but his sheer energy—for good and for bad—that overwhelmed people.  Martin Daugherty, in Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, has an intuitive sense about things that definitely seems spooky; at one point he’s walking through Albany headed one place, but something compels him to head in another, and he thereby runs into Francis Phelan, whom he didn’t even know was in town.  And the intuitive wild bet he made on the horses, and the fact that they all won—a major factor in the plot—is outlandish.

But Ironweed goes to a whole new level, because the aforementioned Francis Phelan, who fled Albany 22 years before and has only recently shown up again, can actually see the dead.  He sees them as plainly as he sees the living, and they act in totally unexpected—and often inconvenient—ways.  The key moment seems to occur early in the novel, when he visits the graveyard and goes to speak to his son Gerald, whom he accidentally killed by dropping him on the floor when the child was only days old.  That was the incident that caused Phelan, in shame, to flee his family and flee Albany.  He had huge resistance to coming to the graveyard  but managed to do it.

I’m tempted to quote a huge swath of prose here—this is a stunning passage—but I’ll try to restrain myself.

“In his grave, a cruciformed circle, Gerald watched the advent of his father and considered what action might be appropriate to their meeting. . . . Denied speech in life . . . Gerald possessed the gift of tongues in death.  His ability to communicate and to understand was at the genius level among the dead.  He could speak with any resident adult in any language, but more notable was his ability to understand the chattery squirrels and chipmunks, the silent signals of the ants and beetles, and the slithy semaphores of the slugs and worms that moved above and through the earth.  He could read the waning flow of energy in the leaves and berries as they fell from the box elders above him.  And because his fate had been innocence and denial, Gerald had grown a protective web which deflected all moisture, all moles, rabbits, and other burrowing creatures.  . . . Gerald rested in his infantile sublimity, exuding a high gloss induced by early death, his skin a radiant white-gold, his nails a silvery gray, his cluster of curls and large eyes perfectly matched in gleaming ebony.  Swaddled in his grave, he was beyond capture by visual or verbal artistry.  He was neither beautiful nor perfect to the beholder but rather an ineffably fabulous presence whose like was not to be found anywhere in the cemetery, and it abounded with dead innocents.”

Those last three sentences, but really this whole passage, reflect the lyrical heights Kennedy reaches in this novel, and the chances he takes.  Such writing is way beyond anything he attempted in his earlier work.

This being, in his grave, mulls on a decision.

“Gerald, through an act of silent will, imposed on his father the pressing obligation to perform his final acts of expiation for abandoning the family  . . . Then, when these final acts are complete, you will stop trying to die because of me.”

The rest of the novel documents those acts of expiation.

Ironweed somehow manages to walk the tightrope between this supernatural, deeply religious view of things, and the profane world that his characters inhabit.  Francis Phelan, to say the very least, is no saint.  For twenty-two years, after abandoning his family, he’s lived as a hobo and a bum, seriously alcoholic, working here and there but never for long.  For a little less than half of those years, he has been accompanied by a woman named Helen who, if anything, had a longer fall into the gutter, because she had been a singer of some renown, often performing in public.  Francis, of course, had been a successful major league baseball player before his fall.

Despite its supernatural trappings, Ironweed doesn’t spare us the gritty details of living on the street.  There are shelters who will accept you only if you’re cold sober, inebriated people who die of exposure on cold nights, kids who steal Helen’s purse with all her money in it, Francis’ days of work as a grave digger and the sidekick to a rag picker.  Francis doesn’t seem physically addicted to booze—he goes for days without it—but given a little cash, and some time on his hands, he once again chooses to drink, in amounts that would kill a lesser man.  I don’t understand this kind of addiction.  But I do recognize it.  It’s that wish to get back to the cocoon—however painful—that seems familiar and hides you from the world.

Somehow or other, Francis inhabits that timeless place where the present, past, and future all happen at once, and one is no more real than another.  This is an astonishing performance for a novelist who, up to this point, hadn’t shown such metaphysical depth.  I heartily recommend all of these novels, in order, but if you’re only going to read one, this is the one.  I’ll think of it as William Kennedy’s greatest work until further notice.bbb