Sex! Passion! Betrayal! Murder!

The Flaming Corsage a novel by William Kennedy.  Viking.  209 pp.  $23.95 *****

In Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, there is a subplot involving a man who, though not the protagonist, is central to the story.  Martin Daugherty is the son of a renowned playwright, who is suffering dementia in a nearby nursing home.  Martin himself is the proverbial journalist with a novel in his desk drawer; the manuscript clocks in at 1200 pages, and concerns his father, Edward Daugherty.  Edward Daugherty’s most notorious play portrays a love triangle involving him, the wife of his best friend, and a young actress in one of his plays; he was married to another woman at the time.

In Billy Phelan, Martin not only meets up with the “young actress” (now much older); she is acting in a current production of the play, playing the wife, not the young ingenue (she had taken that role in earlier productions, in effect, playing herself).  Martin has sex with this woman, as he had done before, making him the lover of his father’s lover, a complicated situation (to say the least).  One wonders at the psychology of a woman who would do such a thing.  That subplot is mighty compelling, and in some ways Martin is the most interesting man in that novel.  But it’s actually not central to the story of Billy Phelan.

A smaller subplot of Very Old Bones, a novel about the earlier generation of Phelan’s, concerns Francis Phelan’s adolescent affair with Katrina Daugherty, Edward’s wife and the Phelans’ next door neighbor.  Again, it seems just a side story in that novel, though when his ultra-Catholic mother discovers the affair Francis is forced to leave home (he is the protagonist of the Pulitzer Prize winning novel Ironweed).

I bring these things up because they make me wonder how much of this massive saga William Kennedy had in mind when he began.  The Flaming Corsage tells the story of that love triangle and of Edward Daugherty himself, who until now has just been a demented man in a nursing home.  But his story is as compelling as anything we’ve had in the series so far.  I keep saying this, but this novel is in some ways the most compellingly written, the most fascinating, and the most vivid story yet.  Kennedy published it when he was 68, and has published two more novels since.  In an interview published in 2020, the man was 92 years old and working on another novel.

The Flaming Corsage—whose chapters travel all over the place in time—opens with a sensational murder: a man enters a hotel room occupied by another man and two women.  One of the women is his wife; he calls her a “Babylonian whore” and shoots her.  He then shoots twice at the other man in the room; one shot hits him, and he flies against the window, breaking the glass.  The other woman flees into the bathroom.  The man places the gun under his chin and shoots himself.  All this in the first two pages of the novel.

The rest of the novel gives us the background to this grisly scene.

At the heart of the story—as is true of many of Kennedy’s novels—is a friendship between two like-minded men, Edward Daugherty and Thomas Maginn.  Both have unfocused literary aspirations; Maginn is a journalist who wants to be a novelist, and Daugherty at that time is writing prose fiction too.  He has one advantage his friend doesn’t.  Though he is an Irishmen, like nearly all the characters in Kennedy’s novels, he has a patron, a wealthy man named Lyman Fitzgibbon.  Edward’s father—a crusty and memorable Irishman named Emmet Daugherty[1]—rescued Lyman from a life-threatening situation, and Lyman vowed that Emmet’s heirs would never want for anything.  So Edward has gone to the best schools, and traveled in the highest social circles.  Eventually he falls in love with Katrina Taylor, Lyman’s granddaughter, and persuades her not only to marry him, but to convert to his Catholic faith.  There are any number of obstacles in their path.  But their fierce passion and love seem equal to them all.

Katrina is in many ways the most fascinating character in the book.  In Very Old Bones, where she seduced the young and virile Francis Phelan, we had the impression that she was somehow mentally ill, and while that sometimes seems possible in this novel (especially after the midway point, when she is driven mad by grief), she also seems one of the most original human beings in the whole Kennedy saga, well-educated and a lover of poetry and the arts; extremely attractive, with a full understanding of the effect she has on men; deeply in love with Edward and full of passion for him but fully aware of how transgressive their love is.  Her parents are overwhelmingly opposed to it.

There is a moment early in the book where Edward is a wildly successful playwright, his marriage is going beautifully, his wife has give birth to their son Martin, and it seems that they have overcome everything that stood in their way, bringing these two social classes (and the British and the Irish) together.  Then a tragedy takes place.  I won’t spoil the plot by saying what it is, but it involves the flaming corsage of the title.  Katrina somehow faults Edward for what happens, though he is in no way to blame (that intuitive, extremely original part of her mind seems to have gone a little haywire).  And everything starts going to hell.

I haven’t mentioned a third friend who would form a triumvirate with Edward and Maginn, a physician named Giles Fitzroy, who has a beautiful wife named Felicity.  The men love and care for each other, but there is a male edge to their friendship, envy on the part of Maginn, adulterous attractions on the part of all three men.  Male energies and hijinks get way out of control.  One wonders why they couldn’t see that coming and put on the brakes.

I can’t think of another novel that is so hopeful at the midpoint and so sad at the end.  It makes us wonder if such a passion was doomed from the start.

It also makes me marvel at the artistic genius of William Kennedy.  It’s as if he was holding all these stories in reserve, waiting for them to appear.  And appear they did.  They are among the wonders of American literature.

[1] Emmet is at the heart of my favorite scene in all of Kennedy’s fiction.  He is on his death bed, and feels the end coming on, so he tells his son to get the priest and his daughter in law to get a pitcher of ale.  A neighbor asks if it’s really a good idea to give ale to the priest.  Emmet replies that ale is God’s greatest handiwork.