| William Kennedy and the Unutterable Eloquence of Human Beings At first you say to yourself as you turn over a copy of Ironweed, the ulitzer-Prize-winning novel by William Kennedy, I don't want to read a story about an alcoholic, homeless bum who murdered three people and accidentally killed his own child. Too depressing. But then you open the book and read the first line and its gritty and ¬yes - supernatural narrative grabs onto you and won't let go. As Francis Phelan, the protagonist, rides on the back of a truck through the cemetery to dig graves, his dead father smiles and tucks a few pul¬verized strands of dead grass roots into his pipe, and his dead mother braids a cross out of dandelion roots and eats it with "insatiable revulsion." You don't ask yourself if these ghosts are real, or metaphori¬calor a figment of Francis' imagination, because you're mesmerized; you have become Francis, and as Francis, you accept the suffering in your life without angst or envy. So even life in hell is bearable, and reading the book is heaven, because you can't remember when you last read a book that was so well written and so readable at the same time. You also wouldn't be the first person who rejected the book initially. As Kennedy's fourth novel, it was rejected by publishers twelve times, including by Viking, who eventually published it after Saul Bellow wrote a letter "admonishing" them for not accepting it, according to the Dictionary of Literary Biography. Speaking about people who rejected it, Kennedy told a Toronto Globe and Mail reporter: "They...objected that the book was overwritten, they didn't understand what I was doing in terms of language, they felt that no bum would ever talk like Francis does, or think like he does. . . they thought of him only as a bum. They didn't understand that what I was striving for was to talk about the central elo¬quence of every human being. We all have this unutterable eloquence, and the closest you can get to it is to make it utterable at some point, in some way that separates it from the conscious level of life." Ironweed turned Kennedy's career around. Where his first books only sold a few thousand copies, Ironweed was a commercial success and won the 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. His earlier novels were reissued; Francis Ford Coppola approached him about writing The Cotton Club; and he then received a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Kennedy used part of that money to create the New York State Writers Institute, which now hosts between 30-50 writers a year, runs workshops, a film series, a radio show and more. Since then Kennedy has become known for his "Albany cycle;" that is, a collec¬tion of seven novels that all depict Albany mostly during 1930.'1: a place of gang¬sters, pool hustlers, Irish bosses, corrupt politicos, bums and prostitutes. "When Kennedy writes about Albany, New York," noted Carolyn See of the Washington Post, "he is, in fact, holding up a mirror to all of American history, to the way this entire country was made. . . This fictional terrain may be compared to the Faulknerian South in its richness and complexity. " Kennedy's most recent novel, Roscoe, was characterized by Thomas Mallon in The Atlantic Monthly as "the best novel of city-hall politics to appear in ages." It follows the life of Roscoe Conway, the second in command of the Irish Democratic political machine headed up by Patsy McCall (based loosely on the real life Dan O'Connell). Roscoe was named one the top seven books of the year by The New York Times Book Review in 2002. Besides the Pulitzer, Kennedy has received many other awards, such as a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the New York State Governor's Arts Award. --Lale Davidson
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| Wednesday, April 23, 2003 • 7:15pm-8:15pm • Library Auditorium • Crandall Library |
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| Bill Losinger:Why Fiction I've always believed that the most insincere form-or genre-of writting is autobiography-to me, the antithesis of the personal myth-making process that the writing of fiction affords. The very idea that one's past can be reconstructed accurately and honestly-in narrative form, no less-seems to belie the very nature of memory which is, in and of itself, subject to a daily revisionist process. (Who would dispute this?) We could almost conclude that with the exception of verifiable names and places and dates "the way things really happened" is primarily fiction anyway and subject to the same story-telling process. I always believed there was more than a little fibbing going on in autobiography, and practially none in good fiction. So why not then just fabricate one's past (as Twain reputedly did in his autobiography)? Who's going to bother quibbling about the details anyway? It's like being patient witness to that one family member (a favorite uncle, perhaps?) who tels the same story over and over with its various-and latest-incarnations. It's more about myth than history, and even more necessary. Research paper or short story or essay-it's just something everybody does. I mean, take any seemingly inconsequential event in your life and write it out, in careful detail, from beginning to end, letting it tell itself (that's important), making it truthful rather than accurate, telling it the way it should have happened, the way you wanted it to happen, the way you didn't want it to happen-even the way it really did hap¬pen-and it becomes, not autobiogra¬phy, but fiction-your own personal myth and, by extension, everybody's personal myth. It all amounts to the same thing, doesn't it? It's one of the reasons I do it. You could say that it is its own reward. So in the end it's the myth, and its telling, what's behind it, and why it turned out the way it did. And, most important, what's in it for me. --Bill Losinger
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| Kathleen Cheney: Tolerating Ambiguity What do you want to be when you grow up? How familiar that question is to many of us! If you were never asked you still, no doubt, contemplated an answer. My answer was often teacher, but never was it writer. I came to that title through the back door, so to speak; yet writing has become a conduit for me to my world. During the years I spent as a full-time mother of four, I often turned to writing-to sort out, to explore, create, nurture, vent, and problem solve. I did this in a journal. It was during those years that I came to recognize writing as a resource that helped me understand who I was and who I wanted to be. Currently, I teach a course in journal writing. Through it I have one more chance to expose students to the rich rewards that can accompany the struggle to write. As in composition courses, I encourage students to see writing as thinking, as a way to develop some sense of the world. Discovery is a critical force in writing. It is a motivator to explore the twists and turns of one's thoughts, to find what Virginia Woolf calls "the diamonds in the dust heap." The drafting of a piece of writing engages the writer in moving that jumbled, random, often illogical mix of ideas out of the mind and onto the page. The very act of doing that, using language to make it all connect, becomes an adventure that requires courage and perseverance, and a bit (or a large quantity) of faith. That writing is discovery must be lived. I think of it as experiencing an "ah ha"-a moment of insight provided by the very act of writing. This happens when a writer resists the desire for closure, for solid ground, and increases the tolerance for ambiguity. Words become an experiment in connections and the evolution of ideas. And that is the experience I seek in my writing and want to nurture with student writers. Among one's writing there may be much fool's gold, but eventually a diamond is discovered. |
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