Kennedy in 1981 (University of Albany)
The work of novelist William Kennedy marks the union of encyclopedic knowledge, built over ninety-eight years spent soaking up the city of Albany, and a profound empathy for human experience in all its forms, from the underworld of gangsters, gamblers, and hustlers to the heights of power and politics. As Joyce is to Dublin or Faulkner to Mississippi, Kennedy is to his city, rendering it as a canvas for every story, everywhere, and a deeply detailed memory palace of a real place, as it was and is.
In the recently published Library of America edition of The Albany Trilogy, three of Kennedy’s greatest works set in New York’s capital take readers through vastly different but interrelated lives. Legs reconstructs the real-life exploits of a notorious celebrity criminal. Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game pits a smalltime crook against the brutal power of the city’s political machine. And in Kennedy’s masterful Ironweed, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Critics Circle Award, a broken man—Billy Phelan’s father—returns home looking to make peace with a lifetime of damage and disappointment.
Below, Paul Grondahl, who edited the LOA edition and serves as director of the New York State Writers Institute at University of Albany, which Kennedy helped found, discusses his mentor’s remarkable retention, the annus mirabilis that followed Ironweed’s out-of-the-blue success, and Kennedy’s morning writing ritual, kept to this day.
LOA: You and William Kennedy have a long history. How did you meet?
Paul Grondahl: I love my origin story with Bill Kennedy. I was an English literature major as an undergraduate at the University of Puget Sound and worked my way through school at the Tacoma News Tribune, my local paper in Washington. I wound up going on for a master’s degree in English literature, and landed at the University at Albany, which offered me a stipend and free tuition. I took the train four days cross-country and arrived on Labor Day weekend in 1981.
When I got there, the campus was shut down and empty, everything locked up. I found a door open in the Humanities building, went to the English department floor, and saw one light on. I yelled, “Hey, is anyone there?” And a voice responded, asking me to come in and introduce myself. That was William Kennedy. He’s been my mentor ever since.
The Albany Trilogy
LOA: Kennedy founded the New York State Writers Institute at UAlbany, where you’re now the director. What’s the story there?
PG: The Writers Institute started right around the time I was finishing grad school. Before that, Kennedy was an adjunct at UAlbany, and he was flat broke. His wife, Dana, got him over the hump by teaching dance and running a secondhand clothing store. When he got the MacArthur Fellowship, he already had three novels published, but they weren’t selling, and he couldn’t get Ironweed published without the help of Saul Bellow. That’s the great story of his career.
The only creative writing class Kennedy ever took was in Puerto Rico, in 1959, with Bellow. At the time, Bill was working as an editor at the San Juan Star English-language paper. Years later, Ironweed was dead in the water, and then Bellow said, “I knew this Kennedy guy since ’59 in Puerto Rico, and he’s a flat-out writer. Give it another look.” And Viking said, “OK, we’ll publish it!”
Kennedy with a copy of Ironweed and sitting with Saul Bellow (University of Albany)
Thus began what Kennedy calls his annus mirabilis, the year when he got the Pulitzer, the cover of Time, the National Book Critics Circle Award. Suddenly everything hits for this guy who couldn’t get Ironweed published.
I was at the university, in the copying room, when it happened. The university president’s secretary came in carrying a big folder. I asked her what it was, and she said William Kennedy just got famous and we don’t want to lose him to another school.
He started the Writers Institute in 1984 and subsequently brought in the greatest writers of the last century: fifteen Nobel laureates, a couple hundred Pulitzer winners, people like William Styron, Peter Matthiessen, Norman Mailer, John Updike. Toni Morrison was a faculty member at UAlbany and a friend of Bill’s. His great saying was, “Literary conversation is the best conversation.”
Kennedy and Toni Morrison, and Governor Mario Cuomo signing legislation to create the New York State Writers Institute in 1984 (University of Albany)
Four thousand writers have come through here, and for at least the first thirty-five years, they came because of Bill. He’s been our North Star. The Writers Institute was designed to keep writers sharing ideas, talking about their writing, and passing it forward to the next generation. It also put Albany on the literary map. The Writers Institute is the only place of its kind at any college or university in the country. I call it the House That Bill Built.
LOA: Kennedy got his start as a journalist. How did his newspaper career flow into his fiction writing?
PG: You can tell Bill is a journalist, because every time you talk to him, he’s got a notebook, and he’s asking, “What was that name again? Spell it out.”
He grew up working class. He didn’t come from a literary household, but they read newspapers, the Times Union, the Knickerbocker News, the New York City papers. He was part of this colorful family on the inside of Albany. Kennedy’s dad was part of the political machine, and the protagonist of Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, this kind of pool-shark hustler, was based on Kennedy’s uncle Pete.
Kennedy wanted to be like Damon Runyon, a great newspaper columnist; that was his burning ambition. He wrote for his school papers, and you can see his early promise. He got his first job at the Glens Falls Post-Star, an hour north of Albany, right out of college.
Kennedy at the Glens Falls Post Star in the 1950s, and scenes of Albany in the 1930s (University of Albany / Albany Public Library)
He always had flair. You can see it in his clips for the Times Union, stuff he was writing in the 1950s. You can scrape his byline and know right away it’s a Kennedy story. As Saul Bellow said, “He doesn’t write a dead sentence.” That’s why he’s always revising, revising, revising—so many drafts to get that sentence to sing.
In Riding the Yellow Trolley Car, a 1993 collection of Kennedy’s newspaper, magazine, and non-fiction writing, you can find an early story, from 1952, called “Langford the Cat.” It’s about a cat that hung out in a bar in North Albany, and someone took out a giant obituary when the cat died. Kennedy elevates it to this epic story about the cat’s owner and a tough neighborhood and what the cat meant to people. As a reporter, he was always taking an average story and making it extraordinary.
It takes about thirty gallons of sap to make a quart of really good syrup. Bill takes one hundred gallons of sap to make his novels.
Some writers are writers and some are reporters. It’s hard to be both. But Bill reports and digs and gets the good material, and then he writes it in a beautiful way. I know great reporters and I know good writers who can cover up weak reporting, but Bill is exceptional at both elements of a story.
If you read Ironweed, you can go back to his source stories at the Times Union and see that early dialogue. There’s the Francis character, the Rudy character. His fiction comes from years and years of digging into Albany and soaking it up like a sponge.
I always wondered how he keeps all the information straight. It’s like continuity in film. But he finally showed me the holy grail. He has a binder of characters, places, descriptions. That’s his continuity, his B-roll shot, and he can go back to it anytime. It’s like the Book of Kells.
First editions of Kennedy novels: The Ink Truck (1969), Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game (1978), and Legs (1975)
LOA: This new LOA edition is titled The Albany Trilogy. How do these three novels stand in relation to Kennedy’s larger cycle about the city?
PG: It’s sap season around here in Albany, and Bill’s great friend Russell Banks used to write in a sugar house. I’ve been up to his place and interviewed him, and it takes about thirty gallons of sap to make a quart of really good syrup. Bill takes one hundred gallons of sap to make his novels, and these three novels are the best of Kennedy.
Early on, Bill decided that everything he ever needed for his mind and soul was in Albany. He had to move to Puerto Rico first, but after coming back, he understood Albany was as authentic as Dublin or London or anywhere the great novelists set their fiction.
Albany is a political town. It’s the state capital, and also what Kennedy calls, in his great subtitle to O Albany!, “Improbable City of Political Wizards, Fearless Ethnics, Spectacular Aristocrats, Splendid Nobodies, and Underrated Scoundrels.” Now, that’s music!
Aerial view of Albany in the 1930s (Albany Public Library)
The real Legs Diamond was larger than life. Bill read about him in the newspapers and thought of him as an American folk hero. He was fascinated by this gangster, a murderer who was beloved by so many. The papers have a daily story on Legs, and he’s on the lam, and now he’s going to trial. Kennedy ended up buying the house where Legs was shot and killed, 67 Dove Street, and owned it for many years, and wrote much of the novel Legs there.
In terms of the most accessible novel in the trilogy—and I hope it becomes a movie one day—is Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game. It’s about a guy on the street, who walks around Albany, knows every gambler, owes a lot of people money. He’s always hustling, hustling, hustling. And that’s Bill’s uncle. Bill reimagined and ran him through his creative mind. There’s a lot of hilarious stuff in that book, and a lot of heartbreaking stuff.
Ironweed through the years: Viking first edition from 1983, poster for 1987 film version starring Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep, and Penguin paperback
LOA: Ironweed is many readers’ introduction to Kennedy. What do you think explains this novel’s appeal? Why has it been Kennedy’s breakout book?
PG: Bill will say (novelists always say) it’s like naming a favorite child, but he knows that Ironweed is the top of his game, the best he’s ever written. Along with Legs and Billy Phelan in this trilogy, these novels represent a pinnacle.
The term of the day was “bums.” You look past bums. But Bill didn’t look past them. He gives them prominence, and in Ironweed they’re deeply human and interesting and layered and smart and funny. But they’re also broken, and they kind of fix each other—or try to. And the result is beautiful.
Not much happens in the novel; Kennedy is not a plot-driven writer. The characters walk up and down a handful of blocks in Albany, but they’re looking for home, much like salmon returning to their spawning stream. These two destroyed people, on the edge of survival, they’re never going to get their job or their life or their house back, but maybe they’re going to get a cup of soup that day, and maybe they’ll get a place to sleep, and maybe they’ll find friendship, or love. You’re rooting for these people. And it really is Albany. But it’s also any city.
We all want the same simple things. I think empathetic is a good word to describe Bill. These characters are not written with halos over them. They have a lot of flaws and they’ve done a lot of damage. He’s not canonizing them, but he’s giving them their due. They deserve the love they can find. They deserve to live another day.
Watch: William Kennedy speaks with Paul Grondahl at the New York State Writers Institute
LOA: What can you tell us about Kennedy that readers might be surprised to learn?
PG: Bill’s working on another big novel now. I’ve read some of it, and he’s not quitting. Writers write until their last breath, and this novel is very ambitious. I wish he had picked something a little simpler, but he’s swinging for the fences, at ninety-eight. This thing spans three centuries, major historical figures, and a story within a story.
When he goes to his desk to write, he puts on pressed slacks, a dress shirt, a tie, and a jacket. It’s because he respects the writing, the word, the literature that much. It’s not just him being old-school. Nobody dresses up to sit at their desk by themselves, but Bill Kennedy does every time he goes to write.
There’s one thing he’s always had, and it sits right by his computer now: a little card that reads, “Write one page.” Writers are like that: you write on your birthday, you write on Christmas. If you can get one page, or one good sentence, every day, that can become a book. But you have to do it every day. And Bill does. He breathes, he writes.
Paul Grondahl, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and Kennedy in 2009 (University of Albany)
Paul Grondahl, editor, is the Opalka Endowed Director of the New York State Writers Institute at the University at Albany. He was a staff writer at the Albany Times Union from 1984 to 2017 and now writes a weekly column for the newspaper. He is the author of several books, including political biographies of Theodore Roosevelt and Albany mayor Erastus Corning 2nd, and a forthcoming biography of Andy Rooney.
