A Literary Light

Who Keeps a Personal Glow

The possible locales for honoring William Kennedy were as diverse as his achievements.

A University at Albany classroom, the type where Kennedy inspired young journalists to cultivate and apply a fascination for human behavior and social awareness, would have been suitable to assess this Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist’s work.

A concert hall would have reflected Kennedy’s deep-rooted love for the performing arts (with screenplays, a play and even a song to his credit) and, in turn, for the drama that media and scholars have found in his own rags-to-riches story.

And, of course, a 1930s vintage downtown Albany eatery or an Irish pub in his native North End might have been the spot for other authors and friends to toast a man of the common man.

But, in reality, size was the issue. And so it was to the modern corporate ballrooms—large rectangles with seashell-papered walls and pre-fabricated, tubular chandeliers—of Albany’s Omni Hotel that hundreds came to celebrate the life and literary output of Albany’s writer laureate, who also heads the University-based New York State Writers Institute. The Kennedy fans were part of the 2,000 writers, literary critics and avid readers who were in Albany April 14-17 for the Associated Writing Programs’ annual conference.

This, thought AWP organizers and the Writers Institute, was the right time to present “William Kennedy: A Celebration,” with such luminaries as Pulitzer Prize-winner Frank McCourt, Grace Paley, Nicholar Delbanco and James Salter analyzing and paying tribute to the work of the creator of the “Albany cycle” of novels.

Yet all also found themselves paying special tribute to the qualities of the man. “He is a literary colossus,” cultural historian Douglas Brinkley, director of the Eisenhower Center for American Frank McCourt Studies at the University of New Orleans, told the Ballroom C crowd in the opening lecture. “William Kennedy is one of the finest novelists America has ever produced, and certainly one of the most important writers of the post-war era.”

As C-Span and Bravo cable channel cameras rolled, Brinkley spoke on the theme of “Kennedy as Journalist”—but it was a personal tale that seemed to animate Brinkley most. He told of his role as sponsor of a Civil Rights “Majic Bus” that takes his students across America to historic sites of political and literary significance. In the summer of 1994, his group was reading Kennedy’s Pulitzer-winning (1984) Ironweed while touring the Northeast. During a stop at Eleanor Roosevelt’s Hyde Park home, Val-Kill, Brinkley phoned a friend, journalist/essayist Hunter Thompson, in Colorado to say the group’s next stop would be Albany.

Brinkley remembered: “Hunter said, ‘You’re reading Ironweed, you’re going up to Albany, and you’re not going to see William Kennedy?’ I said, ‘No, I’ve never met him.’ Hunter yelled, ‘Call Peter Quinn him! Tell him I told you to go see him!’ I said, ‘Hunter, I’m going to call him and say, “I’m friends with Hunter Thompson and I want to come to your house with 20 college students in a bus that’s been traveling across America?”’ “Hunter said, ‘Sure you are!’”

Brinkley called, and Kennedy immediately said certainly, they should come by the next day. “We got there the next afternoon, and, believe me, he and his wife Dana could not have been more gracious a host and hostess to this large group—couldn’t have been warmer or more welcoming. We talked, he answered all our questions, they gave us a tour of the house, they fed us. It was a great time.

“It’s that kind of hospitality which I remember. You always hear about the ‘humanities’—which mean ‘humanist’ —and I can tell you, I’ve met a lot of writers who don’t really like to ‘give’ a lot. It’s not that necessary that with great fiction comes a warm, giving personality. But I think Bill Kennedy and his wife Dana are certainly examples of it.” Dennis Smith

Brinkley spoke of Kennedy’s days as a young sportswriter in Glens Falls, as Army correspondent during the Korean War, his early employment on the Albany Times Union, star columnist in the late 1950s for the San Juan Star in Puerto Rico, as muckraking reporter back in Albany with a Times Union series on poverty and civil rights. The novelist emerged but the journalist remained, said Brinkley, both in style and basic instincts.

Andy Viglucci, an Albany native and managing editor of the San Juan Star who first journeyed to Puerto Rico with compatriot Kennedy in 1956, stood up after Brinkley’s talk to verify Kennedy’s enduring link to journalism.

“A few years ago, when Bill was now a famous novelist, I was visiting Albany,” said Viglucci, “and it’s eleven in the evening and the phone in my Holiday Inn room rings. It’s Bill. He’s with Dana, and he says, How ’bout going out for something to eat?’ I said, ‘I’m in my pajamas.’ And he said, ‘Well that’s okay.’” (Kennedy-speak for “Okay, but you’ll want to come out anyway.”) —“‘I’ve just come from interviewing an 85-year-old man.’

“And that’s Bill. He is always working, day and night. He’s the most ambitious—but you’d never know it—he’s the most driven—but you’d never know it—fellow you can possibly meet . . . He’s still the man with the open mind. He wants to know how he’s doing, what his friends think of him. He’s gregarious—but he cares, and he’s working all the time.”

Event two, “Talking About William Kennedy,” needed a two-chandelier room, Ballroom A. That was because three famous authors from New York City, Frank McCourt (Angela’s Ashes), Peter Quinn (Banished Children of Eve), and Dennis Smith (A Song for Mary), had come to talk about Jan. 6, 1984, the day when the then “seriously underpublished” trio traveled to Albany to meet and lunch with Kennedy at Lombardo’s restaurant on Madison Avenue.

“That wonderful epiphany day,” said Quinn. “I will always remember being in the presence of someone who lives the life of a writer. Amid this afternoon of great wit and laughter he’d hear something he liked and write it down in a little notepad. Kennedy is always thinking about the world about him—its people, its nuances, and its artifacts.”

McCourt recalled, “I may have said something witty and he started writing it down. And I thought, ‘My goodness, should I tell him again to make sure he gets it . . . no, I’m sure he’ll get it.’ What was manifest to me was that this was a writer at work.”

The three men talked warmly of that luncheon, of McCourt trying to return to New York for a romantic tryst, but the other men taking turns paying off Albany cab drivers to go away; and of the loquacious trio not realizing that they had barely allowed Kennedy to talk for the first four hours. Kennedy, however, only relished the sparkling wit of the company, then charmed them with anecdotes of Albany and finally joined them in song.

The men said they found something that day that was consistent in Kennedy’s work. “The idea is not so much that you do this because you are ‘a writer,’ but because you are a person truly interested in other people and in the world,” said Quinn. “And that interest becomes manifest to your talent.” “I didn’t realize that Albany was so rich in character until I read Bill,” said McCourt. “But he makes you realize that everywhere you go, there’s a richness. I wish”—he made a long, mock sigh— “oh, I wish I grew up in Albany!”