By Joe Gagen

Gagen, left, and Kennedy enjoy a game of pool at Kennedy’s home in Averill Park, a few miles east of Albany.

Some seven or eight years ago I was having dinner with Bill Kennedy, an old friend of mine, and I told him a story.

The story involved the legendary boss of Albany politics, Daniel P. O’Connell. Kennedy had fictionalized O’Connell in the character of Patsy McCall, the political boss who figures prominently in Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, in Kennedy’s play “Grand View,” and again in his latest novel, Roscoe.

I recounted the November afternoon that Dan and I were talking in his living room, and one of Dan’s cronies stepped into the room.

“Eddie McDonough and his boys are here to see you,” he said.

McDonough was chairman of the Rensselaer County Democratic Party. The Democrats had just won control of the county. When Dan returned a half hour later, I asked what Eddie and the boys wanted. His voice was raspy, and he peered at me through his thick glasses.

“They wanna know, ‘Now that we’ve got the county, how do we get the money?’”

Kennedy laughed heartily when he heard the story. Then, as usual, he reached into his pocket for his little notebook and made me tell the story all over again as he scribbled furiously.

Two years ago he was invited to read at the New York State Summer Writers Institute at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs. I was sitting center aisle about 10 rows from the stage when he began to read from Roscoe the following passage:

“At the moment, Felix is in his chair, giving an audience to Eddie McDermott, leader of yet another reform faction that hopes to challenge Packy McCabe’s useless but invulnerable Albany Democratic Party organization in the 1917 primary …

“‘I have much to learn, Mr. Conway, but there’s one thing I can learn only from you, for nobody else has an answer, and I’ve asked them all.’

“‘What might that be, Mr. McDermott?’

“‘Once we take over the Party, how do we get the money to run it?’”

Kennedy hesitated a moment and flashed a smile at me in the audience, as though to say: “Recognize this?” He continued reading:

“‘How do you get the money, boy? If you run ’em for office and they win, you charge ‘em a year’s wages. Keep taxes low, but if you have to raise ’em, call it something else. The city can’t do without vice, so pinch the pimps and milk the madams. Anybody that sells the flesh, tax ’em. If anybody wants city business, thirty percent back to us. Maintain the streets and sewers, but don’t overdo it. Well-lit streets discourage sin, but don’t overdo it. If they play craps, poker, or blackjack, cut the game. If they play faro or roulette, cut it double …’”

And so it goes on and on … a brilliant passage in a novel that received overwhelming critical praise around the country.

I marveled at how Kennedy had taken this true fact of life and turned it into the truer fact of fiction. The experience provided an unusual insight into how the creative artist illumines the meaning hidden behind everyday events.

* * *

William Kennedy and I have been friends now for about 35 years. And for more than three decades Kennedy has been filling these little notebooks with thoughts, ideas, stories and snippets of conversation.

Somewhere in his house in Averill Park, 20 miles east of Albany, there are, no doubt, boxes filled with these little notebooks. They probably lie beside the dozens of boxes of notes, research and early drafts of Kennedy’s novels.

“That’s Ironweed,” he once told me when we were in his study together, pointing at a pile of boxes on the floor. I opened one of the boxes and found hundreds of pages with notes jotted in tiny but perfectly legible handwriting. I understood immediately why it took five or six years of steady work to create the novel he wanted. Kennedy lives in the world of his books. During one St. Patrick’s Day parade through North Albany we passed an abandoned storefront. Kennedy leaned toward me and whispered, “That’s where Francis bought the turkey,” alluding to a scene from Ironweed.

* * *

I am still amazed to contemplate the trajectory of Kennedy’s journey from hard-working, unknown novelist to hard-working, celebrated literary artist, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a recently named fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

I lived with him through the early days of The Ink Truck, which was published in 1969 and, like an unbaptized child, went immediately into limbo. For the next six years he worked on Legs while teaching a course at the University at Albany and freelancing. Shortly after the publication of Legs, he asked me on one of my trips to New York to check if Legs was in the bookstores. I hated to tell him I couldn’t find a copy of the novel anywhere.

Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game came out three years later, in 1978. Despite glowing reviews, it too languished in the bookstores. If these disappointments caused Kennedy to question his powers as a novelist, he gave no sign of it. At the half-century mark, Kennedy had steeled himself for the long journey. Like Melville, one of his literary idols, lack of recognition and success would not deter him from his artful creation.

As it turned out, 1983 was a watershed for Kennedy. All the years of disappointment and rejection seemed to vaporize in a tornado of recognition and awards that swirled about him. After 13 rejections from publishers, Ironweed was published to rave reviews by Viking Press, which also re-published Legs and Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, what Kennedy dubbed the “Albany Cycle.”

Kennedy co-wrote the script for The Cotton Club with Francis Ford Coppola.

That same week came the MacArthur Foundation Award that assured him five years of financial independence and brought him national attention. Then, out of the blue, he got a call from Francis Ford Coppola a few months later with an offer to co-write the script for his new film, The Cotton Club.

The tornado went right on swirling into 1984. In January he won the National Book Critics Circle Award. On April 16 Kennedy called to say he’d just been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Ironweed. Two years later the Brazilian director Hector Babenco would turn Kennedy’s Ironweed script into a big-budget film with Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep.

Meanwhile, Kennedy had used $75,000 from the MacArthur Foundation grant as seed money to establish what would become the New York State Writers Institute, realizing his dream to bring the country’s and the world’s best writers, poets, essayists, filmmakers and playwrights to Albany and the University at Albany.

Kennedy’s life — whatever it had been before — was now as improbable as the city he immortalized in his writing. His world had been turned upside down. Liza Minnelli was on the phone inviting him and his wife, Dana, for a visit. I went to a birthday party for him in New York attended by director Francis Coppola and film stars like Robert DeNiro and Christopher Walken. “Jack” would call from the coast. There were visits to Coppola’s estate in the Napa Valley. It was dizzying, yet the one who seemed least affected by it all was Kennedy himself.

Kennedy seemed as comfortable with the rich and famous as he was with his friends in the old hometown. I believe the reason for this was his perpetual thirst for conversation and the mysteries that underlie it. Whenever he was out of town for any period, he’d call from wherever he was to find out what was going on back in Albany.

“Whatayaknow, whatayasay?” he’d spout over the telephone line. And as soon as he got home, there’d be dinner and drinking with all the old friends.

Most importantly, there was the writing. He never let up. We drove up to Lake Placid for a summer holiday with some old friends and spent several days at a rustic inn. One morning I waited for quite a while outside our shared bathroom until Kennedy finally emerged. He had a manuscript — I recall it was Quinn’s Book — and a pencil in his hand.

“Why are you working?” I asked. “This is supposed to be a holiday.”

Bringing Literary Lions to UAlbany ( Click for Story )

He looked at me in astonishment.

“Joe,” he said, “I’m always working.”

And, indeed, he was. Despite trips abroad to attend the publication of his books in Europe and the constant demand on his time, he still resided in the world of his imagination, always returning to the writer’s table. Very Old Bones was published in 1992. The Flaming Corsage followed in 1996, and then last January, in Kennedy’s latest novel, Roscoe, Roscoe Conway exploded onto the stage of Kennedy’s imagined city.

Tom Flanagan, the critic and historical novelist, weighed in not too long ago on Kennedy’s importance to the American literary tradition. In the last words written before his sudden death, Flanagan noted in The New York Review of Books:

“Kennedy’s art is an eccentric triumph, a quirky, risk-taking imagination at play upon the solid paving stones, the breweries, the politicos and pool sharks of an all-too-actual city. The collisions of setting and stance, if nothing more, bring Yoknapatawpha County to mind … But (William) Faulkner and Kennedy also share old-fashioned themes like honor, betrayal, the forgiveness of the past.”

Like Faulkner, Kennedy’s resilience as a novelist is supported by the fact that all of his books — from the publication of The Ink Truck 33 years ago — are still in print.

Perhaps the closest Kennedy ever came to talking intimately about the writing of his books occurred on a hot July evening in 1986. My wife Vera had just cooked dinner for all of us and in an after-dinner conversation Kennedy said that day, July 22, he’d reached a turning point in his four-year-old novel in progress, Quinn’s Book.

Above, Kennedy’s desk in his study at his home in Averill Park. Below: mementos on his bookcase.

“Each time I sit down to write, I ask myself the same question: ‘Why am I doing this?’” Kennedy said. “It’s never answered because that’s the nature of writing, not knowing the whys or wherefores, plodding always toward the unknown.”

Something had happened with Quinn’s Book, however, that convinced him he’d reached an important milestone in this mysterious process. Vera came in from the yard with a sprig of honeysuckle. Kennedy took it from her and inhaled its fragrance.

“There should be more honeysuckle in all our lives,” he said.

“Who Are You Now That You’re Not Nobody,” published by Life magazine in 1985, contained Kennedy’s reflections on success and its impact on the artist. He had traveled to Sweden the previous year for the Scandinavian publication of Ironweed. In Stockholm he had the rare opportunity to meet and talk with director Ingmar Bergman.

The meeting ended, wrote Kennedy, and “we left the theater and walked in the sweet Swedish rain, and I entered then a still point that even now endures — a moment in which the restless spirit, the consciousness glutted with actualized dream, and the sagely aggressive over soul are all harmonious in the advice they offer up: Don’t make a move. Tread softly. The next life you save may be your own.”

At 74, Kennedy treads softly through the landscape of art, friendship and fame, believing, like Roscoe, “that only a bet on the impossible makes sense. It is an act of faith and courage requiring an irrational leap over reason. A man wins simply by making such a bet.”