Imaginative Necessities

By Paul Gray

IRON WEED by William Kennedy; Viking; 227 pages; $14.75

Writers tend to resent it when their work is labeled regional, and with good reason. The term, once honorably used in the U.S. to identify the literatures of a young and far-flung nation, has fallen on hard times. Thanks principally to the homogenizing effects of television and jet travel, regionalism now suggests narrowness and parochialism, a boondocks mentality afflicting authors too timid or dumb to make it in the big city. Such connotations are, of course, unfair; a novel set in Manhattan's East Side, for example, can be many times more provincial than a tale from the hills or the hollows. The question is one not of constricted locale but of the breadth and depth of a writer's vision.

It now turns out that Novelist William Kennedy, 54, has been a secret regionalist, in the best sense, for years. This discovery has been slow in coming because Kennedy disclosed his attachment to a single place, Albany, N.Y., only piecemeal. Legs (1975) was a mixture of facts and fiction concerning the latter days of Gangster Jack ("Legs") Diamond. Albany figured in this novel chiefly as the scene of the mobster's last grab for power and as the place where, on Dec. 18, 1931, his enemies finally put enough bullets in Diamond to kill him. In Billy Phelan's Greatest Game (1978), Kennedy returned to the 1930s and Albany, this time out of imaginative rather than factual necessity. This novel portrayed a fictional and vivid demimonde of conniving politicians, ward heelers, petty gamblers and barflies, all caught up in a bizarre kidnaping and extortion plot in the fall of 1938. One of the characters, Martin Daughtery, is a newspaperman who has chosen to work in the city where he was born: "His column was frequently reprinted nationally, but he chose not to syndicate it, fearing he would lose his strength, which was his Albany constituency . . ."

That description now seems autobiographical. For Daugherty's creator, another lifelong resident of Albany, has shown again how certain talents flourish best in native soil. Ironweed dovetails with its predecessor. The scene is still Albany, the time still 1938. It is Halloween, and Billy Phelan's father Francis is back in his old haunts, meeting ghosts and goblins from his scary past.

Francis is a bum and a lush. He would not be in Albany at all if the local Democratic machine were not offering deadbeats $5 for every time they register as voters. Francis does so 21 times before he gets caught and the politicians reneg. He now owes his lawyer, who once worked for Legs Diamond, $50 for getting him off on a technicality. That means looking for a job that will spring him from a place he can hardly bear to be.

For Francis has made a career out of running away from Albany. Born there in 1880, he is first forced out 21 years later, after fatally beaning a scab motorman with a rock during a strike of trolley-car workers. Escape gives him a taste for life on the lam. He returns to Albany when it is safe for him and marries, but he hits the road in the summers to play minor league baseball and eventually, in 1912, to become third baseman for the Washington Senators. He lasts three years and goes home again to his wife and three children. Trying to change his infant boy's diaper, Francis accidentally drops and kills him. "I couldn't face that," Francis says, and abandons his family for good.

This history emerges gradually during two days while Francis roams the familiar old streets, as spectral as the memories that hound him. His peregrinations can be plotted on an old city map: "He walked north on Broadway, past Steamboat Square . . . He passed the D & H building and Billy Barnes' Albany Evening Journal . . ." Francis runs into his son Billy, now grown, and learns something new about that long-ago fatal accident: "He tells me the wife never told nobody I did that. Guy drops a kid and it dies and the mother don't tell a damn soul what happened." Puzzling over this information, he drops in on his wife. He meets a grandson, talks baseball with him and takes a bath to clean up for a family supper. The affair is tense but successful, and within a few hours Francis is back on the streets and looking for a bootlegger.

Characters without wills of their own are usually bad bargains in fiction, able to play nothing but victims. But Kennedy shows Francis as both helpless and thoroughly responsible for his own condition. This aging drunk is quite capable of exercising volition; the problem is that his choices are crazed. He has taken on the burden of caring for an aging hobo named Helen Archer. Francis finds her warm places to sleep before looking out for himself. He would like to think of this behavior as virtuous, but honesty forces him to admit that he has bummed "not because there was a Depression but first to help Helen and then because it was easy: easier than working."

The '30s are receding into mythology, where the heroic unemployed are martyred on the altar of false and tyrannical economics. Like most myths, this one is generally plausible and specifically false. Kennedy's fiction returns dignity to the little fellow, the common man or woman, those quite capable of fouling up their lives during the best of times, not to mention the worst. Ironweed stands handsomely on its own, but Legs and Billy Phelan's Greatest Game are being issued in paperback to accompany its publication. Those who wish to watch a geography of the imagination take shape should read all three and then pray for more.

--By Paul Gray

Excerpt

"Francis found the grave without a search. He stood over it and reconstructed the moment when the child was slipping through his ringers into death. He prayed for a repeal of time so that he might hang himself in the coal bin before picking up the child to change his diaper. Denied that, he prayed for his son's eternal peace in the grave. It was true the boy had not suffered at all in his short life, and he had died too quickly of a cracked neckbone to have felt pain: a sudden twist and it was over. Gerald Michael Phelan, his gravestone said, born April 13, 1916, died April 26, 1916. Born on the 13th, lived 13 days. An unlucky child who was much loved . . .

'I remember everything,' Francis told Gerald." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.