Ironweed by William Kennedy

William Kennedy's Ironweed has been on my "to read" list for years. I think I even owned a copy in high school or college but never got around to it. The winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as an entry on the Modern Library's Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century, Ironweed had a surprisingly difficult time getting published, rejected by eleven major publishing houses. In addition to winning several literary awards, it was made into a film starring Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep, and it was a movie tie-in paperback I found on the metal bookshelf that passes for a library in our little corner of Camp Arifjan.

Ironweed is the final book in Kennedy's "Albany Trio," tracing the stories of an interconnected set of Albany locals introduced in 1975's Legs and 1978's Billy Phelan's Greatest Game. It follows a few days in the sad life of Francis Phelan, a former baseball player and self-described bum who has returned to Albany in 1938, twenty-two years after abandoning his wife and children there. Just released from jail for registering to vote more than fifty times, Francis is given a day's work at the local cemetery to begin repaying the debt to his attorney. It is here, in the book's opening chapter, that we witness Francis' emotional first encounter with the grave of his son Gerald, who died just thirteen days old when he slipped and fell out of a diaper held in the hands of his father:

Francis found the grave without a search. He stood over it and reconstructed the moment when the child was slipping through his fingers 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.

This tragedy set the tone for Francis' violent and unfortunate life. This scene in the cemetery also sets the tone for this rather dark novel, which contains a great deal of death and violence. It features a series of passages seemingly offered from the perspective of those buried in the cemetery, including Francis' parents and infant son. Francis himself would be confronted throughout the book by the ghosts of his past, such as Harold Allen, whom Francis killed during a strike protest:

Why did you kill me? was the question Harold Allen's eyes put to Francis.

"Didn't mean to kill you," Francis said.

Was that why you threw that stone the size of a potato and broke open my skull? My brains flowed out and I died.

"You deserved what you got. Scabs get what ask for. I was right in what I did."

Then you feel no remorse at all.

"You bastards takin' our jobs, what kind of man is that, keep a man from feedin' his family?"

Odd logic coming from a man who abandoned his own family not only that summer but every spring and summer thereafter, when baseball season started. And didn't you finally abandon them permanently in 1916? The way I understand it, you haven't even been home for a visit in twenty-two years.

A wanderer in the years since, Francis has been accompanied for most of the past decade by Helen Archer, a fellow unfortunate whose prospects as a classical pianist were ended during her first year at Vassar College by her father's death and her mother's subsequent misappropriation of Helen's inheritance. Now sick from years of drinking and a stomach tumor, Helen is resolved to free herself and Francis from their co-dependency by whatever means possible. Francis' struggle, meanwhile, beyond the basic necessities of food and shelter, is to make peace with the resurfaced histories that come from walking the streets of his past, the fresh reminders of his culpability for his own choices:

Francis was now certain only that he could never arrive at any conclusions about himself that had their origin in reason. But neither did he believe himself incapable of thought. He believed he was a creature of unknown and unknowable quantities, a man in whom there would never be an equanimity of both impulsive and premeditated action. Yet after every admission that he was a lost and distorted soul, Francis asserted his own private wisdom and purpose: he had fled the folks because he was too profane a being to live among them; he had humbled himself willfully through the years to counter a fearful pride in his own ability to manufacture the glory from which grace would flow. What he was was, yes, a warrior, protecting a belief that no men could ever articulate, especially himself; but somehow it involved protecting saints from sinners, protecting the living from the dead. And a warrior, he was certain, was not a victim. Never a victim.

This is a grim novel and difficult at times. There is no shading the depredations of street living; Kennedy humanizes his characters without glamorizing them. He offers no Kerouac-esque sense of romance; these are not lives that one would trade for willingly. Yet if these people have disturbed memories, deranged minds, guilt-ridden souls, they are people first and foremost and Kennedy treats them as such. They have loyalties, prejudices, grudges, and pride; they feel hate, despair, tenderness and love.

The book's first epigraph comes from an Audubon guide, informing us that the Ironweed flower gets its name from "the toughness of the stem." The second comes from Dante's Purgatorio, with the pilgrim relying on "the little bark of my wit" to leave behind "a sea so cruel." Both are apt descriptions of the unfortunate but enduring life of Francis Phelan.