How To Write About Home, With William Kennedy

There are those people who know how to write about home, and then there is William Kennedy, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, a MacArthur Genius grant, and pretty much everything but the Heisman trophy, whose career has brought Albany, New York into the reading lives of us all. Many of us wish we knew what William Kennedy knows about how to write about home. We wish we could spend our lives without running out of story. We wish we were fearless about how our home people might take it if we revealed the corrupt history of a city we love. We wish a lot of things. How to write about home? Listen in and read along as we speak to one of the world’s greatest living writers.

Read along as you listen to this episode of QWERTY, my podcast with co-host David Leite. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes, Spotify or Stitcher. (The following transcript has been edited from the original recording).

Marion: David, today I’m honored to introduce you to my favorite writer in the world, period. I mean, I named a dog for one of his characters, so what more do you need to know? Well, maybe this. William Kennedy’s Albany Cycle of novels includes Legs, Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, Ironweed, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Quinn’s Book, Very Old Bones, The Flaming Corsage, and Roscoe, for whom I named a dog. He’s been the recipient of a MacArthur Genius grant. He’s written plays and a screenplay for a Francis Ford Coppola film, The Cotton Club. He created a masterful children’s book with his son Brendan, and is at work producing one of his plays right now, and is writing a novel. In upstate New York, where he and I both live, we’ve done everything but name an ice cream flavor for him. So let me introduce you to one of my favorite people on earth, William.

William: Good afternoon, young lady.

David: Mr. Kennedy, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you for joining us.

William: Well, it’s very pleasant to be here. It’s always pleasant with Marion. She’s ubiquitous in the area, and I know she asks a lot of embarrassing questions.

David: Oh yeah, that’s Marion. So Bill, as you know, QWERTY, our podcast, is all about writers, so I want to jump right in. I want to start getting some advice from you. Specifically, I’d like to talk about place with you. A place, like anything that you love, can be really difficult to portray. You can’t make anyone love what you love, so you can’t walk up to someone and say, “Hey, love Albany, New York the way I do,” yet your writing … you’ve made people so adore being in Albany. When did the idea that Albany, as a place of fiction, could shoulder so much work and stories from you?

William: It was in Puerto Rico, actually. I would say probably 1958, ’59. ’59, yeah. That was it. I had written a novel. I was a newspaper man and I worked in Puerto Rico. Then I went to Miami and I had a great job covering the Cubans. The revolution was on. Fidel had just … Back in ’59. I was down in ’57 but he came in and landed through Mexico in ’59 and … That’s not true. That’s not true at all. That was when the revolution reached its climax. It was great coverage. It was great newspaper job and I really loved it. But I was convinced I wanted to write a novel. And I was still sort of thinking as a journalist and as an emulator of Hemingway and Graham Greene.

Marion: Oh yeah.

William: … who roamed the world and found their subject matter and exotic locations and that was really the way I thought about it. And I’d been two years in Germany during the Korean War and then there I was in Puerto Rico, there I was in Miami with the Cubans. And I mean, they all had their way of beckoning to me as a source material for the novels that I thought I would write if I could ever finish one.

But anyway, I finished one, and it was terrible. It wasn’t about any of those places. It was about Albany for some reason or another. It wasn’t really about Albany. I didn’t even call it Albany. I called it Thurston. What a terrible name. I hated that name ever since I named the city Thurston. So I threw it away and I started another one and I can remember I was starting to write a novel on Puerto Rico after I finished that first one, and writing short stories on Puerto Rico, and I don’t know how I made the leap and the transition, but something compelled me to write a story about Francis Phelan … start a story of the family of Francis Phelan. And I hadn’t really done anything like that before, done any of my own family. But here it was and, I don’t know, I wrote that first chapter of what was then called “One By One.” Not a very good title, but as soon as you’ve finished with one, you go onto the next one and you know that you’re all done with the first one, and that doesn’t necessarily accumulate as a story. Wasn’t a very good title from that point of view.

Anyway, I was writing about it and I had written so many stories on Puerto Rico and, I don’t know, they just didn’t sing for me, and there was something missing, and I didn’t know what it was. And I had taken plenty of notes on Puerto Rico, but then I started to write about this Francis Phelan. He wasn’t married. He was just a guy who was on bum and coming home for his mother’s funeral. And he comes into a saloon, and he rams around in the saloon and alienates about half a dozen people in about 10 minutes.

Marion: Yup, he does.

William: And then anyway, so that was the nature of this piece of work and then I carried him forward as he heads home and there was something that happened in the course of writing about that. And it was about my knowledge of Albany that I didn’t know I had. I mean, it was in the unconscious. Anyway, it was a … And the piece started to sing. It talked to me. So, that was the beginning.

Marion: So it starts to sing. But when a place is one’s home and you write about it, the obvious blunder can become that you get too sentimental or you get a sentimental attachment that can rarely be portrayed well in prose. It’s like going home with your spouse to see his place of birth and you get the tour. The school yard, the place that he went to the boy scouts, the high school. But the story … frequently I see this with writers all the time. The story remains in the heart of the tour guide but isn’t felt by the viewer. So nobody can accuse you of mere sentimental portrayals of Albany.

David: No, not at all.

Marion: So how did you avoid that just purely sentimental voice?

William: Well, I grew up as a newspaper man. From high school, I wanted to be in the newspaper business. When I was a sophomore, I think I got on the school paper and when I graduated, I immediately insisted … that’s part of why I went to Siena … that I could get on the newspaper the first day of class. Actually, I got on during the summer before class started. But it was that I was really, really committed to the newspaper business. And when you’re a journalist, you have an objective sense of reality and that’s what I was looking for. And sentimentality was the enemy and I knew that. That’s the saccharine stories and that it wasn’t something I was going to pursue anyway. But my quest is for some reality that’s authentic, and true, and not just my feelings for it. It’s how I see it as a reporter with a journalistic attitude. So I think that that, in a sense, kept me, from the get go, stopping a sentimentality right in its tracks.

Marion: Yup. Makes sense. I don’t know that many sentimental newspaper reporters.

William: Well there are plenty of them.

David: Were you a reporter in Albany at any given time?

William: Oh sure.

Marion:  Oh yeah.

William: I was there from ’52 to ’56 and then again from ’70 … No, from ’63 to ’70.

David: So, Albany becomes a place in which the characters inhabit, but at the same time, having been a journalist, you’re able to move it around as a three dimensional object and look at it from all aspects without falling into its allure. And I think that is what makes the writing so exquisite, is that you have such familiarity and you have the understanding of the characters in place, but yet at the same time, you are writing about something in a dispassionate way, as the writer, and that I think is what makes it so powerful.

William: Well, I had a feeling that I had to do that. That was doled into what I learned from reading Faulkner or reading Joyce. I mean, his characterizations, Joyce’s, look at how he portrays Bloom. How a wonderful character he is but the flaws he has, and the same with Faulkner’s people. Joe Christmas, a black guy, and he’s not a necessarily a very nice guy and then he turns into a murderer. But he’s a very sympathetic figure in Light in August. Anyway, that’s something I felt in my bones as a writer that that was the way you had to do it. You have to end up being very cold in getting … You have to get into the negative and the positive side of it, otherwise you’re just portraying … you’re doing a puff job on the character and nobody wants that. Nobody wants to read it, nobody wants to write it, but we often do because that’s the way we feel about the character and that’s how it comes out.

Marion: So, in literary terms, and addressing how to write about home, Albany was never known for producing volumes of literature, and certainly not literature that portrays Albany as being the bare knuckle fun that you portray it to be. So now you’re eight books in to what is now known as your Albany Cycle. And I’ve read many quotes from other writers about how you did it and they all center on your language. And every place has its history, that means history that can be told. But your syncopation, your feel of the words, we literally feel them in our mouths. Your delight. The precise shuffle I feel in the feet of the people dancing, the music in your sentences, the clack of the billiard balls that I remember from Legs, and that crisp dialogue when one dirty pol is convincing somebody else to vote the dead. These are remarkable experiences, but they’re beautifully put. And I know that language is a form of annotation. We draw it from everything we’ve heard, and felt, and seen, and tasted. That combined with your amazing imagination, of course, is what makes you you. But I wonder, what do you attribute this feel for the language to?

William: I feel that I was always knocked over by the language of James Joyce. For instance, when I read his short story from Dubliners, The Dead, the language in that story is unbelievable. It’s so exotic, and so beautiful, and so on the money for what’s happening to that character and the penetration. Language is how you get to the inside of the people. You figure out how they talk, what are they saying, and how are they saying it, or what are they thinking? You’re taking dictation in a certain way from yourself, but I’m being a reporter again. You report on the inside of these characters. You interview yourself about him or her until you’ve … Over and over I talk to myself on the page. And I make these voluminous notes and then suddenly, says, “All right. Time to stop the notes. Write a column. Write a sentence.”

Marion: Listen, writer. It’s time to stop the notes and write a sentence. Yeah.

William: And you realize you’ve got enough to go with, so it’s all taking direction from your unconscious, which I believe in so sincerely. I mean, I cultivate trying to fall into daydreams so I’ll dredge up something from my sleep cycle while I’m still awake, because dreams are so interesting and they fascinate me, and I always take notes on them, and sometimes I get up and write for an hour on a basis of a dream, write about the dream. I mean, suddenly it means something to me and I try to explain it to myself and sometimes it works very well and I can use it in a piece of work somewhere or it leads to something that’s … Sometimes it doesn’t mean a thing, it’s just wacko activity and language that doesn’t ever translate into anything meaningful. But it’s always fun even so.

David: Would you say that that exploration you have of language that may never make it to the page is an important way, an important part of the process to find that musicality, to find the uniqueness of the voice of these people and also of the story?

William: I find that the language is … it’s not everything but it’s almost everything. And when you think of the work of William Faulkner, which after I got off my … covered the world for my novels, from Graham Greene and Hemingway, I really settled onto Faulkner and I just kept reading everything that he wrote that I could handle, and for a couple of years, I couldn’t handle it very well. I had to keep rereading it to understand The Sound and the Fury and the Absalom, Absalom and the …

David: As I Lay Dying.

William: As I Lay Dying and some of the others. And then short stories. I was obsessed with his short stories. I read them over and over again. I did the same thing with Hemingway. Hemingway’s language is very different, but it seems like minimal language, but it’s hard to do and it’s beautiful in its own way. But those two guys are so radically different from each other and yet, the language is what dominates in both of them. And so I became obsessed with the language and yet, you can’t use Faulkner’s language and it’s so easily detected when you start to write a Faulkner sentence. Or you read Hemingway … I know that Hemingway is so widely imitated. It’s easier to imitate than Faulkner. But anyway, it’s essential. And that was a quest that I’d been on from the beginning, to find my own language or my own style of writing. And I’ll tell you about how it all came out. Next question.

David: No, please do.

Marion: Yeah, I think we’ll drag it out of you. So there’s an enormous amount of history stashed in every one of your books. And we get American history, we get political history, we get the history of the Hudson River. We get a lot of what happened here, of course, but what really interests me is how you move over the taxonomy of corruption, and how its inherited, and how it moves through people, and how power and influence flows like DNA in families and groups. And it’s really too easy when learning how to write about home to say things like, “Oh, that’s Chicago. Oh, that’s Providence, Rhode Island. Oh, that’s Albany,” and not think it through, think it through to this kind of flowing taxonomy, this almost unconscious that flows from one generation to the next. So why does Albany makes such a gorgeous place to inform us about what spawns in that theater of political corruption?

William: Well, from the beginning … I’m writing a book now, which is ridiculous. It’s so vast in its scope. I want to go back to the Henry Hudson …

Marion: Discovering Albany?

William: Yeah, with discovering Albany. Yeah. That’s really what the chapter I’m writing right now. When I move forward, I’ll get into Jefferson and Burr, and that election of 1800 when Jefferson ran for president. The way Burr manipulated the populace and … It’s very like the way Daniel O’Connell, the Albany boss who was so successful in running Albany from 1921 until he died in 1973 or something … ’77 I guess he died. And then there’s a built in sense of corruption in the system that probably wasn’t established by Burr, but it was brought to a very workable format by Burr. And so it’s a natural flow if Albany learned its political lessons very early on in this game.

Marion: You have to be carefully taught, as we say…

William: Yeah.

Marion: … in the American musical.

William:  And Albany was such a player in that election, in Jefferson becoming president and the formation of the party. Anyway …

Marion: David had a question, I think.

David: I do. I wanted to talk about some of your past, and some of your friends and teachers now. It’s rather well-known that another writer, your teacher at one point, gave you an enormous break. And of course, that was Saul Bellow one of the greatest writers America’s ever known. And he too is so steeped and associated with place. Can you give us just a little idea or background on your relationship with him and whether or not you talked about writing from one’s place of origin?

William: Well I was reading Bellow when he came down to Puerto Rico. I was running a newspaper down in Puerto Rico. We had just started The San Juan Star in 1959. Two other guys and myself, Dorvillier, and Andy Viglucci. Bill was the editor/publisher and I was a managing editor. Andy was a city editor. Andy and I were buddies from Albany. Dorvillier was from over in Williamstown and he was a great newspaper man. And we won the Pulitzer for his editorial writing the first year of our operation. Anyway, we ran a story in the paper that Bellow was coming down to teach. He was going to come to the University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras and brought down by a fellow named Keith Botsford, who was a buddy of his, and they were working on a magazine together, and wound up over in Boston at Boston University together in their late years, in their final years.

But when we ran the story, it said that he was accepting manuscripts for a course in writing. And I had started this novel about Albany. And so I submitted it to him and he accepted me. He also accepted two of my buddies, one was a black woman who was a very good newspaper woman and another fellow who was working for a public relations operation in Puerto Rico, and a nutcase, but a good friend of mine. As crazy as a … I won’t say it.

Marion: You said it. You said nutcase.

William: But anyway, we all got taken, but we never had a class together except one the first meeting. And then we met individually with Bellow and you’d give him a piece of work, and then he would either read it on the spot if it was short, or read it next time, and then you would talk about whatever you were working on.

Marion: How great.

William: And it was just one-on-one in the faculty club and occasionally, we went to dinner or something. And we got to be friendly and he came over. And a funny thing, he was famished and I was cooking the steak on the grill, and I couldn’t light the grill. And it was a disaster and he kept getting nastier and nastier because I wasn’t serving him his steak.

Marion: You had a hungry writer. There’s nothing worse than a hungry writer.

William: We had several big people there. Dana was cooking other things. But anyway, it finally worked out and he was very happy. But Bellow was … he looked at this script of mine with the Albany stuff in it and I had no idea what I was writing. I just knew that the only readings I’d had on that horrible first novel, which got horrible reactions and I threw it away … And so, I mean, I had a couple of friends who would read a short story once in a while. But Bellow read this and he said, “Oh, well there’s some good stuff in here.” He says, “You’ve got a lot of … ” he said. “But this is really … You’re saying everything twice. It’s very fatty. It’s cloddy. You’re misusing words. You’re not being precise.”

So, I mean, what else could he say? He’d say, “Forget about it. Don’t take out…” But he didn’t say that. So I went home that night and I got to work on it and I rewrote it. It was about, I don’t know, 30 pages, something like that. And maybe it was more. Maybe it was 30 or 40. And there were a couple of sections, two different characters at least I think, and kind of a general introduction to the novel. But I paired it down. I took all the fat out. I unclotted the clots, and I got very precise with my language, and I cut away at the second time I would say a thing. I’d say it once and that seemed to be enough.

Anyway, the next session, I gave it to Saul and he sat down and he read it. We were sitting there in the faculty club and he said, “This is terrific.” He said, “This is publishable.” And so what else would I need?

David: Music to a writer’s ears.

William: I just floated up around the ceiling of the faculty club for about 20 minutes and then when I settled down, I went home, and bought a bottle of champagne, and had a party with a couple of neighbor, with Dana, my wife, and celebrated the fact that I was a writer.

Marion: Publishable. Did you ever talk about place? Did you ever talk about … Did he say, “Stick to your own backyard,” or any advice like that?

William: I don’t think we ever got into that particular strain, but what I was doing was writing about what I knew and my sense of place.

Marion: There you go.

William: I mean, we had talked about Chicago, talked about … I was reading Henderson the Rain King at the time and he was writing about Africa, that sense of place that he invented totally.

Marion: Right.

So let me ask you then. So let’s talk about this specific sense of place in Albany, in your Albany, but also in true Albany, and absolute historic Albany. We vote the dead. They voted the dead for years. And they vote early and often in Albany. And voting is a vocation for which you get paid in Albany. And one of the obstacles we face when we write is worrying about what our relatives will think, especially in memoir. But this is fiction. Did you ever worry what Albany might think after being bathed in such sunshine?

William: No, I mean obviously I thought about it. How could you not? But I decided that I didn’t care whether-

Marion: There you go.

William: … that I was going to tell it the way it was and that was the whole point of writing it, to get inside it. I’d been trying from … When I came back to Puerto Rico, from Puerto Rico to Albany and my father got sick in 1963 … My mother had died in ’60 and my father in ’63 was sick and he wouldn’t get out of bed, he wouldn’t see a doctor, he wouldn’t go to the hospital, and my aunt, his sister, couldn’t get him out of bed, and so she called one of my buddies who was a cop, Teddy Flint. Teddy was really a great friend of mine. He was like a brother. And we grew up together for the whole of our childhood. And he went up and he couldn’t move him. My father had called Teddy when my mother died. The first person he called was Teddy to come and get some help. And so Teddy called me up and I was working the city desk, and it was a Sunday, and she was going to mass and she collapsed with a heart attack and died right on putting on her hat.

David: Yikes.

William: And so I went home, and I saw the condition of my father, and I realized that he was in trouble. So I decided I would go back home and get him straight, and I would have to really move up for a while, and it was sort of getting saturated with Puerto Rico, life on the rock. And so I didn’t necessarily look forward to it. I thought I might get trapped into the home place again and I had gotten away from the city and I didn’t want to be there and I just felt it was a dead end in so many ways. But I went back and I got my old job back at the paper. It was always there available to me. The publisher always kept it open for me. So I said, “All right. I want to come back.” And I worked part time. That’s what I was doing in Puerto Rico and I’d quit being the managing editor and I just was writing novels five days a week. And so that’s what I came up in Albany and I did. And when I came up, it was like the first thing I got assigned to do was a history of the city.

Marion: There you go.

William: The city editor said to me, “Why don’t you do a history of the neighborhoods.” And so, I mean, it couldn’t have happened … It was providential.

Marion: Yes it was.

William: I wanted to do this because I realized how little I knew about the city as I was writing about it in this novel that Bellow thought was fatty and cloddy, but wonderful and publishable.

Marion: That could be the name of a really nice set of kittens: fatty, cloddy, wonderful, and publishable. In one of your children’s stories.

William: When I was trying to write it and trying to go back, all I had was one picture book with a guy who put it together and was selling it for a couple of dollars, and it was his old photographs that had been thrown away by the Times Union. And he put them all together in a book called Old Albany, Volume One. He actually put out about five volumes or something like that, maybe six. And they were very successful in a minor way. But very popular with the antiquarians, like myself, and I went through that book, page by page, and studied the way the history, the way the city, the way the docks looked in 1840 and then how they looked in 1928, and went on what the change was in my own neighborhood, all the lumber mills, 42 lumber mills in my neighborhood. I never understood it when I was a kid, but I got to understand we were the white pine center of the world.

Marion: Oh yes we were. Absolutely. So the historical research really helped a lot, but how about when you … You know how to write about home, but your work isn’t limited to Albany. I’ve read your work from Cuba, I’ve read your work from Puerto Rico. You have this remarkable piece about the painter, Edward Hopper in a book called Edward Hopper and the American Imagination. You’ve written the liner notes for Frank Sinatra. So clearly you’re not just situated in Albany, but I wonder about this diversity, this remarkable breadth. You come from Albany, you’ve written about things all over the world. Has the diversity always fed and has it nourished you to go so wide in your writing?

William: These things that I write about, they usually fall in my lap. I mean, somebody … I can’t remember who it was, thought one of my novels reminded them of Edward Hopper, so somebody asked me to write for one of the … I think it was the Guggenheim, whatever it was, whatever New York museum put on a show. And one of my old students from Cornell who knew I traveled with Sinatra types, he was a friend of one of the people at Reprise Records, which was Sinatra-owned. And they were looking for someone to write the liner notes and he said, “Why don’t you get Kennedy?” And so they called me up and I said, “Okay.”

Marion: A bigger fan Frank Sinatra never had as you, I happen to know.

William: Well that’s right. I mean, that was just a fan letter, but it was also a story about getting to know Frank a little bit. One meeting I had with him at Carnegie Hall and it was just a sort of the odyssey of a fan paying attention to his music for a lifetime, and that was a very popular piece. It ran in the Sunday Times Magazine, against the wishes of the Reprise people. They didn’t want to be scooped by their own story, but how could I pass up The Times?

Marion: How could you pass it up?

William: So the Times was a very popular piece, and I got fan mail from a lot of songwriters, and musicians, and very well-known people that wrote me a fan letter on the piece. It was a funny piece.

Marion: Yeah. It was delightful.

William: Yeah. But those things that happened, the Cuban thing, my novel, Chango’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes, people said, “Wait a minute, you’re going to write about Cuba? What about Albany? Is that going to destroy your work?” “No,” I said, “It’s going to be about a guy from Albany who goes down to Cuba.”

Marion:  There we go.

David: There we go. That works.

Marion: And I think that kind of brings us back to where we started and honestly-

William: And also, and then he comes back to Albany in the second half of the book.

Marion: I know. I read it. Well, we can talk to you all day, but I think that would be unfair. Thank you for this. This is just beautiful, gracious and, as ever, a joy.

David: Thank you, William.

Marion: The writer is William Kennedy, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, MacArthur Genius grant, author of eight books referred to as the Albany Cycle. He is the founder of The New York State Writers Institute.

David: As always, thanks for listening and don’t forget to subscribe to QWERTY and listen to us wherever you go. Our producer is Adam Claremont. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. This podcast was recorded and produced by Overit Studios. You can find them here.