Monday, Oct. 01, 1984

A Winning Rebel with a Lost Cause

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE INK TRUCK by William Kennedy; Viking; 278pages; $15.95

To literary New York, it was the equivalent of somebody's winning the state lottery. A middle-aged novelist, burdened with debts, a leaky roof and a bruised ego, suddenly found himself celebrated and rich. It was as sudden as the surprise phone call that informed William Kennedy, 56, that the MacArthur Foundation was giving him one of its "genius awards": $264,000 tax free with no strings attached.

Thereafter, Kennedy's phone never stopped ringing. "Congratulations. The National Book Critics Circle has just named Ironweed the best novel of 1983." "Congratulations. Ironweed has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize." Callers from the West Coast snatched up the film rights to earlier novels, Legs and Billy Phelan's Greatest Game. Francis Ford Coppola hired the author to write the script for his $45 million movie The Cotton Club; and the public library of Albany, New York State's capital and the author's home town, proclaimed a William Kennedy Day to honor its first native literary star since Bret Harte.

One of the bonuses of such success is that a writer is virtually assured that anything he writes--or has written--will be published. The Ink Truck is Kennedy's first novel. Dial brought it out in 1969, a time when even the most unbuttoned fiction could not compete against reality. There was more than enough anarchy on the front pages, and few critics took notice of a book about a journalist's buffoonish terror tactics during a newspaper strike. Read then, The Ink Truck might easily have been mistaken for a political statement about the freedom-loving workers' battle against the oppressive Establishment. Now, by the limelight of the Kennedy phenomenon, the book can be seen freshly for what it is: a bawdy Celtic romp reminiscent of J.P. Donleavy's 30-year-old tour de force, The Ginger Man.

Elements of the story are loosely drawn from experience. In 1963 Kennedy returned from Puerto Rico, where he had been managing editor of the English-language San Juan Star, to write features for the Albany Times-Union. He soon found himself walking a picket line as a member of the striking Newspaper Guild. In The Ink Truck, the real is bent into the surreal. Dingy neighborhoods are weirdly illuminated by arsonists' flames; alleys echo to pagan rites; Old World myths are superimposed on the present. There are elegiac hallucinations of the past and an up-to-date orgy, a perky sketch of a bare female torso, and batty headlines, such as PIGS ARE WHERE YOU FIND THEM, OUTLAW DECIDES: SOUL IS A PORK CHOP, HE DISCOVERS.

Presiding over all this is a columnist named Bailey, a highly sexed free spirit with a loud checkered sports jacket, a long green scarf and a chip on his shoulder as big as the state capitol. The plot can be described as what happens when this immovable object meets guards with billy clubs, gypsies with evil powers, women with irresistible charms and important men of crushing influence.

Bloodied but unbudged, Bailey and a small cohort refuse to acknowledge that the strike is over. He harasses the Guildsmen, intimidates management and dreams of emptying a truck full of link outside the newspaper's offices. Dreams are in fact what Bailey is largely about: "A man could act on dreams as he acted upon thought. A man could act upon delusions as he acted upon dreams. They would have only a private validity. No one would be able to accept them; but neither could anyone negate them."

With his private validity, Bailey is a forerunner of Kennedy's later outsider heroes: the romantic Legs Diamond roaring confidently through the '20s, gun in hand; Billy Phelan conquering Albany with bowling ball and pool cue; and Phelan's father, Francis, a tormented bum stripped of everything except his will to endure.

The Ink Truck rolls to a poignant conclusion, yet it does not show Kennedy at his full spellbinding power. Much of the book is inspired blarney, fun to read and probably fun to write. There are willing wenches, dramatic confrontations and Bailey's gift for subversive gab: "Nietzsche generalized that all good things approach their goals crookedly, and so for very crooked reasons I'll put his idea to the test." But page by page, scene by scene, Kennedy's prose is lean, energetic and grounded in the detail and humanity that keep Bailey from becoming that fatal cliche, larger than life.

--By R.Z. Sheppard

For 20 years, William Kennedy has been in the right place at the right time: behind his typewriter nearly every day. Holed up in his 19th century farmhouse in Averill Park, N.Y., Kennedy recalls, "I never expected a whole lot in the early days, but I always hoped for a great deal." The voice carries the deliberate calm of a man who has struggled singly and triumphed over great odds. One thinks of Gary Cooper in the last scenes of High Noon, though Kennedy now sees himself living in a smash movie by Federico Fellini.

La dolce vita? "Well," says Dana, the author's wife of 27 years, "the day he got the MacArthur grant, he went around the house repeating, 'How sweet it is.' " Nearly a year and a half later, Kennedy is still tasting successes. On a European tour he will promote foreign-language editions of his novels. The State University of New York at Albany, where Kennedy holds a professorship, sponsored a weekend of cultural events in his honor. In addition, one of the writer's best-known fans, New York Governor Mario Cuomo, signed a bill granting $100,000 a year to support a series of writing workshops and lectures that Kennedy started at SUNY with a $15,000 grant. "You become successful, and the first thing you turn into is a patron of the arts," he was told by Saul Bellow, who once instructed the younger writer in a fiction class, and encouraged him to persevere at the craft.

That was 1960, when Kennedy was a journalist in San Juan and the future Nobel prizewinner was a visiting teacher at the University of Puerto Rico. The island was also where Kennedy met Dana Sosa, a gifted dancer-singer who forsook the stage to raise three children and help her husband buy time to write during the lean years.

Ironweed was turned down 13 times, frequently with the comment "Who wants to read a book about a bum?" Bellow did, and afterward wrote a stern letter to Viking, the house that originally rejected the book: "That the author of Billy Phelan should have a manuscript kicking around looking for a publisher is disgraceful." The admonishment worked.

Not only was Ironweed published to high praise but interest revived in Kennedy's previous novels, Billy Phelan and Legs, a fictional treatment of the life of Jack ("Legs") Diamond.

All of the books are set within the city's limits. "The literature I care about most comes out of a deeply rooted sense of place," says Kennedy. "Without this element, the work is often reduced to a cry of voices in empty rooms, a literature of the self, at its best poetic music; at its worst, a thin gruel of the ego." The author's fondest appreciation of his birthplace is O Albany (1984), three parts raffish history to one part autobiography.

His father William was a frequent gambler and political factotum from the capital's North End, the textures and tones of which fill all of Kennedy's work.

In progress is Quinn's Book, another novel in the Albany cycle. Kennedy is increasing his nonwriting stake in the city as well. He recently bought the downtown rooming house where Legs Diamond was shot dead in 1931.

Excerpt

"The ink truck bled of its ink grew larger as Bailey thought of it. A gesture at last that would be more than a gesture. It would be the transfiguration of a protest. He would be done with the mortifying slouch of the timid piss ant. Something moved in his center, urging itself upward from the grave. Seeds. Transfigured. Up, up! The crust of the grave began to crack. Isn't it grand what a little call to adventure can do for you, Bailey. Does Bailey love a challenge? Do eggsuckers suck eggs?

He entered the Guild room, sat once again, stared at the photo once again, felt at ease in old contours once again, was swept over with joy, doom, nostalgia."