Riding the Yellow Trolley Car: Selected Nonfiction Read online

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  Praise for the Writing of William Kennedy

  “Kennedy’s power is such that the reader will follow him almost anywhere, to the edge of tragedy and back again to redemption.” —The Wall Street Journal

  The Ink Truck

  “Lean, energetic, and grounded in detail and humanity.” —Time

  “Wildly funny, rich, and full of lyrical moments.” —People

  Riding the Yellow Trolley Car

  “Graced with an emotionally satisfying arrangement and a deep appreciation for life’s variety.” —The Washington Post

  “As quirky and satisfying a literary journal as its title implies.” —GQ

  “There is a spirit of grace and generosity here as Kennedy delights in each of his subjects. He continues to ride his yellow trolley with wonder and delight, and the reader is just as delighted to take the journey with him.” —San Francisco Chronicle

  “The writer who emerges here sounds not merely interesting but delightfully genuine. . . . This eclectic collection both entertains and enriches.” —The Dallas Morning News

  “Whether he’s discussing his taste for oysters or the plight of the homeless, there’s a touch of the poet about Kennedy.” —Library Journal

  “It is Kennedy’s voice that makes this collection sparkle; he is a personable, unique writer, one who studies his craft as well as plies it.” —Booklist

  Quinn’s Book

  “Richly packed . . . It is Quinn’s endless, apparently effortless invention that dazzles, like a virtuoso musician improvising.” —Publishers Weekly

  “As a writer of historical fiction, William Kennedy is unparalleled among his contemporaries. . . . A revelation. Large minded, ardent, alive on every page, it is a novel to savor.” —T. C. Boyle, The New York Times

  Very Old Bones

  “Few Irish-American writers have produced more haunting portraits of their ancestors or the ghosts that possessed them than Mr. Kennedy has in Very Old Bones.” —The New York Times

  “Kennedy’s narrator speaks for a grand cast of saints, eccentrics, artists, blackguards and tarnished heroes, all of whose lives come together in this quirky but consistently fascinating weave of a story. Paternity, aesthetics, the toll and virtues of madness, the tortures of religion, the pains and pleasures of sex and marriage, the pressure of history always pushing at our backs—these are some of the motifs that come to life in Kennedy’s pages.” —The Dallas Morning News

  “The very best of William Kennedy’s work.” —The New York Times Book Review

  “A complex but beautifully shaped saga.” —Publishers Weekly

  “The Phelans can claim a place beside O’Neill’s Tyrones and Steinbeck’s Joads as one of the premier families of American literature. . . . If you think the great books are no longer being written, reading William Kennedy will change your mind.” —Library Journal

  “In many ways Kennedy’s most mature and profound work.” —San Francisco Chronicle

  Riding the Yellow Trolley Car

  Selected Nonfiction

  William Kennedy

  This book is dedicated to all journalists

  with a novel in the desk drawer.

  CONTENTS

  I. The Writer on the Examining Table

  The Beginning of the Book: Riding the Yellow Trolley Car

  The Beginning of the Writer: Eggs

  A Memoir: Hearst Is Where You Find Him (And I Found Him in Albany)

  Early Assignments:

  Langford, Prominent Cat, Dies

  Albert the Swimmer

  Tracking the Missing Leopard

  A Speech: Be Reasonable, Unless You’re a Writer

  The Hopwood Lecture: Writers and Their Songs

  An Interview: Tap Dancing into Reality

  Fragments of a Talk with The Paris Review: Ironweed and Style

  An Argument: Rejection and Henry James

  (Ironweed award speech to National Book Critics Circle)

  Winning the Pulitzer:

  Who Are You Now That You’re Not Nobody?

  II. Examining Writers: Some Interviews and Essays

  A Week with the Verbivorous Joyceans: The Quest for Heliotrope

  Bernard Malamud:

  On the Short Story

  On The Fixer

  Pictures of Fidelman: A Review

  Ernest Hemingway:

  His Clear-Hearted Journalism

  His Dangerous Summer

  J. P. Donleavy: Captivated by Ginger: A Non-Interview

  James Baldwin: The Distractions of Fame

  The Beat Generation:

  Ginsberg’s Albany Pain

  Where Did They Go? Everywhere.

  Jerzy Kosinski: On Still Being There

  Walker Percy: Grim News from the Moviegoer

  Saul Bellow:

  Intellectual Activity: A Form of Resistance

  If He Doesn’t Have a True Word to Say, He Keeps His Mouth Shut

  E. L. Doctorow:

  A Strong Voice in the Universe

  Shimmering Loon Lake

  Norman Mailer: An Eavesdropper at the Lotos Club

  Robert Penn Warren: Willie Stark, Politics, and the Novel

  Damon Runyon: Six-to-Five: A Nice Price

  III. Thirteen Reviews, One Review Rebutted

  Samuel Beckett: The Artful Dodger Revealed

  The Lime Works: Thomas Bernhard’s Citadel

  Players: DeLillo’s Poisoned Flowers

  Something Happened: Joseph Heller’s Great Monologue

  Ionesco’s Remarkable Irreducibility

  Far Tortuga: Peter Matthiessen’s Misteriosa

  O’Hara’s Letters: A Quest for Celebrity

  The Grapes of Wrath at Fifty: Steinbeck’s Journals

  Malcolm Muggeridge’s Wasted Life

  Frank Sullivan: Serious Only About Humor

  The Fan Man: Kotzwinkle’s Buddha as a Saint of Dreck

  Nathanael West: The Stink of Life and Art

  Nothing Happens in Carmincross: Benedict Kiely’s Deathly Variety Show

  Freedom of the City: Clive Barnes Is Wrong About Brian Friel

  IV. Ten Latin Writers, Plus Translator

  Gabriel García Márquez:

  One Hundred Years of Solitude

  The Yellow Trolley Car in Barcelona: An Interview

  Gregory Rabassa: Keeper of the Golden Key: An Interview

  Carlos Fuentes: Distant Relations

  Osman Lins: Avalovara

  Lygia Fagundes Telles: The Girl in the Photograph

  Jorge Amado: Tereza Batista: Home from the Wars

  Carlos Castaneda: Tales of Power

  Ernesto Sábato: On Heroes and Tombs

  Julio Cortázar: A Manual for Manuel

  Pedro Juan Soto:

  Spiks

  To What Extent Was Enrique Soto the Creation of Pedro Juan Soto?: An Interview

  Mario Vargas Llosa:

  Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter

  V. Exotic Life Forms Beyond Fiction

  Frank Sinatra: Pluperfect Music

  Pablo Casals: Master Class at Marlboro

  Satchmo: “All My Days Are the Same”

  Paul McCartney: The Major Possum Game

  Jiggs: “What’s the Matter with Father? I Saw Him Drink Water.”

  The Photography of Stillness: Muckraking the Spirit

  Marshall McLuhan’s Message Is …?

 
Diane Sawyer: The Subject Is Beauty

  “Tropicality” Defined

  Rudolph Valentino: He’s No Bogart

  Cassius Clay Arrives

  Ballet: Everybody Loves a Fat Girl, Right?

  Roberta Sue Ficker Is Going to Become Suzanne Farrell

  The Cotton Club Stomp

  The Making of Ironweed

  The Homeless: Do They Have Souls?

  VI. Albany Resurgent: More Reports from the Native

  O Albany!: Remarks to the Publication Party

  Jack and the Oyster

  The Capitol: A Quest for Grace and Glory

  Talking to the High Court

  Jody Bolden or Bobby Henderson: Either Way the Music Was Great

  The Charcoal Man: Warming Up to the Press

  Barney Fowler: The Quest for Curmudgeonous Joy

  Radicalism and Dwight MacDonald: Not What They Used to Be

  Requiem for a Lady at the Bottom of the World

  Baseball at Hawkins Stadium: “Here’s Your Son, Mister.”

  Family:

  My Life in the Fast Lane

  Dana’s Ironic Hiccups

  Snapshots: Two Grandfathers

  About the Author

  PART ONE

  The Writer on the Examining Table

  THE BEGINNING OF THE BOOK:

  Riding the Yellow Trolley Car

  The Yellow Trolley Car is a realistic, or perhaps surrealistic, vision I may, or may not, have had in Barcelona in 1972 when I was there to interview Gabriel García Márquez. When my wife, Dana, and I crossed into Spain at Port Bou, we asked at the tourist window for some literature on Barcelona and were given a brochure that detailed the trolley lines in the city, by number and destination. At Columbus Plaza we tried to find the trolley that would take us to Antonio Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia church, one of Barcelona’s wonders. A vendor of fresh coconut at the plaza explained that there hadn’t been any trolley cars in Barcelona for fourteen or fifteen years.

  Why, then, were they still mentioning them by name in the tourist literature? The coconut vendor had no answer and so we boarded a bus instead of a trolley and rode toward Gaudi’s monumental work. We stood at the back of the bus and watched the mansions and apartment buildings make splendid canyons out of the street, which at times looked as I imagined Fifth Avenue must have looked in its most elegant nineteenth-century moments. And then I said to Dana, “Look, there’s a trolley.”

  She missed it, understandably. Its movement was perpendicular to our own. It crossed an intersection about three blocks back, right to left, visible only for a second or so, then disappeared behind the canyon wall.

  When we reached García Márquez’s house we talked for some hours and eventually I asked him, “What trolleys still run in Barcelona?” He and his wife, Mercedes, both said there were no trolleys in Barcelona. Mercedes remembered a funicular that went somewhere.

  “This one was yellow,” I said, “and old-fashioned in design.”

  “No,” she said. “The funicular is blue.”

  García called his agent, Carmen Balcells, on the phone. “Is there a yellow trolley car in Barcelona?” he asked. “I’m here having an interview with Kennedy and he saw a yellow trolley.” He listened, then turned to us and said, “All the trolleys were yellow in the old days.”

  He asked about the blue trolley, but Carmen said it was outside of town, nowhere near where we had been. In a few minutes she called back to say that about two years ago there was a public ceremony in which the last trolley car in Barcelona had been formally buried.

  What had I seen? I have no idea.

  “To me,” García said, “this is completely natural.”

  He had already told us a story of how a repairman woke them and said, “I came to fix the ironing cord.”

  “My wife,” García said, “from the bed says, ‘We don’t have anything wrong with the iron here.’ The man asks, ‘Is this apartment two?’ ‘No,’ I say, ‘upstairs.’ Later, my wife went to the iron and plugged it in and it burned up. This was a reversal. The man came before we knew it had to be fixed. This type of thing happens all the time. My wife has already forgotten it.”

  In a later year a friend pointed out that I had included trolley cars in all my books except Legs, and in that I included a train. I grew up riding trolleys to school, hated to see them displaced by the mundane bus, and obviously gave them a significant place in my imagination.

  When I wrote about my Barcelona vision, I equated riding the trolley with writing fiction, but in trying to find a title for this collection of essays, journalism, reviews, interviews, and other pieces that seem to create their own categories, it became clear I should also equate the trolley with writing nonfiction.

  That said, I must also say that I am torn. García Márquez, in an interview in The Paris Review, said he didn’t think there was any difference between fiction and nonfiction. “The sources are the same,” he said, “the material is the same, the resources and the language are the same. A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe is a great novel and Hiroshima is a great work of journalism.”

  And in a panel discussion in Albany that opposed fiction to nonfiction, Mary Gordon raised a comparable argument: “Do we have to say that War and Peace is more important than The Confessions of St. Augustine? … I think that’s an unnecessary and a false choice and I think it’s a very human thing. People like to feel that they know where they stand, that there is a truth, there is a superior genre.”

  I find validity in both arguments; and genius is genius in whatever form. But I also believe that fiction, at its most achieved, comes from a source—a profound wellspring in the unconscious—that is not accessible to nonfiction, unless the form is stretched to the point where it overlaps with, or is indistinguishable from, fiction.

  It is axiomatic that nonfiction is the collection and interpretation of information; and that fiction is information invented and interpreted. If done well, fiction reads the soul of a nonexistent being, dramatizes it, and creates an effect on the reader that is beyond the reach of reporting, or analytical or theoretical writing.

  That said, nonfiction is the genre at hand, and I love it extremely well. I have worked in it all my writing life, and have enormous respect for its pitfalls and its exalted reaches.

  I began my writing career as a newspaperman, and fragments from those early days are here, along with the story of my first effort at fiction. My original career plan was to live the life of the reporter who could go anywhere and write about anything, and, on the side, toss off an occasional short story to satisfy the craving for art; also to help pay the rent, newspaper salaries being scandalously low.

  This is not how it worked out. I quit newspapering in 1957 to write a novel, but was back in the city room two years later. I quit again two years after that to finish a novel, yet continue to work part-time as a journalist even to this rainy July day in the early summer of 1992. I have covered sports, crime, trials, slums, city hall, politics, race, movies, books, and theater. I’ve done investigative work, raked muck, written columns and editorials, been an editor, and I’ve loved it all. But along the way something happened to my head and I turned into a novelist.

  Yet I valued the nonfiction experience and always dreamed of making a book out of it: this book. The earliest story in the collection, the demise of Langford the cat, dates to 1954, and the most recent, a story about Damon Runyon, a hero of mine, I wrote a month ago. I have included, in large measure, pieces about literature, other art forms, pop culture and Albany. I left out my writings on politics, crime and other hard news; though they may turn up another day.

  The problem from the beginning was in deciding what work survived, what had gone rancid. One piece that survived was a review of Hemingway’s journalism, and I quoted him saying this:

  The “newspaper stuff I have written … has nothing to do with the other writing which is entirely apart.… The first right that a man writing has is the choice of what he will publish. If
you have made your living as a newspaperman, learning your trade, writing against deadlines, writing to make stuff timely rather than permanent, no one has any right to dig this stuff up and use it against the stuff you have written to write the best you can.”

  Of course you have the right to do this yourself, if you can live with it, and I decided I could. This book, in a way, is a writer’s oblique autobiography (of his taste, if nothing else). It is the tracking of a writing style as it develops. It is about reading, and it can stand as a chorale of contemporary voices, also a chorale of my own assumed voices. It is a historical chronicle of what some of the world’s best writers were writing in the decades the book spans, and it is an analysis of how fiction is written: writers talking of their craft, their ideas.

  The latter element is the result of my own need to know. I was still an apprentice in fiction when I moved back home to Albany from Puerto Rico in 1963, starving for conversation about writing and literature. I’d worked for the Albany Times-Union from 1952 to the spring of 1956 and now I was back, writing anything that appealed to me, working half-time. I also became a stringer for a new national newspaper, Dow Jones’s staid National Observer; and I self-propelled myself into covering, among other things, the literary life upstate for these two papers.

  I sought out James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, and others, and when writers like Allen Ginsberg and Robert Penn Warren came to town I was there, cajoling them into telling me how they created literature, how they imagined it, lived it. Of these literary encounters, I’ve included only those that still seem worth reading twenty or more years after the fact.

  After I did these interviews, my editors decided I was such an aficionado of writing that I should become a book reviewer. Also, because I had lived in Puerto Rico, I was considered expert in Latin American literature, and so I was thrust into assuming a point of view on the works of others: a critic, can you believe it? This was not what I was supposed to do in life. I was a newsman, a writer. I well knew where, in descending order, Beckett had ranked the critic: moron, vermin, abortion, morpion, sewer-rat, curate, cretin, and finally, “crritic!”