Issue One

When writing about the down-and-out, there are two main traps a writer can fall into. One, he can sentimentalize the story and make the characters typecast victims, pure-hearted innocents who are crushed by the heedless machinery of Society. Or, two, he can romanticize the characters’ condition, giving a Bukowski-type bravura to situations which do not warrant such glorification.

In his novel "Ironweed," William Kennedy has chosen a story that could easily stumble into either trap: after years of tramping around the country, a bum returns to his hometown. And, by the way, it’s the Great Depression. The scenario begs for either some finger wagging or the adventures of God’s Own Drunk. Kennedy, thankfully, avoids any such reductive approach, for "Ironweed" is comic and tragic, philosophic and poetic, earthbound and spiritual, all at once.

Back in his old hometown of Albany, NY, Francis Phelan digs graves, works for a junkman, tries to dry out, gets drunk. He looks for places to flop with his barfly lover, Helen, revisits the family he left years before, goes back on the bum, and battles some questionable do-gooders who attack a hobo shantytown. Strung throughout this meandering present, though, is Francis’s vivid scrutiny of his past. The constant inclusion of the past gives the novel its complexity–a sense that time is not determined so much by the sequence of events, but rather by the psychological relevance of events.

Among other things, Francis’s past is filled with women, most notably the three lovers who have shaped him over the years. His first, a teenage love named Katrina, is both profound and absurd–a woman who fakes catatonic trances and speaks through bizarre poetic allusions: "Oh, little Francis, my little rabbit, you must not fear me. I shall not rip you to pieces and let your sweet intestines dangle from my teeth." Francis’s affair with Katrina is never consummated, and in consequence, assumes a larger-than-life proportion For Francis, it comes to represent idealized romantic love. The second love is his wife Annie, with whom Francis has three children during his years of success as a professional baseball player, a trolley worker, and the guardian of his family. This time of relative calm and happiness, however, is short-lived, and is only revisited years after, when he has returned home. While Annie is Francis’s love during his high-times, his third love, Helen, is the love of his failure. Yet, although Francis meets her while he is on the bum–Helen herself a barfly–they last years together.

While these three women occupy much of Francis’s reveries, his true obsession is his violent past, a violence he struggles to come to terms with throughout the novel. When Francis first returns to Albany, he works for a day as a gravedigger. More important than the actual corpses Francis buries, are the unburied corpses from his past. And his past is littered with corpses. Some accidental, a dropped infant, and others, a well-aimed stone thrown at the head of a strikebreaker, perhaps not.

Francis’s obsession with the past goes beyond simply remembering it. In moments that reflect both his booze-soaked mind and a psychological realism, Francis literally sees and communicates with his dead, who appear to him in trolleys, on streetcorners, and in bathrooms. Even more startling is Kennedy’s implication that the dead actually do live and intermingle among the living. When Francis walks toward his infant son Gerald’s grave: "Gerald watched the advent of his father and considered what action might be appropriate to their meeting." The novelist freely roams inside the minds of all the characters–minds, it seems, which include the dead.

The death of his infant son, Gerald, who slips accidentally from Francis’s hands, perpetuates his guilt. Like Oedipus, who blinds himself for actions not wholly within his control, Francis blocks his sight by running from the vision of an act that is out of his hands. For after his son’s death, he leaves his family and becomes a drunken wanderer.

Thereafter, the novel follows Francis’s search to find out "what went bust," and in doing so, unearths a series of possibilities. While working for a day as a junkman, Francis passes his childhood home and imagines, in a quick burst, his development from conception to his present age. From a "primal pool of his own soulish body," Francis was "molded...into a bestial weed," a body that grew until it "stood fully clad in clothes Francis was now wearing."

At one point, Francis even considers that his hands "seemed to be messengers from some outlaw corner of his psyche, artificers of some involuntary doom element in his life." He is who he is, has done what he has done, because the raw materials of his being could not do otherwise.

Only upon returning to his broken home, his abandoned wife, and his two grown children, does Francis find any semblance of resolution. It is not, however, the resolution one would expect. Once more, Kennedy does well to avoid the pitfalls of sentimentality.

There are few faults to find in Kennedy’s prose. The only flaws are minor infractions on the show-don’t-tell maxim. Kennedy sometimes can’t help overstating his ideas. In addition, some readers might not accept Francis’s wife’s undying loyalty. Like Penelope, Annie keeps her fidelity to her absent husband for over twenty years. Francis, however, isn’t off fighting a Trojan War, he’s getting drunk. But within the rhythm of "Ironweed,"Annie’s loyalty seems to work; just as Francis cannot fully understand his constant flight, Annie cannot understand her steadfastness. For whatever unknown reasons, Kennedy’s characters simply are what they are.

As a small preface to the novel, there is a description of Ironweed from an Audubon Society field guide. Ironweed, the guide says, has a "tall erect stem" with "deep purple-blue flower head," and its fruit has a "double set of purplish bristles." It is called Ironweed because of the "toughness of the stem." In other words, Ironweed is beautiful even while it is tough and bristly. By definition, a weed chokes off the life of other plants. At the same time, Francis repeatedly speaks of sleeping in the weeds to keep out the cold and the wind. Such ambiguity and shades of characterization are at the heart of "Ironweed."

Francis is never just one thing: he is a killer and a protector; a running coward and a brave fighter; a success and a failure. Likewise, he can never presume to fully define himself, for he is the product of many forces: fate, change, his nature, and, though least of all, his free will. Still, Kennedy manages to find a beauty in these run-down lives, a poetry of squalor.

With "Ironweed," Kennedy has transcended the mundane tale of the down-and-out. No matter how much rehashing and explaining away of his past, Francis ultimately finds his solace in the realization that he can never be whole, can never fit the misshapen pieces of his life together. For in the end, he knows that he is a "creature of unknown and unknowable qualities...that lived in a world where events decided themselves, and that all a man could do was to stay one jump into their mystery."