William Kennedy: a life in writing

'Fiction has to come up from below. It has to be generated out of what is not necessarily the consequence of surface events'
William Kennedy
William Kennedy … 'I would take 35 books out of the library at the same time. Just trying to get a sense of ­comprehension of what the hell fiction was.' Photograph: Nathaniel Brooks/Polaris

There is a page on the wall of William Kennedy's townhouse, ripped from the notepad of Gabriel García Márquez, on which the Colombian novelist has written, in a combination of English and Spanish, a list of words describing what goes into fiction: love, humour, politics, nostalgia, tristeza, vida, muerte and, the final ingredient, three question marks. Kennedy, who turned 84 last month and is publishing his ninth novel, spent years trying to figure out his friend's question marks – the alchemy of a successful novel – and complete the move from journalist to fiction writer. "Fiction has to come up from below," he says, frowning in the late afternoon light. "It has to be generated out of what is not necessarily the consequence of surface events. I talked to myself about this when I was trying to write my early short stories and even my first novel." He smiles. "It was a long conversation."

We are in Albany, New York, the location of so many of Kennedy's novels, the most famous of which, Ironweed, won the Pulitzer in 1984 and was made into a film starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson and which is part of the eight-novel "Albany cycle". The writer's interest is rooted in the Irish-American community and Kennedy, who is tall, robust, reddish of hair and skin, has, he says, become more Irish as he has aged: "Being Irish was the only thing I couldn't resign from. I stopped being a Catholic and I stopped being a Democrat." His secondary interest, Latin America, stems from the years he spent as a journalist on newspapers in Puerto Rico and Miami, where he covered the Cuban diaspora, and on which he draws for his latest novel. Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes fictionalises the era of Hemingway's Cuba, introducing both Hemingway and Castro as characters in the story, and if Kennedy belongs to a stylistic school, it owes something to that hard-living vein. There are not, surely, too many people of whom Jack Nicholson might be moved to remark – as he said of Kennedy – "That man can drink."

The foundations of Kennedy's writing style – brisk, spiked with arresting images and swift dialogue – grew out of his apprenticeship as a news reporter. He always wanted to be a journalist and came of age in the industry's grubbiest and most glamorous era. He started writing for the school newspaper in Albany and carried on through college and his first job, after the army, at the Albany Times Union. This was in the early 1950s when Albany, the state capital of New York, was riven with corruption scandals, political infighting and social unrest, fertile territory for a young reporter.

"It was great training, the fact that you have to use the language, and organise, and learn to think. You have a built-in set of ethics. You have to deal objectively as best you can with whatever the reality is, if you're trying to say something straight and honest, unless you're Fox News."

The difficulty Kennedy encountered was when he tried to get a parallel ambition under way, and write short stories drawing on some of the more lurid events he had reported on.

"I would have a great story; an interview with somebody on death row, or someone who just lost her children in a fire, all sorts of things that seem highly dramatic. And then you come back and you start to put them into fictional practice. And you find out that you're still writing a news story. It took me a while to separate the two careers. One is so much involved with the moment and the topography of the moment, the sounds and sights and smells of the moment. But fiction is not that. Fiction has to start inside."

Those early short stories generated some "friendly rejections" but nothing else and after a few years, Kennedy began to get restless. "I got away from Albany because I was bored with it. I thought the editors were mostly brainless. I had to get out and do something different." When a job offer came up in Puerto Rico, he jumped at it and decamped to a newly founded newspaper called the San Juan Star.

This was when he started to pursue his fiction writing in earnest. Saul Bellow happened to be in Puerto Rico teaching, and Kennedy sent him a manuscript, which he enjoyed and sent to his own editor and agent. ("None of that worked.") It was a slow, painful process, which, given Kennedy's quick start in journalism, he found hard to deal with. "It was baffling that I couldn't make a breakthrough in fiction. And I was working in isolation. I didn't have access to any expertise.

"But I began to read everything, to re-educate myself. I would take 35 books out of the library at the same time. Just trying to get a sense of comprehension of what the hell fiction was, and what I had to know in order to do it. You come up against that question: what is it I don't understand? The feeling was, give me enough time and I'll figure it out. And that's what happened."

He never met Hemingway, but was mindful of his advice about the risk to the would-be novelist of a long career in journalism. "He thought it would deaden you and you'd become a victim of the pattern of thinking in terms of how you cleanse your mind every day to start fresh on tomorrow's news. Whereas, the writer has to train himself to remember everything. I think there's a deadening element when you stay in the business too long in terms of imaginative writing. The pattern will be unbreakable."

But, he says, "it's a very difficult apprenticeship. It's only rare birds like Hemingway, who started young and got into the news business and fiction writing early, who are successful at both."

While he slogged over his novel, Kennedy was having a good time at the newspaper. It was a product he was proud of, he says, although it was shabbily organised and distributed. It was the kind of place where at 9pm, the city editor walked out of the newsroom to do a show on his local radio station, while the managing editor tore his hair out over missing copy. Kennedy, who was, he says, "the only one who really knew how to edit copy and keep it moving out the door", eventually ran the place for a while, before the newspaper folded and he moved, with his wife, Dana, to Miami.

There is a short tribute in his new novel to the strengthening experience of failure. Of a young journalist, trying to get a job as a stringer in Havana, Kennedy writes: "Failure can be a creative act … how truly exciting this quest for failure can be." And so, in spite of the fact that no publisher had yet taken him on – after sending around the manuscript of a novel, he had received encouraging notes as well as a line, from one impressed but apologetic editor, that said: "I cannot add another book to my list that will not make money" – he decided to quit a cushy job as a columnist at the Miami Herald.

"I was trying to write 7am to 9am and then go to work at 9.30am. And after work, at 10pm, I'd do a couple of hours, and fall asleep. I realised I couldn't do both jobs … In September 1957, I read a review of On the Road, in Time magazine, and I thought, goddamn, I gotta get on the road myself and do something. Or I'll never do it. This is the time. I wanted to write a novel. I had failed as a short-story writer, so I decided I wanted to fail at something bigger." He failed again, failed better, got published, and after three modestly well-received novels, in 1983 reached a tipping point.

The premise of Ironweed was so unpromising, that in marketing terms the writer still to this day finds it funny: the story of a bunch of itinerant alcoholics, knocking around Kennedy's hometown, falling out, having visions, trying to pass for sober to cadge a bed for the night in the homeless shelter. Or, as Kennedy puts it, smiling, "Who cares about bums? And especially bums in Albany."

Ironweed was his fourth novel, after The Ink Truck, a stand-alone novel, and the first two books of the Albany cycle, Legs and Billy Phelan's Greatest Game. It was to Albany that Kennedy found himself returning in his mind as he tried to knuckle down to full-time fiction-writing. While he was there, he had been frustrated and bored. It was only now, from a distance, that he began to look at his own family with a critical eye, the history of his ancestors' emigration from Ireland, his great grandparents who worked on the railroads, and the legacy of his large family.

He began to talk in earnest to family members; to absorb their details like a novelist. He went back to the 30s, to the turn of the century and his mother's family. "Of the house, and how they lived and what they looked like. Their arguments. Their deaths. The great dinner parties they gave. Their Christmas presents. My great uncle Pat was a kind of politician, a wheelman. He rode a bicycle and wore bicycle clothes. And he knew a lot of people in power, governors and so on. And he was a dude in a way. I remember him only as squat, cantankerous, funny. He had a beard like a comic-strip character. And a white moustache. Some residual white hair. My mother loved him. He thought the sun revolved around her. So anyway I don't think I represented him as he was, but it's the kind of memory that goes into defining a personality. In the unconscious. And out of that comes this new character."

Ironweed was turned down by 13 publishers before being picked up. Kennedy was living more or less on the poverty line, taking teaching jobs, doing bits of freelancing, supporting his wife and family and barely keeping his head above water. Then something started to happen. Ironweed made the cover of the New York Times book review. Then of the LA Times book review. Then of the Chicago newspapers. Kennedy was awarded a MacArthur fellowship, worth $255,000 tax-free at the time. "The Times did a piece on the sudden fame of William Kennedy. It was a phenomenon. I got a thousand fan letters."

And then, as Kennedy sees it, a lot of very improbable things happened. The movie got made, and was nominated for two Oscars. Kennedy, who wrote the script, had a few years earlier come to the attention of Francis Ford Coppola, who'd asked him to collaborate on a script for The Cotton Club. (Kennedy taught himself screenwriting after adapting his novel Legs for the screen, fired his existing agents and hired the kind of movie agent at William Morris who "got me more money at a 15-minute luncheon to write a treatment than I'd made all year as a teacher".) As part of the fellowship, he was given an extra $15,000 to set up a non-profit organisation. He gave it to the English department at the university in Albany, to found something called the Writers Institute, which every year arranged a programme of free lectures by writers. "We got Saul Bellow in as our first guest and it was such a success; 1,000 people came out. Toni Morrison came next. Brought another 1,000 people out." That was 27 years ago. Kennedy, who is still heavily involved, considers it among his greatest achievements.

His best writing is still set in Albany, although the new novel opens dramatically in Cuba just prior to the revolution. Kennedy met Castro several times in 1987, at the house of García Márquez ("Gabo"), where on one occasion he was introduced thus: "I was in the rocking chair. And Gabo came in and said: 'Bill, would you mind moving? The comandante is coming and he likes the rocker.'"

He recalls that Castro never took his hat off. That he was very interested in Latin American movies. That he couldn't understand why American movies cost so much to make. "We talked about books, how much he loved to read. He's a great storyteller. His explanations are so lucid. That's when I interviewed him about how he survives and how he views himself as a survivor. It's in the novel."

The action in Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes flips from Cuba to Albany (which is where some of the characters flee after the revolution), and takes up the story years later, during the civil rights era. With great precision and control, Kennedy writes about those who have lost it; in this case, a man in the grip of dementia, a city in the grip of a riot, and those involved in a series of bar-room brawls. His characters talk in the stylised, cinematic mode – "If I ever see him again I'll give him a swift kick in the candy". It makes Kennedy such fun to read and the narrative races along. George has it explained to him that he has had a good day: "You got lost in the city, you got cut and went to the hospital, you had a romance, you were in a fight, a race riot, and a shooting, you went to a house of prostitution and a concert, you danced a waltz, and you serenaded a very lovely woman who seems to be in love with you."

Kennedy says that these kinds of high-octane scenes have been informed as much by cinema as by reading. "The perception of action: I've been going to movies all my life, since the early 30s. This has to have an effect. It got into my blood." That, and the influence of newspapers: "The idea of telling a narrative: what, where, when, why, how – all of that. And not having anything that isn't essential. The movement is what creates the action, and the action is what creates the story and then you're into more movement.

"You keep perpetuating the flow. If it doesn't pertain to what's relevant to the instant, when you're trying to describe the action, then it shouldn't be there."

That evening, I watch Kennedy read from Chango's Beads in a bookshop in a town near Albany. He is a great, energetic reader, while his wife Dana, a former ballet dancer with the Joffrey Ballet, looks on proudly. As Kennedy discovered all those years ago, the point of the question marks in García Márquez's list is they can't be articulated – although a room full of people, watching him read, knows that he found the answer.