A Conversation with William Kennedy

William Kennedy vaulted into national prominence in 1983 with the publication of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Ironweed (later made into a feature film with Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson) and the award of a MacArthur Foundation grant. His cycle of novels set in Albany, New York—now numbering five and counting—comprise Legs, Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, Ironweed, Quinn's Book, and Very Old Bones. These novels have created for his home town an almost mythic quality clearly implied in the title of his non-fiction book O Albany! Improbable City of Political Wizards, Fearless Ethnics, Spectacular Aristocrats, Splendid Nobodies, and Underrated Scoundrels. Kennedy was interviewed by Rudy Nelson, a friend and fellow professor in the English department of the State University of New York at Albany.

Image: In one of your earlier interviews, you made a statement something like this: "I don't need Buddhism or Zoroastrianism. I've got Sacred Heart Church in North Albany. Can you elaborate a bit on that?

William Kennedy: I don't know where Zoroastrianism came from—probably a college history course—but the way I was educated in high school and college was immersion in religion. I lived in the North End and Sacred Heart Church was the bulwark of all the spiritual guidance I was getting. It stayed with me—and it always will. I consider it a strength, although I've long since ceased to give allegiance to the Church in any formal or ritualistic way. But I value my religious education as I value so many of the priests I've known through the years. I value the way it became a substructure for my life. It was a way of engaging the world, confronting moral dilemmas. It was a broad education in human behavior and I'm very grateful for that. I had to learn probably half of the Baltimore Catechism, the Ten Commandments and their explanations, the virtues of faith, hope, and charity as defined by the Church. And all this can have high validity, whether you're a Catholic or a Zoroastrian. So many people in my life and in my books have grounded their moral behavior in these imposed tenets of the Faith; and when they transgress, it is often against those same tenets.

Image: Your use of Catholicism in your fiction—as institution and as system of belief—is significantly different from the way other Roman Catholic writers have used it. For example, Flannery O'Connor, J.F. Powers, Walker Percy, Ron Hansen. Will you comment on the ways Roman Catholicism enters into your fiction?

WK: I wouldn't know how to compare myself with those people. I admire them all, but I haven't read any of them extensively enough to be sure. It's a question I've asked myself in the book I'm writing now, which takes place at the turn of the century: How does religion come into play in this particular relationship I'm writing about? I probably won't answer the question, but it's something that I don't leave out. It's like politics. In Very Old Bones there isn't much political overtness, but politics underpin the behavior of the characters. In Bones, Tommy has a job in the city water works, and it's obviously a political appointment. He dies there—he falls into a filtration pool and drowns. The politicians gave him his job and the politicians pay for his funeral. It's a given, even though it's not explicitly stated. That kind of politics was a part of my family's life—and my life for many years. Religion enters my novels in a similar way. Religion is more overt, has highly visible significance in Very Old Bones, and it probably will in the novel I'm thinking about now. I may write about a priest. So religion is something I can't be without. It's gotten into my imagination and my language. It's true enough what they say about the Church. If they get you young enough they've got you forever.

Image: Which reminds me of a comment Marcus Gorman, the narrator, makes in Legs—referring to himself, his father, and the criminal Jack Diamond: "Products all of the ecclesiastical Irish sweat glands, obeisant before the void, trying to discover something."

WK: The Church was on your back when you were a working man. Edward Daugherty's father, Emmett, a significant character in my novel in progress (he's also in Ironweed), actually did help build the Sacred Heart Church that still stands. That church rose on the shoulders of the faithful, paid for with their pennies, nickels, and the sweat off their backs. But I suppose in that "sweat glands" phrase I also meant that those men were believers, but quizzical ones, instructed by the clergy that they were living on the rim of hell's fiery caverns. And if this didn't cheer them, it at least made them sweat. Though they couldn't see anything except the void we all see, they kept believing, after a fashion, and they kept working and sweating through daily life and the life of the soul, anxious, at least at Sunday Mass, to get away from that hellish rim and onto the road to the cool pastures of heaven.

Image: In Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, Edward Daugherty's son Martin takes a rather anticlerical position. Isn't his own son about to enter the priesthood?

WK: Yes, he's about to become a Franciscan.

Image: Martin doesn't like that very much.

WK: Well, no, he feels it's a loss to the family. He feels he's losing his son, for he doesn't believe in the Church the way his son does. He's seen the extremes of people who enter the religious life and are lost to the family forever, and that's not what he wants for his son, or himself. It's a very selfish attitude on the part of Martin, but what he's trying to do is get his son to strike some kind of balance between the real world and the sacred. The balance of the sacred and the profane, I suppose, in the same sense that Martin believes he himself has balanced his life. Martin has a mystical streak, a visionary quality that is little understood by himself, but he knows that he has it, and it impels him to reverence before the unknown. And yet he's a very mundane citizen of the world—even a profane one, I'm constrained to say.

Image: What you say about Martin in Billy Phelan is that "despite his infidel ways, the remnants of tattered faith still had power over his mind."

WK: Yes, that tattered faith is what I'm trying to talk about in people I know who grew up Catholic, then fell away and yet retained some kind of association with the faith they didn't believe in. You revere God, if there is a God, but you don't really believe there is. It's mystical atheism. You believe there's something, but it's not necessarily God as any religion would have its God.

Image: In a way, Martin represents a sort of middle ground, doesn't he, between religion's often arrogant assumption that it has all the answers and has God in its hip pocket and, at the opposite extreme, the equally arrogant assumption of reductionist naturalism that there is no transcendent reality. Martin senses the pull in both directions and is somewhere between those extremes.

WK: You meet a lot of people in life with a religious calling, and you hear them espouse what they consider the manifest proof of the existence of God. They preach as if they are in unarguable possession of supreme truths, but you know they haven't got a metaphysical bone in their accumulated bodies. Also you find people like Martin Daugherty, truly a spiritual figure, who knows that a great deal of religion is what the Irish would call blarney, and knows also that something exists that's far more powerful than the fanciful theology offered up to him as inviolable truth. This thing that Martin knows is a mystical vision he has; and it is absolutely inexplicable, well beyond the naturalistic state he inhabits every day. He knows there is a surreal dimension to his life but he doesn't create a religion out of it, nor does he try to impose it on others. It exists side-by-side with his palpably real knowledge of the universe.

Image: Francis Phelan is a different kind of character, of course, from Martin Daugherty, and yet there's some pretty profound religious significance to Francis's life as you portray it in Ironweed. Although it would surely be stretching a point to call him a saint—he wouldn't stand for it, for one thing—he is far from irredeemable. In fact, it seems clear that by the end of the novel he has experienced a redemption of sorts and even makes gestures of grace in his chosen way of life. He gives his last bit of food to a man with hungry children in the hobo jungle, and says offhandedly, "Got some stuff here I can't use."

WK: Well, that's true. Ironweed was meant as a book of redemption. It didn't start out as one. I was not sure how it should end when I began it, but I became sure by the time I finished the first chapter set in the cemetery. That's where Francis communes with the dead and speaks with his son Gerald who died when he was thirteen days old. This miraculous creature in the grave mystically imposes on Francis the obligation to perform acts of expiation for abandoning the family, and tells him, "When these final acts are complete, you will stop trying to die because of me." By then I knew Francis was on his way to redemption. Thereafter he slowly becomes aware of what he has been consciously and unconsciously avoiding—going back home and confronting the worst that he's done in life: abandoning his wife and two children for twenty-two years in order to flee his shame for dropping Gerald and causing his death. And so the book became an odyssey. In some measure, language and certain events from Dante's Purgatorio are woven into Francis's experience, particularly in the psychic realm, the ineffable, unconscious element of his life and thought. He could never speak it, but in time did intuit it; and it was in those segments that I used the most exalted, most Dantesque language I could muster, as a reflection of Francis's soul rising from purgatorial depths toward absolution for his grave sin, and then on to ultimate redemption. This language was not accessible to Francis—or to me either, until I started to write it. I then tapped into some unconscious flow of language, images, and ideas that I didn't know were part of my imagination. And the writing then became a calculated effort to arrive at what is deepest in any human being. When the book was going around and around, some editors argued that bums didn't think this way.

Image: Which is curious. There's certainly a venerable tradition of writing that way in American literature. Faulkner often did it. But I'm sure there were some editors who didn't approve even when he did it.

WK: Any editor who would say such a thing to a writer should be exiled to mathematics.

Image: The action of Ironweed appropriately takes place on All Saints' Day. I think it's a fascinating commentary on the creative process that you didn't choose that time frame specifically for Ironweed, that you were already locked into it by the action in the earlier novel Billy Phelan's Greatest Game.

WK: The thing that's comic about this is that Billy Phelan was purposefully set close to election time. I wanted it to be a gubernatorial year so Governor Thomas E. Dewey could be attacking the Democratic machine—as he actually had in 1938—and I would be able to reveal the machine in all its machinations and incredible power. So I had to set the action not on election day itself but during the primary campaign. This is when Francis comes home to register to vote, and he registers twenty-one times, at $5 per, and earns $105. Well, the story is played out, the kidnapping takes place, Francis is arrested for the multiple registrations, and Billy saves him. Such things take time, and so the story came to the end of the month; and there it was—Halloween, then All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day—those three very holy days in the Christian calendar. This brought back a world I had studied in the Catechism, with the nuns in fifth and sixth grade, and the Christian Brothers in high school. The memories came back of All Saints' Day, a holy day of obligation, and All Hallows' Eve, and All Souls' Day when the dead walk abroad and you pray for all the suffering souls in purgatory. It fit perfectly with the odyssey Francis was on, his purgatorial venture; and I find it comic that I was led to all that by Albany politics. The irony is that Albany politicians were always very close with the Church in my younger days. The priest and the bishop and the political boss were close friends and allies in defeating the scurrilous Protestant Republicans who tried to take City Hall away from them.

Image: Let's stick with Billy Phelan's Greatest Game for a bit here. The father-son motif in that book seems to have an almost archetypal quality to it, what with the various pairs of fathers and sons. Primarily, of course, it's Francis and Billy, but also Martin and Peter Daugherty (and Martin and his father), Patsy and Charlie McCall...

WK: Patsy is Charlie's uncle. Bindy's his father. But yes, Patsy's a surrogate father. He's also the patriarchal figure of the community.

Image: Then there's also Jake Berman and Morrie. This father-son motif is nothing if not religious in its significance, but it escalates to a new level and an even greater resonance because of the references throughout the novel to the Abraham-Isaac story. Do you want to discuss your use of that biblical allusion?

WK: I don't recall the origin. I suspect that I was reading the Old Testament and some Hebrew scholars. I had a number of conversations with a Jewish colleague, an academic who was writing a philosophical treatise. I think that was a period in which Abraham came very much into my consciousness. I used to go around asking people, "What do you think about Abraham and Isaac?" And I'd get this weird look. My conclusion was that Martin Daugherty would conclude that Abraham was a prototypical fascist, because of the way he behaved toward his son. My own son was about three or four years old at the time, and the concept of sacrificing him for some higher power was unthinkable. I'd sacrifice myself before I would touch him in any hurtful way. That archetypal faith of Abraham was something very foreign to me and foreign to what Martin was thinking. I'm not Martin, I didn't have the experiences Martin had, but I knew how he would think in many situations, and that was one of them.

Image: Martin thinks: "All sons are Isaac, all fathers are Abrahams, and all Isaacs become Abrahams if they work at it long enough."

WK: That's the way it turns out sometimes. There's also a line in the book that says we're all in a conspiracy against the next man. I woke up one night with that as a headline I had seen in a dream. I didn't know what it meant but I decided I would use it. It becomes clear in the context of Martin's thinking in Billy Phelan's Greatest Game. Martin is feeling hostile toward his own son, trying to deny him his vocation—and he perceives this hostility in himself. The quest for balance is not a quest for total liberation of the child. In the same way, his own father was a very difficult mentor for him as a writer. Martin takes a walk in the park with his father at one point, and his father makes light of his writing and tells him his novel is a joke. His father says that he should write about something more serious. Jake Berman has taken the same attitude toward his son Morrie, one of the kidnappers. Martin sees the cycle of change—that as you become older, as your son becomes more antithetical to what you are, you move into the Abraham role—in a metaphorical way if nothing else.

Image: Still on the father-son theme. There's a significant rhetorical echo in Billy Phelan that will take us a step farther. Referring to Francis and Billy, Martin says: "For I know how it is to live in the inescapable presence of the absence of the father." Then, only a few pages later, he makes a comment on what he wants for his own son, who, as you say, is headed for the priesthood: "Balance: that was what he wanted to induce in Peter. Be reverent also in the presence of the absence of God." Which seems to indicate, doesn't it, that all this talk about earthly fathers is somehow connected with the heavenly father?

WK: Well, it certainly is in that context, because of what Martin is trying to infuse into his son: Have a little reverence for somebody like me, he's saying, for whom God is not as present as he is to you. The statement does have an intended meaning at a theological level. There was always that tendency in the Catholic Church toward condemnation of the pagans, the infidels, anyone not of the Christian faith. It's too bad about you, you're going to be damned. Even as a child, that didn't make any sense to me. And yet it was a tenet of the Church for so many years. Even though they've softened their position on that in recent years, I suspect there are a good many in the hierarchy who still believe it.

Image: On this concept of the absence of God, which is certainly a part of Martin's approach to life, the novelist Sue Miller (who I know is a friend of yours) has made a comment about her own work—specifically with reference to her upbringing in the Protestant church: "Fictionally, I've chosen to place myself outside that world. And my intent has been to examine via my characters a life lived without the conviction of faith, and yet with a strong awareness of its loss."

WK: Yes, we're talking about the same thing, aren't we. You bemoan the loss of faith because it was so comforting in its own way. You could have this solidity of belief that everything was organized and the only way you could miss going to heaven would be if you got unlucky and died before you got to confession on Saturday. The Church was the font of wisdom and absolution. No matter how bad things got, you could go and see your priest and talk about it and he'd tell you, "Okay, just say a couple of Our Fathers and a couple of Hail Marys, go home and you'll be all right in the morning." If that's faith at all, it's a very childish faith. You grow into something a good deal more problematic.

Image: Let's take a different angle, and this may move us along to two more recent novels: Quinn's Book and Very Old Bones. It seems to me that perhaps the most important and far-reaching religious dimension in your work has to do with the sacredness of the novelist's calling. You treat this in the 1990 Hopwood Lecture—somewhat tongue-in-cheek but no less seriously—when you play off the Catechism's answers to the question "How do we sin against the faith?" Here's the paragraph that introduces that section: "But it is in the virtue of faith that the writer grounds himself (or herself) in the true religious experience of literature: and faith was defined early on for me as a firm belief in the revealed truths—truths of God as religion would have it; truths of the writing life, as I would have it."

WK: Is that where I went on to talk about the necessity of learning how to write and having to read everything that was worthwhile, knowing the canon of literature from the Greeks on down to the lyrics of the Beatles?

Image: Yes. And another way of sinning against the faith, as you quoted from the Catechism, is "By not performing those acts of faith, which we are commanded to perform." Or as you would have it: "This means you should write even on Christmas and your birthday, and forswear forever the excuse that you never have enough time."

WK: Well, that was comic, but it was typical of my going back to those forms of thinking that I learned early on. I was talking about what it means to be a writer. I don't want to exalt writing above other callings, but I felt that way about it: there can be a sacredness to it—"the priest departs, the divine literatus arrives." The feeling I have of the calling is that some writers have done sacred things; the fact that the writing world values them so highly, and the fact that I had valued them so highly, gave a private sacredness to certain texts and certain writers whom I read as if they were producing holy writ. I feel that still, but I also know, as a printer once told me, that the guys working in the marble quarries up in Granville have a tough time of it too, and their work is not to be diminished by any hyperbolic exaltation of a mere writer. What I remember thinking is that I couldn't call myself a writer—even though I had written twenty or thirty short stories and a couple novels—because nobody had published me. The idea was that until you were anointed into the priesthood of literature you weren't really a writer. And public acceptance was the only way you were anointed. But then many people do anoint themselves and one day decide, as I also did, as so many writers have to do, that you want to be a writer—the same as deciding you want to be a priest or a brain surgeon—and you work your way toward it. One day you get your degree and you can cut people's heads open; or you can open their imaginations if you're a writer. There must be a lot of unknown texts. There certainly have been writers whose work has died with them in the grave—"born to bloom unseen"—and what are we going to do about those? I don't know. I don't think there's anything we can do.

Image: You say there were certain texts by certain writers that you read as if they were holy writ. Who were a few of those writers?

WK: I would say certain works of James Joyce and William Faulkner have this quality for me, and many poems of Yeats, the prose of John Cheever and Saul Bellow, work by Nathanael West and, when I was younger, much of Winesburg by Sherwood Anderson and the short stories of Ernest Hemingway. Chekhov and Tolstoy and The Stranger by Camus, and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, are a few of the books that have wonderfully impressed me, but more for their story than for their language. I've read all the latter group in translation, all the former in my own language, and the difference is that I go back to the works in my own language and linger over the sentences, which are their essential glory. A particularly felicitous English translation of poetry, of Dante, say, will have the same impact on me. The holy writ of literature, for me, resides not in story but in the artistry of the word.

Image: This summer I read Riding the Yellow Trolley Car, the collection of your journalistic writings that goes back to the earliest days of your writing career. What impressed me was your long disciplined apprenticeship—in the artistry of the word—which counters the mistaken notion that you came out of nowhere in 1983 with the publication of Ironweed and your reception of the MacArthur grant.

WK: Well, writing can be a world that you enter very casually and then stay in forever. You think you can probably master this craft with your left hand and a little time—that's the way I thought about it at first—but the farther I went, the more difficult I perceived it was. I failed with the short story, decided I should go on and fail with the novel; I did, and I learned a lot. I became this figure who didn't know how to arrive, always on the quest. And even though I've subsequently been published, this is not in any way a culmination. I don't think I've arrived. I'm still trying to write things that have been nagging at me since childhood. Seventeen years I've worked on the novel I'm writing now. I started it in 1977. These things are part of a lifetime's engagement, a lifetime's belief that this is a valid way to spend your life. I suppose there's a spiritual quality to that sort of commitment.

Image: In almost every one of your novels I find one or more characters who, to some extent at least, embody this role of the artist. There's Martin Daugherty as journalist-narrator of Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, Orson as the memoirist of Very Old Bones, Daniel Quinn as the emerging young writer of Quinn's Book, and especially Peter Phelan as the painter in Very Old Bones. We'll need to get to Peter, who I think is of crucial importance in the context of this discussion, but let's talk about Quinn first. I had a very different impression of this book in my rereading of it this summer. When the novel first came out, I read it as Quinn's Book (as distinguished from Francis's book and Billy's book). This time I read it as Quinn's Book—the main thrust of the novel being the making of a writer, a true writer. I see some of William Kennedy in what's going on in the development of Quinn as a writer.

WK: Yes, I suppose there's something of me in every one of those characters you mentioned. Quinn is specifically an effort to reeducate myself in what I've lived through, by casting a comparably aspiring mind back into the nineteenth century to see how it would have negotiated the early stages of Irish-American life, especially those teeming years when the Irish were here in such great numbers, were so loathed by nativists, and were themselves in many ways a hateful people. Look at what they did to the blacks in the Civil War period. The Irish eventually transcended that—as I did (though I don't remember ever feeling violent antipathy toward anybody). But I knew it was in the genes somewhere, as was the aspiration to journalism and then to writing of a different order. And that's what I chose to track in the life of Daniel Quinn. In the course of doing that, I suppose I imposed some of my own knowledge of artistic progress on his trials and tribulations, on what he learned and lost and found valuable.

Image: The thing that he seems eventually to find which makes him a true writer, as he understands the process he's been going through, includes the concept of mystery. The word mystery is used often throughout the text in reference to Quinn becoming a writer—and it almost seems to take on a metaphysical quality. Quinn says, for example, "I knew that what was wrong with my life and work was that I was so busy accumulating and organizing facts and experience that I had failed to perceive that only in the contemplation of mystery was revelation possible."

WK: The importance of mystery in art first came home to me in reading an essay about or by Luis Bunuel, the great Spanish filmmaker. At some point in his life he said that mystery is the basic element of all works of art. That seemed like a pretty heavy statement to make. I now live with it under glass on my desk.

Image: I noticed it in one of the scenes in the PBS documentary "William Kennedy's Albany." I was going to ask you about that.

WK: That's exactly it, and if you look closely at that little piece of paper you'll see that it's full of holes. Those are thumbtack holes where it was pinned to the wall for twenty years. Finally I put it under glass because it was beginning to disintegrate. I thought that was a very interesting thing to say about anything artistic. And of course Bunuel's work is full of mystery. He was one of the original surrealists. I knew this, I suppose, when I was writing my first novel, The Ink Truck. I had been very involved with the surrealistic works of Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, Rene Magritte and many of those in the surrealist school of the twenties, and those pictures were hauntingly interesting. I can look at them again and again and always draw some new reaction out of myself—unlike the pure aesthetic response to color or shape in abstract painting. The surrealists touched something much deeper in me when I looked at their work, deeper than most other artists did. And their strong point was obviously the belief that there is something mysterious in everyday life that is, for a time, incomprehensible. In Bunuel's movies, like Viridiana and The Exterminating Angel, you have these mysterious events taking place in everyday life—for example, people who are locked in a room and can't leave. Why? Why can't they leave the room? Why is it locked? And so I began to examine everything I was writing. In my journalistic upbringing I was looking for crystallization, thinking that if I could get at the crystalline center of a moment I would reach some kind of wonderful truth. I'd really get to "the way it was," as Hemingway used to tell us to do. Now if I get to that crystalline moment, I know there's a lot left to be discovered. And that should be implicit in everything you write—that you are never bottoming out, that this isn't the definitive statement on this particular person, this particular incident, or even this particular line of dialogue. Just look at the way you read the title of my book in two ways. That second way—I don't think I had thought of it in that way. It was just an offhand way to label that book when I was writing it. I didn't have a title for it. This is a book about Quinn—Quinn's Book. Like a slug on a newspaper story, that you put at the top of every page. I felt that I would find another title, but the farther I went, the more I saw that Quinn was actually writing this book. He was looking back at his own life, and this was the very book of that life.

Image: And the first words of your book become the first words of the book he's writing about Magdalena, his fiancÈe's larger-than-life mentor.

WK: Right. There's also a great deal of mystery in Quinn's life. He can't explain any number of things—the way I can't either—yet that very mystery is what I'm trying to achieve. Mystery is important in creating fiction. In creating anything

Image: There's a little four-line poem by Emily Dickinson that doesn't often get anthologized: "Lad of Athens, faithful be / To Thyself, / And Mystery—/ All the rest is Perjury—"

WK: That's a fascinating statement, isn't it. She's saying that if you believe anything is less than mysterious, you're a liar.

Image: Paul Tillich has said that the shock of being—the awareness at some deep level of the Mystery at the heart of all there is—is the matrix out of which proceed both religion and art. Wouldn't it follow, then, that any serious attempt to explore and understand the mystery of being—in literature or music or drama or the visual arts—is fundamentally religious? It doesn't have to deal with dogma or religious institutions, or speak the language of piety.

WK: I wouldn't argue with that. We're all trying to go back to some kind of first cause in whatever we create, some kind of origin of this human being we're writing about—or in the case of the novel I'm writing now, this situation involving six human beings. The characters are infinitely complicated and will never know each other's secret motives—and may never know their own—and yet you're trying to explore and define them as well as you can in order to understand the nature of the complexity. And maybe you'll arrive at some kind of illumination. That in itself, the illumination of the mystery that pervades these lives, is the beginning of something. And beginnings are holy events more often than not: births, marriages, self-anointings by writers.

Image: You're making these comments with regard to the novel you're working on right now. I wonder if in your most recent novel, Very Old Bones, that same kind of process was involved. Very Old Bones seems to me a tying up of many loose ends we've confronted in earlier accounts of the Phelan family—a digging down to the roots of various family tragedies and troubles, and finally a healing of some of the destructive forces that have been at work. And the agent of the healing process is Peter, the artist, by way of his sequence of paintings called "The Malachi Suite." The healing comes, first, by painting scenes of this horrible legacy and, second, by planning the family luncheon at the book's climax. I can't help but wonder: What Peter attempts to do as a painter, Kennedy tries to do as a novelist. Does this ring a bell or is it off the mark?

WK: Well, I am trying to write about these people I know in the same way Peter was painting pictures of the people he knew—or, in some cases, knew only marginally or by osmosis through his mother. He couldn't have known his insane father Malachi. He was in his mother's womb at the time of Lizzie's murder. And he was born into the livid aftermath of that horror a few weeks later. Then, for some reason (is it mystical or is it just because he intellectually arrived at the moment of confrontation with old newspaper accounts of that story?) Peter decided to illuminate these events for his siblings and for himself—to see what it meant after he was able to paint it. I think that's the kind of impulse writers and painters experience: trying to convey some sense of learned or intuited experience that will be valuable to somebody, even if it's only to the artist himself, or herself, at the outset—which is almost enough. The interpretation of the mystery, the revelations that Peter brought to that horrible set of events, were to me not the final resolution of what really took place. It was impossible to really know what took place, because you could never know what was in the mind of Malachi. You could only know what Malachi did and said. What was it that impelled him to become this madman who burned his wife as a witch in their own home, in their own bed? That's a madness that's very hard for any artist to explain.

Image: That madness in the Phelan family history underscores the fact that your fictional universe is clearly a fallen world (to use a theological term), filled with disappointment, despair, violence, corruption. But Daniel Quinn makes this statement: "In writing about what was worst in this world, an unconscionable pang of pleasure dogged my every line."

WK: It's a funny thing about writers—that's what happens. You create a great murder scene...it's like watching a horror movie. But the murder is not what is thrilling about it. It's the perception that you were able to execute it and tell something that was truly important. That's the motivation, I believe, and these important acts of madmen or arch-criminals, isolatos or derelicts like Francis, or exiles like Billy Phelan, are really the extremes that illuminate the ordinary. The high drama of imagined worlds becomes a Rosetta Stone—the key that unlocks the very real mysteries and complexities of our daily lives; and so fiction at its best has extraordinary significance for all of us. The indecision of Hamlet, the cruelties of Lear's daughters, or the mad jealousy of Othello—all of these powerful things—the evil nature of Iago—are not easily penetrated; and yet they are milestones in human history. To have these things to help us live from minute to minute, to help us know that others have lived here this way—this seems to me the most valuable kind of work we can do.

Issue #8 • Winter 94-95