Francis Phelan in Purgatory: William Kennedy's Catholic Imagination in Ironweed

A cradle Catholic born in 1928, William Kennedy says that he ceased long ago to "give allegiance to the Church in any formal or ritualistic way" (Nelson 221). When asked by interviewers about the influence of his Catholic upbringing and education on his work, however, he goes a long way toward suggesting that much of what is distinctive in his worldview and his approach to fiction has been shaped definitively by his Irish-Catholic heritage. In an interview with Rudy Nelson, published in Image in 1994, he says that his religious education gave him the "substructure" of his life, "a way of engaging the world," and he talks frequently throughout the published interviews about the ways in which Catholic doctrine, images, cultural practices, and habits of mind have "gotten into my imagination and my language" (221-22). While he doesn't "look at it in the way [he] used to when [he] was a kid," he tells another interviewer, he believes that Catholic theology has "great humanistic dimensions, great wisdom about how to achieve peace of mind in relationship to the unknown, the infinite. Maybe it's a palliative [...]. At the same time, it's beautiful. It's as good as I see on the horizon. I don't need Buddhism, or Zoroastrianism--I've got the Sacred Heart Church in North Albany" (Quinn 85). Kennedy's keen, not to say obsessive, interest in rendering the particularities of historical Albany--especially of Irish-Catholic Albany between 1850 and 1960--makes attention to the role of the Church in the lives of his characters supremely important. A writer who wants to bring to life the world and worldview of such characters cannot but be attentive to the presence of the Church, the influence of which historically has pervaded the domestic, social, and political lives of Albanians. Kennedy somewhat paradoxically connects this interest in novelistic verisimilitude with his famously mixed style, in which lyric flights of "magic" (a favorite word), fantasy, and surrealism are wont to break out in the midst of even the most starkly realistic or stylistically mundane passages: there must be, he says, a surreal dimension in "any society in which religion plays such a dominant role" (Quinn 82). Kennedy's Albany is a world shaped historically and in the present by a collective imaginative vision that regards the real world of sense perception as always open to the unaccountable and mysterious. His passages of "magic," then, are part of a commitment to render as fully as possible the world in which his characters actually live. In distinguishing the imaginative world of what he has called his "best book,"--Ironweed--from that of the first three (The Ink Truck, Legs, and Billy Phelan's Greatest Game), Kennedy emphasizes his interest in creating fictional worlds that make room for mystery. All four novels spring from his attempt to move beyond the "ordinary realism" and psychologism of mid-century American fiction into a more capacious, more expansively rendered reality. The surreal, "wacky," and "hyperbolic comedy" of the Ink Truck, he says, liberated him from the strictures of too materialist or naturalist a vision, but was insufficiently grounded in reality, as if his imagination were always operating "six inches off the ground" (McCaffery 51). In Legs and Billy Phelan, Kennedy worked to ground his vision in the historical reality of his subjects--the prohibition-era gangster lack "Legs" Diamond and the dark underside of Albany politics in which Billy Phelan finds himself entangled--while exploring simultaneously the continuing fascination such people and places hold as larger-than-life mythic constructions. The subject of both novels is to a large extent the processes through which imagination shapes history, creating through the resources of story or myth a super-reality that is somehow a discovery of the true shape or inward significance of the real. In both novels, a participant-narrator in the tradition of Fitzgerald's Nick Carraway allows Kennedy to move back and forth between the historical and the mythic, exploring, defining, blurring, and sometimes erasing the boundary between them. …