Books: Imaginative Necessities

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For Francis has made a career out of running away from Albany. Born there in 1880, he is first forced out 21 years later, after fatally beaning a scab motorman with a rock during a strike of trolley-car workers. Escape gives him a taste for life on the lam. He returns to Albany when it is safe for him and marries, but he hits the road in the summers to play minor league baseball and eventually, in 1912, to become third baseman for the Washington Senators. He lasts three years and goes home again to his wife and three children. Trying to change his infant boy's diaper, Francis accidentally drops and kills him. "I couldn't face that," Francis says, and abandons his family for good.

This history emerges gradually during two days while Francis roams the familiar old streets, as spectral as the memories that hound him. His peregrinations can be plotted on an old city map: "He walked north on Broadway, past Steamboat Square . . . He passed the D & H building and Billy Barnes' Albany Evening Journal . . ." Francis runs into his son Billy, now grown, and learns something new about that long-ago fatal accident: "He tells me the wife never told nobody I did that. Guy drops a kid and it dies and the mother don't tell a damn soul what happened." Puzzling over this information, he drops in on his wife. He meets a grandson, talks baseball with him and takes a bath to clean up for a family supper. The affair is tense but successful, and within a few hours Francis is back on the streets and looking for a bootlegger.

Characters without wills of their own are usually bad bargains in fiction, able to play nothing but victims. But Kennedy shows Francis as both helpless and thoroughly responsible for his own condition. This aging drunk is quite capable of exercising volition; the problem is that his choices are crazed. He has taken on the burden of caring for an aging hobo named Helen Archer. Francis finds her warm places to sleep before looking out for himself. He would like to think of this behavior as virtuous, but honesty forces him to admit that he has bummed "not because there was a Depression but first to help Helen and then because it was easy: easier than working."

The '30s are receding into mythology, where the heroic unemployed are martyred on the altar of false and tyrannical economics. Like most myths, this one is generally plausible and specifically false. Kennedy's fiction returns dignity to the little fellow, the common man or woman, those quite capable of fouling up their lives during the best of times, not to mention the worst. Ironweed stands handsomely on its own, but Legs and Billy Phelan's Greatest Game are being issued in paperback to accompany its publication. Those who wish to watch a geography of the imagination take shape should read all three and then pray for more.

—By Paul Gray

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